Page 335 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

282 The Argosies

must have been in these centuries that the language of the
herdsmen from the east came to be the languages of Europe. Just
as Anglo-Saxon and Norman French fought for dominance in
England in the centuries after the Conquest, so the Indo-
European language brought by the battle-ax invaders six hundred
years ago had been fighting the original languages of Europe. But
by now Indo-European was clearly winning out (every language
in Europe is now Indo-European or else known to have been in­
troduced later, save only Basque).
With its new language, new social stratification, new semi-
nomadic economy, new tools and weapons of metal, Europe had
suffered a revolution in the last third of a millennium. But a third
of a millennium is a long time, eleven overlapping generations of
birth, growing-up, marriage, and new births, and it is unlikely
that the revolution was ever even as much as a consciousness of
change to the people to whom it happened. Things they would
notice, though, were the fluctuations of trade and the growth of
manufacturing and marketing.
Traders and prospectors, of course, had been known for gen­
erations, as long as tradition went back, since long before the
millennium opened. But never had trade been organized as it was
now. Since the Achaeans of Greece had sacked great Knossos a
hundred years ago—and Europe still reverberated to its fall—the
lords of Mycenae and of the lesser Greek cities had taken over
and expanded the organized supplying of primary products from
the hinterland of Europe to the markets of the Near East. And
with the ending of the long wars in the Levant and the re­
covery of Egypt, the eastern markets seemed insatiable.
Many luxury goods were shipped and portaged along the
coasts and the great riverways of Europe, furs and amber and
gold and silver and semiprecious stones. But trade ran largely on
staples such as hides and salt and metal, copper and above all
tin. The metal trade was now well organized at the source. Pros­
pectors had hundreds of years ago located the ore-bearing re­
gions and trained the local populace in their exploitation. Gold
was panned on a commercial scale in Ireland and in Spain; on
the northern slopes of the Alps in Austria and in southern Eng­
land open-cast mining for copper and tin had long ago exhausted