Page 83 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

along the coast of Portugal against the Atlantic rollers, crossing
the Bay of Biscay to Brittany, and sailing on to the north, to

the sheltered waters of the Irish Sea, to make landfall on the
Irish or the Welsh coasts. This voyage took them as far from Los
Millares as Los Millares is from Crete, and only the lure of the

red gold panned from the rivers of Ireland could have induced
the more venturesome of the ships’ captains to brave the perils

of the Atlantic and the whole lee shore of Europe. Yet some, it
would seem, went farther. Sailing through the Channel, or by

way of Scapa Flow, some ships from the Aegean would appear
to have reached Denmark across the North Sea, there ending a

total voyage of over four thousand miles. And these voyages, it
should be emphasized, were not isolated exploits of daredevil
captains. All the evidence tends to show that, seen from the time

which we now survey, ships from the Aegean had first begun to
call at the coasts of northern Europe and the British Isles at least

two hundred years ago, longer ago than, for us, the Boston Tea
Party.

The evidence for these voyages is slender and lends itself
to several explanations. Since it is important to the events of the

following thousand years, it is only reasonable to review it here
in some detail.

Along the whole course of the voyage here described, in
Malta and in Sicily and in Sardinia, on the west coast of Italy

and the south coast of France, along the south and west coasts of
Spain and Portugal, in Brittany, Wales, Ireland, and Denmark,
a remarkable type of burial monument is found, beginning at all

these points in the century or two or three prior to 2000 b.c.

This burial monument consists of large tomb chambers for com­
munal burial, approached by a passage, sometimes cut in the liv­
ing rock, sometimes built of dry stone walling with vaulted roofs,

sometimes of upright slabs of stone roofed with similar stone
slabs. Sometimes the monuments show combinations of all these

factors. The resemblance to the communal graves of Crete and
the Aegean is immediately obvious, and it is the greater the closer

t ese sites he to the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, mother-
go dess idols, and carved reliefs of the goddess, are found in