Page 336 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Wide View (II) 283
the surface outcroppings, and the lodes were being followed ever
deeper. The metal was smelted at the source and traveled south
in ingots or was fashioned into heavy necklets, convenient to
carry and easily refashioned at the end of the route. The metal­
producing peoples had grown wealthy on this export trade. And
as a subsidiary which was rapidly outstripping in importance
the primary production, they had gone into the manufacturing
line, producing tools and ornaments and weapons of bronze
which were bartered to the surrounding peoples in exchange for
other wares. Even the ingots were not now all sent southwards.
For the rich amber lands of the Baltic were great buyers of raw
metal, and had their own schools of itinerant smiths producing
distinctive wares of high quality, which in turn were bartered to
the lands beyond.
Caravans of traders, families of wandering smiths and tink­
ers, coastwise trading vessels and river barges, and convoys of
ships on the long hauls were moving in all directions over the
lands and seas of Europe, supplied by the mining and smelting
villages whose ever-smoking furnaces stained the sky.
But this incipient industrialism was still a fragile thing. The
local European market was limited, for the bulk of the popula­
tion, herding its cattle and reaping its barley, was too poor to
purchase bronze, and there was a limit to the quantity of metal
that the ruling classes could absorb. The metal industry de­
pended still on the main market, the wealthy nations of the
civilized Near East. And in central Europe the incoming wealth
had already occasioned an increase in population that was be­
ginning to press heavily on the available land.
But while Europe and the Near East, with much of Africa
and of central Asia, were in these middle centuries of the Second
Millennium knit together as never before into a commercial and
manufacturing unity, farther east a “bronze curtain” had de­
scended. The charioteers of the Russian steppes, whose western
cousins had played and were still playing a dominant role from
Europe to the valley of the Euphrates, had wiped out the civiliza­
tion of Meluhha, with its cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa.
Throughout the Indus valley and into the valley of the Ganges
the Aryan invaders roamed with their cattle and horses, settling