Page 136 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

THE LAWGIVER

1790-1720 B.C.

I t is 1790 b.c. The Second Millennium b.c. has already

lasted longer than the independent existence of the United
States. Much has changed in these two centuries, and many

changes are in progress now. We have seen the first appearance
in Europe of the Indo-European-speaking charioteers from south

Russia., and their gradual assimilation by the farmers already
settled there—with some drift of refugee families, mainly of the

“native” fishing and hunting stocks, towards the west. And we
have seen the beaker people from Spain and Africa pushing

deep, in small organized groups, into central and northern Eu­
rope, establishing as they go the beginnings of a regular trade in

bronze among the Stone-Age peoples whom they meet.
Movements of peoples, conquests and assimilations, spread­

ings of ideas and state religions, trade and manufacture and
war was the pattern of the background against which the
European of 1800 b.c. lived out his intensely personal life. In

the Middle East the same pattern regulated the run of men’s

lives (as indeed it regulates our own), and a warning is in
place. In Europe we can only talk in general terms, of peoples
with names we have ourselves given them (beaker folk and

battle-ax people and the Windmill Hill culture and the users of

Peterborough ware) and of events of a so indefinite date that it is
only with reservations that we can even ascribe them definitely
to one lifetime rather than another. In the east, on the other

hand, we know what people called themselves, we have the

names of individuals and nations and cities, accurate compara-