Page 94 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

uie giazing range or ms nation may lie. Although archaeologists
have succeeded in dividing the material remains of the battle-ax
peoples into some seven different “cultures,” the overriding simi­

larities are vastly greater than the small divergencies of pottery
types or burial customs on which the division is based. In any
case, the divergencies increase as time goes on and as the sepa­

rate “hordes” of the battle-ax people become gradually isolated
from the main stem and differently influenced by the different
peoples whom they meet and with whom they mix during their

migration. The year 2000 b.c. is early in the migratory period, and
homogeneity has not yet been lost.

It is not without reason that the nomads are known today as
the battle-ax people. The battle-ax is their characteristic weapon.
Every male throughout their range possesses one. He receives it
at puberty, after a ceremony of initiation into the ranks of the

warriors, a ceremony probably quite as elaborate and barbaric as
those we know of among the Plains Indians. This tomahawk is

his personal property, clearly possessed of a symbolic, and per­
haps religious, significance far outweighing its practical utility,
and on his death it is buried with him, laid immediately before

his eyes.
The battle-axes are themselves works of art. The closer their

owners live to their original homeland north of the Caucasus, the
more likely they are to be of metal, heavily cast in solid copper
with a shaft hole and a narrow drooping blade. It would seem

that they were made by the metalsmiths south of the mountains,
modeled on the work axes and adzes of Mesopotamia to the
south, and traded north to the nomads in exchange for cattle and

hides, and perhaps for the first horses to cross the Caucasus.
Farther north copper cannot be bought, and the axes are
made of stone. They are of the same pattern, slim shaft-hole

tomahawks with trim lines, and are clearly made not merely to
resemble but to counterfeit the axes of metal. The casting seams

of the metal ax, the ridges of metal left by an imperfect fit of the
two halves of the mould, are often reproduced in the stone,
while frequently the type of stone chosen, reddish or green in

color, seems a deliberate attempt to produce a passable imita­
tion of copper. In other cases ornamental stone such as porphyry