Page 332 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

we to regard garden ^on;f -

SdFor Peri isa’asWfar away from Mexico as the Niger coast

iSfrTnX are we to make of the Mexican. pottery^ Are we

entitled to assume that the Mexicans invented both farm, g
notterymaking, not knowing that the same two inventions had
been made (with an interval of two thousand years between

them) millennia before in another part of the wor w lc i > y
did not know existed? Or are we entitled to assume that—some-

how—the news of how one fanned and how one made pottery
reached the Mexicans around this period from some other part of
the world where both arts were practiced (and the nearest part
was the coast of Portugal some five thousand miles away) ? Both

hypotheses are so unlikely that either would be automatically
rejected were it not that that would mean automatically accept­

ing the other!
Fortunately, we are not compelled, in these wide-view chap­
ters where we rise above the problems of individual lifetimes, to

take a stand on questions of this nature. This is not a history,
nor even an attempt at a history, but rather an experiment to
see to what degree it is possible to write a history, in the present

state of knowledge, of the Second Millennium b.c. And we are not
obliged to pretend that problems have been resolved which are
still sub judice. In fact this problem is not even sub judice- it is at

a stage where, to continue the metaphor, there is not sufficient
evidence to bring the case to trial. But there will be, and some
’±7 have t0 be Siven- And *at d™
poZce en“ are t0 be °f decisive J

Mid^lLriXTe^X^n:0^8 °f “PP- and bronze in

pushed further and ffinhei bal be-
search into the earliest civilizations of M ar^baeologicaI re-
Nicaragua has extended in scope If it^’m’ Guatemala> and

working of copper in fact commenced n th J tbat tbe

e case for contact across the Atla r- e Second Millennium,
greatly strengthened. n 1C at this period would be