Page 40 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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a headman to each village, and village and village were united
in a loose confederacy of family relationships. But there were no
autocratic lords, and no palaces or manors. Slavery was accepted
as a natural institution, but slaves were few, because wars were

few. Whether the herds and the crops were held in common we
do not know, but it seems certain that they were tended in

common, and class distinctions are practically unknown. There
were, of course, the natives, the fishers of the foreshores and the
hunters of the less thickly wooded hinterland. But there the bar­

riers were down, had been down for generations. There had never
been any noticeable racial difference between the settlers and

the old hunters and fishers who had dwelt in the land before ag­
riculture came. Now there was none, and few in the village
could not claim a portion of native blood. And while fishing and

hunting were still profitable occupations, the coastal villages on
their millennia-old shell heaps had adopted as much as they
wanted of agriculture and cattle herding, and were often practi­

cally indistinguishable from the colonist homesteads. Though,
as their fishing grounds held them to a fixed village site, their
agriculture gave poor returns and was never more than a sub­

sidiary occupation.
The farmers had a knowledge of the outside world greater,

perhaps, than we reckon, with. There were many travelers, and
they were not averse to earning the hospitality with which they
were met by giving the news of the places where they had been.

Seated under the great tree at the end of the wide village street
late into the white nights of midsummer, or grouped around

a hut fire in the autumn, the bearded villagers in their home-
spun cloaks would listen sagely to the latest traveler, and later
compare at length his news with those of other travelers or

with their own recollections of the journeys of their youth. And
the women would listen as they replenished the home-brew, or
prepared the evening meal, their heavy amber necklaces glinting

tawny in the firelight. They knew, vaguely, of the rich lands of
Egypt and Mesopotamia, as a Persian farmer of today knows of

New York, with little idea of direction but some idea of distance,
and they knew that it was too long a journey to be worth making.