Page 439 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

bronze, jewelry of faience and topaz and ivory, fine weapons and

fine tools, woven linen and damask, skins of wine and of olive oil,
drugs and dyes and incense. And with the traders had traveled all
manner of men, smiths and tinkers, acrobats and priests, wheel­

wrights and prospectors and physicians. There had always been
life on the road in the old days.
Now few used the Amber Road. Since the Dorians had taken

Greece, no ships came up the Adriatic from Mycenae and Crete
and Pylos. Only an occasional coastal vessel brought to the mouth
of the Po a scanty cargo, bought on speculation from the Phoeni­

cian ships that called in farther south. And the merchants of the
estuary towns put aside their plowshares and organized a hasty
and expensively escorted pack train to defy the brigands of the

Alpine passes and bring the goods through to the Danube mar­
kets, where they were sold at exorbitant prices.
The Master of the Horse was interested in the Amber Road.

It ran only some eighty miles west of HaHstatt, and in the ten
years since his abortive attempt to process iron at the bronze
foundries there, the Celtic dominions had been extending west­

ward along the northern foothills of the Alps almost as far as the
valley of the Inn.
They had been ten years of almost ceaseless fighting. As he

had forecast long ago, any attempt to form a strong kingdom
along the upper valley of the Danube depended upon the support

or subjection of the Alpine hillmen who dominated the valley,
and the hillmen had resisted subjection stubbornly. Their vil­
lages, stockaded or when possible built on a wooden platform
supported by piles in the marshes of the shores of lakes, were

difficult to attack. And when they were eventually taken and
burnt, the inhabitants preferred to move rather than submit. The

western expansion of the Celts seemed, in fact, merely part of an
unending chain reaction, uprooting the peoples they met, who in
turn wandered westward to uproot others. Report had it that as

far as the Rhine valley and the plains of France people were
pressing on people just as in the youth of the Master of the Horse
the Scythians had pressed on the Cimmerians on the far-off Rus­

sian steppes.
It was a pity that the Alpine peoples should migrate, iney