Page 44 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

26 Bronze and Stone

sions. And since the prospectors from Asia Minor discovered the
copper lodes in their mountains, they have begun themselves to
make axes and adzes of the metal. In their rectangular frame
houses the housewives display proudly on wooden shelves pot­
tery which is burnished and painted in spirals and meanders of
white, yellow, and red, home-produced but quite as decorative
as anything that can be imported from Asia Minor. And they
talk with cultured sympathy of the primitive way of life far­
ther north and west where pottery is undecorated, or at best dec­
orated with chalk rubbed into grooved patterns to imitate their
own sophisticated ware. And their menfolk wear signet stamps
hanging from a cord around their necks. They understand the
importance, now that communications with Asia Minor are be­
coming more regular, of being able to set their seal on their wares,
and there has even been talk in the town council of sending
young men south to learn to read and write.
Yes, things are stirring in Europe. The winds of change are
blowing from the southeast, and the fanners of Europe are alive
to the opportunities of the new age. The civilized lands have mar­
velous devices for sale, if only one had the wealth to buy them.
And, who knows, if one could strike copper or tin on one’s ter­
ritories, or find some other marketable commodity, it might be
possible at that. . . .

The farmers of Europe did not look beyond the civilized
lands to the south and east. In that direction lay wealth and cul­
ture; in the other direction lay the cold benighted lands where,
if one went far enough, even cultivation ceased. That there could
be other lands, on the other side of the civilized world, never
even occurred to them. (And we can hardly reproach them, for
until very recently we too have paid little attention to the pre­
history of regions other than those of the ancient civilizations and
of Europe. Even now we know all too little of the state of the
rest of the world at this arbitrarily chosen date of 2000 b.c. )
South of the Sahara there stretches, at this date, a broad belt
of tropical grassland, from the fringes of the Guinea coast of Af-
frica in the west, across the upper valley of the Niger to the
Sudan, the upper Nile, and the mountains of Abyssinia in the