Page 445 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Ltie i rojan war; the Etruscans had a calendar going back to

935 b.c., and Vergil’s story of the coming of Aeneas to Italy after
the sack of Troy is a reflection of an old Etruscan legend. It has
been one of the favorite pursuits of archaeologists to seek to
identify the recorded peoples of Europe with particular "cultural

complexes,” types of artifacts, layouts of settlements, methods of
burial and of ornament, and then to trace these cultural com­

plexes back in time, justifiably assuming that the name asso­
ciated with the complex in the historical period would be the
name of the people as far back as the complex remains basically

unchanged.
This chapter is fiction based on these archaeological facts.

The later so widespread culture called Keltoi by the Greeks and
Galli by the Romans does appear in fact to have originated among
the farmers of the upper Danube at just about this period, and

there is direct evidence that one of the factors in the rise of the
Celts was an influx of a very small number of horsemen from
the south Russian steppes. Since the Scythians are recorded as

having, not much later, driven the Cimmerians from this area, it
is reasonable to believe that these horsemen were Cimmerians.
Certainly at this time cremation burial, long practiced among the

farmers of the Danube valley, spreads to the herdsmen of the
lands north of the Alps, and later, in the form of huge urn­
fields, to much of central Europe. And this urnfield culture is

believed to be the stuff out of which the Celtic empire of First
Millennium Europe arose. For an elaboration of this argument,
one should go to T. G. E. Powell’s The Celts.

The origin of the Etruscans is much discussed. But they said
themselves that they came from Asia Minor, and their civilization
shows sufficient traces of Near Eastern traits to make this claim

likely. It would appear from the archaeological record that they
were already in Italy by 1000 b.c., and it is not unlikely that the
appearance of the Teresh among the People of the Sea who at­

tacked Egypt in the twelfth century b.c. marks their first settle­
ment in Italy. This, however, may have followed later.
Iron was in fact first worked on a large scale in the Hallstatt

area about 700 b.c., but copper and bronze had been worked
there in quantity for centuries before that. And since some iron