Europe: A History (18 page)
LAUSSEL
T
HE
‘Venus of Laussel’ dates from c.19000
BC.
It is a bas-relief, sculptured on the inner wall of a cave in the Dordogne, and painted with red ochre. It shows a seated female figure with no surviving facial features, but with a large coiffe of hair drawn behind the shoulder, long pendulant breasts, and knees opened wide to display the vulva. The left hand rests on a pregnant belly. The crooked right arm holds aloft a crescent-shaped bison horn.
Like most of the human images of earliest European art, covering over 90 per cent of human history, the manifestly female gender of this artefact is both striking and eloquent. It is widely taken to represent the palaeolithic Godhead, a variant of the ‘Great Cosmic Mother’, whose cult dominated the rites of a matriarchal community. According to one interpretation, it would have presided over masked ritual dancing, where women, men, and children sought mystical communion with the animal spirits. Less certainly, it formed the pinnacle of cave-life imagery where the cave was the ‘Womb-tomb-maze of the Great Earth Mother’ and where ‘blood-woman- moon-bison horn-birth-magic-the cycle of life are analo-gised in a continuous resonance, or harmony, of sacred energies.’
1
The matriarchal, or ‘matrifocal’ character of prehistoric society has been accepted by most theorists, from Marx and Engels onwards. However the assumption that matriarchy only operated at the most ‘primitive’ level is not now regarded as valid. In his work on myths, the poet Robert Graves explored the origins and fate of matrifocal culture in Europe, tracing the decline of woman’s status from ancient divinity to classical slavery.
2
Others have considered the female origins of speech, and hence of conscious culture. In humanity’s long ‘nursery age’, women and children may conceivably have learned to talk whilst the menfolk were away hunting. If so, the gender difference can only have been one of degree, since boy-children must surely have learned to verbalize alongside their sisters.
More convincing is the strong possibility that matriarchal and patriarchal societies overlapped, creating a wide range of hybrid forms. If the Gimbutas theory is correct (see p. 86), the advance on to the Pontic Steppes of the late neolithic ‘Kurgan peoples’ marked the arrival not only of the Indo-Europeans but also of warlike, patriarchal traditions. On the other hand, after the subsequent arrival of the Sauromatians—the first wave of the Irano-Sarmatian confederation—the matriarchal newcomers began to mingle c.3000 BC with their patriarchal predecessors. In this connection, Herodotus retailed a curious story how Amazon warriors fled the southern shores of the Black Sea and, after mating with Scythian braves, set up a new homeland ‘three days march from the Maeotian Lake’. The
story was rejected as sheer invention until archaeologists began to uncover the skeletons of female warriors in Sauromatian graves. A Sarmatian princess of a still later vintage, whose tomb was found at Kolbiakov on the Don, had been buried with her battle-axe.
3
Like every committed doctrine, the feminist approach to ‘preherstory’ has its extravagances. But it is not entirely implausible:
Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, … and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand … the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use … speaks of tools, hunters, and men, when every statue and painting we discover cries out that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women … Gathering is as important as hunting, but only hunting is discussed. Storytelling is discussed, but the storyteller is a hunter rather than an old priestess of the moon. Initiation is imagined, but the initiate is not the young girl in menarche about to wed the moon, but a young man about to become a great hunter.
4
Western civilization, however defined, is generally thought to have its roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and in the Classical World. Both those source cultures, whether of Yehovah or of Zeus-Jupiter, were dominated by male Godheads. Yet one should not forget that through eons of earlier time the Godhead was female. One can only presume that humankind, so long as it was a tiny vulnerable species, was more moved by the feminine role of generation and birth than by the male role of killing and death.
All sorts of people have dreamed of a long-lost paradise in the remote past. Romantics, nationalists, and Marxists have all had their idealized Gardens of Eden, their semi-mythical Golden Ages. Now feminists are doing the same.
5
One thing is certain. The Venus of Laussel, and others like her, was no sex object of male gratification. In fact, she was no Venus at all.
The Middle Stone Age or mesolithic represents a transitional era when Man was adapting to rapidly improving climatic conditions. The terminal moraine of the last Finno-Scandinavian ice sheet has been dated to 7300
BC.
Technological advance was characterized by the appearance of microliths—very small, pointed or bladed flints. Greatly increased supplies offish and shellfish encouraged settlement along the lakes, rivers, and coasts. Earlier cultures identified in the south, as at Mas d’Azil in the Pyrenees, were complemented by more northerly ones, such as Maglemose in Zealand or Ertebolle in Jutland, where deep-sea fishing emerged. For the first time, the mesolithic stone axe was capable of felling the largest trees.
The New Stone Age, or neolithic, was marked by the transition from food-gathering to food production. The domestication of plants and animals, otherwise known as agriculture, was accompanied by further improvements in stone technology, where grinding, polishing, and boring produced implements of far superior quality. This ‘Neolithic Revolution’ began in the Middle East in the eighth millennium
BC,
in northern parts of Europe as late as the second. It saw the beginnings of cattle, sheep, and pig-farming; of horse-breeding and of hybridization to produce mules; of systematic cereal production; of ploughing, weaving, pottery, mining. It also saw the principal drive for the comprehensive colonization of the Peninsula, where previously only scattered settlements had existed.
Two main lines of neolithic advance have been identified. One, which is associated with the
Linearbandkeramik
or ‘linear pottery’, moved rapidly up the Danube Valley into central Europe. In a brief spurt of perhaps 700 years in the fifth millennium, it crossed the 1,500 miles between present-day Romania and the Netherlands. The pioneer settlements clustered round great communal long-houses built from the largest timbers of the newly cleared forest. Problems of agricultural over-exploitation and of manpower shortages led to temporary retreats, followed by the characteristic reoccupation of abandoned sites. A second line of advance, associated with the spread of a ‘stamped-pottery’ culture, moved westwards round the Mediterranean shore. In the fourth millennium there were further extensions of agricultural settlement into the Peninsula’s western and northern extremities—into Iberia, France, and Switzerland, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and eastern parts of the Great Plain. By c.3200
BC
the whole of the Peninsula below latitude 62 °N was occupied by various types of a food-producing economy.
15
[GAT-HUNTER] [TAMMUZ] [VINO]
In this era lake villages were built such as those at Charavines near Grenoble, at Chalain in the Jura, on the Federsee in Württemberg, or on Lake Zurich. They are particularly valuable to archaeologists, since the mud of the lake has acted as an almost perfect preservative of everything from kitchen utensils to half-eaten apple-cores,
[TOLLUND]
Overall, six principal neolithic zones have been established: an east Mediterranean and Balkan zone, under strong influences from the Levant; the Tripol’ye-Cucuteni zone on the Ukrainian steppe; the Baltic-Black Sea zone of cord-impressed ceramics and of the ‘battle-axe’ people; the central zone of linear ceramics, with its heartland in Bohemia but with outposts west of the Rhine and east of the Vistula; the northern zone of the Great Plain, dominated by funnel-necked beaker ware; and the western zone of the ‘bell beaker’ people, stretching from southern Spain to the British Isles and Scandinavia. Late neolithic cultures were often connected with vast megalith constructions varying from simple dolmens or menhirs to huge chambered tombs, stone avenues, and stone circles. The principal sites are at New Grange (Ireland) and Maes Howe in the Orkneys, at Carnac in Brittany, and at Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The risky suggestion has been made that they owe their
development to international enterprise, even to contact with Egyptian, or possibly Minoan, metal-prospectors,
[DASA] [GGANTIJA]
TAMMUZ
T
AMMUZ
, son of Ishtar or Ashetar, Mother of the Universe, was the Corn God of ancient Babylon. At the end of the harvest, the stalks of the last sheaves were plaited into straw fans or cages, in which the god could take refuge until the next season.
These corn idols or ‘dollies’ have continued to be made wherever wheat is cultivated. In the Balkans a dolly known as the Montenegrin Fan is still fashioned in the shape of its predecessors on the Nile. In Germany and Scandinavia straw stars and straw angels are popular items of Christmas decoration.
In England a vast repertoire of corn dollies was saved by rural conservationists when the art began to die out in the 1950s. Simple designs such as the Neck and the Horseshoe, the Knot and the Cat’s Paw, the Bell and the Lantern, can be found in all the wheat-growing counties. Local specialities include the Shropshire Mare, the Derbyshire Crown, and the Cambridge Umbrella. The Kern Babby of Northumberland and the Ivy Girl of Kent are nothing other than modern versions of ‘Mother Earth’, distant daughters of Egyptian Ishtar, of Demeter of the Greeks, and of Roman Ceres.
1
The world knows three major staple cereals: rice, maize, and wheat. Of the three, ‘Europe chose wheat.’ Wheat came to Europe from Mesopotamia, and wherever Europeans have settled in force, they have taken their wheat with them—first to the empty lands of the neolithic north-west, more recently to the virgin prairies of America, Australia, and southern Siberia. The process whereby ‘the choice’ was made involved an endless series of experiments over several millennia. Although the rival cereals of rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, and millet have continued to exist in Europe, the triumphal march of King Wheat is uncontestable.
2
Wheat—the genus
Triticum
of the grain-bearing grass family—is known in more than 1,000 varieties. Its grain is extremely nutritious. It consists on average of 70 per cent carbohydrate, 12 per cent protein, 2 per cent fat, 1.8 per cent minerals. The protein content is markedly higher than that of rice, 1 lb yielding up to 1,500 calories. Wheat-based nutrition is one of the factors which has given most Europeans a clear advantage in bodily stature over most rice-eaters and corn-eaters. Wheat is a seasonal crop, which only requires intensive labour at the spring sowing and the autumn harvest. Unlike the rice-growers, who had to tend the paddy-fields in disciplined brigades throughout the year, the wheat farmer was granted time and freedom to branch out, to grow secondary crops, to reclaim land, to build, to fight, to politicize. This conjunction may well contain the preconditions for many features of Europe’s social and political history, from feudalism and individualism to warmongering and imperialism. Wheat, however, quickly exhausts the soil. In ancient times, the land could only retain its fertility if the wheat fields were regularly left fallow and manured by domestic animals. From this there arose the traditional European pattern of mixed arable and livestock farming, and the varied diet of cereals, vegetables, and meat.
In bread-making, wheat proteins have the unique property of forming gluten when mixed with water to form dough. In turn, the gluten retains carbon dioxide emitted from the fermentation of yeast. The net result is a wheaten loaf that is lighter, finer, and more digestible than any of its competitors.
3
‘Give us this day our daily bread’ is a sentiment which European civilization could share with some of its Middle Eastern neighbours, but not with Indians, Chinese, Aztecs, or Incas.
The Chalcolithic Age is a term used by some prehistorians to describe the long transitional phase when Stone and Bronze overlapped.
The Bronze Age was marked by the manufacture of a new alloy through the admixture of copper with tin. Its onset began in the Middle East c.3000
BC,
in northern Europe perhaps a thousand years later. Especially in the Mediterranean, it saw the growth of urban culture: written records, specialized crafts, widespread trade. Its greatest achievements were found at Mycenae, unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann from 1876 and at Cnossos in Crete, excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in 1899–1930. These sites are roughly contemporary with the stone circles at Stonehenge, whose three phases of construction began c.2600
BC.
Charcoal from the ‘Aubrey Holes’ of Phase I at Stonehenge has been carbon-dated to 1848
BC
± 275 years; an antler pick from a stone socket of Phase III to 1710
BC
± 150 years. Hence, whilst advanced civilizations akin to those of the Middle East were developing in the Aegean, the peoples of the north-west were passing through the transition from Neolithic to Bronze,
[SAMPHIRE]
However, talk of ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’ cultures might well be inhibited by the skills of the engineers of Stonehenge, who contrived to transport eighty blue-stones weighing over fifty tons apiece from the distant Presceliy Mountains of South Wales, and to erect them with such precision that awestruck observers have imagined them to be the working parts of a sun-computer.
16
Indeed, carvings at Stonehenge of axes and daggers resembling objects found in the shaft-graves at Mycenae gave rise once again to speculation about direct contacts with the Mediterranean.
