The Dawn of European Civilization
By
V. GORDON CHILDE
D.Litt., D.Sc.
Professor of Prehistoric European Archceology, University of Lo^on
LONDON
ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD
BROADWAY HOUSE : 6S-74 CARTER LANE, E.C.4
VI
CONTENTS
XL The End of the Forest Culture . . ... 199
XII. Megalith Builders and Beaker Folk : Megalithic
Tombs — Beaker Traders ..... 208
XIII. Civilization in Sicily and Italy : The New Stone Age in Sicily and Southern Italy — Siculan Civilization — North-western Sicily — ^Developments in South Italy — Neolithic Cultures Upper Italy — The Bronze Age in Upper Italy . . . . . . .225
XIV. Island Civilizations in the Western Mediterranean :
The Megalithic Civilization of Malta — Sardinia —
The Balearic Islands . . . . . *245
XV. The Iberian Peninsula : Neolithic Cultures — ^The
Copper Age — ^The Bronze Age .... 258
xvr.
xvn.
XVIII.
XIX.
Western Culture in the Alpine Zone : The Cortaillod Culture — ^The Michelsberg Culture — ^The Middle Neolithic Horgen Culture — Upper Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods — ^The Eastern Alps
Megalith-Builders in Atlantic Europe : Chassey and Fort Harrouard — ^The Megalithic Culture of South France— -The Seine-Oise-Mame (SOM) Culture — ^The Annorican Megalithic Culture — ^The Armorican Bronze Age .....
The British Isles : Windmill Hill Culture — ^Megalithic Tombs — ^The Round-Headed Invaders — ^The Dawn of the Middle Bronze Age .....
Retrospect
Notes on Terminology
Abbreviations .......
Books
Index ....
293
312
330
346
347
351
353
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG.
1. SWIDERIAN FLINT IMPLEMENTS, POLAND (afUf Kozlowski) .
2. Magdalenian harpoon from Cantabria and Azilian
HARPOONS AND PAINTED PEBBLES FROM ARI^IGE .
3. Geometric microliths and micro-gravers from
Franconia [after Gumpert) ......
4. Microliths from Huge, Portugal, and transverse
arrow-head shafted from Denmark
5. Lyngby axe of reindeer antler, Holstein .
6. Maglemosean types from Zealand ....
7. Ertebolle pot, antler axes and bone comb, Denmark
8. Neolithic figurines from Crete and their relatives
[after Evans) ........
9. Early Minoan III “ teapots " and button seal [after
Evans) .........
10. The Minoan “ Mother Goddess and [left) Horns of
Consecration, from a sealing [after Evans)
11. Minoan axes, axe- adzes, and double axe, and seal
impressions [after Evans and Mon. Ant.)
12. (i) Early Minoan daggers, (2) Stone beads [after Evans)
13. Middle Minoan I-II daggers [after Evans) .
14. M.M.III rapiers (Mycenje) and L.M.i; hilt (Crete)
[after Evans) ........
15. Middle Minoan spear-head .....
16. Egyptian representations of Vapheio cups
17. Pottery from Thermi I-II(A) and III-IV (B) [after Miss
Lamb, BSA., XXX).
18. Megaron ” palace, Troy II .... .
19. Pottery from Troy II ......
20. Knife and daggers and gold vessels, Troy II
[Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin) ....
21. Battle-axe, gold-capped bead and crystal pommel,
FROM Treasure and stray axe-adze [Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin) ......
22. Gold earring and pendant from Treasure A, pin from
Treasure; D, bracelet from Treasure F, and knot- headed PINS [Mtiseum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin) .
23. Tomb-group. Amorgos ......
24. CyCLADIC frying pan AND SHERD SHOWING BOAT
vii
PAGE
4
5
6
7
8 10 12
18
20
26
29
29
30
31
32
34
39
40
42
42
43
45
49
50
X
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
88. Grave 28 at Jordansmuhl {after Seger) , . .180
89. Tongue club-head, Denmark; polygonal battle-axe,
Jordansmuhl; and flint axe of eastern type . i8i
90. Furniture of a grave at Zastow ; and collared flask
FROM GRAVE AT NaLENCZOW . . . . . 182
91. Danish Passage Grave pottery of phases B and C;
BATTLE-AXE AND ARROW-HEAD . . . . . 184
92. Amber beads from Passage Graves . . . .186
93. WaLTERNIENBURG vases, LaTDORF drum, AND JUG . 188
94. Globular amphorje from Saxo-Thuringia and Podolia,
AND BONE GIRDLE-CLASP FROM PODOLIA . . . 189
95. Kujavish Grave, Swierczyn {after Kozlowski) . .190
96. Flint daggers and Swedish cists of Montelius* IV . 193
97. The Leubingen barrow — section . . . .196
98. Bronze-shafted halberd, and halberd-blade from
Leubingen barrow . . . . . .197
99. Maglemosean types which survive : (1-4) Esthonia
{after Clark) ; (5) Ukraine ..... 200
100. Slate knives and dart-head, Sweden ; stone mace-
heads, Finland, and slate pendant . . . 201
lor. Nostvet and Suomusjarvi celts, and polished chisels
AND ADZES ........ 202
102. Pitted ware from Central Russia and vase of East
Swedish style from Aland Islands .... 204
103. Knives and axe from Seima hoard .... 206
104. SiCULAN I rock-cut TOMB, CaSTELLUCCIO, AND CORBELLED
TOMB, Los Millares 210
105. Rock-cut tomb and naveta, Balearic Islands . .212
106. Segmented cist, North Ireland, and Giant's Tomb,
Sardinia . , 214
107. Beakers : (1-2) Palmella, Portugal ; (3) La Halliade,
South France ; (4) Villafrati, Sicily . . .219
108. Beaker, wrist-guard and associated vases, Woisch-
wiTz, Silesia {after Seger) . . . . . .220
109. West European dagger (Bohemia) and flint copy
(Silesia) ; arrow-straightener (Wiltshire) ; gold-
leaf FROM WRIST-GUARD AND COPPER AWL, BOHEMIA . 221
no. Neolithic painted pottery : (i) black on buff,
Molfetta ; (2) Matera ; (3) red and black on buff.
MeGARA HYBLiEA . 227
111. Bossed bone plaque, Castelluccio {after Evans) . . 229
1 12. Copper Age pottery: (1-2) pit-cave, Otranto; (3)
DOLMEN " OF BiSCEGLIE ; (4-5) SiCULAN I . . 230
1 1 3. View into Siculan I tomb, Castelluccio . . . 231
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
xi
1 14. SiCULAN II KNIFE AND RAZOR, PaNTELLARIA . . . 232
1 15. Vase-handles and bronzes from terramara of Taranto 236
1 16. Copper daggers and flint copies, Remedello . . 239
1 17. (i) Vase from North Italian lake-dwelling; (2) square-
mouthed neolithic pot from Arene Candide . .241
1 18. Terramara dagger and Peschiera safety-pin . . 244
1 19. Plan of “Temples'" at Mnaidra, Malta . . . 246
120. Plan and elevation of tomb XXbis at Anghelu Ruju 251
12 1. Tripod bowl, San Bartolomeo, and vase-handle of
nose-bridge type, Anghelu Ruju . . . .252
122. Necklace from Anghelu Ruju ..... 253
123. (i) Gouge, El Garcel ; (2) Schist adze, Portugal ;
(3) Jar, El Garcel. ...... 260
124. Stages in conventionalization of parietal art in
Spain (after Ohermaier) ; A, Maimon ; B, Figuras ;
C, La Pileta ........ 261
125. Flint arrow-heads : (i) Alcal^. ; (5) Los Millares.
Halberd Blades : (3) Casa da Moura ; (4) Los
Millares. (2) Palmella points . . . .264
126. “ Late Neolithic " vase from Tres Cabezos, and Copper
Age vases from Los Millares ..... 265
127. Ritual objects : (i) Almeria ; {2 and 4) Portugal ; (3)
Granada ........ 266
128. Copper daggers and adze, AlcalA, and bone pin,
CABE50 DA Ministra ...... 268
129. Pottery from Portuguese Passage Graves (after Leeds) 270
130. Argaric burial jar showing diadem ; funerary vases,
halberd, dagger-blades and sword {}>y permission of Trustees of British Museum) . . . . .276
131. Antler-harpoon and bone arrow-head, Switzerland 281
132. CoRTAiLLOD POTTERY (after Antiquity) .... 282
133. MICHELSBERG POTTERY . . . • • .284
134. Plan of house at Aichbuhl ..... 286
135. Types of antler sleeves for axes : A-B, Lower ;
C, first in Middle; D, first in Upper Neolithic;
L. Neuchatel . . . . . • .287
136. Bones copies of Unetician pins 289
137. Mondsee pottery . . . . . • .291
138. Vase-supports in Chassey style : (i) Le Moustoir,
Carnac ; {2) Motte de la Garde, Charente . . 294
139. Polypod bowl, La Halliade ..... 298
140. Late Chalcolithic types from Cevennian cists :
Liquisse ; /-i, Grotte d'en Quisse, Gard ; j-o “ dolmens " of Aveyron , . . . • 299
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
xii
141. Statue-menhirs from Gard and sculptured tomb.
Petit Morin (Marne) ...... 302
142. SOM, POT FROM Paris cist, and channelled pot from
CONGUEL, MoRBIHAN ...... 303
143. Arc pendant of stone ...... 304
144. Passage Grave, Kercado, Morbihan .... 306
145. Breton Bronze Age vase . . . . . .310
146. Bronze Age and Neolithic arrow-heads from Britain 313
147. Windmill Hill pot-forms . . . . 314
148. North Scottish Passage Graves : (i) Quoyness,
Sanday, Orkney ; (2) Ormiegill, Caithness . .318
149. Long stalled cairn, Midhowe, Rous ay . . .519
150. Peterborough bowl from Th.^mes, and sherds from
West Kennet long barrow {by permission of Trustees of British Museum) . . . . . . .322
151. Segmented fayence beads, Wilts [by permission of the
Trustees of the British Museum) . . . . *325
152. Evolution of a socketed spear-head in Britain (after
Greenwell) : (i) Hittlesham, Suffolk ; (2) Snows-
HiLL, Glos. ; (3) Arreton Down, Wilts. . . . 326
153. Food Vessels from Argyll and East Lothian . . 327
154. Gold earring ........ 327
155. Gold lunula, Eire (by permission of Trustees of British
Museum). ........ 328
Map I 339
Map II ......... . 341
Map III 343
Map IV 345
PREFACE
The material basis and spiritual context of modern life are the cumulative result of the achievements and discoveries of the past. Europeans share with the Chinese and even with the aborigines of Australia a part of this cultural heritage. With the genesis of that common substratum however we are not here immediately concerned ; it has been described by M. de Morgan in an earlier volume in this series. My theme is the foundation of European Civilization as a peculiar and individual manifestation of the human spirit.
But on this topic sharply opposed views are current. One school maintains that Western Civilization only began in historic times after looo b.c. in a little comer of the Mediterra- nean and that its true prehistory is to be found not in Europe but’ in the Ancient East. On the other hand, some of my colleagues would discover the origin of all the higher elements in human culture in Europe itself. I can subscribe to neither of these extreme views ; the tmth seems to me to lie between them. In such a field it would of course be presumptuous to pretend to have attained a final synthesis. I can but present in all due humility the results of an earnest attempt to survey all the facts as a whole.
The Occident was, I would submit, indebted to the Orient for the rudiments of the arts and crafts that initiated man's emancipation from bondage to his environment and for the foundation of those spiritual ties that co-ordinate human endeavours. But the peoples of the West were not slavish imitators ; they adapted the gifts of the East and united the contributions made by Africa and Asia into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines. By the sixteenth century B.c. the new organism was already function- ing and the point had arrived when the Westerners were ready to assume the r61e of masters. Among the Early Bronze Age peoples of the ^Egean, the Danube valley, Scandinavia, and Britain, we can recognize already the expression of those very qualities of energy, independence, and inventiveness which distinguish the Western world from Egypt, India, or China. But this does not justify the contention that the
xiii
XIV
PREFACE
mutual r61es of the Ancient East and the modem West, as they existed at the dawn of history, had been mysteriously reversed in a more remote antiquity.
My task is then to exhibit the creation out of the cultural capital common to many lands of the new force, the growth of which has ultimately transformed the face of the world. Since the germs of the new are evidently active in the Middle Bronze Age that period puts a natural term to the inquiry. But the existence of such divergent schools of thought necessitates a careful study of the evidence.
The Orientalists indeed treat the humble productions of early man in Europe with a certain contempt and have relied largely on a priori theories. But their opponents have lavished a loving care on the rude artefacts of our forerunners and by patient research have built up a powerful case in support of their thesis which cannot be demolished by a few generalizations. The material itself must be examined and the reader must judge which view allows of its co-ordination into the most logical and coherent whole. To that end the Continent has been divided into several provinces, the spatial relations of which at different epochs are illustrated by four maps. Within these provinces the sequence of observed phenomena is well known ; disputes begin with the interrelation of the groups. Here I have tried to set forth the material objectively in its proper order and to expound the several views of competent authorities upon its inter- pretation.
But it must be remembered that our material is only the skeleton of an organism which once was clothed with flesh and which stiU is immanent in every moment of our lives. The Continent which is so neatly mapped for us is itself a heritage from prehistoric times. Peasants with stone hoes and axes opened up its valleys to cultivation ; hunters and herdsmen blazed the trail through the primeval forests ; mariners in dug-out canoes sailed the seas to the isles of the West ; prospectors with picks of horn and flint revealed the treasures of the^ earth and crossed mountain passes in search of merchandise. These explorers .were the fore- runners of Greeks and Phoenicians ; the paths they dis- covered have been followed by Roman roads and modem railways.
PREFACE
XV
The monuments of early man are but insignificant bits of flint and stone, bronze and baked clay. Yet such fragments embody concretely the achievement of our spiritual ancestors. In such rude implements are revealed the preconditions of our gigantic engines and of the whole mechanical apparatus that constitutes the material basis of modem life. Progress is an indivisible whole in which the invention of a new way of hafting an axe formed a necessary prelude to the invention of the steam-engine or the aeroplane. In the first innovations the germs of all subsequent improvement were latent ; and the first steps on the path of discovery were the hardest. Thus the achievements of our nameless forerunners are in a real sense present in our cultural heritage to-day.
In conclusion, I should like to express my deep indebted- ness to many workers in the same field, not excepting those whose conclusions I have been unable to accept. Moreover, to supplement their published works which I sc often cite, Mr. M. C. Burkitt, Sir Arthur Evans, Sir John Forsdyke, Mr. W, A. Heurtley, Dr. Ferencz Laszlo, Dr. Adolf Mahr, Mr. Harold Peake, Dr. P. Reinecke, Prof. Tallgren, Dr. P. Vouga, Prof. A. J. B. Wace, and others have very kindly given me valuable advice and assistance on several points. To Miss M. Joachim I owe a further debt of gratitude for reading the proofs. For permission to reproduce here illustrations from their publications I am indebted to the courtesy of Dr. Ailio (Helsingfors), the Accademia dei Lincei, the Trustees of the British Museum, the British School at Athens, the Editors of the Bullettino di Paletnologia Italiana, the Cambridge University Press and Messrs. Wace and Thompson, the Comision de Investigaciones paleontologicas y prehistoricas and Prof. H. Obermaier (Madrid), Sir Arthur Evans, Prof. Kozlowski (Lemburg), the Greek Ministry of Public Instmction, Dr. J. Schranil (Prague), Mr. R. B. Seager (Crete), Dr. H. Seger (Breslau), the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Soci^t6 des Antiquaires du Nord (Copenhagen), the Soci^te d’Anthropologie de Bruxelles, Dr. Stocky (Prague), the Schweizerisches Landes- Museum (Zurichjt, Prof. A. M. Tallgren (Helsingfors), Prof. Tsountas (Athens), the University of Bordeaux, Faculty of Letters, the K. Vitterhets, Historie och Antikvitets Akademien (Stockholm) the Director of the Prahistorische Abteilung of
XVI
PREFACE
the Museum fiir Volkerkunde (Berlin), Dr. P. .Vouga (Neuchatel), and others.
I might add that the index is especially designed to enable the layman to locate at once the explanation (usually illus- trated by figures) of the technical terms inevitably employed.
V. GORDON CHILDE.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
When this book was first published in 1925, large tracts of Europe were blanks on the archaeological map ; in few of the remaining areas had the evidence, dispersed among local museums and the pages of inaccessible periodicals, been assembled in systematic monographs. Only a vague picture could be constructed by piecing together the scattered fragments and filling in the gaps by inferences. Since then fourteen years of feverish archaeological activity have transformed European prehistory. The unknown, or scarcely known, tracts of Macedonia, Wallachia, and Southern Hungary have been scientifically explored. Startling new discoveries in regions that seemed so well charted as England, Denmark, and Greece have invalidated what seemed well-established truths — the genuinely neolithic culture of England, for instance, was first defined by Leeds in 1927! Detailed surveys of several provinces have not only conveniently assembed accumulated data, but have invested them with fresh significance.
To correct its deficiencies, the original text had not only to be enlarged; it had to be completely rewritten. The apparent simplicity of the picture, offered in 1925, proves largely due to ignorance. The new discoveries introduce fresh complications as they raise the abstractions of pre- history nearer to the concrete complexity of history. But the essential outlines of the thesis, originally advanced, still holds good. Our deepened knowledge of the archaeology of Europe and of the Ancient East has enormously strengthened the Orientalists' position. Indeed we can now survey continuously interconnected provinces throughout which cultures are seen to be zoned in regularly descending grades round the centres of urban civilization in the Ancient East. Such zoning is the best possible proof of the Orientalists' postulate of diffusion.
Indeed revolutionary discoveries, published even during 1938, warn us tjiat the picture here presented is still in a high degree provisional. But further postponement of the new edition seems indefensible. Perhaps we are standing at the end of an era of free research. Over a large part of our
xvii
xviii PREFACE
Continent prehistory has been harnessed to the service of a political dogma. Reliable additions to knowledge there can hardly be expected now. It will be useful to sum up objectively the position attained before September, 1938.
I have to thank Dr. Grahame Clark, Prof. Daryll Forde, Miss Winifred Lamb, F.S.A., and Mr. R. W. Hutchinson, F.S.A., for very kindly reading and helpfully criticizing sections of the text, and Mr. A. J. H. Edwards and Mr. R. B. K. Stevenson for reading the proofs. In addition to those named on pp. xv-xvi, we are indebted to the Council of the British School at Athens, the Editor of Antiquity, Mrs. Hawkes, Mr. W. A. Heurtley, and Miss W. Lamb for permission to reproduce figures.
V. GORDON CHILDE.
University of Edinburgh.
March 1939.
TO THE FOURTH EDITION
lentific liberty foreseen in the Preface to materialized a couple of months after 1 the course of the resistance the whole ed. So, the attack having been repulsed, tng of the text has given me the opportunity derial discovered or made accessible during The closer contact with colleagues in the from the alliance against Hitlerism, has plete rewriting of chapters viii, ix, and xi. iry discoveries in Denmark have radically and X. Information collected on the spot ;evenson has inspired me to attempt a new )rehistory in chapter xiii. But it should be ire published in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, e 1939 is not yet available in the British Dveries made in those regions are known rom Italian citations or not at all.
, and Mr. R. B. K. Stevenson have very oofs.
V. GORDON CHILDE.
THE DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER I
Survivals of Food-Gatherers
Despite a startling refinement of industrial equipment and a masterly graphic art Pleistocene Europe altogether lacked civilization in the economic sense. During the last Ice Age collective hunts on open steppes and tundras in South Russia, Moravia, and France yielded such plenteous and reliable supplies of mammoth, reindeer, bison, and horse flesh, that the hunters could establish relatively permanent camps and enjoy leisure to cultivate art. But they remained, none the less, pure food- gatherers, dependent on what the environment offered them. With the passing of glacial conditions, the old herds vanished ; forest, invading the open lands, rendered obsolete the familiar technique of communal hunting, and so the culture based thereon shrivelled and decayed. Indeed last century it appeared that Europe, abandoned by reindeer and mammoth- hunters, was left an empty wilderness for neolithic immigrants to subdue to pasturage and tillage.
Forty years' researches have erased the last outlines of that picture. Archaeologists have discovered the remains left by various communities occupying Europe continuously since the close of the Ice Age, but st^ lacking the hall-marks of neolithic civilization. Their remains constitute cultures that are termed mesolithic, because in time — ^but only in time — they occupy a place between the latest palaeolithic and the oldest neolithic cultures. At the same time botanists and geologists have defined more precisely the changes in environ- ment to which the mesolithic cultures were adaptations. Modern vegetation was only slowly established in the glacial landscape ; a temperate climate did not abruptly replace an arctic one.
In northern Europe phases in the colonization of the once frozen plains by forest trees have been determined with great
2
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
precision by pollen-analysis (i.e. a quantitative study of the pollen grains preserved principally in peat mosses).^ The first immigrants were birches and willows, then come pines, later the hazel, soon followed by elms, limes and oaks — the mixed oak woods — ^lastly, in Denmark, the beech. But of course the composition of a forest is profoundly affected by topographical and geological as well as climatic factors so that even on the North European plain itself the local variations are large and significant. Stages in the gradual amelioration of climate can also be distinguished, largely on the basis of the same botanical evidence. In North Europe a cold Pre-Boreal regime of long duration was superseded by a continental Boreal phase, characterized by summers longer and warmer than to-day, but severe snowy winters. Next a relatively abrupt increase of rainfall and westerly winds affected North- Western Europe without reducing the average annual tempera- ture so that the climate of Denmark was really Atlantic, and mixed oak woods attained a maximum extension at the cost of pine woods. In Britain on the contrary excessive rain and wind caused deforestation in exposed areas. ^ Gradually the course of the Altantic storms shifted again allowing a second period of forest growth in England, but inducing some contraction on the Continent. This phase, still warmer than to-day, is termed the Sub-Boreal. It ultimately ended with the onset of modern cold wet weather in an exaggerated form in the so-called Sub-Atlantic phase. Of course the terms Boreal, Atlantic, and so on, are not strictly applicable to Switzerland or South Germany ^ and are meaningless in Mediterranean lands : they were devised in, Denmark and Sweden, where alone they are accurately descriptive.
In the meanwhile the distribution of land and water was also changing. The release of the vast volumes of water locked up in glaciers during the Ice Age produced a general, if gradual, rise in seal level or marine transgression, but this was offset in the north, where the accumulations of ice had been deepest and heaviest, by an '' isostatic ” re-elevation of the earth's crust that had been depressed by their weight. Round the Scottish coasts the late glacial sea had formed a beach some
^ Clark, 1936, 23-40 ; note the cautions by Bertsch, BRGK., XVIII (iQiiS), 1-65.
* Childe, Scotland, 9-12.
» BRGK., XVIII, 65.
SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
3
100 ft. above the present strand while corresponding strand- lines in Scandinavia may be 200 m. above sea-level to-day. The Baltic depression was occupied by a frozen sea, com- municating with the Arctic Ocean and termed the Yoldia Sea. The rebound of the earth’s crust on the melting of the super- incumbent ice raised strips of the Scottish coast above their present relative level and isolated the Baltic depression ; it was occupied by the Ancylus Lake, rendered slightly brackish by a small inflow of salt water across Central Sweden. At the end of Boreal times the continued rise of sea-level opened the Belts so that salt water poured into the Baltic depression, forming the Littorina Sea, larger and salter than the modem Baltic. England was completely separated from the Continent while in Scotland whales could swim up the enlarged Forth estuary to above Stirling. The resultant extension of the area occupied by warm salt water was perhaps the cause of the shift in storm tracks that brought about the Atlantic phase of climate in the North. But north of a line that runs through southern Zealand and co. Durham the isostatic re-elevation of the land has continued so that the shore line of Atlantic times is now represented by the ‘‘ 25 ft. raised beach ” in North Britain and corresponding raised strands round the Baltic.^ Nevertheless some time elapsed before this local re-elevation of the land overtook the general rise in sea-level, so that in marginal areas like Denmark and East Anglia several local transgressions can be distinguished. In Denmark and Southern Sweden in fact four have to be admitted — the first at the beginning of the Atlantic phase, the last, and sometimes the greatest, during early Sub-Boreal times, ^ coinciding with Montelius' Neolithic III a and b (p. 205).
This changing environment constitutes for the archaeo- logist a provisional chronological framework, but contemporary men had to adjust their cultures to it. To small groups of food-gatherers the temperate forests offered greater facilities for picking up a bare livelihood without intensive social co-operation or a highly specialized kit-bag than had the bleak hunting-grounds of the Ice Age. Mesolithic groups appear in general isolated and poorly equipped in contrast to Magda-
^ Clark, Northern Europe, 7-22 ; Childe, Scotland, 9.
* “ Aamosen," 1943, 162 ; ArsberdUelse, 1937-8, 36-96 ; cf. New Phytologist, XVIV (1944), 64.
4
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
lenians or Predmostians. But all had acquired, or themselves domesticated, dogs whose co-operation would be of greatest assistance to man precisely in the pursuit of the smaller, less gregarious game of the new woodland. Everywhere the collection of nuts, snails, and shell-fish played a conspicuous part in the new economy. Several of the mesolithic cultures are clearly just the responses of palaeolithic survivors to the new environment.
The Swiderian culture,^ represented by assemblages of small flint tools collected from sand-dunes in Russia and Poland, sometimes under fossil turf-lines of Atlantic age, is characterized by small asymmetrically tanged-points (Fig. i)
Fig. I. Swideriaa flint implements, Poland. After Kozlowski. (f.)
used presumably as arrow-heads, but morphologically descended from the large dart-heads used by the South Russian mammoth- hunters. Such was their ultimate response to the extinction of the mammoth.
Descendants of the- Franco-Cantabrian Magdalenians who combined with hunting and collecting fishing with the harpoon in the ancestral manner, created the Azilian culture.* The Azilians like their ancestors lived by preference in caves where they buried their dead too.® The famous cave of Ofnet in Bavaria contained a nest of twenty-one skulls, buried without the trunks, but not belonging certainly to Azilians. Because eight of the skulls were brachycranial, anthropologists used to think that the burial indicated the immigration of a new race into Europe, but now admit that at least a tendency to round- headedness existed among Upper Palaeolithic Europeans.* The AzUians’ equipment seems poor. The type fossil is the harpoon
^ Claxk, 1936, 62 ; similar cultures are here reported from Belgium and Germany.
* Obermaier, Fossil Man in Spain, 1925, 340 f.
> e.g. in Arifege, UAnthr., XXXVIII (1928), 235.
* See C. S. Coon, Races of Europe, 1939, 35-6, 67-8.
SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
S
of red-deer’s antler (Fig. 2), flat and clumsy in comparison with the ancestral Magdalenian instrument of reindeer antler. Flint blades and gravers persist, but tend to be diminutive. The cores could be used for wood-working, but were not specialized into axes. However, some heavy wedge-like tools from the cave of Bize (Aude) may denote responses to the needs of primitive carpentry. And in the late Azilian deposit in the Falkenstein Cave (HohenzoUem) ^ an antler sleeve was found of a tjTpe later used for mounting axes and adzes. (Here the idea might have been borrowed from the neighbouring Forest
Fig. 2. Magdalenian harpoon from Cantabria and AziKan harpoons and painted pebbles from Arifege. (f.)
peoples.) The only reminiscences of Magdalenian art are highly conventionalized figures painted on pebbles.
The cave deposits suggest that the Azilians lived in very small and generally isolated communities ; their isolation was not however complete since shells of Columbella msticana, imported from the Mediterranean, reached the Falkenstein Cave.^ Some sort of boat must have been available since Azilians encamped on small islands.^ Azilian encampments are found on the slopes of the Cantabrian mountains and the Pyrenees, of the Massif Central, the Jura, Vosges and Black Forest, Alpine foothills, and finally on the south-west coast of Scotland.^ In south France the Azilian succeeds the Magdalenian almost immediately, presumably in Boreal times ; the Scottish sites are situated above the 25 ft. beach and must be Atlantic in age. The discrepancy must indicate the slow rate of migration by short st^es presumabry along tracts of coast now submerged.
^ Germania, i8 (1934), 81-8.
* Childe, Scotland, 14-17.
6
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Descendants of the local Aurignacians created a very similar culture in early post-glacial times in the Crimea ^ and Transcaucasia. They too lived in caves and buried the dead therein either in the contracted position or extended. They had tamed a local wolf or jackal to help them in the chase. In the Crimea harpoons of bone, but of Azilian form, and slotted points armed with flints as in the Forest cultures, appear late. Geometric microliths, at first triangles and lunates, later also trapezes, were made and that even in layers that contain pottery and polished celts and so look formally neolithic.* The Tardenoisian culture survives in the archaeological record almost entirely in the form of pigmy flints or microliths, ingeniously worked into regular geometrical shapes — ^triangles, hombs, trapezes and crescents — or into microgravers (Fig. 3)
Fig. 3. Geometric microliths (2-5) and microgravers (k) from Franconia. After Gumpert (J).
that may be a by-product in their manufacture. All were presumably parts of composite tools of wood or bone, but no one knows Why the little blades should be so carefully trimmed. Their madcers camped exclusively on sandy soils,* that would be lightly wooded, and sheltered at first often in caves, but also in flimsy huts,* partly sunk into the sandy soil. At Muge ® on the Tagus and Teviec,* now an island on the coast of Morbihan,
1 Han6ar, Kaukasiens, 116-126, 148-150, 194-206; SA., I, 195-212 ; V, 160-175 ; 299.
* SA., V, 97-100; KS., IV, (1940), 29.
* Cl^k, 1936, 190-4.
* Clark, 1936, 198 ; Antiquity, XI (1937), 477 i Gnmpert, Frank. Mesolitkikum (M annus Bibliothek, 40), 14-27.
* Obermaier, op. cit., 324 ; CIIA., Paris, 1931, 362.
* Pequart, Bonle, and Vailois, Inst. Pal. Hum., Mem. 18 (1937), with important section on mesolithic races in general.
SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
Tardenoisians settled on the open shore, hunting and collecting shell-fish and leaving mounds composed of the debris of their repasts. Skeletons, some brachycranial, were buried in these midden heaps in the contracted attitude — at Teviec wearing crowns of red-deer antlers, protected by stones on edge and covered with a heap of boulders.
A tendency to reduce the size of flint blades was common to many Upper Palseolithic industries, but led regularly to geometric forms only in Africa. Burial in shell-middens is also characteristic of the North African Capsian. It is therefore believed that the Tardenoisians include immigrants driven north by the incipient desiccation of the Sahara at the close of the European Ice Age. But they spread over an enormous territory in Europe including the greater part of the Iberian Peninsula, France, Britain, Belgium, South and Central Germany, Poland and Russia. Perhaps several waves of immigrants coming across Spain, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus
Fig. 4. Microliths from Muge, Portugal, and transverse arrowhead shafted from Denmark ( J) .
should be invoked to explain this dispersion. In any case Tardenoisians had reached Britain, Belgium, and South Germany in Boreal times.^ But in both Britain ^ and France ® and probably too in south-west Germany ^ and Portugal ® Tardenoisians still survived, retaining their primitive economy and microlithic traditions in industry, when a neolithic or even a Bronze Age economy had already been established among neighbouring groups. And certain Tardenoisian types — trapezes and lunates — ^used by later communities in the
^ Clark, 1936, 211-213.
* Ibid., 217 ; 1932, 51.
® e.g. at Sauveterre (Lot-et-Garonne) Tardenoisian microliths were associate with finger-tipped cordoned pottery and tanged and barbed arrow- heads, Conlonges, Inst. Pal. Hum,, Mem, 14 {1935), 26.
* Childe, Danube, 18.
® Sherds of decorated “ cave pottery were found at least in the upper levels of the middens. ,
8
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Peninsula, France, and South Russia, may denote the absorp- tion of Tardenoisian hunters by food-producing peoples. Microlithic must not be mistaken for mesolithic.
Asturian ^ is the term applied to the culture of strand- loopers who succeeded the Azilians on the coasts of North Spain and appear in Portugal too. They lived very largely on shell-fish during a period of greater rainfall than the present and are characterized in the archaeological record by a pick-like tool formed by chipping a beach pebble to a rough point.
Though inhabiting wooded countries, none of the com- munities so far described give any sign of a sustained effort to master this element in their environment by the elaboration of
Fig. 5. ** Lyngby axe of reindeer antler, Holstein (i).
Specialized carpenter's tools. Peoples occupying the forested plain of North Europe on the contrary did develop adzes and axes for dealing with timber. To emphasize this adaptation to their environment they may be grouped together as the Forest folk. Their ancestors had advanced as far north as Jutland, before the end of Pre-Boreal times. The pioneers in the colonization were known down till 1936 only by stray discoveries of " L3nigby axes " — ^reindeer antlers on which the brow tine has been trimmed to form an adze or an axe Mge or the socket for a flint blade (Fig. 5). In 1936 a camp of the reindeer- hunters was located on the banks of a shallow mere at Stellmoor (Ahrensburg), near Hamburg.* The reindeer were killed with arrows tipped with asymmetrically tanged flint points (of Ahrensburg type), fish or birds speared with barbed harpoons of reindeer antler that had been carved with flint gravers.
^ Obennaier, op. cit., 349-35^ ; CISPP,, London, 1932, 95.
• Offa, I (1936), 2-18 ; summarized by Clark, Antiquity, XII (1938), i65--9. The new finds prove that Ahrensburg is identical with Lyngby.
SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
9
Each year the first-fruits of the chase, weighted with a stone in the breast, were thrown into the mere as offerings to the spirits of the land ; a reindeer’s skull, mounted on a post was planted on the shore like a totem pole. Stellmoor seems to be a temporary camping place for hunters whose homes presum- ably were situated farther south and whose ancestors had created the " eastern facies ” of Magdalenian culture. Chisel- like tools of antler are in fact common in the Magdalenian of Petersfels (Wurtemburg) ^ and Lsmgby axes had been used in pleistocene times in Moravia, Hungary, and Moldavia,® where woods survived the Ice Age.
In Boreal times the Forest folk had spread all over the still unbroken North European plain from Southern England to Finland, and had achieved a very nice adjustment to their environment of pine woods, interrupted only by lakes and rivers. In England, Germany, and Denmark they had apparently joined forces with the Tardenoisians ; they ha ’ at- least learned to make geometric microliths in the Tardenoisian manner. And while hunting expeditions brought the widely scattered groups into contact from time to time, fishing beside streams and meres encouraged more permanent encampment so that equipment wais already being differentiated locally to meet divergent conditions. Within the larger continuum local facies or cultures can be distinguished in England,® Denmark, and North Germany,* the East Baltic ® (Kunda) and perhaps the Norwegian coast. But the Maglemose * near MuUerup and other classic sites in Zealand supply material for an adequate picture, applicable with modifications to the rest.
These were smnmer-camps, submerged each winter, whither men repaired for hunting, fowling, fishing, and nut- gathering. For these ends they employed many devices and a highly specialized equipment — ^slotted bone points armed with flints (Fig. 6, 3), several kinds of “ harpoon ” (Fig. 6, 1-2), bone fish-hooks, nets of lime-bast with pine-bark floats, spheroid or
^ Brock, Die altsteinzeitUche Kulturstaite von Petersfels, 43.
^ Dacia, V-VI (1934-5). pi. Ill ; Antiquity, XVI (1942), 259.
* JRAI., LXIV (1934), 101-128 ; no bone work survives in the settlements, but characteristic harpoons have been found in Holdemess, near Cambridge, and in the Thames and dredged up from the North ^a. Clark, 1932, 17, 1 15 ; Childe, PCBI., 26-8.
* Full description in Clark, 1936.
® Indreko, Vorlaufige Bemerkungen iiber die Kunda-Funde/' SiUun^sherioht d. gelehrter Estnmhm Gesell,, 1934 (^93^)*
10
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
spiked stone mace-heads perforated by percussion,^ and wooden clubs. East of the Baltic conical wood or bone arrow-heads were employed (Fig. 99> below) for kilhng fur-bearing animals with minimum damage to the pelts and a specialized antler pick for breaking the ice. Bone needles were made for netting, flint gravers for cutting bone, small disc scrapers (Fig. 6, 4) for dressing skins, and split boars' tusks for knives. The wood- worker was now provided with chisels of antler, socketed chisels made from marrow bones of large game (Fig. 6, 8),
Fig. 6. Maglemosean types from Zealand. 1-3, 7-8 (J) ; 4 (j) ; 5-5 (^)
perforated antler adzes, and flint core-axes (Fig. 6, 5) or exceptionally flake-axes (Fig, 6. 6) mounted as adze-blades in perforated antlen sleeves (Fig. 6, 7). East of the Baltic, where flint was scarce, the adze-blades were pebbles sharpened, like
'oSk “ i” a Boreal
uuiBxi vjarK, Morthem Europe, fig. 38 ; Mannus, XXV, 271 fi.
SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
11
the antler tools, by grinding. In England the flake-axe was still;, unknown.
Communications were maintained most easily by water in boats, presumably of skins, which have not sumved, though the paddles that propelled them are extant. For land transport over the winter snows dog-sledges were perhaps available east of the Baltic.^ Dogs of a wolfish t3^e were everywhere domesticated and may be the ancestors of modem sledge-dog breeds. The electrical properties of amber had already been recognized as a magic virtue so that the substance was collected in Denmark. .Esthetic satisfaction was obtained by decorat- ing bone implements with geometric patterns, generally outlined by a series of points in the so-caUed drill-technique.
The Boreal forest cultures may be derived without remainder through the Lyngby complex from Upper Palaeo- lithic cultures of East and Central Europe. Links between their axe-like tools and the Lower Palaeolithic hand-axes seem totally lacking. Only the Finnmarkian ^ of Norway offers remote possibilities of affiliation with an East Siberian cycle, since both exhibit implements of Middle Palaeolithic type associated with gravers.
The marine transgression that ushered in the Atlantic phase broke up the unity of the Forest cultures and offered new opportxmities to certain groups. Rich oyster banks combined with sealing and sea-fishing allowed communities to settle down at sheltered spots along the Danish and South Swedish coasts. The Ertehelle culture represents the appropriate adjustment.® The sites are marked by huge shell-heaps (that may be lOO yards long and 30 yards wide), the refuse of a sedentary population, still, however, practising a gathering economy. The exposure of new deposits of superior flint resulted in an increasing substitution of flint for bone in* making heavy tools. Flake- axes were preferred to picks, plump green-stone axes were
^ A runner was recovered from a Boreal peat in Finland, SM., XXXVIII-IX (1932-2), 60 ; XLI, 121 ; XLII, 22.
2 Dwelling places on high strands of the North Sea and Arctic Ocean have yielded flake- and core-axes, tanged points, gravers, and some Moustieriform tools, but no bone-work, Boe and Nummedal, Le Finnmarkien, Oslo, 1936.
® Clark, Northern Europe, 138-156, but cf. now Acta Arch., VIII (1937), 278-294 ; Mathiassen, *' Bopladsen Dyrholmen,” K. Dansk. Videns. Selskabs Ark-Kunsthist. SkrifteY, I, i (1942) ; Bagge and Kjellmark, Siretorp, ; and Aamose 136-144.
12
DAm" OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
sometimes made by grinding, as earlier in the East Baltic, but perforated antler axes ^ — ^no longer adzes— and sleeves for axes were still made. The only microliths manufactured were transverse arrow-heads. Fish were not speared with harpoons but caught with hook and line. The sedentary life permitted the ihanufacture of pottery in the form of large jars with pointed bases and troughs that may have been used as blubber lamps. A taste for personal adornment is indicated by bone combs and armlets. The dead were buried extended in the middens.® While the coastal populations thus took advantage of a new environment, the communities inhabiting Norway, Central
Fig. 7. ErtefaaUe pot, aatler axes and bone combs, Denmark. (J.)
Sweden, the East Baltic lands and even the interior of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein remained true to the Boreal way of life ^d preserved ^ much of the old equipment — ^particularly baboons or, as in the Gudenaa culture of Jutland,^ geometrical microliths— throughout the greater part of the Atlantic phase. Similar survivals to the south and west might be expected, but only at Lower Halstow * on the Thames estuary is a culture of
aie mis of^^to' if 'ibiT’^^23*’ exceeded long heai^ in
• ‘iG-d^^lturen,” AarU,ger. 1937.
SURVIVALS OF FOOD -GATHERERS
18
mesolithic character dated botanically to Atlantic times. The famous site at Le Campigny, Seine Inferieure, once the type station of a mesolithic culture, now turns out to be a typical settlement of the intrusive Western neolithic culture just as in Denmark itself the Erteb0lle culture with core and flake-axes of flint — has been proved to persist into the second phase of the local neolithic.
Many prehistorians have wished to explain the innovations seen at Erteb0lle — notably the pots and the ground stone axes — ^by some sort of immigration from the south-west. But though coastal gatherers were stiH making their coarse Erteb0lle pots in Denmark and Southern Sweden after neolithic peasants with a finer technique had arrived in early Sub-Boreal times, no trace has been found yet of previous colonists to teach the gatherers' ancestors in Early Atlantic times.^ Erteb0lle pottery seems to be a local invention, but not the source of even the Danish neolithic peasants' pottery, still less that of the much earlier cultivators in Hither Asia and North Africa. The Northern Forest-folk may further be credited with the development of a serviceable axe and even the invention of the polished stone celt " — the typologists' criterion of ‘‘ neo- lithic " — ^through the transfer to stone of techniques first applied to bone. Favourably situated for a food-gathering existence and well equipped to exploit their advantages, their environment offered no inducements to change their economy, no cereals to cultivate, no sheep to tame. Still less did it impose upon them the stem discipline that led to city life.
In general the mesolithic cultures just described fill gaps in time and prove the occupation of parts of Europe from the glorious days of mammoth hunting. None illustrates in any sense a transition from the old food-gathering economy to a new food-producing one. Is it not significant that mesolithic cultures are most richly represented in regions remote from the oldest historical centres of civilization and, the native habitat of wild cereals and wild sheep ? Whatever part mesolithic folk may have formed in neolithic populations, the flocks of sheep and the seeds of grain on which the new economy was based were not carried by wind or intertribal barter, but brought by actual immigrant shepherds and cultivators.
' " Aamose/' Nord. Fort., Ill, 3, 93-7.
14
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
The following table will help readers to follow the very complicated relations between climatic phases, sea-levels and human cultures in the West BaJtic region described in Chapters I, IX, X and XI.
CLIMATIC PHASE OF HUMAN CULTURES
PHASE BALTIC HUNTER-FISHERS FARMERS
Ancylus Mullerup
Boreal Lake Gudenaa
Maglemosean
First ? Gudenaa
Transgression Atlantic Second
Transgression ErteboUe
(very few potsherds)
Third Gudenaa
Transgression Ertebolle ?
(many potsherds)
Neolithic I (Virring, Vr4)
Neolithic II Dysser (Barkaer)
Sub-
Boreal
Last
Transgression
Neolithic III
Ertebolle Gudenaa Passage
Graves A
*» B Battle- C axe
A . -r. ^ cultures
1946^7 SS! Archaeology, University of London.
CHAPTER II
The Orient and Crete
The now desiccated zone of North Africa and Hither Asia had been grassy prairie when Northern Europe was tundra or ice- sheet. And therein grew the wild grasses that under cultivation became our wheats and barleys; sheep and cattle fit for domestication roamed wild. In such an environment human societies could successfully adopt an aggressive attitude to surrounding nature and proceed to the active exploitation of the organic world. Stock-breeding and the cultivation of plants were revolutionary steps in man's emancipation from dependence on the external environment. They put man in control of his own food-supply so far that population could — and did— expand beyond the narrow limits imposed by the naturally available supply of wild fruits and game. But the expansion of population led by its very conditions to the expansion of the revolutionaries themselves — ^the primitive half-sedentary farmers— or their transmutation by a second revolution into a settled peasantry producing surplus food- stuffs for its own surplus offspring who had become artisans and tr^iders, priests and kings, officials and soldiers in an urban population.
The second revolution was accomplished first in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus. The con- siderations adduced in the preceding paragraph would lead us to expect that the first or neolithic revolution too began in the same East Mediterranean area. By 3000 b.c. archaeology and written history reveal Mesopotamians and Egyptians already grouped in vast cities any one of which might,, like Erech, measure 2 square miles in area, and in which secondary industry and trade offered an outlet for the surplus rural population. But beneath the oldest historical buildings in Sumer and Assyria some 70 feet of debris from prehistoric villages bear substantial witness to the immense antiquity of settled life in the Tigris-Eupl^rates valley. Behind tfie monumental cemeteries of the first Egyptian Djmasties, himdreds of pre- historic graves, ranged in the consecutive periods termed Badarian, Amratian, Gerzean, and Semainian open a no less
15
16
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
extensive vista back to the remote beginnings of food-produc- tion on the Nile.
In New Light on the Most Ancient East I have tried to sketch in some details in that prehistoric background of Oriental history. And I have tried to show too how the first revolution that precedes it had to spread, and how the growing demands of the new urban centres of population and wealth must involve the propagation both of the arts and crafts on which the second revolution rested and of the economy that sustained it. To find food for rising generations the simplest step was to bring fresh land imder cultivation. To supply the needs of Mesopotamian or Egyptian cities the Anatolian or Syrian villages thus formed must turn themselves into cities producmg a surplus of farm-produce to support industrial workers and traders. And villages, thus urbanized, must become secondary centres of demand and for diffusion ; they must in turn repeat the process of propagation, generating thereby tertiary centres to carry on the work. We should thus expect a hierarchy of urban or semi-urban communities, zoned, not only in space, but also in time and in cultural level around the metropoles of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. How far does prehistoric Europe confirm such anticipation ?
By its spatial position and by special favours of the winds and cmrents the great island of Crete is easily accessible from the Nile, from Syria, from AnatoHa, and from peninsular Greece. Its fertile lowlands guarantee a living to farmers and orchardists ; its resources in timber, copper, and other raw matenals can supply the needs of secondary industry ; its natural h^bours are not only bases for fishermen, but havens for merch^ts who can transport Cretan produce to urban centres and brmg back m return the manufactures and also the science of older cities.
TEe rums of neolithic villages have formed a tell, 6-S m oldest Minoan levels at Knossos in Central (^ete where the Mmoan civilization was first identified. But trial pits have revealed but Httle of the neolithic cultured It
_o make plump celts (axes and chisels). But obsidian was un^rted from Melos and from Yali so that the fanners were hardly self-sufiicmg. For the later levels indeed Z
» Pendlebury, Archaology of Cnu (London, 1939), 35-41.
THE ORIENT AND CRETE
17
neolithic is not even formally correct since a copper flat axe was found on a house floor with stone celts. Stone was also drilled to make spheroid and pear-shaped mace-heads and worked into studs and even vases. The latest houses consisted of agglomerations of small chambers with fixed hearths and stone foundations for their walls.
Pottery, though hand made, was of fine quality, self- coloured grey-black or red-brown according as to whether it were fired in a reducing or an oxidizing atmosphere ^ ; the surface was often burnished, sometimes so as to produce a decorative rippled effect. The forms cannot be called primitive : the vases may be provided with genuine handles (including the wish- bone variety) instead of mere lugs and even with short spouts. Goblets on tall, half-solid pedestals and a globular jar with strap handles in the belly appear before the period ends. Ladles are common as in Lower Egypt and Western Europe. The potter decorated her products with incised patterns including triangles and ribbons filled with punctures.
For their fertility rituals the farmers modelled in clay or carved in soft stone highly conventionalized figurines of the Mother Goddess seated or squatting (Fig. 8). As amulets they wore miniature stone axes pierced for suspension (axe amulets). Caves were used for burials but for individual interments, not as ossuaries.^
Since palaeolithic food-gatherers have left no relics on the island, we may assume that the earliest Cretan farmers were immigrants who brought their neolithic equipment with them. " Neolithic Crete,'* writes Evans, “ may be regarded as an insular offshoot of an extensive Anatolian province." His table (Fig. 8) shows many Asiatic relatives to the squatting figurines. The self-coloured pots, with handles and spouts, have a general Anatolian aspect, the fine grey wares can be paralleled in the Chalcolithic levels " of Megiddo ® and in the deepest layers of many Asiatic tells.^ The mace-heads too belong to an Asiatic family but recur, like the axe-amulet, in the neolithic village of Merimde ^ in Lower Egypt, which also
1 BSA., XXXVII, 31-3.
2 BSA„ XXXVIII, 15.
® Engberg and Shipton, ** TJie Chalcolithic Pottery of Megiddo ** (O.I.C. Studies, 10), p. 61.
* AJA., XLI, II (Judeideh on the Orontes) ; LAAA., XXIV, 133 (Sakje-Geuzi) ; XXVI, 66-70 (Mersin); Syria, XVI, 162-5 (Ras Shamra), etc.
* Childe, NLMAE., pp. 59-61.
£
yieiaea piump a,; decoration and pi
Balk^ (p. 88), and the wishbone handle is typical of the Mac^o^ Bronze Age. Indeed in the " transitional ’’ pottery of the Trapeza cave in the mountainous interior, cordoned decoration and a schematized human face -on the vase rim are still more reminiscent of Balkan and Apennine wares.i
1 BSA., XXXVI, 30.
THE ORIENT AND CRETE
19
The neolithic phase was ended by a quickening impulse from the Nile, which permeated the rude island culture and transformed it into the Minoan civilization. Evans suspects an actual immigration of predynastic Egyptians, perhaps refugees from the Delta fleeing from Menes' conquest. At least on the Mesara, the great plain of Southern Crete facing Africa, Minoan Crete’s indebtedness to the Nile is disclosed in the most intimate aspects of its culture. Not only do the forms of Early Minoan stone vases, the precision of the lapidaries’ technique and the aesthetic selection of variegated stones as his materials carry on the predynastic tradition. Nilotic religious customs such as the use of the sistrum, the wearing of amulets in the forms of legs, mummies and monkeys, and statuettes plainly derived from Gerzean block figures and personal habits revealed by depilatory tweezers of Egyptian shape and stone unguent palettes from the early tombs and, later, details of costume such as the penis-sheath and the loin- cloth betoken something deeper than the external relations of commerce.
At the same time even more explicitly Asiatic traits can be detected among the innovations distinguishing the Metal Age ” from the '' Neolithic " civilization. Some might indeed have been transmitted via Eg5q)t : stone paint-pots consisting of two or more compartments hollowed out of a stone parallelepiped with perforated comers which were especially favoured in the Mesara, are common to Sumer and Egypt in Early Dynastic times.® But Minoan metallurgy is based entirely on Asiatic traditions ; the coppersmith cast axe- heads with a hole through the head for shafting in the Mesopotamian manner, the artists treated rosettes and similar figures in the Asiatic, not the Egyptian style.® The most striking Minoan pot-forms — ^the pyxis with cylindrical neck and string-hole lid, the jug with cut-away neck and the side-spouted jar have parallels on the Anatolian, not on the African side ; the so-called tea-pot with curious spout (Fig. 9) recurs — without the handle — as far away as Tepe Hissar near Damghan *
1 Childe, NLMAE., fig. 29 (incorrectly attributed to Amratian phase).
* Evans, P. o/M., II, fig. 20 ; cl Childe, NLMAJET., 198.
® Matz, FrUhkr^ische Siegel, 88,
* Schmidt, Excavations at Tepe Hissar, 193 1-3, and Mus. XXIII, pi. CXVI : cf. Frankfort, Archaeology and the Sumerian Problem (O.I.C. Studies, 4), 57-64. In Anatolia kindred forms were popular under the Hittite Empires (1950-1200 b.c.) ; MDOG., 75 (1937)* 3^-
20 DAWTV OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
and even Anau in Turkestan. The technique of glaze paint that distinguishes Minoan pottery had been earlier employed by the Tel Halaf potters of North Syria. So in religion the cult of the Double-Axe is foreshadowed by Tel Halaf amulets.^ The use of engraved bead and button seals as contrasted with carved amulets is a very ancient North S57rian-Iranian practice later adopted in Eg5^t as in Crete.
Fig. 9. Early Minoan III teapots ” and button seal. After Evans.
How far fresh Anatolian or Syrian colonists — ^merchants or artisans — ^joined with Egyptian refugees in founding the Minoan cities is for us a secondary question. Minoan civiliza- tion was not brought ready made from Asia nor from Africa, but was an original native creation wherein Sumerian and Egyptian techniques and ideas were blended to form a novel and essentially European whole. The admittedly Nilotic and Oriental elements that we see superadded to the Cretan neolithic culture, may be treated as concrete expressions of the transformation of the island's economy in response to the demands of the great consuming centres that arose, round about 3000 B.C., on the Nile and the Euphrates. In suppl3nng their
^ Iraq, II, fig. 51, 5.
THE ORIENT AND CRETE
21
needs the Cretan farmer’s sons might find a livelihood in trade and industry ; their self-sufficing villages would become commercial cities.
On the basis of the stratigraphical sequence, best preserved at Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans divided the Cretan Bronze Age into the famous " nine Minoan periods ” to which he attributed absolute dates on the strength of contacts with the literate centres of civilization. His scheme, columns I and II below, needs some revision after forty-five years. Firstly the chrono- logies of Egypt and Mesopotamia ^ have been deflated since then. Secondly Evans’ division was based mainly on the sequence of ceramic styles observed at Knossos. This turns out to be applicable to other parts of the island only with drastic modifications. The ceramic art, defining Evans’ L.M. II, was a “ palace style ”, in vogue only at Knossos. The same thing had happened before. Once it looked as if East Crete had been deserted in M.M. II, since the eggshell fine polychrome pottery defining that phase was lacking. In reality this style too was confined to the palaces of Knossos and Phaestos in Central Crete, 2 Even in the Mesara, a fortiori in East Crete, the M.M. I style was still in fashion as late as 1790 b.c.® Moreover, at Knossos the Early Minoan period is poorly represented owing to the levelling carried out by later builders ; Evans’ account had to be filled out by large drafts on material from East Crete and the Mesara. But during E.M. Minoan culture was by no means uniform so that there is a real danger of inflating the sequence by using local styles to represent chronological periods. Thirdly the first reliable synchronisms based on an actual and dated interchange of products are afforded by M.M. II vases in Middle Kingdom Egypt securely dated about 1850 b.c. We have no Early Minoan imports in dated contexts in Egypt or Hither Asia, and, though actual Eg5q)tian manufactures of Old Kingdom and even predynastic type were imported into the island, they occur only without stratigraphical context.** For later periods on the contrary the Egyptian and Syrian evidence justifies the dates given in column IV below. We thus have the following scheme :
•
^ e.g. by Sidney Smith, Alalakh and Chfonology, London, 1940.
* Aberg, Chron., IV, 201 fi. ; Pendlebury, Crete, XXXI, 300-2.
» Smith. AJA., XLIX (1945). 23-4.
* Pendlebury, MgypHaca, 20.
22 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
|
Period, Early Minoan |
Abbreviation and Subdivision. Knossos. East Crete. E.M.I E.M.II E.M.ni E.M.III ? |
Absolute Date B.C. ? 2000 1850 1700 |
|
Middle Minoan |
M.M.I M.M.II M.M.I |
|
|
L.M.I |
1550 |
|
|
Late |
L.M.I |
1450 |
|
L.M.II |
||
|
Minoan |
||
|
L.M.III(A) L.M.III{A) |
1400 |
|
|
L.H.ni(B) |
1300 |
|
|
L.H.in(C) |
1200 |
No attempt can be made here to evoke in a few pages an adequate picture of Minoan civilization. We must content ourselves with a brief outline of the economic development and some reference to the industrial products that are relevant for comparative purposes.
As in neolithic times the foundations of Minoan economy were fishing, the breeding of cattle, goats, and pigs (sheep are not osteologically attested till Late Minoan times) and the cultivation of unidentified cereals together with olives and other fruits. But now specialized craftsmen — ^jewellers, copper- smiths, lapidaries — ^must have been supported by the smrplus produce of the peasantry. And so in addition to rural hamlets, larger agglomerations of population must be assumed though no Early Minoan township has been fully excavated. Sound- ings at Vasiliki.* in East Crete and beneath the palace of Knossos give hints of the existence of complexes of rectangular houses of brick and timber on stone foundations, like the contemporary cities of Anatolia and Mainland Greece. But even as late as M.M.I we find the rural population living in isolated house- complexes more reminiscent of a big farm than even a village. A dwelling of that period at Chamaezi * was an oval walled enclosure, measuring 20 m. by 12 m. and divided by radial
O
1 Hazzadalds, Tylissos h Vipoque minoenm (1921), 77.
* Described in Boyd Hawes, Goutnia,
* Evans, P. of AT., I, 147.
THE ORIENT AND CRETE 2S
walls into eleven compartments — exactly like the Iron Age courtyard houses and wheel dwellings of Western Britain F
Similar conclusions might be drawn from the graves. The standard Minoan burial practice at all periods was collective interment in a family or communal ossuary used for many generations. This practice, foreign to Egypt, Sumer, and the Anatolian plateau, was current all round the Mediterranean, going back to '' Mesolithic times among the troglodyte Natufians of Palestine.^ In the Minoan ossuaries the bones are generally lying in the utmost disorder. The dislocated condition of the skeletons, which has been observed in collective tombs farther west too, has been taken as evidence of secondary burial ; the remains would have been deposited in a temporary resting place until the flesh had decayed. Xanthudides'^ careful studies of the Mesara burials have, however, shown that the disordered condition of the bones was due in the main to disturbances by those undertaking later interments who showed little respect to the former occupants of the tomb in making room for a fresh interment. The bodies had generally been placed on the floor of the tomb in the contracted attitude. Similarly traces of fire, sometimes noted on the bones, are due to ritual or purificatory fires kindled within the ossuary rather than to cremation.
The ossuaries themselves may be natural caves (E.M.I to M.M.I), rectangular stone chambers, imitating two-roomed houses, or circular enclosures commonly termed tholoi. In the Mesara the tholoi vary in internal diameter from 4- lo to 13 m. and are entered through a low doorway, formed of two mega- lithic uprights supporting a massive lintel and often entered from a small walled enclosure. The walls are from i • 8 to 2 • 5 m. thick and the inner courses oversail one another as if the whole had been roofed with a corbelled vault on the principle employed in the Cycladic tomb illustrated in Fig. 25, i. While it is hard to believe that a space 30 or 40 feet across could really have been spanned by a false dome, the smaller chambers certainly do deserve the name of tholoi, or vaulted tombs In an early example at Krasi® in East Crete, 4*2 m. in diameter, the corpses must, as in the Cyclades and Attica (pp. 52, 69), have
^ Garrod, The Stone Age of Mt. Carmel, I, 14.
* Xanthudides and Droop, Vaulted Tombs of the Mesard. » A. A., 1920, 103.
24
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
been introduced through the roof, since the door, only 0-5 m. high, was completely blocked by an accumulation of bones and offerings ; the “ door ” would in fact be purely symbolic as in Egyptian mastabas and some British long barrows.
Evans has compared the Cretan tholoi to Libyan and Nubian closed tombs of later date, but Mallowan, followed by Peake, would find the prototypes of the Minoan tholoi in circular brick constructions of unknown, but certainly non- sepulchral, use which he had discovered in the chalcolithic Tel Halaf township at Arpachiya in Ass3nia that goes back at least far into the fourth millennium b.c.^ By that date the device of corbelling was certainly well understood in Hither Asia, but it is not attested in Eg5^t before the Second or Third Dynasty. In fact, the Minoan tholoi, like the contemporary rectangular ossuaries, may be just imitations in permanent material of dwellings for the living, since round houses are attested by a model from Phaestos. As the tholos tomb was current also in the Cyclades, pottery and ornaments of Cycladic character were abundant in the early tholos at Krasi, and Cycladic idols occur even in the Mesera tombs. Marinates seems inclined to think that the type of sepulchre may have been introduced by families from the small islands.
J.n East Crete (for instance at Mochlos) the house-tombs may be grouped to form small cemeteries such as should correspond to a township where several lineages lived together. Tholoi are more often isolated as if the territorial unit corre- sponded to a single clan or lineage. But in the Mesara small cemeteries are known— three tholoi and a rectangular ossuary at Koumasa, three tholoi at Platanos, etc. Such aggregations imply the association of several kinship groups in a single ^dllage, but no actual settlements anterior to Middle Minoan have been yet identified in the vicinity. Both in the Mesara and at Krasi when the tholoi had become congested, accessory ch^bers were built on to the original mausoleum to receive xr interments, mostly of Middle Minoan date. And bv
M.M.II there developed the practice of excavating in the soft rock sepulchres designed for a single small family-irregular
« antechambeLas attested by the Mavro Speleo cemetery near Knossos.s A
‘ Iraq.. 11, 20, figs. 13-4.
» BSA., XXVm (1926^7), 263-296,
THE ORIENT AND CRETE
25
small tholos seems to have been built in an excavation in a hillside in the same period. Subterranean chambers became the standard form of tomb in Late Minoan times in Crete as in Mycenaean Greece. But even before the end of Early Minoan, individual burial in small stone cists, in clay coffins (lamakes) and in jars (pithoi) grouped in cemeteries as contrasted with ossuaries, was beginning to compete with ossuary practice, and steadily increased in popularity during later periods. The clay coffins ^ have early parallels both in Mesopotamia and Egypt whereas jar burial is a specifically Anatolian-Syrian rite.
The variety of burial practices coexistent in Early Minoan times, like the variety of ceramic traditions, suggests that the island had been colonized by distinct communities which had not yet fused to form a single people with an homogeneous culture. But they seem to have lived together peaceably, as no fortifications have been found, and as members of a single economic system in view of the uniformities in types of metal tools, stone vases, jewellery, and seals. This system secured and distributed foreign materials, gold, silver, lead, obsidian, marble, and perhaps amber (from the tholos of Porti), Egyptian and Asiatic manufactures such as fayence beads and stone vases that were copied locally and perhaps Cycladic figurines. Individual artisans needed seals (buttons, beads, and prisms) that might bear scenes symbolic of their craft ; merchants stamped therewith bales of goods exported to Asine and other mainland ports. But no regular system of writing and ciphering was yet needed nor publicly sanctioned for corre- spondence or accounts. Though sepulchral furniture discloses considerable personal wealth, neither monumental private tombs, palaces, nor temples indicate concentration of wealth in the hands of capitalists human or divine. Cult was conducted in rustic sanctuaries and grottoes. Its symbols — stone figurines imported from the Cyclades or imitating predjmastic Egyptian block figures, phalli ^ and model horns of consecra- tion ® as in Anatolia, dove-pendants ^ as in the Cyclades and Assyria, and votive double-axes ® of ^copper and lead
1 Man, XXIX, 1929, 18.
* Koumdsa, tholos X.
» Mochlos, E.M.I. (P. of M., I, 57).
* Mochlos [ibid., 102) ; cf. Iraq, II, fig. 51, 7.
* Mochlos (P. of M„ I, loi).
26
DAWS OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
—while foreshadowing the distinctive apparatus of later Minoan ritual, still appear in forms appropriate to domestic worship.
In Middle Minoan times power and wealth began to be concentrated in the hands of dynasts residing in Central Crete and combining political and religious authority. Palaces that were also temples, factories, and warehouses were
Fig. io. The Minoan '' Mother Goddess and aeft) Homs of Consecration from a sealing. After Evans. *
erected at Mallia, Knossos, and other sites. Specialization invades tie domain of domestic industry. The potters’ wheel symbolamg the industrialization of the ceramic art, is attested rom M.M.I. The wheel itself was a large clay disc which "i potters could carry about with them as they do to-dav ^ Wheeled vehicles are first represented at the same period by a model four-wheeled cart from Palaikastro.* They could hark ^ ^mceable vnthout roads maintained by some authority wth more than local jurisdiction. And in fact during Middle th?So^ divergent local traditions that had persisted Cret^^ ^ preceding penod were gradually fused until Crete came to enjoy a smgle civilization. But the distinction between proymce and metropolis becomes prominent The Facial potters of Eastern Crete could not compete with tihe experts employed m the palaces of Knossos or^ Phaestos in tun^g out polychrome ware of eggshell thinfiess.
1927), Archaology, presented to Sir Arthur Evans (Oxfoid,
* BSA., Supplementary Volume, Palaikastro, 1923, 17.
THE ORIENT AND CRETE
27
The priest-ldngs organized more effectively trade with Egypt, Melos, peninsular Greece, and other foreign lands where even the eggshell pottery has been discovered — ^in Egypt in a Twelfth D3masty tomb sealed some time after 1850 B.c. And this commerce must have substantially augmented their real wealth. For its administration a civil service would be required. And the perpetual corporation thus instituted needed a socially sanctioned system of keeping records and accounts. In fact a conventional script of an ideographic type was developed during M.M.I and used for accountancy. The idea was presumably borrowed from the Minoans’ correspon- dents in Egypt or S3nia where writing had been in use for a thousand years. The actual conventions were local, though several signs have Eg5q)tian analogues and the numeral forms are reminiscent of early Siunerian, while the use of a clay tablet as a vehicle of writing is an Asiatic habit.
Increase of wealth is usually accompanied by increase of population. The palace of Knossos was surrounded with an extensive town of two-storied houses, known not from actual excavation so much as from a mosaic attributed to M.M.IIb. The native population would be swelled by the immigration of craftsmen attracted by the wealth of Minoan courts and towns. So professional potters from Asia may have introduced the potters’ wheel and trained native apprentices in its use. And other specialists such as fresco-painters may have arrived to minister to courtly desires for refinement. But if new arts were introduced by immigrants, the Minoan schools these founded were original and creative both in devising fresh techniques and in creating a new naturalistic style that owed little to Oriental models. In beholding the charming scenes of games and processions, animals and fishes, flowers and trees that adorned the Middle Minoan II and III palaces and houses we breathe already a European atmosphere.’^
The development of Minoan civilization was interrupted by catastrophes which may be taken to mark the end of the phases termed M.M.II, M.M.III and L.M.I. The disaster in each case seems due to earthquake and was followed by reconstruction qf the ruined palaces. Bu{ about 1400 B.c. hostile forces razed the palace of Minos to the ground. The hegemony in the ^gean had passed to Mycen® on the Mainland
1 Spearing, Childhood of Art, 230, 353.
28 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
(p 76) But urban civilization still flourished in Crete for two centuries. Goumia. for instance, in East Crete, now covered six acres and comprised some sixty houses. And the richly- furnished Late Minoan cemeteries comprising corbeUed tombs (partially subterranean), rock-hewn chamber tombs, pit-caves, and shaft-graves as well as larnax burials, remained in use in
places even into the Iron Age.^ ^
This inadequate sketch must be supplemented by a brief reference to certain industrial products that will be cited in later chapters dealing with less progressive parts of Europe. Tools and weapons are particularly relevant in this context. Obsidian was used for knives, sickle-teeth, and arrow-heads (including the transverse type). Fine hollow-based specimens are found even in Late Minoan tombs. At least in Early Minoan times stone was used even for axe-heads i notable is a jadeite celt from the tholos of Kalathiana in the Mesara. But copper was being used for celts even in the latest neolithic ” phase ^ and soon ousted stone. Copper ore exists in East Crete ^ and may have been exploited in Early Minoan times. The addition of tin to copper to facilitate casting is attested as early as M.M.I, though the standard alloy containing 10 per cent of tin was not firmly established till M.M.III. Bronze was known to the Sumerians before 2500 B.c. and knowledge of its qualities was probably transmitted thence to the Mgeoxi via Anatolia (p. 38). But the Minoans’ demand for tin may ultimately have been supplied from lodes in Etruria, Cornwall, or Bohemia, since in each country we shall encounter ambiguous hints of contact with the ^Egean world (pp. 116, 235, 328). Iron is represented by a ring from a Middle Minoan tomb in the Mavro Speleo cemetery, but was not used indus- trially before- 1200 b.c.
For axes the flat celt of the copper age did not lead, as in Cis-alpine Europe, to flanged and socketed forms, but was superseded by the shaft-hole axe (Fig. ii, i) that had been current from prehistoric times in Mesopotamia. After Middle Minoan III the single-bladed axe was ousted in Crete by the two-edged variety — the Double Axe — known also to the Sumerians and elevated to become a fetish or symbol of
^ Arch., LIX, and LXV, 1-94 ; Pendlebury, Crete, 195, 242, 306.
* P. of M., II, 14.
* Mosso, Dawn of Mediterranean CivilizcUion (1910), 290.
29
the orient and CRETE
the axe-adze that may be regarded as a combination of two types of axe nsed by the Sumerians, is represented by a g Jd
rto. ta. I, Early Minoan daggers (f) ; i. Stone beads (i). After Evans.
from the
armhouse at Chamaizi (Fig. ii, 3) attributed to M.M.I and
» P. of M., II, 629, fig. 392. » JD. ^ ^
30
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
then the standard Minoan form (Fig. 4) from M.M.II on. Heavj' perforated hammers of metal rectangular in cross section are reported as early as M.M.II ^ and carpenters* saws are attested as early as wheeled vehicles, by M.M.I.^ But elongated flat celts served as chisels and no sicldes older than L.M.III ® survive.
Early Minoan daggers are triangular or provided with a very short wide tang (Fig. 12, i), and sometimes given longi- tudinal rigidity by means of a midrib cast on both faces. They were attached with small rivets, sometimes of silver, to their bone or wooden hilts that were surmounted by globular or hemispherical pommels ^ of stone or ivory, laterally perforated for transverse rivets to hold them in position. During Middle Minoan times the blades, stiU either flat or strengthened with a midrib, were elongated and assume an ogival form (Fig. 13).
Some have a flat tang, like Asiatic daggers, and the rivets are arge. ut the palace of MaUia has yielded a genuine raoier .totaled to M.M.I • which is shown by to poXS
^d Its attachment to the hilt to be a development of the ^iistrated in the Royal Tombs of Ur. And in
i, ^ clearly elongations, to the surprising length of
93 cm., of the native types of Fig. 13. tS poiLelf are ^provements on the Early Minoan fonn apprSLTo Fig. 21, 3, whl. the hiit-plate of tyj* i SSiS
34
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
handle turned up at Nienhagen in Saxo-Thuringia apparently in an Earlj’ Bronze Age cemetery.
Minoan costume, like the Egyptian, did not require fastening with pins so that, apart from a few hairpins, these toilet accessories, so common in Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Central European graves, are missing in Bronze Age Crete. On the other hand the Minoans, like the Egyptians, Sumerians,
Fig. i6. Egyptian representations of Vapheio cups.
and Indians were skilled at shaping and perforating hard stones for beads. Rock crystal and camelian were used from Early Minoan times as well as ivory and fayence. Two amorphous lumps from the tholos of Porti have been identified as amber, but Evans has questioned this diagnosis.^ By L.M.I amber was certainly reaching Crete regularly from the Baltic, and a gold bound amber disc from the cemetery of Knossos (L.M.II) ® is almost identical with one found in a Middle Bronze Age grave in Wiltshire. Segmented beads of fayence, copying stone beads that go back to E.M.II ® (Fig. 12, 2a) were being manufactured in Crete from M.M.III. Similar beads have turned up as imports in the Danube valley, Spain, Poland and England, but these seem to be of Egyptian manufacture (P- 334» below). Stone hammer-beads occur even in the E.M. ossuaries of the Mesara.*
* Xanthudides and Droop, 69.
• Arch., LXV, 42.
• U. of Penns., Anthrop. Pubis., Ill, 3, 184.
* Xanthudides and Droop, pi. XXXII, 548.
CHAPTER III
Anatolia the Royal Road to the ^gean
In the fifth century the Royal Road from Mesopotamia to the ^gean, led not to the Levantine coasts alone, but on across the plateau of Anatolia — a promontory of Asia thrust out towards Europe. Here ran the route along which Persian armies marched to impose Oriental culture on Greece, along which diplomatists, scientists, and merchants travelled to transmit more peacefully and successfully Babylonian ideas to the young Ionian States. Two milleimia earlier the plateau was already a bridge across which merchant caravans could trans- port products of Mesopotamian civilization towards barbaric Europe ; the Taurus’ wealth in ores had induced colonies of Assyrian merchants to settle in Cappadocia and maintain continuous communications with the cities on the Tigris and Euphrates. But earlier still the riverine cities’ demands had been transforming native peasant villages into little townships, inducing them to sacrifice self-sufficiency for the profits of industry and trade. Indeed, when the archaeological record, as laid baire by recent excavations in Turkey, begins, the transformation is already far advanced ; in the lowest levels yet reached copper is ailready competing with stone aind bone.
This native Copper Age culture, permeated with more Eaistem traits, extends from the Taurus westward to the shores of the Hellespont. Over this vast area close inspection of the record reveals, embraced within a general imity, local diver- gencies till in North-Western Anatolia the material has an almost European aspect. The earliest settlement of this area is represented by pottery found on virgin soil at Kum Tepe ^ in the Troad. Notable are pedestailed bowls of a t5TJe, found in the earliest strata at Alifar on the plateau and then in the Balkans, and stroke-burnished ware which recurs on Samos and often in Europe. The sequel is seen at Hissarlik, the ancient Troy, a key position on the Hellespont commanding at once sea- traffic up the straits and a land route’s crossing to Europe. There Heinrich Schliemann last century distinguished seven superimposed prehistoric cities, but left a multitude of cru- cial issues for more scientific excavations, still unpublished ^AJA., XXXIX. 33.
So
36
DA\\"N of EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
in 1946, to settle. It will simplify the subsequent exposition if we summarize here in tabular form the cultural sequence as disclosed in the latest provisional reports.^
Troy Vila the " Homeric " city, dated by Mycenaean imports to the early twelfth and late thirteenth centuries b.c.
Troy VI destroyed by an earthquake and similarly dated between 1500
Troy V represented in places by 2 - 5 m. of deposit and divisible into four
or hve phases.
Troy IV with 2 to 5 phases and i *85 m. deposit.
Troy III 1-85 m. deposit.
Troy II i*6o m. deposit; reconstructions of the enclosing wall mark three phases, a, b, and c, but two or three additional layers, the latest marking a terrific conflagration, are recognizable above the
He floors. u ,
Troy I 4*4 m. of deposit and four main phases, each subdivisible.
Apart from sheer dead-reckoning, clues to the absolute age of the deeper layers are afforded by the following considerations. In Troy VI the oldest dated sherds imported from Greece belong to L.H.I and L.M.II, but in lower strata of the same city the local “ Minyan ” ware is parallel to that of M.H. Greece and begins only in Vd. From Va down to Id Early Helladic pottery was being imported which in most of Greece went out of fashion about 1850 B.c.® On the other hand a " red cross bowl ” (p. 46), typical of Troy V, was found in the stratified tell near Mersin, Cilicia in the lowest “ Imperial Hittite” stratum that should begin about 1450 b.c.® while grey ware like Minyan is commonest in the contemporary layer at the Hittite capital, Boghaz Keui.* At Gozlu Kale, near Tarsus, the variant of Fig. 19, 5, that is characteristic of Troy III, occurred in a layer, dated by impressions of "Cappadocian” seals between 1970 and 1870.® In sub- stantially earlier levels at Alishar a form of goblet not found below Troy Ilb ® gives a limiting date for that phase before, say, 2200 B.c. (These goblets and other Trojan pot forms reproduce gold and silver vessels actually found at Alaca Hoyiik and elsewhere which, being objects of trade, would be rapidly diffused.) So it is hardly possible to place the beginning
‘ AJA., XLI (1937), 563-6, 595-
! ^¥.(;937). 563-6, 595 ; BSA., XXXVII, 10-12.
^ LAA.i., XK\ I, 132 ; this date is too low.
* MVOG., LXXV (1937), 38.
* AJA., XLIV. 65.
* Bittel, '* Prahistorische Forschungen in Kleinasien ” llstanbuler Ftnsckungen, 1934), 18-20; van der Osten, OIC. Publications, XXVIII- XXX, 1937.
ANATOLIA— ROYAL ROAD TO THE ^GEAN 37
of Troy II much after 2500 and Troy I might take us back easily to 2750 b.c. But Blegen's much higher dates ^ really involve a circular argument.
Troy I was already a little township, girt by a massive stone wall ^ and apparently ruled by a chief whose palace was a long rectangular hall, 12*8 m. long by 5 - 4 m. wide, entered through a porch at the west end.® But pending the full publica- tion of recent discoveries a more complete and accurate picture of the earliest civilization of North-Western Anatolia may be obtained by supplementing the data being gleaned at Troy by those from the cemetery of Yortan in Mysia and above all from the five superimposed townships of Thermi * in Lesbos of which towns I to IV are parallel to Troy L
Even the earliest settlement consisted of clusters of two- roomed houses (often of the long rectangular plan), closely juxtaposed along well-defined but crooked and narrow streets. The mud-brick walls rested on foundations of stones, sometimes (in Thermi I and IV and Troy I) laid not horizontally but obliquely in herring-bone formation, an arrangement often employed in the brick architecture of Early Dynastic Sumer. And as in Mesopotamia the doors were pivoted on stone sockets. Some houses in Thermi were provided with low domed ovens of clay only 3 ft. high. Especially in Thermi III pits (bothroi) were often dug in the house floors and carefully lined with clay.®
Anatolian economy rested on the cultivation of wheats,® barley, millet, and presumably vegetables, perhaps also of vines and fruit-trees, the breeding of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, and fishing with hook and line or with nets. Axes and rare adzes were made from pebbles ground and polished and also from stags' antlers pierced for a shaft-hole, knives, and sickle- teeth from flint blades simply trimmed. Stone battle-axes with cylindrical butts occur already in Thermi I or II and reveal the local ancestry of ornate weapons like Fig. 21, i, but stone battle axes had been used in the IVth millennium in Mesopotanua
1 Milojdic, BSA., XLIV (1949), 258-306. ^ A JA,, XLI, 567,.
® AJA., XLI, 18 the plan is essentially Asiatic, AJA., XLVIII, 342 ff.
* Lamb, Excavations at Thermi in Lesbos,
» On bothroi in general, see JHS., LV (1935)*
• Einkorn is attested, though perhaps later, at Troy and Kusura {Arch., LXXXVI, 10), emmer only at Thermi, where there are some traces of vines.
S8
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
though known only from clay models of the al’Ubaid culture. ^ Bone splinters, pointed at both ends, served as arrow-heads, while the armoury comprised also sling-stones and maces with spheroid stone heads.
But trade already brought metal even to Lesbos, and at Thermi I and Troy I there were specialized smiths available to work it. A crucible was found on virgin soil at Thermi, and small metal pins and trinkets were comparatively common at all levels. Most were made from unalloyed copper, but a pin from Thermi II contained as much as 13 per cent of tin, and a bracelet of this rare metal was found in town IV. Indeed by the time of Thermi II and III metal was common enough for large implements to be left lying about for modem excavators to find. Their discoveries include chisels with rounded butts as in Egypt and in Sumer in Jemdet Nasr times, flat axes and an axe with the sides hammered up to form low flanges,® and flat-tmged daggers like Fig. 20, 2-4, but still without the prominent midrib. Though the shaft-hole axe so common in Mesopotamia is not represented in West Anatolian metal work,® the daggers and pins suffice to show that the local smiths were trained in the Asiatic rather than the Nilotic school of metallurgy.^
Trade was not however exclusively with Asia nor confined to metal and ores. Emery and marble vases were imported from the Cyclades, while copper bird-headed pins from Thermi I ^d polished iMne tubes (hke Fig. 27, i) from III and IV are further reflections of intercourse with ^Egean islands.
Despite the specialization of the metallurgical industry and the ranufications of commerce, pot-making was not sufficiently mdust^ed for the use of the wheel. The self-coloured bumshed vases, varying in hue from deep black to brick red and often copymg gourd or leather vessels, are representative of a traffition common to the whole of Anatolia. A conspicuous pcT^nty throughout the province is the popularity of genuine hanffi^ m adffition to simple lugs. Forms distinctive of West Anatoha are bowls with lugs growing from the inverted rims
i ®50, pl. XVIII t. 5.
1 TV Ahlatlibel, near Ankara
hole in the-I^uvre and two shaft-
Arck^ J. ^ (®934). po:'
* For the distinction see Omt! ilimze Age.
ANATOLIA— ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN 39
(Fig. 17, i), jugs with cut-away necks (Fig. 17, 2-3), tripod vessels, and collared pyxides with string-hole lugs and lids (Fig. 17, 4).i Significant changes in form, documented by the stratigraphy of Thermi, are the expansion of the ends of the
Fig. 17. Pottery from Thermi I-II (A) and III-IV (B). After W. Lamb,
BSA., XXX.
tubular lugs on the bowls to the homed lugs ” in town III and the contemporary transformation of tripod legs into models of human feet. Decoration was effected by means of bosses, ribs, burnished grooves, and incisions and, later andatYortan, thin white paint, the patterns being always rectilinear.
Spinning and weaving would be domestic arts too. Their importance is attested by the numbers of spindle-whorls, often decorated. The weaver may have used perforated arcs of clay up to 9 cm. in length, represented in Thermi III, that seem to be forerunners of the narrower crescentic loom-weights so common in the Hittite levels of Kusura and Ali^ar.^
The domestic fertility cults of a superstitious peasantry may be illustrated by numerous female figurines of stone and
1 Bowls on a tali hollow pedestal are missing from Troy, Yortan, and Thermi, but have been found at Kum Tepe, which may be earlier than Thermi and in the earliest strata at Ali§ar, van der Osten, The Alishar Huyuk, OIP., XXVIII, 67 ; AJA., XXXIX, 33 1
» Arch., LXXXVI, 35, fig. 15 ; Alishar, fig. 30.
ANATOLIA— ROYAL ROAD TO THE ^GEAN 48
ig. 19, 2 and 6), jugs with flaring mouths (Fig. 19, 4), and arious two-handled goblets (Fig. 19, 5). But these appear heady hand-made in phase Ila and are merely exaggerated xpressions of tendencies inherent in the earlier and more eneralized Anatolian tradition. The representation of the Mother Goddess ” on the face-ums is significantly like that m the handles of early Sumerian funerary jars^; but the
TTrr 5T Battle axe (i), gold-capped bead (i) and crystal pommel (i). From Tjea^^L!^ditoyaxe-X (i). Museum f. Vorgescbxchte, BerUn.
convention is already foreshadowed in the stde from Troy . Side-spouted jugs, multiple vessels, jugs with double necfe, zoomorphic vases are essentially Anatolian and not confined to Trov II. Improvements in the preparation of the day and firing, probably introduced at the same time as the wheel, allowed the potter to produce harder, pder, ^d l^s po^ous vessels. But to preserve the effect of the dd self-colour vases, their surfaces were normally covered with a ferrugm wash that turns red on firing (red wash ware)-a device popular
1 ChUde, NLMAE., fig. 75-
44 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
at Ali§ar and farther east, and employed even in the Middle
Danube basin a* . ^ -j- -i
Despite the abundance of metal, stone, flint, obsidian, bone,
and antler were still freely and almost predomin^tly employed for axes, battle-axes, agricultural implements, kiiiyes, awls, pins, and combs. The battle-axes carry on the tradition of Troy I, but include some superbly polished weapons of semi-precious stones (Fig. 21, i) (from Treasure L) that must be ceremomal.
The jewellery from the hoards not only demonstrates the wealth of Troy, but the divergent ramifications of its commerce. Many items are specifically eastern ; the earrings and lock-rings with flattened ends, the spiral filagree work (Fig.^ 22, 3)« the gold disc beads, etc., may be regarded as Sumerian and the technique of the knot-headed pin ^ was known there as in predynastic Egypt.^ Pins with double spiral heads (of which Fig. 22, 3, is a glorified version) are found aU across Anatolia and Iran to India and Anau.* A “ spear-head ” identical with the Cycladic specimen of Fig. 23, i, from Treasure A, belongs to a family represented also in Central Anatolia, Cyprus, and Iran.* Earrings like Fig. 22, i, are worn by foreign dancing girls depicted on an Eighteenth Dynasty tomb-painting.* At the same time as we shall see, so many t37pes familiar at Troy recur in South-Eastern and Central Europe as to give the impression that Trojan tin came from Bohemia and their copper perhaps from Bulgaria. On the other hand, bossed bone plaques, like the Sicilian specimen shown in Fig. iii and rather more distant British analogies to the earrings and twisted armlets from Treasure A may indicate exploitation of western lodes. The bossed bone may belong to Troy III or IV rather than II.* Ring-pendants of stone, recurring in gold in WaUachia and Transylvania, might disclose one source of Trojan gold. Copies in East Prussia and Sweden may be counterparts of the amber beads from Treasure L. If Troadic trade was founded to satisfy the Oriental demands for metal, Troy II was itself a centre whose demands influenced our Continent. Yet Trojan merchants and officials seem to have managed their business
^ Ibid., p. 193 ; Brunton, Badarian Civilization, pi. LIV, 9.
» LA A A., XXIII, 1 19.
® Alik, Les Fouilles de Alaca Hoyuk, 1935, pi. CCLXXV ; Schaeffer, Missions en Chypre, 42 ff. ; Schmidt, Tepe Hissar.
* Aberg, Chron., IV, ii,
® Marburger Studien, I, 12 ; but the gold prototypes from Alaca HQyuk seem to belong to the Illrd millennium.
IG. 22. Gold eaxring and pendant from Treasure A pin from Treasme^ bracelet from Treasure F, and ]pot-h^d^ pins (i). Museum . g crhirTite. Berlm.
46
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
without WTiting. They certainly did not, like the Cretans, adopt the use of stone seals. But they did copy Asiatic stamp seals in clay.
The old native fertility cult continued without any notable changes, but the figurines, now predominantly of stone, are all highly conventionalized (Fig. 8, 15), and the phalli are made of stone.
For the development of European culture Troy II represents the most significant moment in the West Anatolian prehistory, but not of course its end. After the sack of Troy II important settlements termed Troy III, IV, and V were built on the site. All lasted long enough to need several local reconstructions, all were urban in the sense that they comprised specialized potters and smiths and relied upon trade, and in all the pottery attests unbroken continuity of culture. Face-urns and two-handled goblets were still being made in red wash ware in towns III and IV, and the fabric at least remained in vogue also in V. But in the latter township the wash was sometimes used as a paint, but only to produce a simple cross on the insides of shallow bowls. Similarly pottery termed Early Helladic and bone tubes of Cycladic type, like Fig. 27, i, were stih being imported even in the earlier phases of Troy V.^ In this to^ and also in IV, the American expedition has uncovered the ruins of domed ovens.
In the lowest layers of Troy VI a new pot-fabric emerges either through autochthonous developments or through fresh stimuli from without. It is a fine grey ware owing its colour to the reduction of the iron oxides in the selected clay by controlled firing in a kiln — ^what is termed Minyan ware — and is accompanied by an oxidized red variant. These are the characteristic native wares of Troy VI and VII too.
With the sixth town Troy once more attained the full dignity of a city. It was surrounded with a new stone wall enclosing an area of 15,000 to 18,000 sq. metres or about 4 acres Trade across the ^gean is attested by the importation of Mmoan-Mycenaean pottery of L.M.I to L.M.IIIa styles, and these imports fix^ the age of the settlement. From Troy VI comes the earliest osteological evidence for horses in the Troad,^ while bronze sickles give the first indication of the use of
* "iV/' (^934)* 229 ff. ; but cf. LII (1948)
* AJA., XLI, 595. ^
120.
ANATOLIA— ROYAL ROAD TO THE ^GEAN 47
metal in husbandry. The dead were now cremated, their ashes enclosed in urns of Minyan ware and buried in a cemetery outside the city walls.^ The cemetery, of Troy VI was in fact an umfield like those that begin in the Middle Bronze Age of Central Europe.
Troy VI was not, as had generally been thought, the city sacked by Agamemnon and his Achseans.^ It was destroyed by an earthquake but promptly rebuilt on a smaller scale by the old inhabitants. Imported Mycenaean sherds show that the reconstructed city, Vila, flourished in the thirteenth and well into the twelfth century B.c. Its end was violent, and the date inferred from the pottery agrees remarkably weU with the Greek tradition of the Trojan war. Thereafter European barbarians usurped the throne of Priam. In the squalid town of Troy VIIc socketed axes of Late Bronze Age form, cast by Central European methods, and fluted and wart-omamented wares allied to the Danubian Lausitz fabric leave no doubt as to the origin of these invaders. On the other hand, the continued production of wheel-made vases in the old Minyan technique and of native form demonstrates the persistence of the old Anatolian population in alliance with or subjection to the Central European intruders.
Other points in Troy may be documented from Ddrpfeld Troja und Ilion, Berlin, 1902, and H. Schmidt, Heinrich Schliemann*s Sammlung Trojanischer Altertumer, K. Museen zu ^rlin, 1902.
^ A JA., XXXIX, 26.
^ A JA., XLI, 42.
CHAPTER IV
Maritime Civilization in the Cyclades
The Cyclades are scattered across the ^gean, remnants of a land-bridge between Anatolia and Greece affording a passage for cultural ideas from Asia to Europe. To mere food-gatherers or self-sufficing peasants, the islands, often small and barren, offered no attractions. But to mariners crossing from Asia to Europe they offer convenient halting places and lairs to any pirates who might wish to prey on more peaceful voyagers. Moreover they contain raw materials of the sort needed by urban civilizations — copper (Paros and Siphnos), obsidian (Melos), marble (Paros and others), emery (Naxos). Accord- ingly while unoccupied by neolithic men, the Cyclades were early colonized by communities that could find a livelihood in commerce and perhaps in piracy too. Such communities must have lived near the shore and presumably in townships. But only at Phylakopi in Melos ^ has a Cycladic settlement been fully explored. There three consecutive townships could be distinguished, preceded by some earlier occupation represented by sherds collected beneath the oldest house-floors. The city has been partially engulfed by the sea, but must have extended well over 4 acres. The first town was apparently unfortified, the second and third girt with strong stone walls, 20 feet thick in the latest phase. Fortified settlements are also known at Chalandriani ^ on Syros, on Paros ^ and elsewhere. But these fortifications seem relatively late. Soon after the foundation of Phylakopi II M.M.Ib polychrome vases were imported from Crete ; the city is accordingly hardly older than the twentieth century b.c. ; it is frankly Middle Cycladic.
For the remaining islands and for earlier periods we are reduced to estimating the size and stability of the settlements from the cemeteries. Few have been fully explored but they were admittedly extensive. Three on Despotikon comprised 50 to 60 graves each ; on Syros one cemetery at Chalandriani
^ For Pliylakopi see JExcuveUions at Phylakopi in IVIelos (Society for Promotion of HeUenic Studies, Supplementary Volume, IV, 1904).
... * Amorgos and Paros, see Tsountas, KvKXaBiKa, in
Apx-t 1898 ; for Syros and Sipimos, ibid., 1809.
« AM,, XLIII (1917), 10 fi.
48
MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES 49
was composed of nearly 500 graves, a second of more than 50 ; on Paros, Tsountas mentions nine cemeteries of from 10 to 60 graves. Of course all these burials are not contemporary. While it has been customary to assign most cemeteries to the
some graves must be Middle or even Late Cycladic. Fortunately Cycladic imports in Egypt, in Crete, at Tlienni and Troy, and on Mainland Greece sufi&ce to show that the islands' culture reached its zenith in the third millennium. Marble idols like
^ Chronologie, IV, 71, 84.
50
OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Fig. 23, 2, were imported into Crete chiefly during E.M.III, a blade like 23, i, from the same tomb on Amorgos, was included in treasure A of Troy II ; Cycladic marble vases were used in Thermi I-III, and the bird pins of Thermi I recur on 85^:05 ; a pin with double spiral wire head like Fig. 27, 9, was found in an Early Helladic tomb at Zygouries ; “ frying pans ’’ with
Fig. 24. Cycladic " frying-pan " and sherd showing boat.
spiral decoration like Fig. 24 were found in the oldest Early Helladic township at H. Kosmas in Attica, and in the E.H.III vases (like Fig. 28, 2) were imported into ^gina in Early Helladic times though they continued to reach Eutresis in Boeotia during Middle HeUadic I (pp. 68 ff.).
MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES 51
Finally a zoomorphic vase of Parian marble was recovered from a predynastic grave in Egypt.i
The inference that the density of population on the islands was made possible by trade and manufacture is confirmed by the list of exports just given. And of course that list is by no means exhaustive. Obsidian was quarried on Melos and exported as. nuclei or blades to Crete, Mainland Greece, and the other islands. The Cycladic grave goods comprise the products of specialized craftsmen — smiths, jewellers, lapidaries — and prove the use of copper, tin,® lead, silver, and other materials which in some cases must have been imported. The rdle of maritime intercourse is further emphasized by the frequent representation of boats on the vases (Fig. 24).® But the islanders do not seem to have needed writing for their business transactions and did not even mate regular use of seals like the Minoans. The prominence of weapons in the tombs (especially of Amorgos), and the fortification of the settlements may indicate that piracy was already combined with legitimate trade. In any case being dependent on overseas trade, the prosperity of the islands might be expected to decline when that trade wais ” cornered ” by monopolistic princes in Crete and the Troad. A real contraction of population during Middle Minoan II-III and Late Minoan I-II would be perfectly comprehensible. In that case the bulk of our material would really be Early Cycladic.
But this Early Cycladic culture was by no means homo- geneous. Culturally the islands fall into a southern and a northern group overlapping only on Naxos.* To the former belong Melos, Amorgos, Despotikon, Paros, and Antiparos ; to the Northern Syros, Siphnos, Andros, and also Euboea. The contrast is revealed in burial practices as well as in grave-goods. In the southern group, though shaft-graves and chamber tombs of uncertain age are plentiful near Phylakopi,® the early graves were normally trapezoid cists. In the oldest cemeteries ® (the Pelos group), definitely antedating Phylakopi I, the cists served as ossuaries and contain several skeletons together with vases
1 Frankfort, Studies, II, 103. . . • j
® One dagger from Amorgos was of unalloyed copper, but a rmg contamed
13*5 cent tin.
® On JEgean ships see Marinatos in BCH., LVII (i933)» ^7® *■ Aberg, Chronologie, IV, 59 f.
* Phylakopi, 234-8. o
« Pelos in Melos, BSA ., Ill, 40 ; Antiparos, JHS„ V, 48.
52
DAV^s OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
like Fig. 28, i, and " fiddle idols like Fig. 8, 10-12. The later tombs were individual graves ; they contain idols like Fig. 23, 2, marble vases and weapons. On Syros ^ in the northern group rectangular or oval tombs were built in excava- tions in the hillside and roofed by corbelling (Fig. 25). But these too served as individual graves, and the single body was introduced through the roof. As at Krasi in Crete, the door (only *50 m. square) was merely a ritual element. In Euboea ^
I 2
Fig. 25. Tombs on Syros and Eubcna.
the tomb was a pit-cave, excavated in the ground and con- taining only a single corpse (Fig. 25). The pottery from the northern isles includes dark-faced fabrics often decorated with running spirals and excised triangles (Fig. 24). Technically it corresponds to the Early Helladic I of the Mainland though Cycladic imports at Eutresis » prove that on the islands this fabric remained current in Middle Helladic times. Favourite forms are the so-called frying pans and globular or cylindrical pyxides with lids. In some graves on Syros pottery of this class is associated with marble idols like Fig. 23, 2, which are common to both groups of islands.* Other graves on Syros and Naxos ® contain sauce-boats, jugs with cut-away necks and
\ Apx*» 1899 ; cf. p. 48, above.
3 ^ EvPolt^ dpxat^v ra^wv, Athens, 1910.
’ Goldman, Euirests, 182.
^3. 15 ; in both graves the '' frying-pans ** ^ concentric circles so that those with ruS| fpiials
* Aberg, Chron., IV. 86; Congris Ini. Arch. Athens, 1905, 221.
MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES 53
other vessels decorated in Instrous glaze paint in the style of Early Helladic III (p. 67). Finally Anatolian forms are common in the northern isles, and one tomb group on Euboea contained exclusively Troadic vases (like Fig. 19, 3-4) and daggers (like Fig. 20, 2).
The fish emblem carried by (Northern) Cycladic boats had been the standard of a predynastic parish in the Delta that did not survive into historic times in Egypt.^ So Fish-folk from
Fig. 26. Slotted speax-head (showing method of mounting), halberd and tweezers. Amorgos (J).
the Nile may have fled to the Cyclades when Menes conquered the Delta. Other Cycladic traits — ^the tweezers (Fig. 26, 2), the popularity of stone amulets and particularly the type represented in Fig. 27, 4 ; the use of palettes (though the Cycladic specimens are generally more trough-like than the Egyptian and Minoan *) and the preference for stone vases may also be Nilotic traits.
Metal work, pottery and dress, on the contrary, are rather Asiatic than African. Broad flat celts were used eis axe-heads. Shaft-hole axes are represented only by an. axe-haromer and
^ Evans, P. of M., ll, 26.
* These palettes, perforated at the four comers, resemble, but only superficially, the wrist-guards of the Beaker complex; cf. BSA., Ill, 67.
54
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
an axe-adze from a hoard on Cythnos.^ Daggers with a stout midrib and rivets, sometimes of silver as in Crete, are common chiefly on Amorgos. Spear-heads were slotted for mounting as sho^^m in Fig. 26 ; the type with hooked-tang, shov^m in Fig. 23, i, has already been connected with Asiatic models on p. 44.
Fig. 27. Early Cycladic ornaments: 2-8 Paros; i, 9, Syros (f).
At least in the northern islands clothing had to be fastened mth pins, as in Anatolia, and the types with double-spiral and bird heads have already been encountered in that area. Rings bracelets, and diadems of copper or silver were also worn as in
gold ornaments from an f T^’ 2 Mochlos m Crete and from the Royal Tombs
ot Cr. Some of the beads and amulets may be Asiatic, notably the ctove-pendants that are found even in the early tombs of
' ^ be compared with the fly-amulets of Egypt
and Mesopotamia,* but probably derive from a fom fashioned
^ B.M., Srohize, fig.
pi. WooUey, Vr Excavations: The Royal TomU.
’ Aberg, Chrmi., IV, 62-3.
‘ Cf. Childe, A’LMAE., fig. 36 (Gerzean).
MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES 55
of deers' teeth by the mesolithic Natufians of Palestine,^ A speciality of the northern isles was the decorated bone tube designed to contain pigments (Fig. 27, i). But similar tubes have been found in Troy IV and Va, and at Byblos in Syria ^ as well as on Levkas in Western Greece.
The self-coloured sepulchral pottery belongs in a general way to the same Anatolian tradition as the early Cretan, and some vase forms such as the pyxides are in the same vague way Anatolian. Even the curious frying-pan form so common in the northern graves recurs, in copper, in a royal tomb " at Alaca Hojriik in Central Anatolia.^ (The excised decoration and the form of the handles show that these odd utensils are copied from wooden originals.) On the other hand, the running spiral design on North Cycladic pottery is in a general way a Danubian motive.
As already indicated Cycladic culture declined when Minoan palaces indicate a Cretan grip on maritime trade and the warhke Minyans occupied the Helladic cities. On most islands only a few graves are dated by long rapiers or imported Minyan vases to middle and Late Cycladic times. The " halberd " of Fig. 26, 3, comes apparently from such a tomb.^ But her resources in obsidian secured to Melos a share in Minoan commerce, and Thera ® too benefited from her neigh- bours' wealth until a volcanic convulsion overwhelmed her inhabitants. Phylakopi II was a fenced city with regular streets. Imported M.M.I-II polychrome pottery and Minyan vases from Greece found together on the earliest house floors show how close was the island's connection both with Crete and with the mainland. Conversely the matt painted Middle Cycladic I pottery of Melos is significantly like the Early Bronze Age or Cappadocian ware of Alisar, in Central Anatolia, as if the island had also connections with the East. At a later stage in Phylakopi II a large building equipped with pillar-rooms like a Cretan palace and decorated with a frescoe of flying fishes in M.M.III technique might be the residence of a Minoan governor or consul. The potters' craft was industrialized, but
1 Garrod, Stone Age of Mt. Carmel, I, pi. XV, 2.
8 Aberg, Chron., IV, 13, 87 ; A JA„ XXXVIII (i934)> 229, 231.
® Hamit Ziibeyr Kosay, Ausgrdbungen von Alaca Hoyuk (Ankara, 1944), pi. LXXXIII, 60.
* MSAN., 1896, 30.
® On Thera see Aberg, Chron., IV, 127-37.
56
DA\\?s OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
the wheel-made vases were decorated with lovely naturalistic patterns in matt paint imitating the Minoan style of M.il.III-L.M.I (Fig. 28, 3). But though ceramic technique
Fig. 28. Cycladic pottery: i.Pelos; 2, Phylakopi I ; 3, Phylakopi 11. (L.C.)
and style changed there is no break in the tradition ; matt p^t had replaced the glaze medium at the beginning of Phylakopi II or even earUer though the patterns at first were
MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES 57
geometric as in Early Cycladic. In Late Mycensean-L.M.III times the fortifications of Phylakopi were strengthened ; the walls were now 20 ft. thick, and near the gate a staircase led up to a tower or rampart-walk. Most of the other islands have yielded traces of occupation at this time, but their culture now was just a variant of the Mycenaean " koine ” described on p. 78.
CHAPTER V
From Village to City in Greece * Neolithic A '
'he Greek peninsula has so far yielded no remains of palaeo- thic food-gatherers. When the archaeological record begins it was already occupied by “ neolithic ” peasants who must have been immigrants already possessed of a rich equipment, constituting the Sesklo culture.^ Particularly in the wide valleys of Thessaly and Central Greece they found an environ- ment which they could exploit from small self-sufficing hamlets, continuously occupied. They lived in modest round or rectangular huts of wattle and daub or of stone or perhaps mud-brick on stone foundations. A model from Sesklo shows a house with gabled roof. The repeated reconstruction of such dwellings has converted the settlements into little tells (toumba or magoula). Such mounds are very numerous but generally small : lOO by 75 m. is an average area for a Thessalian tell, but at Hagia Marina in Phocis the mound covered 300 by 200 m. From the stratigraphy of these tells two phases, A and B, of neolithic culture followed by a Bronze Age civilization can be deduced.
Now tell formation implies a rural economy advanced enough to maintain the fertility of the fields, if not orchard husbandry that ties the fanner to his fruit trees. In phase A the villagers lived by cultivating cereals, probably also vege- tables and fruit-trees ^ and breeding cattle, sheep or goats, and pigs. For preparing foods stone pestles and mortars were employed as well as saddle-quems. The carpenter used adzes of two types — the bevelled celt (D) and a sort of shoe-last celt (B), quite like the Danubian form (Fig. 29). Both may be made either from pebbles or from sawn blocks. A textile industry is attested by whorls, generally flat, and spools.
^ Mylonas, h *EXXa8it Athens, 1928, gives a good
general survey of the Stone Age. Cf. Weinberg, AJA,, LI (1947), 167-185.
» Barley is attested for period A at Tsani, wheat, barley, figs, pears, and peas for period B at Sesklo and Dimini, vulgare wheat from Rakhmani IV (D).
58
60
DA\\"N OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Unspecialized potters built up by hand delicate vessels, imitating baskets or perhaps even metal vessels ^ in an extremely fine burnished ware, generally red, in the Peloponnese sometimes black or mottled.^ The pots might be decorated with simple rectilinear patterns formed by wedge-shaped or round punctuations or by lines in white paint. In Northern Greece the vase surface was more often covered with a white slip on which designs were painted in red ; in Central Greece and the Peloponnese the white slip is often omitted. The patterns, often very elaborate, are clearly derived from basketry originals, but each hamlet developed its own distinctive style of painting. A few stone vases were found at Sesklo, and a bone spatula like Fig. 45,
Though self-sufl&cing communities, the neolithic hamlets were not mutually isolated ; they exchanged pots ® and doubtless other commodities. War is not attested ; the only definite weapons found were sling-stones, probably used by hunters. Peaceful commerce outside the province is disclosed by the general use of obsidian. At Tsani a stone button seat! bearing a cruciform design was found, and clay models of seals are reported from Sesklo, Hagia Marina and from Nemea in the Peloponnese. The type is certainly Asiatic. Such seals generally occur in a * ** chalcolithic " milieu, and copper may well have been known to the neolithic '' Greeks. Some of their pots seem to imitate the shape and even the rivets of metal vases, and at Hagia Marina Soteriadhes ^ claims to have found riveted copper daggers on virgin soil in a Sesklo settle- ment. Still, no sustained effort was made to secure regular supplies of metal.
Surplus energies were devoted rather to domestic fertility cults. For these figurines were modelled in clay, depicting, often with considerable verisimilitude, a female personage, standing or seated, or, in one example from Chaeroneia, nursing an infant (the ** kourotrophos ") (Fig. 31). Model thrones or altars (Fig. 32) were also manufactured. Cremation burials
1 Forsdyke, British Museum, Catalogue of Greek and Etruscan Vases, I, pp. XVI and 23.
* surface colour is determined by the firing, an oxidizing atmosphere
^ reducing black. See Blegen, Prosymna, 368-^ ; Hesperia,
* Wace and Thompson, p. 241.
* Mylonas, op. cit., fig. 64.
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
61
in pits axe reported from a cave near Argive Heraeum.’- As ornaments and charms the peasants wore bracelets of stone or
Fig. 31. Neolithic figures, Thessaly’’. After Wace and Thompson, (i, f ;
3-4. i ; h)
Spondylus shells (as on the Danube), and stone nose-plugs as in the al’Ubaid culture of Sumer.
The basketry pottery, the figurines, the use of brick and of slings instead of bows and above aU the stamp seals suggest
Fig. 32. Miniature altar or throne. After Wace and Thompson (•!).
an Asiatic origin for the neolithic Greeks, but in North Syria rather than Anatolia. Technically the chalcolithic pottery of
1 Blegen, Prosymna, 24-7.
62
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Cyprus 1 is veiy^ like the red-on-white ware described above and may constitute a link with the Tel Halaf complex farther east. At the same time connections with the cultures of the Lower and Middle Danube valley are already discernible ; significant common elements are shoe-last ad2es, triangular altars, shell bracelets and a coarse rusticated ware from Thessaly and Levkas.^
The Sesklo culture just described is found all over Thessaly and Central Greece and extends north into the Haliakmon valley, westwards to Levkas, and south into the Peloponnese. And phase A endured for a long time : at Tsangli five out of ten metres of settlement debris are attributed to it, and four out of eight occupational levels at Zerelia. But eventually the continuity of tradition was interrupted. Changes in ceramic technique, in art, in architecture, and even in economy not only define a new period, but also may betoken infiltrations of new peoples. But since the break is nowhere complete, it may be assumed that the old population absorbed, or was subjugated by, the new settlers. The latter’s cultural affinities seem to lie in the Balkans, but the manifestations of their advent differ in different regions.
* Neolithic B ’
At Dimini near the Gulf of Volo a completely new settle- ment was founded in phase B. In contrast to the earlier open hamlets it was defended by a complex of stone walls (Fig. 33). Sesklo was probably fortified at the same time. In both citadels houses of the megaron t3q>e with porch and central hearth were erected. At Dimini and Sesklo the bevelled adze (D) *went out of use, and axes (Fig. 29, C) were employed for the first time. These were hafted at Dimini with the aid of perforated antler sleeves. Copper and gold were now imported ; they are represented respectively by two flat celts and a ring- pendant (Fig. 34, 2), all from Dimini. In East Thessaly the vases were now decorated with spirals, normally combined with the older basketry patterns; the designs may be incised or painted in white pr warm black on a buff, red, or brown ground,
\ Report, Dept, of Antiquities, Cyprus, 1936 (Nicosia, 1938), 28 ; Schaeffer, Missions en Chypre, no. The chalcolithic and proto-ch^colithic of Mersin in Cilicia provide even better analogies, LA A A,, XXV, 86; XXVI, 158, 55“63-
MA/., LVII (1932), 104.
63
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
and may then be outlined with a second colour — ^black or white ; the high pedestailed bowl or fruit-stand appears for the first time. Fortifications, megaron-houses, antler mounts, gold, spiral motives, polychromy, pedestalled bowls are all combined as traits of the Ariusd culture in Transylvania. Twenty years ago it looked as if Dimini had been founded by invaders from the Alt valley who imposed their culture also
Fig. 33. Plan of fortified village of Dimini. After Tsountas.
on the inhabitants of Sesklo, Rakhmani, and other East Thessalian villages. But now polychrome Dimini ware has turned up in the Peloponnese at Gonia near Corinth and at the Argive Heraeum, though at the latter site spirals are missing. Sites really intermediate between Ariusd and Dimini have not been disclosed by explorations in* the intervening region. A bodily transfer of any North Balkan culture to Greece accordingly seems improbable to-day.^ Perhaps the
1 Wsice in ESA., IX, 123.
r>l DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
admitted similarities between Dimini and Danubian sites should be explained as parallel modifications of a cultural continuum extending right across the Balkans. For instance while spiral motives might be regarded as Danubian elements in Greece, the technique of vase-painting, even beyond the Balkans, must be considered a south-eastern trait (see pp. gi f . below).
In Western Thessaly and Central Greece the break is less abrupt. But everywhere the bevelled adze went out of fashion to make way for blunt-butted or flat axes (types A and C). And Danubian influence has been seen ^ in the appearance of black or grey (carboniferous) wares which may be decorated by stroke burnishing, flutings or corrugations, incisions, beading, and thin white paint, bear spiral patterns and form pedestalled bowels. Admittedly all these peculiarities, save white painting, occur also north of the Balkans in the Middle Danube basin
I 2
Tig. 34. Dimini bowl (i) and gold ring-pendant (f). After Tsountas.
and reflect a cultural continuity now extending from the Peloponnese to Hungary. But Crete and the Levant might provide as likely sources for black burnished wares, pedestalled bowls and blunt-butted axes as the Danube basin (p. 18) ; even stroke burnishing adorns pottery from Asia Minor, Syria, and E,M. Crete.^ And in any case local styles of painted ware, decorated with exclusively rectilinear designs, though no
^ Frankfort, Studies, II, 40-5.
* BSA., XXXVII, 31-5.
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
65
longer in red-on-white, carry on the ceramic traditions of period A into period B. And in Boeotia and the Peloponnese the black surface of carbonaceous ware was sometime simulated by a coat of lustrous (glaze) paint appKed to the old red wares ; this has been termed ''neolithic Urfirnis” ^ and should be no older than E.M.I. to which period stroke-burnished ware like- wise points.
The Early Helladic Bronze Age
The influx of new settlers in period B had not involved an immediate transformation of the economic structure of Hellas. Despite the copper axes from Dimini, phase B can be termed neolithic as legitimately as phase A. A civilization of Bronze Age character appears in the tells of Central Greece only in a subsequent stratigraphical phase. To this the name " Early Helladic '' (E.H.) has been given and it can be subdivided into three phases, E.H. I, E.H.II, and E.H.III, like the Early Minoan period.
The " neolithic population, swollen by the immigrants received in phase B, might have sought an outlet for the surplus in trade and industry. In many cases the Early Helladic townships have been built upon the sites of neolithic villages ; sometimes specifically neolithic elements, such as Dimini ware, are found on the oldest " Bronze Age floors. But on the whole it looks as if the new economy was introduced by fresh invaders, coming ultimately from Anatolia. Several Early Helladic towns are new foundations on sites chosen with a view to trade rather than agriculture. Architectural tricks, such as herring-bone masonry (Eutresis, H. Kosmas) and pits sunk in the house-floors (bothroi), and ceramic novelties — self- coloured pyxides, jugs with cut-away necks, bowls with tubular and homed lugs growing from the inverted rims and askoi — suggest a transfer of Anatolian culture across the ^Egean. But if that means colonization, it was at least a complex process. All innovations do not occur simultaneously. One of the earliest pots from Asine is more like a Copper Age pot from Alisar than any West Anatolian form.^ In the Pelo- ponnese and Attica Cycladic features point to the islands as a
•
1 Abh. Bayer. Akad. (pliil-hist. Kl.), v. (193^), 31 ; Blegen, Prosymna,^ 371 ; Hesperia, VI (1937), 498.
^ FrSdin and Persson, Asine, 204,
66
Ty^^YS OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
route on which the colonists might have lingered. In Central Greece, on the contrary, Troadic and Macedonian traits are more conspicuous, as if borne by a more landwise migration. In the West while distinctively Macedonian traits occur (e.g. an ^'anchor ornament” from Levkas), Heurtley ^ gives good grounds for thinking that the bulk of the Bronze Age colonists on Ithaka hailed from Corinthia. And in general there is an evident overlap between Early Helladic and ” Neolithic
In any case* the resultant Early Helladic civilization exhibits an explicitly urban character. All settlements indeed stiU depend on farming, often combined with fishing. Viti- culture is now definitely attested by grape-seeds from Hagios Kosmas. But everyw^here trade and industry offered outlets for surplus population. Copper, tin, lead, gold, and silver were mined or imported, distributed, and worked. Stone axes are still common, at least on rural sites, but metal must have been freely used for craftsmen's tools. Though few have survived we have an axe-adze and a flame-shaped knife like the Troadic example of Fig. 20, i, from an E.H.II level at Eutresis. Obsidian was still used for arrow-heads (hollow-based), knives, and sickle-teeth.
The people lived normally in long rectangular or apsidal two-roomed houses (Orchomenos) or in agglomerations of small chambers (Zygouries). The wall foundations were of stone, but the superstructure was often of mud-brick supporting a roof. By E.H.III tiles were employed. The houses were generally closely grouped, and some settlements (e.g. ZEgina) were already girt with walls, but their areas are unknown. In the rustic townships of Central Greece such as Orchomenos the houses were oval or apsidal and more scattered. At Tirjms ^ and Orchomenos monumental circular buildings were erected perhaps for sacred rather than domestic purposes.
The ceramic industry was not industrialized, since Early Helladic vases are all hand-made. The fabrics that appear first (from E.H.I onwards) are dark and self-coloured, burnished and decorated with incised and excised patterns. In a later phase (E.H.II) begins a buff ware which is covered with a dark glaze paint to reproduce the effects of the old biimished fabric. It is generally known as Urfirnis and probably denotes Cretan
1 BSA, XXXV, 39.
* The round foundations at Orchomenos are also Early Helladic rather than “ neolithic Ahh, Bayer. Akad., VIII, 1934,
from village to city in GREECE
67
influence ^ though red wares had been coated with a rather “ glaze ” in late neolithic times. In E.H.III the glaze paint is used as the medium for producing dark geometric mttems on a light ground— chiefly in the Peloponnese— or as a ground on which similar patterns are drawn in white— in Central Greece. The rectilinear light-on-dark designs recall
Fig. 35. Early Helladic sauce-boat, askos, tankard, and jar. (i-)
Cretan E.M.II-III patterns, but are also foreshadowed on the black neolithic B vases of the Mainland. Distmctive E^ y Helladic II-III shapes are sauce-boats (also manufactured in gold ®), hour-glass tankards, askoi and globular water-jars, at first with ring-handles,® later with flat vertically pierced lugs, on the beUy (Fig. 35)-
1 Frddin and Persson, A sine, 433.
• Corded W^e
Die griechische Fundgruppen der fruhm Bronzezett, 1937)- but also g Anatolian forms {Germania, XXIII, 62)-
68
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
The importance and wide ramifications of Early Helladic commerce are illustrated not only by the materials used, but by actual foreign manufactures imported or copied locally : leg amulets as in Crete and Egypt (Hagios Kosmas), Cycladic bone tubes (Hagios Kosmas and Levkas), fr3dng pans (Hagios Kosmas, Eutresis, Asine), marble idols and palettes (Hagios Kosmas) and a double-spiral pin like Fig. 27, 9 (Zygouries). From Asia came an arm-cylinder of twisted silver wire (like a gold one from Troy II) found in a grave on Levkas and a two- handled goblet like Fig. 19, 5, copied locally with other Troadic forms at Orchomenos. In the E.H.III level at Asine lumps of clay stamped wth E.M.III-M.M.I seal-impressions must have sealed bales of merchandise or jars of oil brought from Crete. And the Early Helladic merchants themselves felt the need of seals ; seals, probably imported, have been found at Hagios Kosmas, Asine, and other sites. One from Asine is almost identical with a Sixth D3masty Egyptian seal. The counter- balancing exports may possibly have included tin from Cirrha.^
The defensive character of some settlements and the existence of arrow-heads might warn us not to treat all these foreign relations as entirely pacific. Anatolian forms and fabrics at Orchomenos and in E.H.III levels at Eutresis, and on iEgina, Macedonian wishbone handles from Lianokladhi, Orchomenos, anchor ornaments from Orchomenos, Levkas, and Ithaka, sherds of Corded Ware from Hagia Marina and the E.H.III town of Eutresis might be due to an infliiY of new settlers from the Troad, Macedonia, and farther north.
The marble figurines of Cycladic t5^e may denote a cult of a mother goddess. Clay horns of consecration from Asine point to rites like the Minoan and Anatolian. But the principal superstitious impulse to accumulation of wealth was supplied by the desire for a good burial. In the Peloponnese and Attica the dead were buried in family vaults outside the settlements. At Zygouries the tombs were pit-caves or shafts cut in the rock, one of which contained fourteen skeletons. At Hagios Kosmas in Attica the earlier ossuaries were cists with a false door faring the township. The cists were later replaced by built ossuaries like Fig. 25, i, but stiU used as collective tombs ; in each case
Between Delphi and Crisa on the Gnlf of Corinth, O. Davies discovered op^ ■woridi^'s from which all the ore had been removed but in one a sherd tlmt mght pCThaps be E.H., some slag quite devoid of tin, but a crucible to which adhered a little stannic oxide. JHS., XLIX {1939) 93-4
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
69
the bodies, in the contracted attitude, had been introduced through the roof. In Levkas the bodies were buried, contracted or sometimes allegedly burned, in jars or cists. But these individual graves have generally been, grouped in or under circular stone foimdations, 5 to 9 m. in diameter, which sound like denuded cairns (as does a collective grave at Malthi) and contained in addition burnt layers termed “ pyres " by Dorpfeld. Such cist and jar burials accord with Anatolian practice, but their assembly within a circle brings them into line with the family tombs of Attica and Corinthia. Now collective burial had been practised in Crete and the Levant, but was not in vogue in Anatolia. It cannot then have been introduced by immigrants from that quarter though it might have been developed out of local neolithic cave burials (p. 61), Out of six skulls from Hagios Kosmas three were long- and two round-headed.^
In the stratigraphical record the Early Helladic culture is succeeded by another, the appearance of which is taken to mark the beginning of a new period, termed Middle Helladic. The latter in turn passes over into the Mycensean period, also termed Late Helladic to complete the analogy with the Minoan system. In a total deposit of 6'5m. at Eutresis, 4 m. are accounted for by E.H. ruins, and 2 m. out of 4*5 at Korakou are likewise Early Helladic. Now Cretan coimections make possible absolute datings for the Helladic periods. Pottery typical of developed Middle Helladic was found with M.M.Ib imports at Phylakopi on Melos, and M.M.II imports occur in the M.H. settlement on jEgiiia. Seals and sealings of E.M.III type occur in the E.H. Ill level at Asine, where an Egyptian Sixth D3masty seal ® was also found. Hence the end of the Early Helladic period can hardly be later than 1800 B.c., and E.H.III might go back at least to 2200 B.c. Hence at least for the Pelopoimese and Attica 2750 b.c. might not be an extrava- gant estimate for the beginning of the “ Bronze Age ” — E.H.I. But in peripheral regions Early Helladic culture, as defined by its pottery, seems to have lasted longer than at central points. On Levkas a rapier, 45 cm. long, from the pyre in E.H. cairn R7, and a gold mounting from R17 approximate to Shaft
^ Coon, Races, 144.
* Frodin and Persson, Asine, 234 ; cf. Reisner, Naga ed. Dvr, III (1932) >
70
DAWTS" OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Grave types, current at Mycenae about 1600 b.c. If E.H. persisted so long, its beginnings in provincial regions may be equally belated. So the appearance of E.H. sherds above the neolithic levels in Thessalian mounds affords no accurate terminus ante quern for the local Stone Age periods A and B. In fact an askos of E.H. form was found with Dimini ware^ while other neolithic wares would be Early Minoan in Crete (p. 65). So Neolithic A need only just go back into the fourth millennium, B.c.
Fig. 36. Speax-head, knives, and daggers from M.H. graves in Thessaly, After Tsountas (J).
Middle Heleadic
The Middle Helladic period is ushered in by the violent destruction of Orchomenos and other sites. Many were reoccupied. But abrupt changes in architecture, pottery, burial rites, and general economy, indicate the dominance of new and warlike settlers. The latter can be most easily recognized by their pottery — ^the reduced grey ware described on p. 46 and unhappily termed Minyan by archaeologists — and by the practice of bur37ing the dead contracted in small cists or in jars among the houses. The martial character of the invaders
> AM., LVII (1932), 115 : cf., BSA., XLIV (1949), 258-306.
71
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
is disclosed by the deposition in the graves of metal weapons (Fig. 36)— knives, ogival daggers, and spear-heads with a socket, cast like a shoe on one face of the blade (Sesklo, Levkas, Mycenae). Hollow-based obsidian arrow-heads were still used, but now the archer used also grooved stone arrow-straighteners like Fig. 109 (Asine, Levkas, Mycenae). Perforated stone battle-axes appear for the first time at Eutresis and Asine and antler axes and sleeves at Asine. On the other hand such craft
Fig. 37. Minyan pottery from Thessaly (J), and imitations from Thermon,
.Etolia (5^).
tools as saws aind gouges are first formd in a Middle Helladic grave (on Levkas).
The Minyan invaders did not exterminate the older inhabitants or destroy their economy, but added to the population and accelerated the accumulation of wealth. Malthi now attained its maximum population ; the walls comprised, within an area of 3^ acres, 305 rooms, while the citadel was supplied with spring water by an aqueduct. The houses are more often agglomerations of rooms than long rectangular halls.^ Tin-bronze was now worked by the smiths, and stone
1 AJA., XLVIII (1944). 348.
72 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
moulds for casting spear-heads like Fig. 3^* L Minoan double-axes were found even at Dimini in Thessaly.
The potters* craft was soon industrialized. The grey-ware vases were fired in a closed kiln and either formed in a mould or thrown on the wheel. A family of Minoan potters settled on jEgina bringing with them their clay wheel as used in Crete.^ Perhaps such immigrant craftsmen were responsible for introducing the wheel from Crete everywhere, but there is
Fig. 38. Matt-painted ware from iEgina.
nothing Minoan about their products. The favourite Minyan ** forms are ring-stemmed goblets, high-handled cups (Fig. 37), craters and amphorae. Both in hue and form such Minyan vases imitate silver models. But they had to compete with hand-made vessels of the same shape in polished brown or black and glazed red wares. And rather later jars, bowls, and other shapes were made by hand in buff or greenish ware decorated with geometric patterns in matt paint (Fig. 38).
^ Jahrbuch des d, archdolog. Instituis LII, Arch, Anzeiger, 1937, 20-5.
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
78
In form and decoration these agree precisely with contemporary Middle Cycladic vessels from Melos and show the same Central Anatolian affinities (p. 55). A beaked jug assigned to M.H.III from Asine seems in fact to be an imported " Early Hittite ” product.^
Trade with Crete was at first interrupted, though obsidian was continuously imported from Melos. But during M.M.II Minoan polychrome pottery was being imported into ^Egina and imitated at Eutresis.
Middle Helladic culture typified by Minyan ware and cist graves is found all over Greece as far as the Ionian Islands, Levkas, Thessaly, and even Chalcidice. In 1914 Forsdyke * suggested a Troadic origin for the intrusive elements. Now some new metal tjpes — lock-rings with flattened ends and long narrow chisels — , hke the burial rites, are Anatolian. And Minyan ware is common at Troy. But its first appearance there in Vc can hardly be earlier than in Greece. Burials within the settlement are distinctive of Central Anatolia and Iran in contrast to Western Anatolia. And grey wares technically allied to Minyan are certainly characteristic of Northern Iran * so that perhaps we should look farther east than Troy. On the other hand, Persson *■ insists on the " Northern ” character of the battle-axes and other new weapons. The Middle Helladic culture would have been established by the intrusion of their wielders from beyond the Balkans. The Anatolian elements — ^jar-burial, matt-painted ware — ^would be later additions. But of course battle-axes had long been common in AnatoUa as well as north of the Balkans (pp. 37, 44). Many authorities think that the " Minyans ” were the fest Indo-Europeans to reach Greece. On Persson’s view parallel streams of them from the Balkans would have brought Minyan ware, horses, and Ionic Greek to the TroadandthePeloponnese (cf. p. 46). The available skulls belong to a very mixed popula- tion, predominantly dolichocephalic with some northern affinities.®
1 Fr6din and Persson, Asine 286 ; of. van der Osten, The Alishar HUyiih, 1928-9 (O.I.C. Publ. XIX), pi. IV, p. 1671.
» JHS., XXXIV, 126 fi.
» Cl, e.g. Schmidt, Excavations at Tepe Hissar, Damghan, and Ame in Acta Arch., VI» 1935, 18
* Frddin and Persson, Asine, 433.
* Coon, Races, 144.
74
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Mycen^an Period
Ultimately the martial character of Middle Helladic culture led to a concentration of wealth in Mainland Greece, the complete urbanization of its economy and the adoption on the peninsula of the technical equipment created in Crete. This transfer was made possible by the rise of warrior princes in the townships who concentrated surplus wealth and expended some of their accumulation on the support of Minoan artificers and the stimulation of trade. The urban revolution was first consummated at Mycenae, a citadel that commands a main artery of communications between the south-east and the north-w^est.
The old settlement, founded in Early Helladic times, became the capital of a potent dynasty. The kings and their families were buried with regal wealth in the six Shaft Graves on the citadel. Each deep shaft, save No. II, contained several bodies buried extended and originally encased in wooden cofi&ns. Stelae, car\^ed in low relief with spiral patterns and battle scenes that attest for the first time in Greece the use of war chariots drawn by horses, must once have marked the graves. Imported Minoan pottery shows that the earliest graves at least goes back to M.M.III, the. latest hardly outlasts L.M.I (L.H.I). The Shaft Grave epoch falls within the sixteenth centuIy^
The equipment purchased by the dynasts' concentrated wealth is thoroughly Minoan. Their palace was equipped with a light-well, like those of Knossos, and decorated with frescoes in Minoan technique. Most weapons and ornaments are evidently products of Minoan craftsmen. On figured docu- ments men wear the Minoan drawers and women the flounced skirt of the island. Minoan signets and probably the Minoan script were adopted for official business. The cult of the Mother Goddess, associated, as in Crete, with the symbols of the dove, the double-axe, the sacred pfllar and horns of consecration, was practised with Minoan rites at Mycenae, and draughts were played as in Crete. No one denies that craftsmen trained in Cretan schools produced the objects in question though many must have been executed at Mycenae itself to the order of the local king.
On the other hand, the martial character of Early
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
75
Mycenaean civilization, as revealed in the fortification of the city, the abundance of weapons and the popularity of battle scenes in art, seem quite foreign to the Minoan spirit. The kings of Mycenae wore beards ; the Minoans generally shaved their faces. The Shaft Graves form part of a Helladic cemetery, and grave No. II is really just a Minyan '' cist. In the tombs Helladic Minyan and matt-painted vases are juxtaposed to Cretan imports. An arrow-straightener (grave VI), and a Mainland spearhead like Fig. 36, i (grave IV) occur side by side with Minoan socketed spearheads and the rapiers of Fig. 14, 1-2. A round-heeled dagger and a halberd from grave VI, and perhaps also helmets plated with boars* tusks, though locally made, are proper to West and Central European armament, not to the .Egean, and amber beads from grave IV are unambiguously imports from the North. Other ornaments may be Anatolian ; gold tubes terminating at each end in double spirals recur in the treasures of Troy II, in a royal tomb at Alaca Hiiyuk, at Brak ^ between 2300 and 2100 b.c. and in a fourteenth century grave at Mari ^ in North Syria.
Were then the dynasts who concentrated power and wealth at Mycenae Minoan princes carving out for themselves a kingdom on the Mainland ? Or were they rather Helladic chiefs who by trade or by raids had secured Minoan com- modities and enticed or compelled Cretan artisans, clerks, and priests to settle at their court ? The first view is supported by the supreme authority of Evans and accepted by Pendlebury. The alternative is endorsed by Blegen, Karo, Persson, Wace, and most other authorities.® The indisputable facts are the transfer to the Peloponnese of Minoan artisans and technical equipment and the adjustment of the Helladic economy to allow them to function.
Between 1500 and 1400 b.c. the same process of accultura- tion was accomplished at other sites which had remained rural townships during the Early Mycensean Shaft Grave epoch. Here again the change coincided with the rise in the townships of chieftains, concentrating the local wealth for expenditure on the products of secondary industry and
1 Ira^, IX (1947), 171.
2 Syria, XVIII, 1937, ^3-
» See Nilsson, Homer and Mycmcs (London, 1933), 71-82, for a good summary, but cf. Pendlebury, Crete, 225-230.
76
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
trade. These celebrated their elevation by erecting stately beehive tombs or tholoi. Such tombs are significantly located near the heads of southward facing gulfs and along natural trade routes by sea or land. On the east coast these Middle Mycenaean tholoi extend as far north as the Gulf of Volo, on the west to Kakovatos in Elis. A wealth of amber beads from the last-named tombs may explain the westward extension of Mycenaean culture and shows that amber now reached Greece along the well-documented route across Central Europe to the Adriatic ; for the beads and spacers are of the same forms as were current from Denmark to Bohemia.
Fig. 39. Mycenaean tholos tomb on Euboea. After Papavasileiou.
The bulk of the grave goods from such tholoi are, however, either of Minoan origin (such as the Vapheio cups and some vases painted in the L.M.Ib style) or locally produced by craftsmen trained in the Minoan school. So too the palaces now erected at Tiryns and Thebes (neither a megaron) are decorated with frescoes in the Minoan technique. And many jars notably at Thebes bear inscriptions in the Minoan signary.
Still, however much of their equipment may have been Cretan, the Middle Mycenaean cities have an explicitly Mainland character just as much as Mycenae itself. The tholos tomb may be a Minoan device, but in Crete only one M.M. tholos, discovered in 1*939, can be cited as a link between the E.M. ossuaries and the Mainland vaults. Their corbelled chambers, the finest built in ashlar masonry, were entered by a long passage or dromos. Some were erected in an excavation in
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
77
a natural hillside but many stood on level ground or (as in Ireland) on a hill-top and were covered by an artificial mound or cairn ^ (Fig. 39). The similarity to tholos tombs in Western Europe is too close to be accidental and is enhanced in the case of the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae by the addition of a small ceU opening out of the beehive chamber.^ The majority of the tholoi (Kapokli, Dimini, Menidi, Thorikos, Vapheio, Messenian Pylos, Kakovatos, Chalcis) have yielded pottery of L.M.I-L.M.II style, but others are admittedly Late Mycenaean. Among the nine tholoi at Mycenae (which had all been plundered in antiquity) Wace claims to trace a development from simpler (Middle Mycenaean) L.H.II types to the superbly carved Treasury of Atreus '' which would be L.H.III. Evans on the contrary believes in a degeneration ; he contends that “ Atreus (the carvings on which are paralleled by M.M.III capitads from Knossos) was originally designed to contain the bones of the king eventually deposited in Shaft Grave VI. But a very rich tholos found intact at Dendra near Midea contained no pottery earlier than L.H.III, though the gold and silver vessels seem to be L.M.I. products.^
Throughout the L.H.II phase rural townships subsisted side by side with fenced cities, household crafts competed with specialized industries, and Middle Helladic traditions in potting and cist-burial survived. But by 1400 B.c. the Mainland had thoroughly mastered Minoan techniques and assimilated the Cretan industrial system. Native workers, having been apprenticed to Minoan craftsmen, could turn out en masse rather shoddy articles that satisfied the less refined tastes of the Mainlanders and gradually ousted the products of household industry. Thus equipped the Mainland took over from Crete the political and economic hegemony in the iEgean. Knossos was sacked; the Continental megaron replaced the ^Egean palaces at Phaestos and Phylakopi. The Mycensean .cities were more numerous and perhaps more populous than the Cretan; the acropolis of Mycenae alone, not to mention
^ So Bodia (Messenia), Kakovatos, Heraeum, Patras, Vapheio, Menidi, Thorikos, Kapokli ; of. Valmin, in Corolla archesologica Gustavo Adolpho dedicaia, Lnnd, 1932, 217 fE.
* Cup marks have been noted on the stones composing some tombs as on many megalithic tombs in North and Western Europe, Palestine, and the Caucasus, Acta Arch,, XV (1944), 193.
* Persson, The Royal Tombs at Dendra near Midea (Skrifter, K. Human Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund, 1931).
D
rs DAWN OF EUROPEAN C IVILIZATION
unwalled suburbs, covered about ii acres, that of Asine nearly 9, Gla in L. Copais no less than 24 acres. The immense cemeteries of rock-cut chamber-tombs adjacent to each city are even more con\ancing than the areas. Each tomb, an irregular chamber entered by a narrow passage or dromos, was a family vault. Some contain as many as twenty-seven corpses. Though carefully sealed up after each interment, such tombs were in fact reopened periodically and used over several generations ; vases of L.H.II, L.H.IIIa and L.H.IIIb styles were found in one and the same tomb at Mycenae, showing its use for burial for at least two centuries (1450-1250 b.c.). And a family likeness could be detected on the skeletons from the same tomb. This collective burial practice, though deeply rooted in the ^gean and still current in Crete in Middle Minoan times, is in sharp contrast to the “ Minyan usage and looks like a reversion to Early Helladic customs or a generad adoption of the Minoan rite.
The populous cities sought an outlet for their goods and overflowing population in trade and colonization. Mycenaean pottery and other products were exported in quantities to Troy, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Sicily, rapiers to Bulgaria and perhaps the Caucasus. The iEgean and Ionian islands and even the coastal tracts of Macedonia received contingents of Mycenaean^jtraders, potters, and metal-workers and were incorporated in the Mycenaean economic system. Mycenaean colonies denoted by tholos tombs were planted even on the coasts of Asia Minor and S5nia.i In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries a complete ctdtural uniformity prevailed over the whole ^Egean world — a uniformity that embraced the political diversity reflected in the Iliad.
The zenith of Late Mycenaean civilization, as fixed by Mycenaean imports in Egypt and Syria and Egjq)tian imports in Greece, was reached in the fourteenth century. After 1300 B.c. trade with Egypt declined, wealth diminished, art decayed as piracy and militarism took the place of peaceful commerce. At the same time, fibulae becoming increasingly abundant (like Fig. 118, 2, or with flat leaf-shaped bow) in the tombs especially at Mycenae,^ Thebes, » and on Kephallenia,^
^ Syria, XIV (1933)* 100 ff.
* Examples collect^ by Moutelius, La Gr^ce priclassique, Stockholm, 1928.
* Apx- AeXr, 1917, 151 ff.
* Kawadais, UpolaropiK^ 'ApxojLoXoyia, 367 and 737.
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
79
and cut and thrust swords at Mycenae ^ betoken an assimilation of costume and armament to fashions current in the still barbarous north. They are heralds of the cataclysm that submerged the Mycenaean civilization — the Dorian invasion very plausibly dated by Greek tradition about iioo B.c.
Excavations at the principal sites referred to in the text without other documentation can be found in the following publications :
Neolithic.
Dimini and Sesklo (Thessaiyj. Tsountas, Ai npoZoropiKal d/cpoTroAa? AipLTjviov Kal E^okXov (Athens, 1908).
Rakhmani, Tsangli, Tsani, Zerelia, Lianokladhi, Wace and Thompson, Prehistoric Thessaly (Cambridge, 1912).
Chaeronaea. *E<I>. 'Apy, 1908, 63 f.
Hagia Marina. R.E.G., XXV, 276.
Gonid,. Metropolitan Museum Studies (New York), III, i, 1930. iEgina. G. Welter, Arch. Anz., 1937, 19-26 (in Jahrbuch des detdsch. archdol. Instituts, LI).
Corinth. Hesperia, VI (1937), 490-524.
Argive Heraeum. Blegen, Prosymna, Cambridge, 1937.
Asea in Arcadia, Holmberg in Skrifter Svensh. Inst, i Rom, XI (1944).
Levkas (Chirospilia), ZfE., XLIV (1912), 845.
Astakos in Akarnania, BSA,, XLII (1947), 156-183.
Helladic.
Orchomenos. Abh. Bayer. Akademie, Phil.'hist. Kl., XXIV, 2, 1907 (archi- tecture) : N.F., V, 1931 (neolithic) ; VIII, 1934 (Early Helladic). Eutresis. Goldman, Excavations at Eutresis in Boeotia, Cambridge, Mass,
1931-
H. Kosmas, Attica. A JA., XXXVHI (1934). 259 Korakou. Blegen, Korakoii, Boston, 1921.
Zygouries. Blegen, Zygouries, Cambridge, Mass., 1928.
Asine (Argolid). Frddin and Persson, A sine, Stockholm, 1938.
JBgina. Welter, Aigina, Berlin, 1938.
Malthi (Messenia). Valmin, The Swedish Messenia Expedition (Skrifter K.
Human. Vetenskapl i Lund, XXVI), 1938.
Tiryns. Karo, Fuhrer durch die Ruinen von Tiryns, Athens, 1934.
Rodenwald, Tiryns II. Athens, 1912.
Levkas. Ddrpfeld, Alt-Ithaka.
Ithaka. BSA., XXXV, 5-40.
Mycenae. BSA., XXV (192 1-3) (city, tholos tombs).
Arch., LXXXII (1932) (chamber tombs and skulls).
Rodenwaldt, Der Fries des Megarons von Mykenai (Halle, 1921). Karo, Schachtgraber von Mykenai, Miinchen, 1930.
Kakovatos. AM., XXXIV, 1909, 255 fi.
Messenian Pylos, *Apy., 1914, 99 ff.
Vapheio, Laconia, ibid., 1889, 129 ff.
Thorikos, Attika, ibid., 1895, 221 fif.
Kapokli, near Volo, ibid., 1906, 211 ff.
Chalcis. Papavasileiou, IJepl twv ev Ev^oCa dpxat&v ra<jt<hv, Athens, 1910.
^ Examples collected by Montelius, La Grhce priclassique, Stockholm, 1928.
CHAPTER VI
Balkan Civilizations Neolithic Macedonia
Though facing the ^Egean, Macedonia was heavily wooded and extremely cold in winter. The forests sheltered herds of red deer, and, judging by an antler from Vardaroftsa,^ even European elks wandered down the Vardar in the Early Bronze Age. Macedonian culture ® developed along Continental European rather than ^Egean lines. It lagged behind the Islands and peninsular Greece ; urbanization was only effected late in Late Helladic times during the thirteenth century b.c. Yet throughout prehistoric times the settlements were stable, so that their sites are now mounds (toumbas). And the demands of urban populations for metals soon broke down the isolation of the neolithic villages.
The earliest settlement in the region so far recognized is a simple outpost of the Thessalian Sesklo culture, planted at Servia on the Haliakmon. This Thessalian village was violently destroyed after a time and another was built on its site, apparently by new settlers. Judging by the pottery these newcomers, mixed doubtless with straggling representatives of the Sesklo culture, spread all over Macedonia both into Chalcidice and up the Vardar ; Macedonia as a whole becomes one province — that of the Vardar culture — ^in a continuum extending across the Balkans into the Middle Danube basin.
The Late Neolithic peasants of the Vardar culture lived in permanent villages of wattle and daub or (at Servia) mud-brick huts that at Olynthus were warmed by low-domed clay ovens * as at Thermi. The cultivation of fig-trees in addition to wheat and miUet helped to tie them to the soil, but they bred cattle, sheep or goats and pigs, doubtless practising transhumance like the Vlachs to-day.^ The extensive seasonal migrations of the flocks would help to explain the wide diffusion
^ BSA XXVII, 45 I "til© prehistoric age of the antler is not quite certain.
* For all details of Macedonian culture, see W. A. Heurtley, Prehistoric Macedwtia, Cambridge, 1939 (cited P.M.).
* Mylonas, ** Excavations at Olynthus,” I [Johns Hopkins U. Studies in Arch,, 6). 4 d.
* Wace and Thompson, Nomads of the Balkans.
80
BALKAN CIVILIZATIONS
81
of intimate cultural traits across the Balkans and into Greece. Hunting expeditions would contribute to the same result ; for game was an important item in the food-supply. Slings were used rather than bows. Carpenters used bevelled and shoe- last adzes and unperforated axes, sometimes mounted in perforated antler sleeves.
At S^rvia the red and painted Sesklo wares were replaced by black polished wares, decorated by fluting, stroke burnishing, incision, or white paint with geometric patterns including spirals. This new fabric is identical on the one hand with those of peninsular Greece in neolithic B times, on the other with the Vinca ware north of the Balkans. Coarse vases may be rusticated as in the Danubian Koros group. At other sites and, Heurtley thinks, rather later the potters produced particoloured fabrics, allied to the polished black, but red and brown in patches, or imitated the black polish by brushing the vase-surface with a dark lustrous paint. Both these varieties have already met us in the Peloponnese (pp. 6o, 65). Vases were also decorated with painted patterns generally on a red or dark brown ground. The red vases adorned with black spirals from the last two Late Neolithic layers at Olynthus in Chalcidice are almost identical with those from Starcevo on the Middle Danube and on the other hand are closely related to the Dimini ware of peninsular Greece. High pedestailed, round- bottomed and carinated bowls, sometimes equipped with lugs modelled to suggest an animal's head just as north of the Balkans, occur already at Servia ; later vases are sometimes provided with rudimentary wishbone handles, and at Ol5mthus even jugs were manufactured. Flat, waisted pebbles with parallels at Alisar ^ and farther east and occurring already at Servia in period A, may, like flat whorls, have been used in a textile industry.
Shell bracelets, as on the Danube, and bone combs, as at Tordos, were used to beautify the person; A piece of obsidian from Servia, so translucent that it is thought by Heurtley to be Hungarian rather than Melian, is the sole evidence for extended trade. Stone vases were manufactured at Ol5mthus, but from local marble. However, clay imitations of Asiatic seals were current as in the Sesklo culture.
^ van der Osten, The Alishat Huyuk, 1928-9, 67, fig. 80 ; Speiser, Tepe Cawra, 81.
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Supernatural powers were conciliated by domestic cults for which female figurines of stone and clay, triangular and quadrangular tables or altars, as at Sesklo and Vinca, and also clay phalli as in Anatolia were manufactured. A contracted skeleton had been buried with simple offerings in a pit at Servia.
The Macedonian Bronze Age
But even while neolithic peasants were spreading the Vardar culture, new colonists were arriving from Anatolia to introduce a Bronze Age economy, with the so-called Early
Macedonian culture. At Kritsana in Chalcidice the later neolithic pottery occurs in the same strata as foreign wares of Anatolian ancestry, and some of the later neolithic pottery from Ol5mthus too may be Anatolian rather than Vardar. ^ The invasion is indeed attested by new architectural features (mud-brick houses with bothroi in the floors) and new types of stone implement (perforated axe-heads) as well as by the transformation in the potting and the introduction of a whole series of new forms — bowls with homed tubular lugs growing from the inverted rim, jugs with cut-away necks, askoi, handled cups and tankards (Fig. 40). AU these forms are t5^ically Anatolian ; one demonstrably grew up there. In the earliest Early Macedonian bowls the tubular lugs are turned up at the ends horned i in Lesbos this homed lug appears first in Thermi III, having grown up out of the simpler tubular lugs of Thermi I (Fig. 17). For once pottery indicates an irreversible movement.
The Anatolian settlers brought with them their knowledge of metaUurgy ; a cmcible was found at Saratse, gold slag at
80, n. 3 ; Mylonas, Olynthus, 33, argues for a
BALKAN CIVILIZATIONS
83
Vardaroftsa. It has indeed been suggested that the colonization was actuated by a desire for the gold, sEver, and copper ores of Macedonia. But the Anatolians did not implant in Macedonia their urbanized economy. They lived in small hamlets as simple peasants, like their neolithic forerunners. They were content with stone implements (perforated and unperforated axes) and weapons (sling-stones and hollow-based arrow-heads). Metal was very rare ; only a couple of pins survive. Not even obsidian was regularly imported, though a few chips were found in the deepest level at Kritsana. Sherds of Corded Ware
Fig. 41. Axe and battle-axes from H. Mamas. After Heurtley, BSA,,
XXIX. (f.)
turned up at Kritsana, Hagios Mamas and Saratse, a heeled battle-axe of explicitly South Russian type (Fig. 41), and a necklace of bored-teeth and grooved bone beads at Hagios Mamas. These objects, together with the appearance of horses' bones, certainly indicate contact with the Battle-axe folk of the North European-Pontic plain. They offer limiting dates for more northern cultures ; they may even symbolize the intro- duction of Indo-European speech. They denote an infiltration of warrior-bands rather than commercial relations.
Such obstinate self-sufficiency makes the chronology of the Early Macedonian Bronze Age peculiarly difficult. Thermi III is evidently a terminus post quern for its inception. A clay hook, found at Hagios Mamas, and a fragment from a face-um from Vardaroftsa, establish vague synchronisms with Troy II ; an imported' sherd of E.H.III ware from the latest Early Macedonian settlement at Kritsana simEarly establishes parallelism with developments in peninsular Greece. In any
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
case Corded Ware in Macedonia should be at least as old as in the E.H.III settlement at Eutresis.
The Early Macedonian culture develops slowly in its comparative isolation till the distribution of Minyan ware marks the beginning of a new phase, Middle Macedonian, which must not be too strictly synchronized with Middle HeUadic. In the meantime the Early Bronze Age culture had assumed an indmdual Macedonian aspect. In the pottery the most distinctively Macedonian innovation is the " wishbone handle ” a wood type that remained characteristic of the region throughout subsequent periods. Notable, too, are indented lugs, similar to those of Palestine,^ in the “ Early Bronze Age " and two-handled tankards, intermediate between the Troadic- Early HeUadic ones and the Perjamos type of the Early Bronze Age in the Middle Danube. Such tankards became popular only towards the close of the Early Macedonian phase. Whorls as in contemporary Greek and AnatoUan cultures, are generaUy conical or biconical. Figurines, so popular in Anatolia, were virtuaUy abandoned in Macedonia. On the other hand, curious anchor-shaped ornaments of clay may have had a maOTral purpose. °
In the absence of specialized industry and organized trade to absorb the surplus rural population, the Early Macedonians had to expand. They very soon filtered into Thessaly ; in what used to be caUed neolithic periods III and IV there, culture was^sentiaUy Macedonian (jugs with cut-away necks and other Early Macedonian pot forms, wishbone handles perforated axe-heads, anchor ornaments ®). But the neolithic substrat^ shows through : figurines were stiU manufactured ^ough they mclude males as weU as females, and in Eastern hessdy spirals and other designs were daubed on the vases after firmg— what is termed " crusted ware ”. Perhaps the
had P- 68 mean that Macedonians
^d reached Central Greece in E.H.III times. A small group of
T period Macedonians were established at
Lianokladhi m the Spercheios valley, where they had learned
Pottery of ^ aJid SMpton, Chalcolithic
* BSA., XXVIH (1926-7), 180-194 FrOdin and Persson, Asine. 280.
BALKAN CIVILIZATIONS
85
from Central Greek neighbours to paint in Middle Helladic matt-paint technique amphorae, tankards and bowls with wishbone handles (all good Early Macedonian or Early Helladic shapes) with Macedonian patterns including pot-hook spirals (Fig. 42). A similar fabric appears with local imitation Minyan ware at Thermon in .^tolia during L.H.II (fifteenth
Fig. 42. Matt-painted jar, Lianokladid III. After Wace and Thompson (J).
century) and even on Levkas. Heurtley has plausibly con- nected the makers of this fabric with the Dorians' ancestors.
In Macedonia itself the Middle Macedonian period may be considered to begin with the establishment at Molyvopyrgo on Chalcidice of a strongly fortified settlement where Minyan ware was manufactured extensively but mostly without the wheel. Here the fortifications and ring-stemmed goblets and other forms, strictly parallel to the Middle Helladic, suggest a settlement of fresh people. Nevertheless grey ware adorned with grooves occurs even in Early Macedonian settlements throughout the region. Hence Minyan might have arisen south of the Balkans after the arrival of the Battle-axe intruders or, since the Early Macedonians were themselves Anatolians, it
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
might have been brought from Asia in a perfected form by a fresh wave of immigrants to Chalcidice.
In the interior no sort of break is observable* The local potters maintained the old traditions though they revived spiral decoration and later learned to decorate their vases in matt paint, presumably from their Thessalian relatives.
It was not until the thirteenth century B.c. that Mycenaean trading posts were established on the coasts and Mycenaean potters brought even to inland villages the potters' wheel and the L.H.IIIb ceramic style. Within a century, before they had time to become cities, their settlements were destroyed by barbarian invaders. The latters' dark-faced, fluted pottery demonstrates their origin in the Danube basin, presumably in some branch of the Lausitz culture, from which sprang also the intruders in Troy Vllb.
The Vardar-Morava Complex
Beyond the difflcult passes over the Balkans the Vardar neolithic culture is continued at a series of sites in the Morava valley from Pavlovce,^ some fifty miles south of Nis to the edge of the Danubian loss plains at Vinca on the south bank of the Danube below Belgrade. Even beyond the river a very similar culture appears both in Slavonia and again in the Banat and even in Transylvania, notably at Tordos in the Maros valley. 2 Here we have definitely reached the region of tem- perate forests. But the settlements exhibit superficially the same character as the Macedonian. They were permanent villages whose ruins after repeated reconstructions have formed regular tells. At Plocnik ® near Nis, the deposit is not over 3 m. high, but at Vinca it attains the formidable elevation of 10 m., while Tordos was twice rebuilt after floods.
Such tells ought to present a clear stratigraphical record of cultural development. In practice, however, the information to be extracted even from the extensive reports of Vassits' excavations at Vinca is very meagre. From the extant data changes in architectural, ceramic and ritual fashions can indeed
1 ASPRB., 12 (1936).
- Schmidt, Yutedol, 1 13-140 ; BRGK., XXII, 33-6.
* Grbid, “ Plo&nik ” (Narodni Muzi v Beogradu preist. spomenitsi, I), 1929.
BALKAN CIVILIZATIONS
87
be detected at various levels at Vinca and Tordos. All efforts ^ to correlate these changes with one another and to use them to define distinct consecutive periods have so far proved fruitless.
Life was based on agriculture, stock-breeding, hunting, and fishing. The last named activity was especially important on the Danube, where sturgeon and other fish were caught not only with nets (the clay sinkers for which survive), but also with hooks and double-barbed harpoons (like Fig. 43) of antler. The earliest habitations at Vinca and at Starcevo may have been pit-dwellings half sunk in the loss like those described on p. 99 ; hence the lowest layers are sometimes termed pit
Fig. 43. Bone combs and ring-pendant, Tordos, and “ harpoon Vinca (J).
levels by Vassits. But some of the pits were just silos, and rectilinear houses (not of megaron '' type) with vertical walls of wattle and daub* supported by posts coexisted with pits from a depth of 8 m., and at other sites. Low vaulted ovens were constructed at Vinca ^ from 9 m. upwards and also at Plocnik.
Throughout all levels at Vinca and at all allied sites the carpenter's tool was a shoe-last adze of stone. Perforated celts were not normally used south of the Danube,® but the stone adzes might be mounted in antler sleeves,^ and antlers might be perforated for use as axes or picks. Occasional whorls and loom-weights (Fig. 45) imply a textile industry. Bone spatulae, like Fig. 45, were made at Tordos, Starcevo, Vinca, Bubanj
^ By Childe, Danube, 26, and Menghin, Weltgeschichte, 252 ; justly criticized by Fewkes, Proc. Am. Phil. Soc., LXXV (1935), 657, and ASPRB., 12. 22
2 Preistorijskaya Vinca, I, 14. (This work, of which four volumes have now appeared, will be cited, P.V.)
® They do occur at Tordos, Dolg., XII, fig. ii, and Lipovac on the Morava, ASPRB., 12, 49.
* At Plocnik.
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DA'V\'N OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
and Piocnik. Weapons are rare, but arrow-heads and mace- heads occur sporadically at Vin6a. Obsidian, apparently Hungarian, does not seem to have been found below a depth of 6-5 m.
The Morava pottery, most fully illustrated at Vinca, is astonishingly varied. In the deepest Vinca levels ^ and up to a depth of 7 - 4 m. rusticated or barbotine pottery, characteristic of the Koros group (p. 94) is prominent, as all up the Morava,^ and may represent the earliest phase of neolithic culture here.
3 1 23458789 10
-J 1 1 1 ^ 1 I - i t I cm.
Fig. 44. “ Face urn ” lid from Vinca. After Vassits.
Yet black to red polished wares begin very early and con- tinue through all levels of the tell. They include most of the varieties and forms already described as Vardar ware — fluted, stroke-burmshed, incised, pedestailed and carinated bowls, lugs imitating animal heads. The incised wares are often unbumished, and the designs are generally formed by punctured ribbons and include spirals and meanders which, however, seem rare in the earliest Vinca levels.^ A puzzling group within the incised class is constituted by the anthro- pomorphic lids (Fig. 44), which resemble, though by no means exactly, those from Troy II. Such occur at Vinca even in the
^ P.F.. IV, p. XV ; ASPMB., 12, 27.
* ASPRB., 12, 56.
* The earliest spiral at Vinda comes at 9 m. from top, ASFRB., 12, 28, n. 115 ; they occur in Tordos I, Dolg., XII, 49 ; cl WPZ,, 1939.
BALKAN CIVILIZATIONS
89
pit levels, to the north at Csoka and Tordos and as far south as Plocnik.
Allied on the one hand to the local burnished wares, on the other to Macedonian and Anatolian fabrics, are widely distributed ** red-slipped '' w’ares, often black inside and round the rim. Sherds painted with patterns in black or white on a red ground, like the Olynthus ware, occur sporadically at all levels at Vinca, ^ in the first settlement at Bubanj and very commonly at Starcevo ^ just across the Danube. Painted ware was also in use at Tordos.® There, if not at Starcevo too, vase painting began later than incision and rustication.
True handles were not in vogue either at Tordos or at Vinca (save for some late intruders). On the other hand short tubular spouts (as at Olynthus) were found at Vinca ^ as low down as 8 m., and recur elsewhere while the lugs at Vinca seem to grow increasingly large and elaborate. In addition to these native Morava wares some quite typical Tisza vases from beyond the Danube were found at Vinca on a floor at a depth of 7 •4 m., and again at 4-2.® Crusted ware is reported from the same levels but the most convincing specimens illustrated ® occur as high as 3-2 to 2* 9. On the other hand one sherd from a deep level (8-4) is said to belong to an imported vase of Danubian I linear ware''.’ Marble dishes too were used at Vinca from early times.
Toilet articles include bone combs from Tordos ® like that from Servia (Fig. 43), many bracelets of Spondylus shell, flat, waisted '' knobs " of white limestone,® and pieces of cinnabar. Clay stamps are presumably imitations of Asiatic stamp-seals.
Ritual objects, used in domestic cults, were made in profusion in all the villages. The figurines, all female, from the lower levels at Vinca are crudely modelled representations of a nude female. At depths of 7*7 m. and less the features are carefully delineated, though the head is conventionally flattened while incisions indicate clothing, including perhaps a loin-cloth,
1 P.V„ II, pi. CXXII, and p. 132.
® Painted ware is said to begin later than barbotine, ASPPJB., 9.
» Polg., XII (1936). 48 ; BPGK., XXII (1933). 53, fig. 12.
* P.V., IV. pi. VI, si. 26, c.
« P.V., II, 37, 187; IV, 53, 94
« P,V., II, 134.
’ P.V., IV. pi. XIV, 44 h. ; cf. Holste. WPZ., 1939, 9.
« BPGK., XXII. 36.
• Interpreted by Vassits as "idols”, P.V., II. 103; found also at Plofinik.
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DAWN OF ET^ROPEAN CIVILIZATION
compared to the Minoan.^ Some women are now seated, others nursing an infant. Male figures are found above 6*6 m. From about the same depth come vases in human and animal form.^ Model tables and thrones, such as are familiar from Thessaly and Macedonia were used at all levels and all sites. A collective burial in a chamber tomb, cut in the loss, is assigned to an early level at \hnca,^ but similar chamber-tombs at Vucedol contained relics of the later Slavonian culture (p. 292).
To the Balkan environment the Vardar economy of sedentary agriculture combined with stock-breeding, hunting, and fishing constituted a workable adjustment that persisted with surprisingly little change even into historical times. A balance such as was only achieved progressively by develop- ment through three clearly defined stages in the more temperate environment of the Middle and Upper Danube basins (Chap. VII), had been already reached when the record of the teUs begins and never involved such nomadic habits as there. Hence changes in equipment are not catastrophic nor easily grouped in “ cultures For a very long time stone adzes and other lithic tools remained in use so that culture looks neolithic at all levels. Yet the whole region is metalliferous * and tiny objects of copper turn up even in the deep levels at Vinca. It has indeed been ar^ed ^ that the Anatolian elements already noticed, if not the introduction of food-production itself, were due to prospectors seeking gold, copper, cinnabar, and other raw materials.
Eventually ceramic innovations at some sites do suggest that some of the Anatolians who had initiated the Early Macedonian Bronze Age had filtered across the divide to mingle with the earlier population. At Bubanj, a hill-top settlement close to Nis, ® the first settlement, defined by Koros and painted wares, was succeeded by Bubanj II in which appear two- handled tankards like the Early Macedonian and cups with handles rising high above the rim. In the same level, Ila, occur some graphited and white on black painted wares and
^ Childe, Danube, fig. 35.
* P.K., I, 43, 89 ; si. 1 13.
^ II, 9*14 » Schmidt, VuSedal, 41.
i ‘ distribution of ores and tools,
e.g., Cnude, Danube, 34.
• Mitt, pr&hisi, Kommission Akad. Wissens. Wien, 1940 IV b 1-2
BALKAN CIVILIZATIONS
91
others with 'fluted or channelled patterns including spirals. Later in Ilb crusted and polychrome painted wares are reported. Perforated hammer axes of stone and mace-heads, and flint axes and arrow-heads now appear for the first time. Near by at Plocnik similar handled tankards and jugs have not been separated stratigraphically from such common Vinca types as anthropomorphic lids, but five stone adzes were associated in a hoard with 13 flat copper adzes and a hammer- axe like Fig. 53, i.
At Vinca itself layers above 3.40 yield relics of the “ Baden culture.^ This explicitly succeeds the Morava culture at Sarv^as and Vucedol in Slavonia where it is explicitly associated with moulds, furnaces and other evidences of local metallurgy. It is closely allied to that of Bubanj II and may be equally Anatolian. But its authors did not establish regular commerce either with the Aegean or the Upper Danube basin. Hence there is no recognizable counterpart in Yugoslavia to that Early Bronze Age we term Danubian IV Only in the topmost strata at Vinca ^ and in Bubanj III do we find tankards and cups such as characterize the Middle Bronze Age — Period V — in Hungary.
The relative isolation of the province after the well- attested early contacts with the iEgean and Anatolia impedes the establishment of any convincing chronology. Bubanj II ought of course to be approximately contemporary with the advanced phase of Early Macedonian and with crusted ware in Thessaly III. The earlier Vardar-Morava continuum must have been established before the beginning of the Macedonian
Bronze Age”. In view of the pedestalled bowls and the stroke-burnished ware from Kum Tepe (p. 35) and Alishar and from Vardar sites it might begin before the foundation of Troy I and Thermi I and be parallel to the early spread from Asia Minor that brought neolithic culture to Crete (p. 17). Once the continuum were established the use of spirals and other Danubian features might have spread back to Greece, for instance as a result of those seasonal migrations postulated on p. 80 while the technique of vase painting and the idea of the stamp seal {pintadera) could have been transmitted northward in the same way from Thessaly. The Vardar culture
1 WPZ., XXVI (1939), 14 : Milojdic in BSA., XLIV (1949), 258-306.
* Vassits, PF., II, 135 ; IV, figs. 200-4.
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DAWX OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
should then be at least as old or older than Neolithic B in Greece.
On the other hand many authorities including Frankfort ^ and Tompa would attribute the late neolithic of Greece and Macedonia and presumably also Kum Tepe and the Chalcolithic of AIi§ar to a southward expansion of Danubian peasants. The great objection to such a view lies in the difficulty of explaining the introduction of cereals and domestic animals into the Danube basin and of finding there any population to create a neolithic culture if. these requisites were introduced. No mesolithic population, descended from Old Stone Age hunters, has yet been discovered in the Middle Danube basin. ^ Yet such hunters had undoubtedly lived in Hungary and Tran- sylvania as in Moldavia ® and Bulgaria.^ Hence Krichevskii ® has suggested that in post-glacial times while some developed the fishing collecting economy here termed mesolithic those on the fertile loss turned instead to hoe-cultivation ; Einkorn at least probably grew in the Balkans to be cultivated, and there may have been wild sheep to domesticate as well as boars and oxen. On the other hand Coon^s ® studies of a very inadequate series of Danubian skulls lead him to attribute them to a variety of Mediterranean, physically unlike the palaeolithic and mesolithic Europeans.
Whatever its age and however constituted, the existence of the Vardar-Morava culture conclusively establishes, if not the diffusion of culture from the iEgean to the Middle Danube basin, effective opportunities for such diffusion. Moreover it illustrates admirably the principle of cultural zoning. In the Vardar valley a Bronze Age economy was established in the third millennium ; even the ceramic industry was industrialized during the second. North of the Balkans neolithic self- sufficiency was maintained much longer, and the potters' wheel was introduced only late in the first miUennium.
^ Studies, II, 40.
* Fewkes. ASPRB,, 12, 17 and 66.
» Dacia, V-VI, 7 ft., 23 H., 50 ff.
* ASPRB,, 1939, 46.
* MezoJit i neolit Evropy/* KS., IV.
* Races, 105-6.
CHAPTER VII Danubian Civilization Period I
Immediately north of the Serbian Danube and the Save begin loss-clad plains and slopes which extend, not without formidable interruptions, right up to the edge of the moraines in Poland, Germany, and Belgium. These Central European loss lands had been frequented in Aurignacian and Solutrean times by mammoth and reindeer hunters, but mesolithic successors of such food-gatherers survived only among the post-glacial forests on the northern and western fringes. To food-producers, the loss lands, naturally drained, not too heavily wooded and easy to till, offered a domain where they could practice the simplest conceivable sort of farming. With unstinted water supplies and seemingly boundless territories the peasant was free to shift his hut and break fresh ground as soon as his former fields showed signs of exhaustion. And in fact we find prevailing throughout Central Europe a system of nomadic cultivation that does look really primitive — such as the earliest food- producers, undisciplined by environmental limitations, might be expected to invent.
The cultures ^ based upon this economy exhibit con- siderable uniformity throughout the loss lands. Though the temporary nature of the settlements excludes tell-formation and the stratigraphical chronology derived therefrom, the cultural sequence is well established. Throughout the area three main periods can be recognized before the Early Bronze Age which coincides with period IV. In period I we can distinguish three main groups : the Koros culture in south-eastern Himgary and the Banat, the Bukk culture in north-eastern Hungary and Slovakia, and the Danubian I extending from "Western Hungary to the northern confines of the loss.
The Koros Culture
The Koros culture ^ is itself just one component of that disclosed in the very deepest layers of Vinca — or shall we say
^ For points not otherwise documented see Cbilde, Danube,
® Kutzian, “ The K6r6s Culture/* Dissertationes Pannonicae, ser. Il, No. 23 (Buda Pest, 1944-7).
93
94 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
the Vin£a culture stripped of refinements, that presuppo settled life. It was based on breeding cattle, goats, sheep and pigs, nomadic agriculture, hunting, and fishing. The hunte relied on pit-falls and perhaps arrows tipped with doubl^ pointed bone heads, the fishermen chiefly on nets, pjjg settlements were tiny clusters of huts, interspersed between all sorts of pits and generally situated on the banks of streams lagoons. The framework of the simple trapeze-shaped huts
Fig. 45. Clay loom-weights (i) and bone spatula (i) of K6r6s culture.
of wattle and daub was formed of two pairs of poles slantine inwards to support the ridge-pole.^ ®
Whorls and loom-weights (Fig. 45) attest a textile industry The commonest carpenters’ tool is the shoe-last adze, as in ajj " Danubian ” cultures and the Morava culture ; it might be mounted in antler sleeves. But stone axe-heads were perforated with a hollow borer and antlers were perforated too. Bone spatulae were manufactured as at Vinca and Starcevo The potter could produce a variety of distinctively ceramic fonns equipped with flat bases or even stand-rings, but not with true handles. Instead of rings some vases stand on four nipple-like feet or have a quatrefoil base. Characteristic forms are hemispherical bowls, globular narrow-mouthed jars and curious bottles flat on one side with rows of lug handles on the other' me latter are evidently intended to be carried on the back Decoration is normaUy effected by rustication precisely as at Vmca and Startevo, but a few Koros vases are adorned with
» mg., ix-x, 75.
DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
95
representations of men, cattle, or stags modelled in low relief.^ Such figural relief ornament survives locally on Tisza vases of period II and recurs at Vinca and Tordos. The resemblance of the modelled figures to those adorning Early Bronze Age vases from Cj^prus and Hittite vases from Ali§ar is very striking. At the same time a resemblance between the barbotine pottery covered all over with finger-nail and finger- tip impression, some of the patterns thus formed and even the big globular jars to the earliest neolithic pottery of South Italy cannot be denied. Red-slipped pots sometimes adorned with white paint, from some Koros settlements near Hodmezbvasar- hely, may be imports from the Vardar province (e.g. from Starcevo).
Trade was sufficiently developed to enable the plainsmen to obtain mountain rocks for querns and adzes. North Hungarian obsidian for knives, and even armlets of Tridacna and Sfondylus shell from the Mediterranean. So too they imitated in clay Asiatic stamp-seals ^ ; one from Hodmezo- vasarhely-Kotacpart, being rectangular and decorated with a filled cross, is a peculiarly faithful copy of the favourite Central Anatolian form.
Much of the ritual apparatus of the Vardar-Morava was conserved — clay figurines of women, triangular altars, and libation tables (i.e. small bowls on four feet). The dead were buried with scant ceremony and few, if any, gifts, contracted in refuse pits between the huts.
The attribution of the Koros group to period I is not yet quite certain. Koros hut-ruins have been disturbed by graves of period III.^ Koros sites occupy an area that would be otherwise blank on a map of period I and that is occupied in period II by the Tisza culture. And at Vinca imported Tisza pottery ^ appears stratigraphically later than the rusticated wares, bone spatulas and libation tables of the Koros culture.® On the other hand clay stamps belong farther north to period 11.® Nor is it clear whether we should regard the Koros folk as members of the Vardar-Morava communities who had broken
1
2 S
4
5
6
Dolg., XIII (1937). 45-8*
Dolg., XI, pi. XVII, 4-6.
Dolg., IX-X, 76.
Marburger Studien, I (1938), 30.
Dolg., XI, 122 ; BRGK., XXIV-V, 51.
But these are further removed from the Anatolian models.
96
DA^\'N OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
loose to follow an easier, if less refined, life on the plains or aboriginal food-gatherers who had adopted some elements of the Vardar culture. Their range lay essentially east of the Tisza from the Danube northward to the Koros. But even in the Danubian I culture farther to the north-west Koros elements will be found so that the K5ros group may disclose the intermediaries through w^hose agency neolithic culture was transmitted to the more w’esterly loss belt.
Bukk Culture
Though its territory was contiguous to that of the Koros group, the Biikk culture ^ does not obviously illustrate the transition from the latter to the classical Danubian I. On the other hand it is so closely allied to the Danubian I, to be described below% that only the divergencies need be emphasized here. Its economy w’as based on farming but combined with hunting and fishing (by means of hook-and-line as well as nets). Caves were extensively used as habitations, but, according to HillebrandtA mainly as winter shelters ; in the summer their occupants w’ould have hunted and fished on the Tisza plains. The usual Danubian shoe-last adze is combined with hollow- bored stone axes and perforated antler axes. The potters sometimes imitated gourd vessels as in Danubian I, but at other times follow^ed leather models as in the Troad. Moreover, they gave some vases tubular spouts and mounted bowls on hollow pedestals in the same form as the classical vases of period II, or on model human legs as at Thermi. The orna- mentation is based on the Danubian spiral system, highly elaborated, but it is executed with very fine incisions. And the Danubian motives may be combined with conventional indications of a human face or even a complete figure in the West Anatolian manner.® Moreover, in addition to grey wares clear buff vases were produced and decorated with spiral designs in black paint applied before firing. The Bukk people controlled the obsidian deposits of the Hegyalya near Tokay and presumably exported the material which they certainly utilized.
^ Arch. Hung., V-VI, 19-38 ; BRGK., XXIV-V, 32-9. * AE., XLIV (1930), 301 ; cf. AE., 1943, 22.
» Arch. Hung., V-VI, pis. XVIII, 5 ; XXIV. 13.
DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
97
The chronological position in period I of the Biikk culture should be fixed by a burial at Nagyteteny (Pest) furnished with Biikk I and late Danubian I vases and by the stratigraphy of Taliya (Zemplen), where early Biikk pottery occurred in a layer below Tisza sherds of period 11.^ But the Biikk culture, as defined by the pottery, certainly lasted into period II ^ and then formed an integral constituent of the Tisza culture. The relations of the painted Biikk ware to those of Starcevo and Ariu§d and of the pedestalled bowls to those from the last two sites and the Danubian II culture remain debatable.
Danubian I Culture
The loss lands west and north of the Danube were first occupied by a neolithic population whose whole culture down to the finest details remains identical from Hungary to North Germany and from Galicia to Belgium.^ This is the best known culture in Central Europe and perhaps the most classically neolithic in the ancient world. Hence the term Danubian I may be legitimately applied to it in preference to the clumsy and inaccurate terms linear pottery or spiral-maeander ” culture.
The Danubian I economy was based on the cultivation of barley, Einkorn, and perhaps also emmer ^ wheats, beans, peas, lentils and flax, in small plots tilled with stone hoes. Only small herds of stock were kept ; a few bones of sheep, oxen, and pigs turn up in the settlements, but animal dung was never incorporated in hut walls as is usual where the farmyards are well stocked. To hunting the Danubians made no resort. Danubian I settlement sites are dotted very densely all over the loss lands, but none shows evidence of prolonged occupation. That is a result of the Danubians' crude agricultural technique, one still illustrated by some hoe-cultivators in Africa to-day.
1 AE„ XLIX, 86 and 70.
a Dolg., XII, 49.
® For the distribution in Hungary, BRGK., XXI V-V, 30-2 ; AE., XLIV, 30 ff. ; in Poland and East Germany, Bl. f. d. Vorg., VII (1930), 18-52 ; for the rest of Germany, Buttler, Donau. ; for Bohemia, Stock^, Boh. Prih. ; for Belgium, Bui. Soc. r. Beige d*Anthrop. et de Prehistoire {Brussels, 1936), XII, 25-106.
* Emmer is reported only from the Rhineland and Belgium, bread wheat from Poland alone ; both might have been borrowed from other populations. Cf. BRGK., XX (1930), 30.
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
They cultivated a plot till it would bear no more, and then another, and so on until they had used up all the land round the hamlet ; thereupon they shifted bag and baggage to a new site not too far distant.
The details of the process that must have gone on ail over the province are knowm from the excavation of Koln-Lindental.^ The first structures erected at a new site were barns, presumably put up by inhabitants of a hamlet a couple of miles away. After a time the cultivators themselves removed their houses and their families to the vicinity of their new fields. Some twenty-five pit-dwellings tvere constructed, some of the granaries shifted, and the whole group of buildings eventually
surrounded with a trench and palisade to keep out wild beasts. And then after a time the villagers abandoned the site which lay desolate till at length it was reoccupied by a kindred group using rather different pottery. The process thus documented explains how and w^hy the Danubians spread over such a vast area ; they simply had to move on to new land every ten or tw-enty years.
This simple method of getting a livelihood is, of course, incompatible with refinements or the accumulation of capital. Houses so soon to be abandoned must not be over elaborate The Danubians allegedly lived in complex pit-dwellings — excavations dug i8 to 30 inches into the loss over an irregular
^ Buttler und Habery, Das handkeramische Dorf Kdln^Lindenthal {Romisch-Germanische Forschungen, ii, Berlin, 1936).
DANUBIAN CmLIZATION
99
oval area lo to 35 feet long, and covered over with a wattle and daub superstructure supported by stakes bordering the excavation. It now seems more likely that the real Danubian I houses were rectangular structures, supported by five rows of stout posts and attaining at times lengths of 90 ft. and widths of 20} Such had formerly been designated “ bams.”
The rest of the Danubians’ equipment was equally home- made. Shoe-last celts of stone (Fig. 46) served, if mounted on knee-shafts, as hoe-blades smd adzes, or, if perforated, as axes and hammers. Knives, sickles and scrapers were made of flint. No whorls nor loom-weights attest a textile industry ;
the flax foimd at Koln-Lindental may have been grown for oil. At Statenice in Bohemia,* a bone implement like the spatulae of the Koros was found.
Two sorts of pots (Fig. 47) were manufactrired — ^hemi- spherical bowls and globular bottles (some flattened for carrying on the back) — ^provided with 3, 6 or 9 lugs and clearly derived from gourd models. The resemblance is often enhanced by zig-zag incised lines reproducing the slings in which gourds are c£irried. But instead of skeuomorphic patterns the peasants often incised on their vases the continuous spiral and maeander designs that are regarded as distinctively Danubian. Some designs, perhaps late, suggest human figures, double-axes, and
» Germania, XXVI {1942). 84-103 ; of. XXI (1937). 213. 217-
* Stocky, Boh. Prih., 62.
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
other objects. And some coarse vases were just rusticated as on the Koros. Lugs may be modelled to resemble animals’ heads as on the Vardar and the Morava, while the incised double-axe patterns may be inspired from Crete or North S\’ria,^ but probably belong in to Danubian II.
In principle this economy was essentially self-sufficing. But in practice materials had to be carefully selected and often transported over long distances. The green schist, used for adzes at Koln-Lindental, must have been brought 6o or 70 miles from the Hunsruck or the Taunus ; Niedermendig lava from near Mayen was used for quems in Belgium.® Such partiality for selected materials, without destro3dng self-sufficiency, encouraged intercourse between distinct communities. In fact, a few vases, made from local clays in the Main valley, were transported to Koln-Lindental, 50 miles away. Moreover, in Moravia, Bohemia, Thuringia and even the Rhine valley ornaments made from the Mediterranean Spondylus shell were worn as in Thessaly and on the Middle Danube ; they must have been handed on by some sort of inter-tribal exchange from the jEgean or the Achiatic ! So too African ivory reached Flambom near Worms.® The interchange of goods, thus disclosed, developed into something like regular trade. Par- ticularly on the borders of the Danubian province in Branden- burg, Holstein, and West Prussia hoards * of shoe-last adzes turn up. Like the later hoards of bronzes these must be the stocks of specialized travelling merchants. Individuals must already have been at least supplementing their livelihood by satisf3dng the Danubians’ prejudices in favour of selected materials and extending their activities to other still mesolithic tribes. Such were surely the forerunners of the bronze- merchants described on p. 116. And workshop debris in villages ® may indicate even industrial specialization within a community.
The Danubians were a peaceful folk. The only weapons found in their settlements are disc-shaped mace-heads, such as had been used by the predynastic Eg5q)tians, and occasional flint arrow-heads. They were democratic and perhaps even
] 1 : PA., XL (1934-5). 3.
* Buttler, Donau., 32.
* Buttler, Donau., 36 ; Marburger Studien, 1, 27—9.
* /5r., XXin (1935), 73 ; BLf, d.Vorg., VII, 51 ; Buttler, Donau., 21.
* Germania, XXII, 220.
DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
101
communistic ; there are no hints of chiefs concentrating the communities’ wealth. Nor did deities fulfil that function. A few female figurines of clay have survived, but nothing like the multiplicity of ritual objects noted at Vinca and in Macedonia. Few graves have been discovered. The dead were generally buried in the contracted position, more rarely cremated. The skulls examined are all dolichocranial and in a general sense " Mediterranean”. One from an Alsatian cemetery had been trephined.^
A first clue to the origin of the Danubians is given by their pottery; they must have learned potting and translated preceramic gourd vessels into clay in some region where gourds harden. That does not happen north of the Middle Danube plain, which is accordingly near the northern limit of then- possible cradle. To this extent a southern origin for the Danubians is almost universally admitted. In Germany a centre in Czechoslovakia is assumed by most authorities. But here no mesolithic population is known, nor cereals for them to cultivate. And the Danubians’ traditional preference for Mediterranean shells should indicate a more southerly cradle. Several speculative theories could be framed : (i) the
Danubians came from the Mediterranean or Anatolia, but made no pots as long as they could use gourds and so have left no traces of their presence till they reached Hungary. {2) The overflowing peasant population of the Morava sites, advancing still farther northwards, dispensed with superfluous refinements till their culture was reduced to the bare minimum just described. (3) A stfll undiscovered mesolithic stock acquired from the Morava or from the Koros peoples, cereals, tame sheep, the potters’ art and other “ neolithic ” traits. The solid fact is that the Danubian I economy is two stages lower down the scale than that of the Vardar-Morava, just as it is two stages farther away from the .®gean.
Period II
The Tisza Culture
In South-Eastern Hungary and adjacent regions the Kerbs culture gives place to another, adapted particularly to exploiting the fish and game abounding in the Tisza and its tributaries.
^ Germania, XXVI (1942), 177-181.
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
At the village of Kokenydomb,^ the dwellings — rectangular houses measuring up to 7-2 m. by 3*4 m., entered through the long side and decorated with painted clay models of bulls' heads — were strung out in a single row along the river bank. The fisherman now employed harpoons of antler (Fig. 43) (as at \inca) and double or triple rings of bone in addition to nets.® Stock-breeding and agriculture still provided the basis of life. Grain was stored in large clay jars or rectangular vessels, 70 cm. by 50 cm. by 65 cm. in volume and exactly like the wooden bins used locally to-day.^
The general economy remained neolithic. The materials for axes were drawn from the Banat, Transylvania, and Northern Hungary, but obsidian was no longer imported. Shells were still imported from southern seas and t5^ical vases were exported to Vinca and Silesia (p. 89), but clay “ stamp seals " w^ere no longer used.
Pots, including cylindrical jars and large oval bowls, suitable for cooking fish in, may be provided with indented lugs like the Early Macedonian and short tubular spouts as in the Biikk group. They are decorated with coarse incisions in a thick slip, supplemented by crusting in red and yellow, forming mseanders, concentric circles, and conventionalized faces, but not spirals ; the designs are grouped in vertical panels.
Clay figurines were no longer manufactured, but rattles in animal form may have been used in ritual. The dead were buried flexed in small cemeteries, some after amputation of the feet. Shell or marble buttons with shanks were sometimes worn as brow ornaments.
Danubian II Cultures
A contemporary but less specialized series of cultures extends from the Drave ^ and the Upper Tisza to Lower Bavaria, Central Germany, Silesia, and Galicia.® Though less homogeneous than Danubian I, these cultures in view of their wide dispersion may be grouped together under the common
1 Dolg., VI {1930). 50-150 ; of. PZ., XXI, 185 f. ; AE., 1943, 22.
* BRGK„ XXIV-V, 43 ; Dolg., VI, pis. Ill, VI.
« AE., XLV (1931), 253,
* Germania, XXII (1938), 215-8.
* Buttler, Donau., 38-43: PZ., XXI {19^0). ft to; WA., XIV (1936),
DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
103
name, Danubian II ; the term Tisza culture, introduced by Tompa ^ and accepted by some Germans too, to replace the old designation Lengyel-Jordansmiihl, must be reserved for the group last described which is quite distinct.
The Danubian II economy combined stock-breeding, and probably also hunting, with cidtivation. But explicit evidence for the use of the plough is lacking. And the settlements are scarcely more permanent than those of Danubian I, but were shifted periodically like the latter. The peasants did, however, build rectangular houses entered through the narrow end and ornamented, like those of the Tisza group, with clay bulls’ heads. Commerce, as in Danubian I, is most clearly attested by the importation from the south of Spondylus and Tridacna shells. North Hungarian obsidian was distributed all over the
Fig. 48. Clay block vase, Strelide I, Moravia (f).
Middle Danube basin and northward to Moravia, Western Galicia, Silesia, and Bohemia, but in the northern districts it is found only in the earliest settlements as if stocks had been brought by the colonists, but not subsequently replenished by trade. Cubical blocks of clay, perforated at the corners, in which one, or exceptionally two, cups have been hollowed out ^ (Fig. 48) have been claimed as copies of Early Minoan block vases of stone. Clay imitations of stamp seals are attributed to the later phase of the period in Moravia, and by that time copper trinkets began to be distributed in Moravia and Silesia (Fig. 49, i).
Besides shoe-last adzes, triangular greenstone axes (Fig. 49, 2), hollow-bored axe-hammers and antler axes were employed. A few spheroid mace-heads and flint arrow-heads
1 BRGK., XXIV-V, 40 ff.
* Schrdnil, Bdhmen, 50 ; cf. p. 33 here.
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DAWlf OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
and, in Bohemia, stone arrow-straighteners,i may point to warlike behaviour. Whorls and loom-weights attest a textile
industry.
Fig. 49. Copper trinkets (i), and triangular axe (J), Jordansmuhl. After
Seger.
Characteristic pot forms are hoUow-pedestalled bowls (Fig. 50, i), ladles with socketed handles (Fig. 50, 2), biconical jars (Fig. 50, 3). and variants on the older bottles. Bowls are
Fig, 50. Danubian II pottery, Lengyel. i, 3, 4, (J) ; 2, (J).
flat-bottomed and often carinated, but intumed rims do not occur till the end of the period. Handles remain unknown. In
1 PA.. XXXIX (1933), 50-3.
DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
105
Moravia ^ the earliest vases were decorated with spirals, mseanders and basketry patterns, incised and painted after firing in white, red, and yellow (generally termed crusted ware). In a second phase, defined stratigraphically in Moravia, white paint alone was employed on a fine burnished red ware, but some red-ware vessels are covered with a white slip and painted in red before burnishing and firing, just as in Thessalian A. In a still later phase which is alone represented in Silesia, Bohemia, and Bavaria, coloured decoration went out of fashion, and only low bosses adorn the vase surface.
For domestic fertility cults, similar to those practised in Greece and in the Vardar-Morava complex, the Danubian II people made female figurines, models of animals and doves and zoomorphic vases. The dead were sometimes buried, flexed, in small cemeteries. One near Pecs comprised seventy-eight graves scattered about in eleven groups.^ In late graves in Bohemia and Central Germany the bodies had been cremated. Cattle too were given ceremonial burial in Silesia.
Comparisons with the .®gean and Anatolia offer ambiguous possibilities for dating period II. The resemblances of crusted ware to that of phase C in Thessaly, of the indented lugs on the Tisza to Early Macedonian and of clay stamps and block vases to Early Minoan forms, suggest a date round about 2500 b.c. for the period's beginning. On the other hand pedestaUed bowls very much of Danubian II form go back to the fourth millennium in the chalcolithic of Ali§ar and at Kum Tepe ; the red on white painted sherds from Moravia recall equally ancient Thessalian fabrics, and a Macedonian neolithic pot from 0l3mthus shows a panelled decoration rather in the Tisza manner. On this evidence 3300-3000 would seem just as plausible as 2500-2200 as the historical dates of period 11.
Danubian I Survivals in the North
The expansion of Danubian II farmers, like that of their precursors in Danubian I, was a slow process. Indeed it had begun while Danubian I folk were still spreading down the Oder, the Elbe, and the Rhine valleys. Since period II begins with the emergence of the Danubian II and Tisza cultures in the
^ Vildomec in Obzor Prahist., VIII, 1-43.
“ Arch, Hirng,, XXIII {1939).
106 DA\^’N OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Middle Danube basin, we may say that Danubian I cultures survived in the north into period II. In fact they outlasted e\-en that period in remote places. Moreover, the Danubian I exnansion did not take place iyi vucuo. In the hill countries between the Danube and the Rhine and in Thuringia, along the rivers of the North European plain and on the sand-dunes of Silesia and Poland, still lived scattered groups of Tardenoisian,
Fig. 51. Stroke-ornamented vases, Bohemia (J, J) ; Rossen vases. Central Germany (^).
Maglemosean and Swiderian food-gatherers. Some of these were absorbed into Danubian communities or copied the Danubians' way of life. Thus arose various cultural groups,^ essentially Danubian in economy, and equipment, but diverging from the norm in details, particularly in ceramic art. Hence the groups are defined by their pottery. And most flourished in period III too.
(i) Stroke-ornamented ware [Stichhandkeramik) (Fig. 51) distinguishes a group which arose probably in Bohemia and
^ Buttler, Donau., 29, 45.
DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
107
spread thence back into Moravia, and. into Bavaria, Central and East Germany in the wake of the Danubian I groups, and under pressure from the same economic forces. Economically it differs from Danubian I only in a tendency to supplement farming by himting for which transverse arrow-heads of Tardenoisian ancestry were employed. The arrow shafts were straightened on grooved stones as in the Danubian II culture and farther east.^ The pots were still round-bottomed, but were decorated exclusively with skeuomorphic zig-zag patterns composed of ribbons executed by a series of distinct jabs instead of continuous lines. In Bohemia, Bavaria, and Central Germany the dead were cremated. In Moravia and Poland stroke-ornamented ware occurs in late Danubian II setlements, and at Gleinitz in Silesia an imported Tisza vase was found with stroke-ornamented ware.^ Late stroke-ornamented ware was even found associated with a Globular Amphora of period III. Hence the culture it defines begins sometime in Period II and persists throughout the period.
The Rdssen group arose in Central Germany ^ probably through the adoption by Forest folk of the culture of the last-named group, and spread thence to the Rhine valley. Though the Danubian agricultural economy had been taken over entire, himting retained much of the importance that it had enjoyed in the ancestral Forest culture. The increased competi- tion for land, due to the rise of this and other new groups of cultivators, may by now have led to war. The Rossen people were the first in the Rhine valley to fortify their settlements, while weapons — ^transverse and hollow-based arrow-heads, disc-shaped mace-heads and the old perforated antler-axes of the Forest folk — ^were relatively common. The Rossen folk lived in rectangular houses with vertical walls and gabled roofs supported by three rows of earth-fast posts, ^ and they also erected rectangular granaries. But their settlements were no more permanent than those of the preceding groups. Their pots are hemispherical or globular in profile, but are often provided with stand-rings and are decorated with rectilinear
1 PA., XXXIX (1933). 50-3.
* Buttler, Donau., 60 ; Altschles., Ill (1931), 153.
* The theory of its derivation from the North-West German Megalith Culture, long dominant in Germany, was refuted by Stocky, Boh. Prdh., 161, and more conclusively by Buttler, Donau., 44.
* Germania, XX (1936), 229-243 ; cf. Fig. 134 here.
108 OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
patterns imitating basketry, and executed in stab-and-drag technique (Fig. 51, 2). As ornaments the Rossen folk wore marble bracelets, disc-beads of shell, bored tusks and deers’ teeth, and marble buttons identical with those from Lengyel. The dead were buried in the contracted attitude.
The buttons of Danubian II type from the graves at Rossen in Central Germany prove that the group even there belongs to period II, while on the Isar, in Alsace, and in the Wetterau, Rossen house-foundations have disturbed the ruins of those left by later Danubian I peasants. On the other hand, on the Goldberg, in Wiirtemburg, the Rossen village was succeeded by a settlement of the Western Michelsberg culture that generally belongs to period III. Hence Rossen flourished in period II.^
The Danubian I peasants themselves persisted, wandering about during period II and in the Rhine basin even into period III, preserving their culture intact, but not unaffected by the example of their neighbours and rivals. Even in their pottery they preserved the old forms and the spiral-maeander as the basis of their decoration ; but the patterns tend to break up and are embellished with punctuations, comb-impressions and other devices. Plastic suggestions of a human face from Koln-Lindental, in the manner of Trojan face-ums, may belong to this phase.®
Even in Central Germany the later Danubian I pottery is associated with the stroke-ornamented ware of period II, on