Page 187 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

fifty years before were still there—the fisher-farmers of Greece,

under direct Cretan influence; the farmer-prospectors of the
Balkans, pushing into the mountains from their bases in Asia
Minor, looking for and mining copper and tin; the widespread
slash-and-burn cultivators of the Danube valley and the great Eu­

ropean plain; the passage-grave builders of Denmark and south
Sweden. But without exception they appear now in the archae­
ological record as relying more than before on cattle-herding and
hunting, as being more warlike and less egalitarian, with a greater
gulf between the aristocracy and the commonalty. And every­

where the aristocrats bear the now typical armament of the
Indo-European speakers, long straight daggers (almost a stab­
bing sword in length), battle-axes, and spears. And everywhere
the horse appears, though rarely as yet in the north. We may

imagine Europe east of the Rhine as a large number of small
princedoms, often at war with each other, occasionally united
into a larger confederacy, their princes all speaking the same
language, which is gradually permeating down to their subjects.

Life for these subjects had probably not changed for the
better during these three hundred fifty years. They lived still in a
Stone Age, reaping their millet and barley with flint sickles, fell­
ing their timber and building their houses with flint axes and

spokeshaves, cutting their meat with flint knives. The knowledge
of copper, and even bronze, had spread during these centuries;
bronze was known in the Balkans, and copper as far as Austria
and Hungary. But it was reserved for the aristocrats, fashioned

into their daggers and spearheads and axes, their trinkets and
necklets and the long pins with which they held their gowns.
North of Austria it was only rarely that even the aristocracy saw

copper, and at this time the superb flintsmiths of Denmark be­
gin to copy the bronze daggers and spearheads of the south in
copper-colored flint, flaking the stone to the thinness of the metal
prototype, and even reproducing in flint the curved scimitars of

the Hyksos.
Typically enough, the only community in central Europe
which appears to have escaped the actual physical dominance
of Indo-European speakers is a truly “native” people, probably,

like the rest, of well-mixed origins, but mainly descended from