Page 85 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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bility of making a profit several times over which could make a
voyage of this length, to parts of the world still poor in this
world’s goods, commercially feasible at all. And thus we would
expect to find, at the end of the voyage in Denmark, not copper

daggers or silver chalices of Cretan origin, but the products of the
last port of call, the flat-cast copper halberds and axes and the

golden lunulae of Ireland. And this is in fact what we find.
But the ships and crews which beached at the coastal vil­
lages of Ireland and Wales and Denmark would be nonetheless

Cretan. And it would be they who preached their religion of
mother-goddess worship and of communal burial places—even
though the gradually changing style of burial chamber, from

vaulted dry-stone structure in the south to megalithic slab con­
struction in the north, would suggest that the local representa­

tive of the Cretan traders, the factor left behind to collect pro­
duce for the next ship to call (and in his spare time to organize
the new religion), was not himself a Cretan but rather an ex­

apprentice, a native from one of the nearer countries.
The sea routes of the world, then, are well established at the

opening of the Second Millennium before our era. They are per­
haps not so old that their beginnings cannot be remembered
(though every new discovery tends to make them older and

wider). The Mesopotamian trade to the east and the Egyptian
trade to the south would seem, by present showing, to be some

five hundred years old at this time, about as far in the past as the
discovery of America and the beginnings of trans-Atlantic trade

for us. And the Cretan trade to the west and north is not more
than two or three hundred years old, corresponding in our his­
tory to the discovery of Australia. Such old-established trade in­

evitably means a closely knit world. It would not be impossible
for an Indian to reach Scandinavia and return within a space of

two or three years. How far he could travel in the other direction
only future research along the coasts of the Far East can tell us.

We have ended our survey of the world of 2000 b.c., a world
as rich in contrasts as at any period in history. We have seen the
settled civilizations of the great river valleys, the Nile, the Eu-