Page 99 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

in life-and-death competition with each other, and there was
land enough for all.
We should not, of course, envisage the farmers as welcoming
the cattlemen. Clashes there must have been, and very con­

siderable suspicion of motives, and resentment, and downright
fear. But there could have been serious warfare between the
settled population and the incomers; had there been that, we
should have found traces of it in burnt villages and split skulls.

In any case, neither side was equipped for serious warfare. The
villages of the Danubians lay on the high ground, on ridges and

spurs, or on peninsulas running out into the lakes. They could
be easily fortified with stockade and ditch, and many were al­
ready so fortified. Around such a stockade the chariot warriors

with their bows and tomahawks would circle in vain, their mobil­
ity and light weapons even more useless than those of the Indians
against the forts of the North American colonists in the far

future. On the other hand, if the farmers left their palisades to
take the offensive, they would be at the mercy of the swift
chariotry of the herdsmen.

It was, nevertheless, with no great force of chariots that the
nomads pressed westward. It has even been doubted whether the

first groups to reach the west possessed horses at all. But it is
difficult to argue from negative evidence. As is to be expected
with nomads, remains of their sites of settlement are exceedingly

rare, and it is there that one would expect to find evidence of the
horse. The graves of the battle-ax people are legion, but horses

were too valuable to be buried with their masters. We know that
the domestic horse was unknown before the coming of this peo­
ple and was well known some generations after their arrival. It

seems necessary and reasonable to postulate the horse in order
to account for the rapid spread of the herdsmen through the
lands of the settled farmers.

But the herders did not pass in the night. Though their
movement appears fast viewed from our pinnacle of four thou­
sand years in the future, they were not driven on by any con­

sciousness of historic destiny, or by a compulsive urge to reach
the utmost west. Where they found grazing they stayed, perhaps