Page 459 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

396 Bronze and Iron

in the isolated Indus valley do they destroy a civilization
without themselves being infected by its virus. There they retain
their herding life, nomadic or settled in villages until, at the end
of the millennium, the cult of city life is again introduced from
the west.
The invasion of Indo-European speakers into Europe and
Hither Asia does not even disrupt the steady growth of trade. On
the contrary, they provide a new market, and their nomad tradi­
tions, like those of the Semitic speakers earlier, encourage the
free movement of goods. Where they meet the sea and seafaring
peoples, they take to the sea themselves, and seafaring and sea­
trade flourish as never before (oddly enough, especially in the
areas where both Semitic-speaking and Indo-European-speaking
strains have mingled with the original inhabitants).
But the Indo-European speakers and the Semitic speakers
keep on coming, not in a continuous stream but in waves. And
there is a limit to the amount of armed incursion that a settled
culture, “industrial” or farming, can take without breaking.
This limit is reached about 1200 b.c. The edges of the
civilized area crumble, with the fall of Troy and Mycenae and
the Hittite homelands. The shock waves reach even to Egypt and
to England. Trade is interrupted, retrenchment and local self-
sufficiency are perforce introduced. Local warfare becomes en­
demic, and nations war for survival and supremacy rather than
for wealth. The spread of the knowledge of ironworking helps,
though it does not cause, all these processes.
It was to happen again at the collapse of the Roman Empire,
and then, as now, it was followed by a Dark Age, though then,
as now, seeds of the renaissance began to sprout even in the midst
of the collapse.
That is the story of the millennium in terms of trends and
movements. But we should not forget that the story is in fact not
one of trends. It is a story of people, of lifetimes, of births and
deaths and sorrows and happinesses. The trends are merely
superimposed upon these, and no one alive in this thousand
years, lacking the knowledge of his own past and his own future
which we now have, could have recognized the trends while
they were operating.