Page 98 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

extends his dominion in a series of campaigns extending as far as
the rising city of Ugarit near the borders of present-day Turkey.

In Crete the merchant princes are still adding to their new
palaces in these early years of the new century, and no news
comes to them of the events far to the northeast on the Russian

steppes. Their news comes by the sea routes, and only from the
farthest end of those routes do they hear vague reports of a new
people appearing. For it is in far-away Scandinavia that the

battle-ax nomads from Russia come into contact with the mis­
sionary traders from the Aegean.

In their outward wandering the nomadic herdsmen had over
a generation before come into contact with the farthest-east
settlements of the Danubian farmers of central Europe. Over the

swampy plains of the western Ukraine and Poland the villages of
the Danubians lay scattered, carved out of the forest and sur­
rounded by fields of millet and barley. Often the villages were

on the higher ground, on spurs rising above the damp plains
and affording protection on three sides. There the villagers lived
in wattle houses thickly plastered with clay, perhaps forty houses

grouped in a circle. The houses are divided into two or more
rooms, with raised clay floors and the clay beehive ovens in which

the women prepare the food. It is the women, too, who—as we
have seen—manufacture the surprisingly sophisticated pottery
with its painted fronds and spirals in red and white and black.

The men use tools and weapons of stone and flint, though near
the coasts of the Black Sea traders from Troy and the Aegean
have introduced copper axes and pins and jewelry, and even a

little gold.
Between the villages of the agriculturalists the cattle herders
appear to have passed without let or hindrance. In fact, it is a

noteworthy feature of the movement of the battle-ax people
that nowhere is it accompanied by evidence of battle, murder, or

sudden death. The explanation is probably to be found in the
intrinsically small numbers of the farmers, and in the fact that
the herdsmen found the best grazing for their cattle and horses

on the lighter-wooded grasslands, while the farmers preferred the
heavier enriched loam of the forests. The two peoples were not