Page 256 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

B.C.J
land of stone-using cultivators scratching the soil for a bare liveli­
hood, with no surplus to spare to buy the goods that the civilized
world was so eager to sell. Now it was an intricate jigsaw of in­
dependent and semi-independent kingdoms, with rich princes
and a growing middle class of traders and craftsmen. In the val­

ley of the Salzach and in Transylvania copper and tin were be­
ing mined and alloyed into bronze; and the bronze crafts of cen­
tral Europe were competing successfully in the north with the
products of England and Spain.
Down all the valleys of the Alps came regular caravans,

bringing trade goods on the long portage from the headwaters of
the Elbe. The villagers of the independent cantons of the Swiss
and Italian Alps, though they had little natural wealth of their
own, were growing rich on this carrying trade, even as the Scan­

dinavians were growing rich on the sea hauls. There was not a
little resemblance in custom between the Alpine peoples with
their pile-built villages beside their lakes, and the Swedes in
their sod villages beside the fjords. And the Swedish captains
could tell of high valleys in the Alps, such as Vai Camonica,
where the laden caravans passed rocks covered with carvings in

quite as rich a profusion as those of their Scandinavian home­
land.
By land and sea Europe was being bound into a single econ­
omy by the merchantmen putting out from the coastal towns of

Scandinavia and England and Ireland and Brittany and Spain,
by the deeply laden river boats moving slowly along the great
navigable inland waterways, and by the slowly plodding ox
teams connecting the water routes. In the Mediterranean there

were Cretan emporia on most of the islands and along the coasts
from Spain to the Black Sea.
Immediately to the north of Crete, in the islands and inlets
of Greece and of the west coast of Asia Minor, many Cretan mer­

chant houses had branches and representatives at the courts of
the numerous independent princes. The Swedish seamen had of­
ten sailed in the Aegean waters, which reminded them in many
ways of their own native fjords. They felt a kinship, too, with the
Achaean princes of Greece and Asia Minor, whose way of life

and traditions and religion and even language still bore out the