Page 39 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

tUFOUS yotinis WUUIU SUllieUllieb SCI uin tu xuiiavv
tion routes, spending years wandering from tribe to tribe among
their distant blood-brothers, and, if they returned, they would

bring back family news, and perhaps a wife, and perhaps an ax
or a spiral bracelet of copper as visible proof of the wealth and
sophistication of the fabulous southern lands. They were envied

and admired, these bearers of copper, for metal ornaments and
implements were hard to obtain. Some flat copper axes, it is
true, were brought in across the western sea by infrequent ships,

the ships which brought the architects of the passage-graves and
the expounders of the religion which demanded them. But only

the wealth of a lifetime could purchase such an ax, and if a young
man aspired to that symbol of wealth and culture he must go
out himself and earn it.

Others must make do with implements of flint. And the flint­
smith had little to fear from the competition of metal. On the

contrary, he prided himself on producing, from the red-brown
native flint, axes and spears, and even halberds, which from a
distance of a few paces could hardly be distinguished from those

of copper.
In contrast to the rich and variegated urban life of the old

farming lands of the Middle East, with their specialized metal­
workers and carpenters, jewelers and shopkeepers, scribes and
auditors and millers and weavers, these homesteaders of the

new lands had only one specialist, the flintsmith. Apart, of
course, from the half-alien priests. Beyond that, all the work of

the settlement was done in common, with only the century-old
division of labor between the sexes. The women undertook the
sickle harvesting and the grinding of the grain in the troughlike

stone querns, the baking and the weaving and the making of pots.
The men tended the cattle, and milked and hunted and car­

pentered, and perhaps sowed the grain. And it was they who
felled timber and chopped the underbrush, though in the actual
burning-off of the new sowing areas all the population took part,

except the youngest children, who were set to watching the pigs
rooting in the forest a safe distance from the fires.

This was the pattern of their lives, and they were not to
know that change was upon them. They had, it would seem,