Europe: A History (20 page)
Neither Crete nor Mycenae were known to the early classicists who first formed our view of the ancient world. But it is now generally accepted that Minoan culture on Crete, and Mycenean culture on mainland Greece, formed the twin peaks of ‘Europe’s first civilization’. From the day when Schliemann found a golden death-mask in one of the royal shaft-graves at Mycenae, and telegraphed the mistaken news: ‘Today I have looked on the face of Agamemnon’, it was clear that he was opening up something far more significant than just another rich prehistoric grave,
[LOOT]
Both the palace sites on Crete, at Cnossos, Phaestus, and Mallia, and the mainland sites at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos have yielded abundant proof of art, religion, technology, and social organization of a far more sophisticated kind than anything known before. The golden age of Minoan life, in the so-called ‘palatial period’, began c.1900
BC.
That of the more warlike Mycenaeans, whose fortresses commanded the Plain of Argos and the Gulf of Corinth, began three or four centuries later. Together with the Trojans, who commanded the Dardanelles, the Minoans and the Mycenaeans brought European history out of the realm of faceless archaeology,
[THRONOS]
In the late Bronze Age of central Europe, a widespread group of ‘Urnfield cultures’ was characterized by cemeteries where the cremated remains of the dead were buried in urns together with elaborate grave goods. Important Bronze Age sites have been found at Terramare (Italy), El Argar (Spain), Leubingen, Buchau, Adlerberg (Germany), Unëtice near Prague in Czechoslovakia, and at Otomani in Romania.
In the last quarter of the second millennium, c.1200
BC,
Bronze Age Europe suffered an unexplained breakdown from which it never recovered. Archaeologists write of a ‘general systems collapse’. Trade was disrupted; cities were abandoned; political structures were destroyed. Waves of invaders descended on the remnants. Crete, having barely withstood a series of terrible natural catastrophes, had already fallen to the Mycenean Greeks, before Mycenae itself was destroyed. Within the space of a single century, many established centres passed into oblivion. The Aegean was overrun by tribes from the interior. The Hittite Empire in Asia Minor came to an end. Egypt itself was besieged by unidentified ‘sea peoples’. The Urnfield People survived in Central Europe relapsing into a long passive era which ended with the appearance of the Celts. Greece was plunged into its archaic Dark Age which separated the legendary era of the Trojan Wars from the recorded history of the later city-states.
SAMPHIRE
B
oiled Samphire
…. Pick marsh samphire during July or August at low tide. It should be carefully washed soon after collection and is best eaten very fresh. Tie the washed samphire with its roots still intact in bundles, and boil in shallow unsalted water for 8–10 minutes. Cut the string, and serve with melted butter. Eat the samphire by picking each stem up by the root and biting lightly, pulling the fleshy part away from the woody core.
1
Prehistoric food has long since perished, and cannot easily be studied. Modern attempts to reconstruct the menus and the gastronomic techniques of the neolithic period rely on six main sources of information. Prehistoric rubbish tips present the archaeologists with large collections of meatbones, eggshells, and shellfish remains. The kitchen areas of hut sites often reveal seeds and pollen grains which can be identified and analysed. Implements for fishing and hunting and utensils for preparing, cooking, and eating food have survived in large numbers. (Cauldrons for boiling were common; ovens for baking were not.) The total food resources of the past can be assessed by subtracting modern items—such as yeast, wine, or onions—from the vast repertoire of edible plants and fauna living in the wild. All sorts of delicacies no longer in the cookbooks are known to have been eaten: guillemots, seakale, hedgehogs, beechmast, sloes. Much may also be learned by analogy with the food technology of primitive or pre-industrial societies, whose skills in everything from wild herbs to wind-drying, salting, and preserving are by necessity very considerable. Finally, modern techniques have permitted the analysis of the stomach contents of prehistoric corpses. The Tollund Man, for example, had eaten linseed, barley, and wild plants,
[TOLLUND] [VINO]
Whether, in the end, one can ever recreate an authentic neolithic meal is a matter for debate, preferably pursued whilst chasing the samphire with marrow-bones served with virpa:
Marrow-Bones
. (8 oz/225 g. marrow-bones, flour, salt, dry toast) Scrape and wash the bones, and saw in half across the shaft… Make a stiff paste of flour and water, and roll it out. Cover the ends of the bones with the paste to seal in the marrow, and tie the bones in a floured cloth. Stand upright in a pan of boiling salted water and simmer slowly for about 2 hours … Untie the cloth, and remove the paste from each bone. Fasten a paper napkin round each one and serve with dry toast.
2
Sowans or Virpa
. (1 lb/450 g. fine oatmeal, 3 lb. wheatmeal, 16 pt./ 91, water) Put both meals into a stone crock. Stir in 14 pints or 8 litres of lukewarm water, and let it stand for 5–8 days until sour. Pour off the clear liquid … This is the swats, which makes a refreshing drink. The remainder in the crock will resemble thick starch. Add about 2 pints or 1 litre water to give the consistency of cream. Strain through a cheesecloth over a colander. The liquid … will contain all the nutritious properties of oatmeal… Gentle rubbing with a wooden spoon, and a final squeezing of the cloth … will hasten the process.
3
Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly. Whether one deals in prehistoric recipes, colonial settlements, or medieval music, it needs great imagination and restraint if the twin perils of artless authenticity and clueless empathy are to be avoided. Did neolithic cooks really serve marrow-bones in a paper napkin, or strain their virpa through a cheesecloth? And were there prehistoric Augusts, when samphire could be picked?
THRONOS
T
HE
throne in the Palace of Knossos in Crete has been described as ‘Europe’s oldest chair’. The claim is unlikely to be correct. What
is
certain is that high-backed chairs with arm-rests were reserved in ancient times for ceremonial purposes. They enabled rulers and high priests to assume a relaxed, dignified, and elevated position, whilst everyone else stood at their feet. From the royal throne, the concept of the chair as a symbol of authority has passed to the
cathedra
or See of bishops and to the Chairs of professors.
Furniture for everyday sitting is a relatively modern, European invention. When not standing, primitive peoples sat, squatted, or lay on the floor. Many Asian nations, including the Japanese, still prefer to do so. Ancient Greeks and Romans reclined on couches. The medievals used rough-hewn benches. Individual chairs were first introduced into monastic cells, perhaps to facilitate reading. They did not join the standard household inventory until the sixteenth century, nor the repertoire of fine design until the eighteenth. They were not widely used in schools, offices and workplaces until the end of the nineteenth.
Unfortunately, flat-bottomed chairs do not match the requirements of the human anatomy. Unlike the horse-saddle, which transfers much of the rider’s body-weight onto the stirrup, leaving the natural curvature of the spine intact, chairs lift the thighs at right-angles to the trunk and disrupt the equilibrium of the skeleton. In so doing, they put abnormal stress on the immobilized pelvis, hip-joints, and lumbar regions. Chronic backache is one of the many self-inflicted scars of modern progress.
1
The Iron Age brings prehistory within range of regular historical sources. Iron-working is usually thought to have been initiated by the Hittites of Asia Minor. A gold-hilted dagger with an iron blade, unearthed from the royal tombs at Alaca Hüyük, may originate from the end of the third millennium
BC.
From there, the use of iron spread first to Egypt c.1200
BC,
to the Aegean c.1000
BC,
and to the Danube Basin c.750
BC.
[TOLLUND]
On the mainland of the Peninsula, the prehistoric Iron Age is customarily divided into two successive periods—that of Hallstatt (c.750–400
BC)
and of La Tène (c.400–50). Hallstatt, a site in the Saltzkammergut first explored in 1846, gave its name to a period and culture which blended the traditions of the former Urnfield people with fresh influences coming from the East. La Tène, a site on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland discovered in 1858, gave its name to the second period, where iron-working reached a very high level of competence. Longswords, beautifully wrought from a hard iron core and a soft iron cutting edge which could be fearfully sharpened, were the hallmark of a warrior society, living in great hill forts. These people were familiar with the potter’s wheel, with horse-drawn chariots, with the minting of coins, and with highly stylistical art forms that combine native, Mediterranean, and even nomadic elements. At Rudki in the Holy Cross Mountains near Cracow in southern Poland, they left traces of the most extensive iron-workings in prehistoric Europe. They were active traders, and the tombs of their princes have yielded up Celtic jewellery, Etruscan vases, Greek amphorae, Roman artefacts. Not without dissenting voices, they have been widely identified with the Celts, ‘the first great nation north of the Alps whose name we know’. Apart from La Tène itself, important sites are located at Entremont in Provence, at Alesia in Burgundy, and at Villanova in Emilia.
With the appearance of Celts, European prehistory reaches the knottiest of all problems—the matching of the material cultures defined by archaeologists with the ethnic and linguistic groupings known from other sources. Most prehistori-ans do indeed accept that those iron-workers of the La Tène period were Celts, that they derived from the formation or influx of Celtic tribes in the first millennium
BC,
and that they were one and the same group whom Greek and Roman literary records refer to as
Keltoi
or
Celtae
. But the most recent survey of the matter maintains that the origin of the Celtic languages may lie much further back, in the neolithic era.
17
One thing is certain: modern linguistic research has proved beyond doubt that the languages of the Celts are cognate both to Latin and to Greek, and to most of the languages of modern Europe. The Celts were the vanguard of a linguistic community that can be more clearly defined than the archaeological communities of prehistory. The Celts stand at the centre of the Indo-European phenomenon.
As long ago as 1786 Sir William Jones, a British judge serving in Calcutta, made the epoch-making discovery that the main languages of Europe are closely related to the principal languages of India. Jones saw the link between classical Latin and Greek and ancient Sanskrit. It subsequently turned out that many modern Indian languages formed part of the same family as their counterparts in Europe, namely the Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavonic groups (see Appendix III, p. 1232).
At the time, no one had any idea how this family of’Indo-European’ languages could have found its way across Eurasia, though it came to be assumed that they must have been carried to the West by migrating peoples. In 1902, however, a German archaeologist. Gustav Kossinna. linked the Indn-F.urnneam with a
specific type of corded ware pottery, that was widely distributed in sites throughout northern Germany. Kossinna’s conclusions indicated that an ‘Indo-European homeland’ could have existed in the north European Iron Age. The idea was developed by the prominent Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957), whose synthesis,
The Dawn of European Civilisation
(1925), was one of the most influential books of its day. Most recently the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas has confirmed his placement of the Indo-European homeland on the steppelands of Ukraine by identifying it with the widespread Kurgan culture of barrow-burials in that area:
TOLLUND
T
OLLUND
is the name of a marsh near Aarhus in Denmark, where in 1950 the whole body of a prehistoric man was-discovered in a state of remarkable preservation. It is displayed in the Silkeborg Museum. The tan-nic acid of the peat had mummified him so perfectly that the delicate facial features were quite intact, as were the contents of his stomach. Except for a pointed leather cap and waistband, he was naked, and had been strangled with a braided leather rope, apparently the victim of ritual murder some two thousand years ago. His strange fate can evoke a haunting sense of compassion, even today:
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old, man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy, and home.
1
Yet Tollund Man is not alone. Similar discoveries were made thirty years later at Lindow Moss in Cheshire (England); and a particularly interesting corpse came to light in September 1991 in a glacial pocket near the Similaun Ridge of the Otztaler Alps in South Tirol. The body appeared to be that of a pre-Bronze Age hunter, fully dressed and equipped. He was 5 feet (152 cm) in height, 120 lb (54.4 kg), perhaps twenty years old, with blue eyes, a shaven face, and even a complete brain. He was very thoroughly clad in tanned leather tunic and leggings, a cap of chamois fur, birchbark gloves, and hay-lined, thick-soled boots. His skin was tattooed with blue tribal markings in four places, and he was wearing a necklace made from 20 sunray thongs and one stone bead. He was carrying an empty wooden-framed rucksack, a broken 32-inch (975 cm) bow, a quiver of 14 bone-tipped arrows, a stone-bladed axe tipped with pure copper, a short flint knife, and a body belt containing flints and tinder. He apparently froze to death whilst crossing the pass in a blizzard. Rigor mortis fixed his outstretched arm, still trying to shield his eyes. Dated to 2731 BC ± 125, he finally reached an unintended destination in the deep-freeze at Innsbruck University with some 5,000 years’ delay.
2
Prehistoric bodies are clearly a valuable source of scientific information. Recent advances in ‘prehistoric pathology’ have facilitated detailed analysis of the bodies’ tissues, diseases, bacteria, and diet. But no one can entirely forget the case of Piltdown Man, whose bones were unearthed at a quarry in Sussex in 1908. In the same year that Tollund Man was discovered, Piltdown Man was shown to be one of the great master forgeries.
