Page 437 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

now that the Thracians and the other nations from Russia had oc­

cupied the Transylvanian mining districts, the Danubians were
glad enough to come to Hallstatt. And they expected the Hall-
statt foundries, if you please, to produce Hungarian specialities

for them, broadswords instead of rapiers, and caldrons, and
jingle-jangle ornaments. It was just like them now to send this

foreign trooper from the Caucasus, expecting Hallstatt to stand in
for the ironworks of Asia Minor as well, and to produce Assyrian-
type weapons of iron for his armies.
Though the Celts were newcomers to the mountain uplands,

and the name they gave themselves was new, they were not
strangers. For centuries their ancestors had been farming the rich

cornlands of the Hungarian plain, growing most of the barley
without which the cattle and sheep ranchers of the uplands would
have had neither cakes nor ale. For this reason, and also for a
certain grim courage in defending themselves and their home­

steads, and for their broad-bladed swords, which—though they
were not horsemen—they could wield so devastatingly against

mounted men, they had been tolerated in spite of their odd
customs. And their customs were very odd indeed. They did not
bury their dead under a mound, as other Europeans had done for

a thousand years, but burned them and put their bones in a pot,
and the pot they placed in a simple hole in the ground. And their
gods were not the gods of the open spaces and the open heavens,

the sun-god and the wind-gods and the god of thunder; they were
not even, as one might have expected, farmer deities, corn spirits
and fertility goddesses. No, these Celts worshipped older gods

(somehow, one knew that they were older), gods of the forest
and the hunt, gods with deer antlers or with three faces, gods who

lived in oak trees and in the mistletoe, gods that were worshipped
by moonlight.
For over a hundred years now nation after nation of the
steppe people had been pressing in from the east, and the fanners

of the plains of the middle Danube had stood full athwart their
path. They had had much use for their broadswords, and for

their courage, in that hundred years, and many a horde from the
east had turned away to seek easier lands to the south. Three
generations had stood to arms, while Phrygians and Moschians,