The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

Before 200 B.C.

	Introduction
	Out of the Ice
	From Cave to Village
	The Megalith Builders
	The Minoans
	The Bronze Age and the Indo-European Migration
	The Mycenaeans
	The Phoenician Pioneers
	The Villanovan Culture
	The Celts
	Pre-Roman Britain
	The Legends of the Emerald Isle
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At the beginning of history, Europe was a frigid territory on the northwestern edge of the Eurasian landmass, looking more like present-day Siberia than a major center of human activity. As the ice and steppes gave way to forests and fields, the continent's climate became one of the mildest around, with few of the extremes of heat and cold that occur in Africa and Asia. It also helped that there are no deserts, except along the shore of the Caspian Sea. Warm waters to the south (the Mediterranean) and the west (the north Atlantic) are a major factor in moderating the winters; compare northern Europe with Canada, which is at the same latitude but far less habitable.

Civilization as we know it began in the area where the three continents of the Old World meet; to a Babylonian, Hittite or Egyptian, Europe was not a center of culture, but a wild western frontier. It wasn't too different for the next four thousand years. The citizens of the Roman Empire thought they lived in the heart of the civilized world, but the truth was that the larger Chinese Empire counterbalanced it on the other side of Eurasia, with the secondary states of Parthia and Kushan filling in the middle. In the Middle Ages Europe was woefully behind other continents; even Black African kingdoms like Ghana and Mali were stronger and richer at this point. However, non-European civilizations did not peek too closely at the sky, or delve too deeply into the ground, lest they offend the spirits they believed were in every natural object around them; the result was that they progressed to a point, and then stopped. The Europeans, by contrast, were insatiably curious about everything, so when they invented new instruments like the telescope and the microscope, to gather knowledge for its own sake, Asia lost its lead in science. Finally in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A.D., Europe gained enough power and technology to pull ahead of everybody, transforming itself into the most important continent.

The last five hundred years saw European explorers, traders, missionaries and armies conquer the rest of the world. European settlers moved into uncivilized areas, becoming the new Americans, Australians, South Africans, etc. Non-European civilizations found that modernization was the only alternative to total domination, and many of them (i.e., the Japanese) accepted a heavy dose of Western culture when they accepted the latest Western gadgets. Eventually local nationalist movements succeeded in shattering Europe's colonial empires, but no nation of the Third World has completely purged itself of the institutions brought in while the Europeans were in charge.

Most history books divide European history into three major phases or eras: classical, medieval and modern. The pervasiveness of Western civilization shows when historians refer to these time periods by habit, even if they are talking about non-Western history. The reader will find this work roughly divided the same way: Chapter 1 for prehistoric Europe, Chapters 2-5 for the classical era, Chapters 6-9 for medieval times, and Chapters 10-15 for modern Europe. In most cases various cultural elements are used to define each era, like how much Greek art is in circulation, and whether feudalism is in force. In addition, the author has found that looking for what Western civilization emphasized in each time period works quite well. The classical world of Greece and Rome produced beautiful masterpieces, and literature that is still widely read in today's colleges, but the ancients were not interested in machinery; they did not see a need for labor-saving devices because they had enough animals and slaves to provide whatever muscle power they needed. The medieval world was just the opposite; it gave us tedious literature, and crude, two-dimensional paintings, but medieval man invented machines to make his life easier; Chapters 7, 8 and 9 end with discussions on the effect of those inventions. With the Renaissance we see the emergence of a culture that was willing to dabble in both great art and improved tools, and that may help to explain why Western civilization did so well against older, more impressive rivals.

Another factor that eventually worked in Europe's favor was the idea of limited government. In fact, most of the political systems we use today, like republicanism, democracy and communism, are of European origin. Oh sure, Europe had its share of absolute monarchies (there are several in Chapter 11), but the monarchs were never god-kings in the sense that the Egyptian pharaohs were. A king claiming "divine right" could call himself God's chief agent on earth, but anyone who claimed to be God incarnate set up an institution that did not last very long. No European tribe or nation allowed its kings to run everything by themselves; the primitive ones gave the king a council of advisors, while the advanced ones produced a legislative body. Often these organizations were not allowed to do anything important, but their constant presence suggests that deep down, even the most oppressive dictator felt the need to court the people's will, if only to make his own rule look legitimate. The political experiments of classical Athens, the Roman Republic, and nineteenth-century England revealed that people work best if the state does not coerce them; when the power of the man on top loosened, society became correspondingly more efficient, producing more wealth, more art/literature, and more scientific research.

Another effect of limited government was stability in the long run, if not the short run. Though European history is full of petty wars, the nations it produced were more enduring than those of the non-Western world. Of the 43 nations that make up present-day Europe, twenty of them already existed five hundred years ago, in recognizable form. Compare this to Asia, where despotism was the norm and there were fewer political entities that we can associate with today's nation-states; most Eastern nations rose and fell with the governments that ruled them.

European history is extensively recorded, more so than that of any other continent. Because of that, I don't consider this work completed; in fact, I added a section to Chapter 9 while I was composing this introduction. I will probably continue editing these history papers for as long as I can handle a keyboard and a mouse, so if you don't see a topic you'd like to know more about, come back later and you may see it then. In the meantime, happy reading!

Out of the Ice

The first men who entered this setting were stone age hunters who lived by chasing the great Ice Age animals: mammoths, wooly rhinos, cave bears, bison and reindeer. Bones, tools and burial mounds from these "cavemen" have been found over the last century and a half to show what kind of lifestyle they followed.⁽²⁾ Most impressive are the cave paintings found in France and Spain. We already know from the styles of burial practiced that they believed in life after death, and the paintings likewise appear to have been used in some form of ritual magic; the artist believed that if he painted a certain animal realistically enough, he would gain control over it. The paintings were not put in a place for all to see, like we do in an art gallery; on the contrary, they were put in the deepest passages of the cave they could find, often high on ledges that must have been extremely difficult to reach.⁽³⁾ This suggests that the paintings were not meant to be seen in everyday life, but kept in places where they would only be viewed by people who deliberately came to see them, like those taking part in some mystical ceremony. Animals were the main subject of the prehistoric artist, but occasionally he also drew stick figures with bows and arrows, so we know that they had this weapon at an early date. Various stone phalluses and statues of naked women (called "Venuses") have also been found, suggesting either stone-age pornography or a fertility-oriented religion.⁽⁴⁾

From Cave to Village

Despite the name we give it, the Neolithic revolution was not a sudden event. Europeans practiced a mixture of hunting, gathering and farming until the beginning of the classical era, when their cities grew so large that only agriculture could feed everyone. The first farmers also left evidence that they knew how to make fermented drinks, leading us to wonder whether the most important product of their grain was bread or beer.

We now believe that the lifestyle of the caveman was healthier. The farmer or city-dweller did not have as much variety in his diet as the nomad did, and his crops were vulnerable to disease and drought; unlike the hunter-gatherer, he couldn't simply move somewhere else to escape the consequences of a bad harvest. Worse, the crops he chose for staples did not have all the nutrients essential for a healthy life; because he ate the same foods all year round, he became susceptible to deficiency-caused diseases like rickets and scurvy. And because his diet was higher in carbs and lower in protein than that of the hunter, he was more likely to become overweight, with all the health problems that caused, if he had a successful harvest. Moreover, close contact with livestock allowed the transfer of viruses like measles, smallpox and influenza. Finally, overcrowding and poor sanitation in the cities encouraged still more diseases, and attracted vermin like rats and cockroaches. Studies of the bones in prehistoric cemeteries around the world show first an increase, then a decline in the average person's height and lifespan, once intensive agriculture and animal husbandry become firmly established. Prehistoric skeletons from Greece and Turkey show a generous average height--5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for women. But after they switched to agriculture, their height dropped to as low as 5’ 3" for men, and 5’ for women; even today's Greeks and Turks have not regained the stature of their oldest ancestors. As for life expectancy, it finally bottomed out between 34 and 38, where it remained for most of the Bronze and Iron ages; in those days many people must have felt lucky if they lived to see their children grow up. One could argue that the Mesolithic European was better off than many citizens of today's Third World, or even better off than the "urban poor" of our more advanced nations.⁽⁶⁾

People who live by hunting and gathering need an awful lot of land to seek their game in; in temperate/tropical climates such a lifestyle requires ten square miles per person, and in the tundra of Ice Age Europe, it could only have been worse. Consequently Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon Man must have been spread very thin, and the number of artifacts found suggests that there were never more than a few thousand cave men. The warming that accompanied the glacial retreat allowed groups larger than a single family; the introduction of agriculture meant these villages could stay put all year round. It also became possible to try different ways of living; the most interesting structures we have from this time are the ruins of several houses that were built over lakes in Switzerland. Some of the nearby houses on dry land were also on stilts; we don't know if this was protection against flash floods, wild beasts on the prowl, or marauders from other tribes.⁽⁷⁾

At some point in the fourth millennium B.C., the plow, the wheel and the use of soft metals (gold and copper) appeared.⁽⁸⁾ We used to think of these as imports from Egypt and/or Iraq, but because we haven't found any of them in the Middle East before 3000 B.C., it now appears that ancient Europeans learned how to make them on their own. The oldest known wooden wheel turned up in Switzerland's Lake Zurich, while the earliest metallurgists made gold jewelry and copper tools near the Danube River, in places like Varna, Bulgaria and Lepenski Vir, Yugoslavia.

Because we have no written records from this far back, any attempt to write a prehistoric "history" is largely guesswork. On such scanty evidence as two styles of pottery, it looks like the pioneer farmers formed two cultures when they left the Balkans. One style, called Cardial-ware pottery, had shell impressions in it; we find it along the shores of the Mediterranean. The other style, called Linear, had zigzag or curved incisions and appears to the north, from Hungary to France and from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. Villages where Linear pottery turns up also feature wattle-and-daub huts and wooden longhouses, architectural designs that would be found in northern European communities as late as the Middle Ages. The people in the westernmost Linear pottery villages protected themselves with wooden stockades, suggesting that they had unfriendly neighbors (Cro-Magnon hunters who refused to give up the nomadic life?).

The Megalith Builders

The burial mounds now had walls and roofs made of megaliths; when erosion removed the surrounding earth, the result was a stone table called a dolmen. The purposes of the other monuments are more difficult to figure out. The most common are individual megaliths, or menhirs. In places where menhirs stand alone, they probably served as boundary markers, but in a few places many menhirs were arranged in a line, or in a circle. At Carnac in Brittany, for instance, 3,000 menhirs formed thirteen parallel lines, sprawled across four miles of the French countryside. Such arrangements may have served as sites for performing important rituals. The largest menhir of all, at Locmariaquer (also in Brittany), once stood 67 feet tall and weighed 350 tons, before it broke into five smaller pieces. The number of men it must have taken to move these stones (more than a hundred miles in the case of Stonehenge) and the organization involved in directing such a work gang, boggles the imagination.⁽⁹⁾

At one time it was thought that these monuments were built in the third and second millennia B.C., and many suggested that the construction was supervised by visiting architects from Crete or Egypt. That view changed in the 1970s, when it was discovered that the oldest living things, the bristlecone pine trees of California, yielded carbon-14 dates that were centuries younger than expected; a tree ring known to date from 2100 B.C., for example, yielded a radiocarbon date of only 1600 B.C. The carbon-dated artifacts from the Megalithic sites were compared with the tree ring data, and a whole new chronology was set up. Ancient Europe turned out to be older than we thought, with its monuments dating between 4000 and 2100 B.C.! The continent as a whole now seems to be more than the barbarian fringe that has been traditionally portrayed in textbooks. The forty stone temples on Malta and the nearby island of Gozo, for instance, are now considered older than most of the pyramids of Egypt.

Stonehenge itself was built in three stages. In the first phase, sometime between 2800 and 2100 B.C., only the large "Heel Stone" and two sighting stones were used; the main feature was a circular earth embankment, eight feet thick, six feet high, and covering an area 320 feet across. A tribe called the Beaker Folk (more about them later) raised 82 menhirs in the second phase, around 1500 B.C. A few more menhirs and an earthen avenue were added before 1100 B.C. to complete the structure. For centuries there has been speculation on how the early Britons built Stonehenge, and why. The most popular theory, proposed by American astrophysicist Gerald Hawkins in 1965, claims that it was a combination calendar and calculator, used to identify the dates when summer and winter began, and to predict when lunar eclipses will occur. However, Dr. Hawkins' measurements weren't accurate enough to convince all scholars, and older theories still abound, like the one that claims Druids performed sacrifices there. Because of that, a few modern-day Druids come to Stonehenge every year on the first day of summer, to celebrate the rising of the sun over the Heel Stone.

Stonehenge, taken during a 1999 eclipse.

It is now believed that the Iceman was a shepherd from the nearby village of Remedello, driven away by some sort of catastrophe. His four broken ribs, and the unfinished state of his bow and arrows, tell us that he had to flee into the Alps after the winter snows had begun to fall on the peaks, taking whatever tools he could grab in a hurry. An x-ray revealed an arrowhead lodged beneath one shoulder, so it looks like he was murdered by those he was running away from.

The fate of the Megalithic people is uncertain; they just seem to have disappeared sometime after 2000 B.C. Nobody knows what ethnic group they belonged to; they could be an early Indo-European group, or a group preceding the Indo-European migration. If the latter is the case, the Basques could be the present-day heirs to the builders of Stonehenge.⁽¹¹⁾ At any rate, Stonehenge is an appropriate monument to mark the end of the Stone Age. The introduction of gold and copper had not changed the European way of living much, because those metals were too soft by themselves to make tools that were better than stone ones. Now the early metallurgists had discovered that an alloy of copper and tin was strong enough to make superior tools; this technological achievement began a new era, the Bronze Age.

The Minoans

The excavations of the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans first brought to light this civilization, whose existence was only known from the epics of Homer and the Greek myth about the Minotaur, a monster that was half bull and half man, who devoured youths and maidens sent as tribute from Greece. Beginning in 1900, Evans unearthed the ruins of a great palace at Knossos, the dominant city in Crete after 1700 B.C. Rising at least three stories high and sprawling over nearly six acres, this "Palace of Minos," built of brick and limestone, was a maze of royal apartments, storerooms, corridors, open courtyards, and broad stairways. The main architectural feature of the palace at Knossos is red columns that are wider on top than at the bottom; this unusual style may have originated in the custom of using whole tree trunks for pillars, which were planted upside down to keep them from taking root again. Furnished with running water, the palace had a sanitation system that surpassed anything constructed in Europe until Roman times, including the oldest known flush toilet. Walls were painted with elaborate frescoes in which the Minoans appear as happy, peaceful people with a pronounced liking for dancing, festivals, and athletic contests. Early visitors must have gotten lost in this chaotic asymmetrical structure, and that may be the origin of the Greek myth about the Labyrinth.

Wherever they came from, the first settlers must have found farming difficult. The soil is rocky; the terrain is a wild place of limestone peaks and hills, separated by tangled gorges. Rivers on Crete are too small to provide much water for irrigation, and do not have a large flood plain to grow crops on. Sunlight and light rainfalls are reliable enough, though, so some agriculture would be possible from the start. And though the space for grain crops like wheat and barley was definitely limited, the island was a perfect place for growing grapes and olives, so wine and olive oil became the main exports.

The Minoans soon learned that the sea around them, which other civilizations feared, was in fact their best friend. Since nobody else in those days liked to sail out of the comforting sight of land, the sea served as a more effective deterrent to enemies than any manmade fortification. Throughout the age of Cretan civilization the Minoans never had to build walls around their cities; the sea was their protective wall.

The sea was not only a wall, but also a highway for the Minoans. Once they became skilled at building ships, they launched the world's first merchant marine. They established colonies on the nearest islands of the Aegean--the Cyclades--and during Egypt's First Intermediate Period (about 2000 B.C.) they began making regular trips to Egypt and Syria. They may have even sailed as far as Sicily--Greek mythology says that Minos was killed on a military expedition to that island. From the Middle East they learned bronze making, from Egypt how to make stone vases. Their profits from such trade and crafts allowed them to build fine harbors, aqueducts and palaces; around 1700 B.C. they began construction on the palace at Knossos.

The Minoans were confident about sailing because their ships were the most seaworthy of the age. Pictures of them, on wall paintings and seals, depict galleys with high prows, low sterns, rounded hulls, and a single square sail. Some are shown with a small deck cabin and a large oar in the stern for steering. When there was no wind, up to twenty-five oarsmen on each side kept the ships moving. The high prows turned aside waves, the heavy construction kept it from breaking up in all but the worst storms, and deep keels provided stability. Even the haughty Egyptians had to admire the skill of the Minoans--an Egyptian tomb painting shows a group of dignified Minoans, called Keftiu, bringing gifts to Pharaoh Thutmose III. It is possible that the pharaohs even hired the Keftiu as brokers, using Minoan ships to bring Lebanese cedar to Egypt. Of all foreigners, only the Minoans were honored with a special name; other non-Egyptians were usually called Ha-Unebu ("people from beyond the seas"), or "barbarians who are an abomination to God."

To keep track of their commerce, the Minoans employed an efficient bureaucratic government, whose administrative records were written on clay tablets, first in a form of picture writing resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics; then after 1700 B.C. they used a syllabic script known as Linear A. Because we have deciphered neither script, our knowledge of Minoan civilization is scanty and imprecise; most of it is derived from those wall murals.

Perhaps because of their isolation, the inhabitants of Crete paid less attention to war and politics than the other peoples of their time did. They did not cover walls with scenes of pomp, or use pictures and inscriptions to record their military exploits; favorite Cretan art subjects were people at leisure or engaged in sports, and pictures of flowers, birds, fish and dolphins. Nor do we see any Minoan king raising up giant statues or mountain-sized tombs to be remembered by; they didn't even leave pictures or inscriptions of their achievements. Instead they made portraits of handsome people with long black hair, slim figures (they seem to have been obsessed with staying in shape!), and semi-naked dress--men wore little besides a loincloth or kilt, women wore flouncy, open-faced gowns that left their breasts exposed--both sexes are shown without a care. Later the Greeks thought that the Minoans invented dancing, and indeed, some murals show dancers in a mid step. Minoan art was spontaneous and full of rhythmic motion; they saw it as an essential part of everyday life, not the exclusive monopoly of religion and the state. If one can trust these pictures, the Minoans must have been the happiest people of the Bronze Age.

The women of Crete enjoyed more freedom than any other women of the age, even more than those of Egypt. The palace murals show them not as chattel or under veil, as in the Middle East, but with stylish dresses and makeup, often enjoying public festivals with the men or even taking part in athletic events.

Cretan society had an aristocracy of nobles, priests and priestesses on top; a middle class of artisans and clerks; a working class of farmers, herders and laborers; and serfs at the bottom. Despite their lowly status, the serfs seem to have been better off than slaves in other Bronze Age civilizations; they did not live in ghettoes or shanty-towns, for one thing. Moreover, Crete does not appear to have experienced the social unrest and upheaval that afflict most societies; if they had, the kings would not have survived it, because they had no walls to keep the masses at a safe distance. More than a thousand years later, Aristotle wrote that the serfs enjoyed all the privileges of Minoan citizens, except two: they could not bear arms or take part in gymnastic exercises (they may have seen flabbiness as a symbol of lower class living).

Whether or not they could afford a big house, Minoans lived comfortably. Sometimes they decorated their homes with flowerpots or gardens; their furniture was made of animal skins stretched over a wooden frame. Nobody used fireplaces; for cooking and housewarming they used portable braziers made of clay or bronze.

Minoans also ate better than their Egyptian and Mesopotamian contemporaries. They made their bread from wheat and barley flour, which was ground in their homes. From gardens or orchards lettuce, lentils, beans, peas, squash, plums, quinces, and figs were readily available. The sea provided octopus, clams, squid and fish. Cows and goats gave the milk used to make cheese. They drank wine most of the time, but since they grew barley, beer was common too.

Religion and politics must have been closely related; the throne room of Minos, a lovely but unimposing hall with a high-backed alabaster chair on one end of it, was the place where priestesses often performed important ceremonies. Sporting events were also considered a form of worship. Other ceremonies were small affairs conducted in caves. From the start, the bull was a sacred animal to the Minoans. Art objects featuring bulls are all over the palace; vases shaped like bull's heads were used in ceremonies; the most popular sport was a dangerous one where athletes grabbed a bull by the horns and did somersaults over it. Sometimes the king might wear a bull mask, which may be where the Greeks got the idea of the Minotaur.

What little else is known of Minoan religion also contrasts sharply with conditions in the Near East: there were no great temples, powerful priesthoods, or large cult statues of the gods. The principal deity was the Mother Goddess, which probably explains the important position held by women in Cretan society. Many statuettes show her dressed like a fashionable Cretan woman with a fancy Cretan dress and an elaborate coiffure; often she holds a snake in each hand. She was probably the prototype of later Greek goddesses like Athena, Demeter, and Aphrodite.

Sometimes the Mother Goddess appeared with a youth who may have been her son. This son seems to have been a weather god, like the Canaanite Baal, who controlled the seasonal death and rebirth of nature. Later the Greeks would equate the boy with Zeus, the king of their gods; they remembered the sacred bull and Mother Goddess of Crete as Kronos and Rhea, the parents of Zeus.

The ceremonies, sports, and sacrifices of bulls were all done to make the Mother Goddess protect them from a host of disasters: shipwreck, disease, failed crops, and especially earthquakes. Earthquakes hit the eastern Mediterranean regularly--often a big one strikes every fifty years--and whenever one happened whole towns were likely to be destroyed, with many people killed or buried alive in the rubble. The Minoans never forgot this violence for long, and they may have thought that the muffled roar of the shaking earth was the bellow of a giant bull moving the world, hence the preoccupation with bulls.

Despite their supplications, Minoan civilization literally went out with a bang. On more than one occasion, a series of earthquakes and aftershocks caused so much death and destruction that it disrupted Crete's society. Fighting broke out between Knossos and the other cities; in the end Knossos won and all the other palaces were destroyed. On the mainland, true Greeks, who called themselves Achaeans, had been civilized and taught to sail by the Minoans; now they took advantage of the situation to seize several Minoan island colonies. Then around 1160 B.C. came another natural disaster that made all others minor by comparison. About seventy miles north of Crete, the volcano on the island of Thera exploded. The explosion was so awesome that it vaporized two thirds of the island, and it sent a 200-foot-high tsunami to wipe out the cities on Crete's heavily populated north coast. It also wrecked and sank most of the Minoan fleet, leaving the island defenseless against any other naval power.⁽¹³⁾

Excavations have been conducted on what remains of Thera since 1967. The town they have uncovered, Akrotiri, was a Minoan colony; its art and architecture are so well preserved that the site is called "the Pompeii of the Aegean." Curiously, no skeletons or valuables (like jewelry) were found; apparently the residents were warned of disaster--possibly by the series of earthquakes that often precede an eruption--and escaped in ships with much of their personal belongings. They went wherever Minoan ships traveled, but most probably headed for the nearest mainland, Greece. This has convinced many, including this author, that the evacuation preceding the Thera eruption is the source to the Atlantis myth. When the Egyptians told Solon in the early 6th century B.C. about Atlantis, the oldest civilization they knew, they were probably talking about the Minoans.⁽¹⁴⁾

The survivors on Crete were scattered in isolated settlements. By 1100 B.C. they were conquered by the Greeks, whose navy now became the one that ruled the waves. The palace at Knossos was occupied and rebuilt; tablets written in a script called Linear B were used to keep track of inventories. The newcomers decorated their buildings and pots with a stiff geometric style, without the free expression that characterized the Minoan frescoes. An age of trading, piracy--and heroes--began.

The Bronze Age and the Indo-European Migration

The burials also got richer in another way-they now contained gold items, especially jewelry. Another very common item was a thin-walled cup without handles. Because of these, we often call the builders of the Bronze Age mounds the Beaker people. Other names for these folk are the Corded Ware people, Battle Axe people, Single Grave people, and Ochre Grave people, all derived from the grave goods they left.

The Indo-European migration is one of the most important events in the history of mankind. 5,000 years ago the Indo-Europeans only lived in the Caucasus mountains; after the migration they were distributed over a larger portion of the earth than any other language/racial group. However, it was also an undocumented migration; it happened so early that today's Indo-Europeans have no record--not even legends--of their ancestors' journey. Historians have resorted to archaeology and language comparison to deduce the great migration's path.

In the eastern Ukraine are several burial mounds called kurgans, dating back as far as 2000 B.C.; we call the builders the Kurgan culture. We believe the kurgans mark the Indo-European arrival in eastern Europe, but we don't know if the Cimmerians, the tribe living in the area when written records become available, are direct descendants of the kurgan-builders.

At first these tribes had to travel on foot, so their migrations were slow, perhaps just a few miles per year. Even so, in a few centuries they could migrate all the way across the steppe, going farther than the typical Egyptian or Babylonian would dream of traveling. The steppe had a rainfall high enough to support the grasses and other plant life on which herd animals feed, but not nearly enough for sedentary farming. Thus, the nomads were herders from the start, always ready to move when their animals had finished grazing the surrounding pasture, and living on a diet of that was mostly meat and dairy products. Because their footloose lifestyle could not support as many people as farming, there were never very many of them, but they had a huge portion of land, five thousand miles across, to themselves.

We may look at these nomads as poor, but they viewed themselves as free men compared to the inhabitants of civilized places. Not only had they rejected a lifestyle of laborious digging, planting and harvesting, but they came to disdain those who lived by farming. Because they always had to watch out for predators who might steal from their herds--either wild beasts like wolves or other men bent on rustling--their tribes had a warlike organization, with a chief to take command in battle and to decide where to march. Thus the steppe-dweller expected a violent life, and a few of them could generally beat a much larger group of people from a civilized country. If there was a civilization nearby, they regularly attacked it, to steal crops and to capture humans for domestication, meaning slavery. For millennia to come there would be an ongoing struggle between the farmer and the pastoralist, one having superior numbers, the other having superior fighting ability. It finally ended after 1500 A.D., when the farmers gained an insurmountable lead in technology.

The Indo-European herdsmen kept the same food animals that Middle Eastern farmers had for livestock: cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. They added to this list the horse, and thus changed the course of history. Stone age hunters were familiar with the horse, but to them it was just another meal; they caught them by driving an entire herd off a cliff. At some uncertain date, no later than 1700 B.C., the dwellers on the steppes managed to domesticate horses. Strange as it may sound to us, they got horses to pull wagons a long time before they learned how to ride on horseback. This was because the mounted warrior had to learn how to ride and fight at the same time--something which takes years of training--and because the techniques for breaking and teaching horses to carry a man had not been developed yet. Even so, the introduction of the war chariot had a devastating effect on the civilized world. The charioteer had a huge advantage over the foot soldier, creating a situation much like that between infantry and tanks in the twentieth century. Between 1700 and 1400 B.C., all the major centers of civilization (Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China) suffered invasions from raiders in chariots. Not until the victims learned how to use chariots themselves could they drive out their enemies and restore unity in their nations. By 1200 B.C. the Cimmerians were using chariots in the Ukraine, so we must assume that chariot use was introduced to Europe shortly after that.

The biggest weaknesses of chariots were that they were vulnerable to arrows (one well placed shot at a horse could overturn the whole thing), and that they were expensive to produce; building a chariot required the skills of several specialists, like horse trainers, tanners, carpenters and smiths. Consequently chariots were relatively few in number, and had to be reserved for officers. With such aristocrats leading an army, there was a tendency for them to behave with chivalrous courtesy, sometimes treating enemy charioteers better than even the foot soldiers on their own side. The invention of iron arms and armor helped to level the ground between infantrymen and charioteer elites, but what really ended the chariot's usefulness was the introduction of cavalry. Soldiers on horseback were faster than chariots, and could go in places too rugged for chariot travel. Again it appears that the nomads of the Eurasian heartland learned how to ride horses first, around 900 B.C., and their civilized opponents, especially the Assyrians, followed suit a few years later.

As with so many other things about ancient Europe, we can only speculate on what happened when the Indo-Europeans arrived. Some scholars believed they came as invaders; Marija Gimbutas thought the kurgan-builders staged four separate invasions of the west. However, no evidence has yet been found of the destruction that such a war would leave, so we must also consider the possibility that the Indo-Europeans came in peace, as traders or immigrants. If they did, they must have persuaded the non-Indo-European residents to accept their culture, and later assimilated them. Sometimes we see a similar trend in other times; the Bulgars and the Varangians, for example, were not Slavs to begin with, but within a century they were absorbed by the Slavic subjects they ruled. One sure sign of the Indo-European arrival is that in the Bronze Age villages, livestock raising became nearly as important as crop cultivation. The newcomers may also have introduced the status items we now see in the barrows, like the cups and the first bronze weapons. However they entered the continent, by the end of the Bronze Age the main Indo-European groups are recognizable and in specific locations: Teutons in Scandinavia, Celts in and around the Alps, Italians in Italy, Thraco-Illyrians in the northern Balkans, Greeks in the southern Balkans, Balts in Latvia and Lithuania, and Slavs in Poland and Belarus.

In the case of the Slavs, we believe that the first sign of their existence as a separate people is the Lusatian (Lausitz) culture, which arose in Poland between 1600 and 1300 B.C. Unlike the other ancient Europeans seen so far, the Lausitz practiced cremation; this funeral rite would spread to neighboring tribes before long. Their cemeteries contained pottery urns instead of coffins, so archaeologists call the Lusatians an "urnfield" culture. Another urnfield culture on the upper Dnieper River is also thought to be Slavic, so maybe at this early date the Slavs were beginning to split into the Western (Polish) and Eastern (Russian) Slavs, separated by Europe's largest swamp, the Pripet Marshes. In the urnfields, as in the Bronze Age barrows, the differences between rich and poor remained visible after death; many urns contained nothing but bones and ashes, and only about one burial in a hundred included weapons or good-quality vessels.

As the trade in luxury items increased, so did the demand for finely crafted metal goods. To meet this demand a powerful network of metalworking and trading arose in central Europe. As early as 1800 B.C., talented smiths in Austria, Germany, Hungary and Bohemia were producing exceptional axes, bracelets, daggers, earrings and pins. They also mined tin from Bohemia, copper from the Alps and the Balkans, and transported amber from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. We call this combination of merchants, miners and craftsmen the Únetice culture, after the modern name for one of their cemeteries near Prague. Traders carried Únetice-style merchandise as far as Scandinavia and the British Isles, and soon it inspired copycat industries in Bavaria, Switzerland, and France. The rivals that produced the best craftwork, however, were the Otomani smiths, based in northwest Romania.

The Germanic peoples, also known as the Teutons, did not learn bronze working until the Middle Bronze Age, or 1600-1200 B.C. This was probably because they were farther away; at this stage, the Teutons only lived in southern Scandinavia (Denmark plus the nearest parts of Norway and Sweden); they would not settle Germany itself until the second and first centuries B.C. They caught up quickly, though; the gold and bronze objects we have found in Scandinavian burial mounds are awesome, both in quantity and quality of workmanship. Of the 2,500 metallic grave goods recovered, one fifth are gold and the rest are bronze, causing some anthropologists to call this period a Nordic golden age. It is all the more impressive when one considers that Denmark does not have deposits of gold, copper or tin, so all the metal had to come hundreds of miles to get there. One researcher estimated that up to a quarter of a ton of bronze was needed every year, just to make the items buried in Danish mounds, and that Denmark's smiths probably used 5 to 7.5 tons annually for everything.

We have to guess at what the Nordics used to pay for all that metal. No doubt their most important commodity was amber; for millennia people have known that the shores of the Baltic Sea are the best place in the world to find this fossilized resin. As early as 1600 B.C., amber turns up in the graves of Mycenaean Greeks, telling us that the civilized world already considered it a valuable gem. When amber got popular elsewhere, it stopped appearing in Scandinavian cemeteries; this suggests that the local chiefs wanted to save all amber for export. They probably also sold slaves and furs, as other barbarians often did, but these items were too perishable to leave any trace for the archaeologist to find.

Recently it was proposed that Scandinavian women were among the items exported from northern Europe, and that the price of a bride was either peace with another tribe, or still more raw metal. The evidence for this idea comes from the fact that in central and southern Europe, Nordic-made necklaces and bracelets are more common than Nordic-made swords and axes, and Scandinavian-style graves are common in northern Germany, but non-Scandinavian graves are not common in Denmark or Sweden. Since most of these women were blondes, like their modern-day descendants, it goes to show that some aspects of human nature haven't changed!

By 1200 B.C., urnfields were turning up in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. This is not seen as evidence of a Slavic migration; instead it seems to mark the rise of a new people who adopted Slavic funeral customs. During the late Bronze Age (1200-800 B.C.), urnfields also spread to most of France. After the Iron Age began, Celts were living in all these areas, so now we cautiously identify the people of the central European urnfields as the direct ancestors of the Celts. The Ligurians, a tribe living in northwest Italy, was also probably Celtic, though they did not have urnfields.

Besides the Celtic arrival, the other interesting event of the late Bronze Age is the appearance of metal body armor. Archaeologists have found this armor in cemeteries and bogs all over Europe, and the style of manufacture is almost the same everywhere. Warrior elites must have cut a striking figure when they wore their ornate breastplates, shields, greaves, and long-horned helmets. However, all these items were made of sheet metal, hammered or cast so thin that it would not have protected the wearer as well as sturdy leather armor. They were probably worn mainly for show, like at religious ceremonies.

Whether or not the Indo-European migration was peaceful, dangerous times followed it. We already saw one sign of this in the preoccupation Bronze Age smiths had with manufacturing weapons; no doubt the warrior class wielded them with chilling effect. Another was the way that middle and late Bronze Age villages were built with defense in mind; usually earthen ditches and elaborate wooden palisades surrounded them, and natural features like hills or islands in lakes were put to use as additional protection. All this suggests a society dominated by heroic warriors, who spent their time hunting, fighting and feasting, like the larger-than-life characters of Greek, Irish and Norse legends.⁽¹⁵⁾ Their activities had produced a new Europe, one more complex and quarrelsome than the Europe that existed before. Yet while they reflected a very vigorous community, they still could not be called civilized, in the sense that residents of Middle Eastern cities were civilized. Full civilization would have to wait until Europe had cities, and the average Bronze Age settlement had no more than 50 inhabitants; conditions were too chaotic to permit the growth of a village into a town. The new technology of iron working would prove to be the democratizer of weapons; because iron was more common than copper or tin, the availability of iron weapons would take away much of the power the sword-swinging aristocrats had enjoyed.

The Mycenaeans

Names of centers like Knossos and Tiryns seem non-Indo-European and evidently date to Early Bronze Age times.⁽¹⁶⁾ The original Aegean peoples were not Greeks; they may have spoken a common language, or related languages, akin to the earliest languages known in Anatolia. Classical Greek historians like Herodotus called these people the Pelasgians, but they told us almost nothing about them. Some modern authors try to draw a connection between them and the Minoans, wondering if Philistine and Pelasgian are two names for the same people; nobody can be sure because the Minoan language remains lost to us.⁽¹⁷⁾

Invaders from various parts of Anatolia occupied many of the Cycladic islands about 2000 B.C. and settled at Lerna and other sites in the eastern Peloponnesus (the southern half of the Greek mainland). A few centuries later, invaders coming from the Balkans appear to have reached the Peloponnesus and left traces at Lerna. These northerners spoke an Indo-European language, perhaps an early form of Greek. From their relatives on the Russian steppe, they learned how to use the horse and chariot.

Signs of violent destruction attest the arrival of the newcomers near Argos, most notably at Lerna, followed by the construction of citadels at Mycenae, Pylos, Argos, and other sites. By 1400 B.C. these Greeks⁽¹⁸⁾ had adopted much of the advanced culture of the Minoans; their civilization reached as far as Rhodes and was in contact with the Middle Eastern kingdoms. Mycenaean women adopted Cretan fashions and added a variety of sumptuous jewelry, from bracelets to earrings. The men remained warlike, though, and plied the seas as both pirates and traders. Battle scenes are prominent in their art, and they took their weapons with them to their graves. Homer made one of their military expeditions famous when he sang about the Trojan War.

Some of the wealth accumulated by the kings of Mycenae--the greatest single hoard of gold, silver, and ivory objects found anywhere before the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb--was unearthed in 1876 by Heinrich Schliemann, fresh from his even more sensational discoveries at Troy. The treasures included golden crowns, diadems, and cups, some in raised relief; vessels of silver and alabaster; and many bronze weapons. Some of the tombs are dome-shaped and called beehive tombs or tholoi; the most monumental of them is the so-called Treasury of Atreus. Like Mycenae's Lion Gate and the palace remains, this tomb reflects the Mycenaeans' ability to organize their resources on a large scale. The kings headed an elaborate palace bureaucracy, a priest or priestess oversaw religious matters, and the work force was highly specialized and regimented. The workers lived beyond the walls of the palaces, the king and nobles within.

The expansive force of Mycenaean civilization led to the planting of colonies on the shore of Anatolia (Hittite sources call the Achaeans Ahhiyawa), and to the conquest of Crete around 1450 B.C. The latter event was made possible by the destruction of the palace at Knossos by earthquakes and a great tidal wave following a nearby volcanic eruption, as noted in the previous section. The Mycenaeans rebuilt the palace at Knossos (to be destroyed finally about 1380 B.C. by earthquake and fire), and the center of Aegean civilization shifted to the Greek mainland.

The Mycenaean settlements Homer called "cities" were really just citadels--fortified palaces and administrative centers, rather than true cities like Crete had. Most of the population lived in scattered villages where they worked either communal land or land held by nobles or kings. The nobles were under the close control of the kings, whose administrative records were kept daily by many scribes. Prominent in these records are details of the disbursement of grain and wine as wages, and the collection of taxes in kind. The most important item of income was olive oil, the major article in the wide-ranging Mycenaean trade, which was operated as a royal monopoly. Perhaps it was a desire to dominate the trade networks of the day that led the Achaean kings to launch the famous expedition against Troy, a powerful commercial rival.

The city of Troy occupied a strategic position on the Hellespont (the strait between the Aegean and the Black seas now known as the Dardanelles). Thus, Troy could command both sea traffic through the straits and land caravans going between Asia and Europe. For many years scholars thought this city existed only in the epic poems of Homer. Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), a German romantic dreamer and amateur archaeologist, believed otherwise. As a boy, he had read the Iliad, and became convinced that Troy was a real place. At the age of forty-eight, having amassed a fortune in the California gold rush and in worldwide trade, Schliemann retired from business to put his persistent dream of ancient Troy to the test.

In 1870 Schliemann began excavating a hill called Hissarlik, on the Asian side of the Dardanelles; this was where the Greeks said Troy existed.⁽¹⁹⁾ Like the tells of the Middle East, the hill contained nine buried cities, built one on top of another. He discovered a treasure of golden earrings, hairpins, and bracelets in the second city (Troy II), which led him to believe that this was the city of Homer's epics. Excavations in the 1930s, however, showed that Troy II had been destroyed about 2200 B.C., far too early to have been the scene of the Trojan War. Nowadays two younger cities, Troy VI and Troy VII, are considered better candidates for the place made famous by Homer.

Neither the view that Troy was the victim of commercial rivalry, nor the other widely held theory that it was destroyed by Achaean pirates seeking booty, corresponds to Homer's view that a love triangle caused the Trojan War. According to him, one day Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, went with his brother Menelaus to Sparta, to obtain wives. The beautiful queen of Sparta, Leda, had only daughters, so one of them, Clytemnestra, married Agamemnon, while her sister, Helen, married Menelaus. Menelaus stayed in Sparta with Helen and became king of that city. Not long after that, a Trojan prince named Paris came to visit, and when he returned to Troy he took Helen with him.⁽²⁰⁾ This was a serious matter; Menelaus was only king because he was married to Helen, so he had to get her back to save the family fortune.

Led by Agamemnon, the wrathful Achaeans besieged Troy for ten long years. Homer's Iliad deals only with a three-month period near the end of the siege.⁽²¹⁾ Troy did not fall to armed might, but to the most famous trick in military history. A Greek officer, Odysseus, suggested leaving a great wooden horse outside the city, as a peace offering; then the Greeks withdrew. Sure enough, the Trojans opened their gates to bring in the horse, and began a citywide party to celebrate their "victory"; they ignored the prophetess Cassandra when she warned that they should run a spear through the horse to make sure there were no spies inside. That night a handful of Greek soldiers came out of the horse, opened the gates, and let in their comrades to sack the city.

First of the Mycenaean strongholds to fall was Pylos, whose Linear B archives contain references to hastily undertaken preparations to repel the invaders. We find orders directing women and children to places of safety; instructions to armorers, "rowers," and food suppliers; and a report entitled "How the watchers are guarding the coastal regions."⁽²²⁾ The preparations were in vain. Pylos was sacked and burned, and the destruction of the other major Mycenaean citadels soon followed. Mycenaean refugees migrated to Athens, the Cyclades, Cyprus, and to Ionia on the western coast of Asia Minor. Wherever they went, the refugees took with them a recollection of their traditions, which crystallized into the oral and epic poetry best known from Homer.

The Dorians took possession of much of the Peloponnesus, and though people lived at some Mycenaean sites for a considerable period, civilization was swept away and population decreased. They introduced new burial customs and fashions in dress, while adopting some elements of the Mycenaean civilization. The art of writing was lost, to be regained when the Greeks adopted the Phoenician script for their own use about 400 years later. This period reminds scholars of the years immediately following the fall of Rome, and is called "the dark age of Greece."

The Phoenician Pioneers

The Pillars of Hercules got their name because Greek mythology asserted that Hercules moved the Rock of Gibraltar and Mt. Acho, the corresponding mountain on the Moroccan side, to their present locations. On the Atlantic side there may have been some prehistoric commerce between the Megalithic tribes of Spain, Portugal, France and Britain, but civilized men went no farther than Gades until the fifth century B.C. Because the Greeks had no idea what was beyond the Pillars of Hercules, they imagined it as the location of legendary and mythical places that couldn't be found elsewhere, like the Kingdom of Antaeus, the Garden of Hesperides--and Atlantis.

When it came to trading with Spain's inhabitants, the Phoenicians clearly got the better part of the deal. Not knowing the value of their metals, the Iberians cheerfully traded them for manufactured goods (mostly of the "glass beads & trinkets" variety), and even helped the Semitic newcomers look for new deposits, unaware that there was much more ore to be had underground than in the nuggets they picked up on the surface. Eventually they wisened up, though, and around 700 B.C. the Iberians in the Andalusia region united to form a kingdom, called Tartessos by the Greeks. This was the only native political unit of any importance before the Carthaginians and the Romans conquered the peninsula. Many Bible scholars believe that Tarshish is the Hebrew name for Tartessos, so the "ships of Tarshish" that King Solomon employed were long-distance Phoenician merchantmen.

Once the Phoenicians had the mineral wealth of Spain, the need to protect existing trade routes became the main reason for colonies. Ancient galleys rarely traveled more than thirty miles a day, and their captains liked to drop anchor at night, so well-placed outposts helped a lot. In the eighth century B.C., they colonized North Africa, Malta, Sardinia and Sicily for that reason. The preferred spot for a new city was either an offshore island or a small peninsula, so that ships could enter and leave the harbors when the winds were blowing from almost any direction; colonies planted on the mainland were only likely to survive if the indigenous tribes were friendly.

In the eastern Mediterranean the Phoenicians competed with the Greeks and came in second place; in the west they played second fiddle to nobody. The conquest of Tyre, first by the Assyrians (665 B.C.), and then by the Babylonians (573 B.C.), left the Phoenician colonies on their own, and they merged into one state, led by Carthage in North Africa, to deal with outside threats. Details on how the colonies united are not available, but the conquest of Tartessos (about 510 B.C.) and the settlement of the Balearic Islands were important steps.

Carthage sent two expeditions beyond Gades around 450 B.C., to explore the Atlantic coast of Africa and Europe. The African commander was named Hanno, while the commander who explored the European shores was named Himilco. Since two families held most of the top positions in Carthage, it is likely that Hanno and Himilco were brothers. The Phoenicians knew very little about western Europe, although they had traded with its inhabitants for centuries, hence the desire to explore. Himilco made it to the northern shore of Brittany before turning back, and described the Atlantic as a place full of calm zones where ships couldn't find any wind for their sails, vast beds of seaweed, extensive shallows, dense mists, and huge sea monsters. No doubt he was exaggerating, to scare off competitors; this area was so rich in tin that the Greeks called Britain the "Tin Isles" when they heard about it later on.

The whole process of unification and expansion was completed by 410 B.C. Thus, when the Greeks went forth to start colonies of their own, they had to steer clear of most of the places the Phoenicians had settled. The main exception was Sicily; this island had so much to offer that Phoenician and Greek colonists fought over it for three hundred years, until the Romans got interested as well. We will come back to look at this struggle when we cover the expansion of Rome in Chapter 3.

The Villanovan Culture

The late Bronze Age occurred in Italy somewhat earlier than it did in the rest of Europe, about 1300 to 1000 B.C. During this time some villages began to grow, and urnfield-style cremations replaced burials as the dominant funeral custom. Artifacts from Greece and the Middle East start to appear, suggesting that merchants from the civilized world were already making trips here.

The next period, 1000 to 700 B.C., was the beginning of the Iron Age for Italy. One district progressed more rapidly than the rest of the peninsula--the northwestern province called Etruria by the Romans, and Tuscany by us. Etruria's boundaries were the Arno and Tiber Rivers, the Apennine mts. and the Mediterranean. Here the first permanent towns, Vetulonia and Tarquinii, appeared by 800 B.C. The inhabitants of Etruria called themselves Rasna, but we know them by their Latin name, the Etruscans. To the Greeks they were Tyrsenoi or Tyrrhenoi, and from that we get the name for the nearest part of the Mediterranean, the Tyrrhenian Sea. Archaeologists call the early Etruscan civilization the Villanovan culture, after the estate near Bologna where early Iron Age artifacts were first identified. The most common artifacts were more burial urns; many of these were made to look like their houses, showing us that they lived in clay-walled huts with thatched roofs.

The Etruscans are one of the most mysterious peoples of ancient times. From the small portion of their language we have translated, we know they were not Indo-European. Ancient historians argued about their origin. Herodotus reported that they came from Lydia, in Anatolia, when half the people of that kingdom moved to Europe to escape a long famine. His argument must have made sense at the time, because both the Etruscans and the Lydians were luxury-loving, and both cultures were alien to the Greeks. Likewise, the Romans thought they came from Asia, too, as refugees from the Trojan War⁽²⁴⁾. However, Dionysus of Halicarnassus, writing in the first century B.C., thought they had always lived in Italy: "This nation migrated from nowhere else, but was native to the country, since it is found to be a very ancient nation and to agree with no other in its language or its manner of writing." Modern scholars have continued the debate, speculating whether the Etruscans are the same as the Teresh, mentioned in Egyptian records among the "Peoples of the Sea," who attacked Egypt in the reign of Ramses III. Currently it looks like the solution could be a compromise of these views; the Etruscans were the first Italians, but an infusion of Asian immigrants did much to help their civilization develop.

Around 775 B.C., Greeks from the Aegean island of Euboea founded a colony on Pithecusae (modern Ischia), a small island in the bay of Naples. The Etruscans had already explored as far south as Naples, so Pithecusae initiated regular commerce between the two civilizations. In return for the manufactured goods the Etruscans imported from Greece, they traded their metals, especially iron mined from Populonia and the nearby island of Elba. The effects of this trade on them were tremendous; the Etruscans also learned Greek art, and the use of the alphabet. What's more, the Euboean Greeks had a colony at Al Mina on the Syrian coast, so Asian products became available in Italy, too. Thus, Etruria was prepared to play a major (though underrated) part in early classical history. When the Romans got started, they would acquire much of their civilization from the Etruscans, until they met the Greeks themselves.

The Celts

They spread over a large part of the Continent because they liked to wander, though they were not true nomads. By 800 B.C. they had overrun all of France except the southwestern quarter; because of that, France will be known as Gaul for the next four chapters of this work. Around 700 they began migrating into Spain, mixing with the indigenous Iberians to produce a hybrid tribe, the Celto-Iberians. Besides the usual desire to find greener pastures, local customs motivated the Celts to keep moving. A man was not allowed to marry unless he owned property, so landless young men had to go out and find some turf of their own, if they didn't inherit any from their parents. A custom of foster parenting may have also encouraged Celtic travel, if not expansion. Called fosterage, it involved sending the children to foster families, usually in another settlement, before they reached the age of seven. The purpose was to teach them skills appropriate to their social standing, and to promote good relations between two communities. For example, the daughter of a farmer learned to grind grain and make bread, while the daughter of a noble learned sewing and embroidery; all boys learned physical skills, especially if they were expected to lead a band of warriors when they grew up. Girls usually returned to their real parents when they turned fourteen, boys at seventeen; despite the shorter stay away from home, a girl's parents paid about a third more for her education, because they felt she needed more attention.

Despite their accomplishments, the Celts have received a bad press for most of the past two thousand years, proving the maxim that history is written by the winners. To the Greeks and Romans, the Celts were wild-haired barbarians, who loved both wine and war, and were so fearless in battle that sometimes their women would fight alongside them. Classical authors describe them as tall and hardy, having fair complexions, blond or red hair, big mustaches, and a fondness for one-piece necklaces called torques. Often the men would use lime to mold their hair into spikes, and sometimes they would charge their enemies naked; both techniques usually scared the daylights out of everyone they met. As with some other ancient civilizations, battles between Celts might begin with a duel between champions from each side. Occasionally this was enough to decide the outcome, but more often the rest of the warriors jumped in for a free-for-all, once the first contest ended. As the Greek historian Strabo put it: "the whole race is madly fond of war."

It didn't take much to start a feast or a fight among the Celts. They were so concerned with keeping fit that they might impose fines for obesity, but when a major religious festival came along, the resulting feast often lasted for several days. Typically the main course was pork, because the young men liked to show their courage and skill by hunting wild boar. Accompanying it would be lots of drink and trimmings like butter, cheese and honey--but none of the elaborate sauces and spices that the Romans were fond of. Guests gathered in a long building made of wood or mud bricks, sat on animal pelts or hay instead of chairs, and used low tables. Seating was done according to rank, with the best cut of meat going to the man whose boastful war stories were the most convincing. Very often the heavy drinking led to fights; as in battle, the combatants were daring, but not well organized. "Every single step the Celts took," the Roman Polybius explained, "being commended to them by the heat of passion rather than cold calculation."

Normally we divide Celtic history (and prehistory) into three periods, the Hallstatt (800-450 B.C.), La Tene (450-50 B.C.), and the Roman Periods (50 B.C.-500 A.D.). The urnfield culture that preceded these in central Europe (1200-800 B.C.) is also thought to be theirs, though as we noted earlier, no documentation exists to identify them at this early date. The Roman Period, when Rome ruled all of the Celtic-speaking peoples except the Irish and Picts, is beyond the scope of this chapter, so when we talk about the Celts, our main interest will be the Hallstatt and La Tene Periods.

If salt was the key to the Celts' economic success, iron was the key to their military success. They were the first people in Europe to become masters at iron working (the Greeks still preferred bronze armor), and though they probably learned the techniques from Middle Eastern smiths, they soon did better than their teachers. Iron smelting requires higher temperatures than copper, lead or tin, but iron ore is easier to find, so whoever knew how to shape and cast iron had a decided advantage. The Celts made a variety of tools and weapons with it: long swords, spears, plowshares, bridle bits for horses, and iron rims for their chariot wheels. Eventually the most skilled smiths invented steel, when they learned that adding carbon to iron under extreme heat produced weapons even tougher and sharper than what they had already. The blacksmith became the most esteemed craftsman in his village; other Celts thought his work was a type of magic.

Besides the blacksmiths, two other professions had skills so important that laymen credited them with the power to work magic: Druids and bards. The Druids were the priests who interpreted omens and observed the rituals needed to placate the gods and ward off evil; next to the chiefs they had the most power in the tribe. Most of their worship took place in forests, near the oak trees that they considered sacred. Mistletoe, holly and fire were special symbols, with the power to heal or purify when the Druids wielded them, while bogs were evil places to stay away from. The Druids also had the job of making sense out of the chaotic Celtic pantheon, which had several hundred gods that could change from one tribe to the next. Finally, the Druid committed most of his tribe's legends and laws to memory, as well as sciences like medicine, genealogy and astronomy; Julius Caesar reported that it took a novice Druid 20 years to memorize all that he needed to know, and he almost never shared that lore with the uninitiated.

No Celtic community was complete without a bard, who was more than just a minstrel. Besides providing music and entertainment, the bards served as oral historians, political critics, eulogizers, and motivators of the warriors. In fact, they were a subclass of the Druids, who passed their verses and poems from one bard to another orally, each adding some personal embroidery to the text. The use of certain formulas, such as fixed phrases and repeated verses or groups of verses, made memorization easier. With the conversion of the Celts to Christianity, the nature-worship of the Druids disappeared, but the bardic tradition continued throughout the medieval era, especially in Wales and Ireland. In Wales many medieval bards were nobles, and they had guilds to set their standards for writing and reciting. Even today Ireland produces more than its share of musicians, from folk singers to rock & roll bands like U2, so calling them modern-day bards is probably appropriate.

The Celtic religion was a bloody one, often calling for human sacrifice; from time to time we find the bodies of their victims in the bogs of northern Europe, especially in Denmark and the British Isles. They also had a head fetish, putting pictures of human heads on art objects, and keeping the severed heads of enemies as trophies, either nailed to poles or swinging from the necks of horses. Oddly enough, they believed that a head could still sing, speak, and guard against evil after its owner had died--though they had plenty of opportunities to learn this was not the case. The most prized heads--those of slain heroes--were embalmed in cedar oil, while at least one tribe coated skulls with gold to make drinking cups out of them. Sometimes a head might be placed in a food storage pit, presumably because they thought it would keep vermin and rot away.

For a wild and woolly people, the Celts had a remarkable sense of beauty. They combined human and animal characteristics to create mysterious images of their gods, and instead of going for realism, the way the Greeks did, they produced stylized interpretations of the world around them. This prompted one Italian archaeologist, Sabatino Moscati, to call the Celts "the world's first abstractionists, the first true moderns." In fact, when it comes to the basic elements of civilization (the arts, an economy, common language and religion, etc.), the Celts had nearly all of them; the main exceptions are a strong political organization and writing, so the author classifies them as a borderline civilization. And the lack of writing doesn't mean they were unable to learn it; we have a few Celtic language inscriptions written in the Etruscan, Latin, Greek and Carthaginian (Phoenician) alphabets. These probably came from individual Celts who served as mercenaries in the armies of the great classical empires. Eventually the Irish Celts invented a runic script, known as Ogham, made completely of vertical lines of different lengths. However, this occurred in the fourth century A.D., long after the Romans had submerged Celtic culture elsewhere. That, combined with the reluctance of the Druids to put down their knowledge in writing, explains why so little is known about Celtic history today. The first Celts who wrote down their literature were Irish monks in the eighth century A.D.; by then all that remained were myths and the eyewitness accounts of non-Celts like Julius Caesar.

Despite their raids, the Celts lived as simple farmers most of the time. Merchants from the nations of the Mediterranean, especially the Etruscans, would cross the Alps to trade with them. The Celts gave them amber, salt and metals; in return, the commodity they wanted the most was wine. Thus, we can thank Etruscan traders and Celtic connoisseurs for introducing grapes to France, beginning the French love for wine that continues to this day. When the Greeks founded Massilia (modern Marseilles) around 600 B.C., they started trading with the Celts, too, though they got a shock when they found that their new customers liked to drink Greek wine straight, without watering it down like they did back in Greece.

Both the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures got their names from the first sites of theirs to be excavated. Georg Ramsauer, the director of the Hallstatt salt mine, began exploring the local graves in 1846, while a dry spell in 1857 lowered Switzerland's Lake Neuchatel enough to allow Friedrich Schwab to discover La Tene artifacts in the lake bed. Besides the introduction of iron, the Hallstatt era saw an increase in wealth and a change in funeral customs; the Celts abandoned the urnfields and went back to burying their elite in mounds. The largest of these mounds were 300 feet wide, 42 feet across, and contained a chamber lined with wooden walls; the occupant was richly bedecked with jewelry and weapons, had a huge cauldron nearby for the customary funerary banquet, and was often laid out on a wagon, the Iron Age equivalent of a limousine burial. Sometimes women received the same honors, suggesting that they enjoyed more rights than their counterparts in the Mediterranean world.

Contact with the more advanced nations seems to have sparked a new flowering of art among the Celts. Around 450 B.C., the La Tene culture began moving out from the neighborhood of the Alps, to every place where the Celts already lived.⁽²⁵⁾ The simple geometric designs that mark Hallstatt pottery disappear, and in their place came the elaborate whorls, spirals and curlicues that we now associate with Celtic art. Soon these motifs appeared on everything they made-swords, shields, pots, brooches and other jewelry. The La Tene period also saw a wave of Celtic expansion eastward. From Hungary they poured down the Danube, settling every part of the Balkans except Illyria, Macedonia and Greece. They even entered the Ukrainian steppe around 270 B.C., pushing up against the Scythians when they reached the Black Sea.⁽²⁶⁾ However, an economic slump seems to have occurred during the same period; early La Tene graves were simpler than Hallstatt ones, and cremations made a partial comeback. This may have been because the Greeks and the Carthaginians were now rivals, disrupting trade in Gaul and everywhere else in the western Mediterranean.

Not until around 150 B.C. would elaborate burials return. Another sign of returning prosperity was that the hilltop forts of previous eras became walled towns, called oppida by the Romans; they now served as centers for commerce and manufacturing as well as defense. The Celts grew rich from trading with the Romans, but they also became dependent of Roman markets for their livelihood; this probably hurt them when Rome began expanding into Celtic territories, starting with north Italy.

From a political standpoint, the best years for the Celts were the fourth and early third centuries B.C. At this point they dominated most of Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans. In 390 B.C. a tribal migration of Celts into Italy wasted the Etruscans and captured Rome. In 279 some Gauls sacked Delphi, the holiest spot in Greece. Right after that three Celtic tribes, the Tolostibogii, the Tectosages and the Trocmi, invaded Asia Minor, invited by Bithynia's King Nicomedes to assist him in his struggle against Antiochus I of the Seleucid kingdom. They brought their families with them and settled in Asia Minor's heartland, becoming the Galatians of the New Testament era. It took a while, but eventually Classical civilization struck back. Attalus I (241-197), the Greek king of Pergamun, stood against the Gauls and defeated them; afterwards he commissioned several works of art to commemorate his victory, the most famous being The Dying Gaul. In the west the Celto-Iberians came under the rule of first Carthage, and then Rome, by 200 B.C. Rome got its revenge when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and divided it into three parts⁽²⁷⁾; we'll cover that campaign in detail when we get to Chapter 3.

Pre-Roman Britain

The original royal family of Britain claimed descent from Javan, the fourth son of Japheth, whereas the Celtic nation as a whole is most likely descended from Javan's brother Gomer. Nennius goes on to list twenty-two more patriarchs, the last one a Trojan named Anchises, who is known to us from Greco-Roman sources. Then the Trojan War took place, and when it ended Anchises fled the burning ruins of Troy with his son Aeneas. They took a ship full of refugees to Italy, and settled on the banks of the Tiber, near the place which would someday become Rome. The local king was a distant relative of the Trojans named Latinus, and in return for his kindness and hospitality, Aeneas defeated the enemy of Latinus, Turnus, king of the Rutuli. Then Aeneas married a daughter of Latinus, Lavinia, and had two sons: Aeneas-Silvius, who became the next king of the Latin tribes, and Ascanius. Ascanius in turn had a son named Silvius, and this Silvius seduced an unnamed niece of Lavinia; from this union came a son named Brutus (Bryttys in the Welsh chronicle). The mother of Brutus died while giving birth to him, and fifteen years later Brutus accidentally shot an arrow into his father's head while they were out hunting. Someone had prophesied previously that Brutus would kill both his parents, so they exiled him; the crown of the future Etruscans and Romans now passed to another descendant of Aeneas.

It was the departure of Brutus that made him the founder of the nation that would one day be named after him: Britain. First he went to Greece, and there he met some slaves, who like him were the descendants of Trojan warriors. They had been enslaved by Priam, the son of Achilles, "in vengeance for his father's death," and were later passed on to Pandrasus, king of the Dorian Greeks. When they learned that his ancestors were kings of Troy, the Trojans accepted Brutus and elected him leader of their band. Under him they rose against the Greeks, defeated Pandrasus in battle, and went looking for a land of their own. Their fleet sailed all the way across the Mediterranean, passed between the Pillars of Hercules (the Greek name for Gibraltar) and met another group of Trojans led by Corineus, who had also escaped their captors. They joined forces, with Brutus becoming king of the whole group, and sailed from Spain to Gaul. In Gaul they fought and defeated the Picts, who were led by a king named Goffar (Koffarffichti in Welsh). Instead of staying in Gaul, however, the Trojans set sail again, and made landfall at Totnes, in the English county of Devon. Then they moved to the Thames valley, where they founded a settlement they called Trinovantum (New Troy), the future city of London.⁽²⁸⁾ Brutus finally settled down here, and ruled for 23 years. This probably happened thirty-five years after the Trojan War, which, according to the chronology this author uses, ran from 874 to 864 B.C., so the best dates for the reign of Brutus are 829-806 B.C.

When Brutus left Greece, he took Ignoge, the daughter of Pandrasus, with him. They married and had three sons, Locrinus, Kamber and Albanactus. Upon Brutus' death they divided Britain between the sons and the Trojan chief Corineus. The lands they took were named after their new owners: Corineus took Cornwall, Kamber got Cambria (Wales), and Albanactus received Albany (Scotland). Locrinus got the rest (England minus Cornwall), which became the kingdom of Loegria.⁽²⁹⁾ To keep the ruling families friendly, Locrinus married Gwendolen, the daughter of Corineus, but later Locrinus took a second wife, Estrildis, whom he hid because he feared Corineus' reaction. As soon as Corineus was dead, Locrinus made Estrildis his queen and divorced his lawful wife. Gwendolen had plenty of friends, though; she went to her father's kingdom and raised an army, which killed Locrinus in the subsequent battle. Estrildis and her daughter Habren were drowned on Gwendolen's orders, and she ruled as queen of Loegria for the next fifteen years. When her son Maddan came of age, she abdicated and retired to her native Cornwall. Altogether Maddan ruled for an uneventful forty years, fifteen of them with Gwendolen (786?-746?).

Maddan bequeathed the kingdom to both of his sons, but each of them wanted it all, so a conflict called the First War of the Two Brothers broke out. This went on until they got tired of fighting, and the older brother, Mempricius (Membyr in the Welsh chronicle), called for a peace conference involving both brothers and a team of delegates supporting each. At the conference, he settled the dispute by killing his younger brother, Malin. Mempricius then ruled as a tyrant; he discarded his wife for unnatural vices, and generally misruled the kingdom, until he got separated from his companions on a hunting trip and was eaten by wolves.

His successor was Ebraucus (Welsh Efrawc), who ruled for 39 years (ca. 726-687). His reign was a successful one; he raided Gaul and founded a city named after himself, Kaerbrauc; the Romans later gave this place the Latin name of Eboracum--modern York. Next came Brutus Greenshield (Bryttys darian las in Welsh), who reigned for twelve years (ca. 687-675). After him was Leil, who founded the city of Kaerleil (modern Carlisle), but otherwise was a weak king, whose twenty-five-year reign ended in civil war (the Civil War of the Feeble King).

Order returned under Leil's son Hudibras (Run baladr bras in Welsh), who ruled Loegria for the next 39 years (ca. 650-611). A great city-builder, he founded Kaerreint (Canterbury), Kaerguenit (Winchester), and Paladur (Shaftesbury). The next king, Blalud, ruled for twenty years and founded Kaerbadum (Bath), which had hot springs reputed to cure leprosy. Blalud's other ideas, however, were not so practical; he promoted necromancy, the occultic art of speaking to dead spirits, and killed himself in a misguided attempt to fly. His son was Leir, the King Lear of Shakespearean fame. Leir enjoyed a long reign of sixty years (ca. 589-535 and 532-529), and founded the city of Kaerleir (Leicester), but lost his kingdom when he tried to divide it among his three daughters.

Leir's crown went to his youngest daughter, Cordelia, but five years later her sisters Goneril and Regan deposed her, and she committed suicide in prison. Then the kingdom was divided between two cousins: Marganus I (Morgan in Welsh), the son of Goneril, ruled the lands north of the Humber, while Regan's son Cunedagius (Kynedda) ruled the south. Two years after that relations between the kings cooled; Cunedagius pursued Marganus into Wales and killed him in battle at a place named after him, Margam near today's Port Talbot. Cunedagius ruled all of Loegria for the next thirty-three years (524-491), and was succeeded by a wise and frugal king named Rivallo (Rriallon, 491-473). His reign was remembered because in it occurred a rain of blood, a great swarm of flies, and a decimating plague. After Rivallo came four kings, of which only their names survived. Then came Gorboduc (Gwryvw, 465?-445?), the last descendant of Brutus to rule in Britain. When he grew old and senile, his sons, Ferrex and Porrex, quarreled over the succession. According to one legend, Porrex killed Ferrex, and since their mother, Judon, preferred Ferrex, she went insane, killing Porrex in his sleep by hacking him to pieces. Judon did not get away with murder; for this she was tied up in a sack and thrown into the Thames. The extinction of the royal family plunged the whole land into chaos.

Order returned around 440 B.C., when five kings fought each other and Pinner emerged the winner. However, ten years later Cloten (Klydno), king of Cornwall, overthrew him; his son Dunvallo Molmutius (Dyfnal moel myd) slew Pinner in battle. Cloten ruled both Cornwall and Loegria for the next ten years and bequeathed the enlarged realm to Dunvallo. Dunvallo's reign (420-380) produced the Molmutine law code, which Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us was still famous and honored in his day; remarkably, it still survives.⁽³⁰⁾ Dunvallo meted out such severe punishments to criminals that violent crime was virtually nonexistent in his day. Dunvallo's eldest son, Belinus the Great, ruled southern Loegria, Cambria and Cornwall from 380 to 374 B.C., while his brother Brennius (also spelled Bran) became king of Northumbria and Albany in 395 B.C.. Brennius crossed the Channel and became the Brennus who sacked Rome in 390 B.C.. Upon his return, however, he was not so fortunate; Belinus and Brennus fought the Second War of the Two Brothers. Belinus won, Brennus was forced to flee to Gaul, and Belinus became king of all Britain. Geoffrey tells us that Belinus built many roads, and that London's Billingsgate was built by and named after him. Finally Belinus won a victory to match that of Brennius; he defeated the king of Denmark, and forced him to pay a great tribute.

The son and successor of Belinus was Gurguit (Gwrgant Varf Drwch, 374-369), who was renowned for peace and justice at home. Across the North Sea, however, the king of Denmark withdrew his tribute, and Gurguit promptly invaded Denmark to reassert British authority there. Then he died peacefully and was buried in Caerleon-on-Usk. Incidentally, one account claims that on his return from Denmark, Gurguit intercepted the ships of Partholan's exiles, and sent them to the uninhabited island of Ireland, but this is probably a chronological error, since Irish legends have Partholan arrive more than a millennium earlier. Gurguit's son, Guithelin (369-363), was a benevolent ruler, but he is known mainly as the husband of Marcia, a learned woman who wrote the Marcian Laws. Later Alfred the Great would find the Marcian Laws and translate them into Latin, but he incorrectly thought they came from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, so today they are called the Mercian Laws.

Queen Marcia ruled for five years after Guithelin's death because their son was a minor. Then she died and the son, Sisillius II (Saessyllt), ruled for the next six years. After him came his two sons, Kinarius and Danius, and then the crown went to Morvidus (Morydd, 341-336). Morvidus was the illegitimate son of Danius and Tanguesteaia, and was known for both his heroism and cruelty. After he defeated an invasion of his kingdom, Morvidus broke the ancient Celtic laws concerning warfare, and personally executed many prisoners of war. "When he became so exhausted that he had to give up for a time, he ordered the remainder to be skinned alive, and in this state he had them burnt." His reign ended when reports reached the king of a monster terrorizing the western part of the kingdom.⁽³¹⁾ In his typical manner, he ran off to fight the monster singlehandedly, but it killed him and devoured his corpse "as if he had been a tiny fish."

The son of Morvidus, Gorbonianus (Gwrviniaw, 336-330), was renowned as a good ruler, but the younger brother who succeeded him, Archgallo (Arthal, 330-326), was so tyrannical that his behavior compelled the nobility of the realm to depose him. Another brother was elected in his place, Elidurus the Dutiful, so called because he showed compassion toward the deposed Archgallo. After ruling for five years, Elidurus abdicated so that a reformed Archgallo could return to the throne, and Archgallo's second reign was a complete opposite of his first. Archgallo died in 311 B.C., and Elidurus resumed the crown, only to see his reign interrupted a second time. There were two remaining brothers in the family, Ingenius and Peredurus; in 306 they rebelled and imprisoned Elidurus in a tower. Then they divided the kingdom along the Humber River; Ingenius got the south while Peredurus got the north. Ingenius died seven years later, and Peredurus, known as a wise and kind king, ruled the whole realm for the next three years. Upon his death in 296 B.C., Elidurus returned to rule for a third time.

After Elidurus, the picture became more complicated. Cousin succeeded cousin for a while, and though a father-son succession eventually returned, there must have been unrecorded political turmoil, for during the next 170 years, there were thirty-one reigns, each lasting an average of 5-6 years. The next long-lived king was Heli (Beli Mawr), who ruled for forty years, 113-73 B.C. Heli's son, Lud (73-58), rebuilt the city Brutus called New Troy, and named it after himself, Kaerlud. Kaerlud's name was later corrupted to Kaerlundein, which the Romans called Londinium, hence London. Lud also gave his name to an entrance of London, Ludgate; he was buried there. He was succeeded by two brothers, Cassivellaunus (Kasswallawn) and Nennius (Nynnyaw, no relation to the writer Nennius), who were ruling together when Julius Caesar brought Britain into the Roman world.

The Legends of the Emerald Isle

The first group to make Ireland their home were fifty women and three men; a woman named Cessair commanded them. The men were Cessair's father Bith, her consort Fintan son of Bochra, and the ship's pilot, Ladra. Why they came, and why there were so many more women than men, we do not know, though a possible answer is that they were the survivors of a tribe that lost a war and had to get away from everyone else. The legend states that Fintan had sixteen other girlfriends in the boat, and that Bith claimed another seventeen for himself; that left only sixteen women for Ladra, so he felt deprived. This must be the most ridiculous case of unreasonable greed and desire ever recorded.

Anyway, Ladra died not long after they landed. Bith traveled north with his harem and died next, so the women who had followed him rejoined Fintan's group. Fintan now had what may be every adolescent male's dream, but when the reality of the situation struck, he left, "afleeing before all the women." He hid at a place called Tul Tuinde, the Hill of the Wave, until a great flood hit the land. Fintan was the only survivor, living for a year in a cave below the waters. After that, he came back through several incarnations, living at different times as a salmon, a stag, a black boar or an eagle, a witness of the invasions that took place later.

How this legend connects to subsequent ones is not clear. Apparently the next arrivals were a tribe of great warriors called the Fomors, because everybody else reported having trouble with them. The Fomors were described as giants or misshapen demons (wartime propaganda, no doubt), though one, Bress, was noted for his good looks. According to the Annuals of Clonmacnoise, the Fomorians "were a sept descended from Cham (Ham?), the son of Noeh, . . . (who) lived by pyracie and spoile of other nations, and were in those days very troublesome to the whole world."⁽³³⁾

A group led by a man named Partholan came after that. According to the Irish chronology, they arrived in the 2,520^th year after the Creation.⁽³⁴⁾ Partholan was an outlaw who had to flee his homeland after killing his father; Geoffrey of Monmouth asserts that he came from the Spanish mainland, and that the colonists were Basclenses, or Basques. Whether or not this is true, Partholan ruled the colony for the last thirty years of his life. There is also a record of a battle they fought with the Fomors; then three hundred years after Partholan a plague wiped everybody out. Appropriately, the name of the area where they settled, Tallaght, came to mean a place to bury plague victims, and ancient burial mounds still litter the site today.

Partholan's settlement left no lasting impression, but the next invaders, led by Nemed, were somewhat more successful. Nemed and his followers came to Ireland in Anno Mundi 2859, either 1145 or 901 B.C. by our figuring. After their arrival they introduced new techniques for cultivation and fort-building. Nemed won three battles and slew two Fomor kings, but after he died, the Fomor leaders Morc and Conand got the upper hand. They forced the Nemedians to pay a crushing tribute, which included two thirds of their children; naturally they rebelled. The revolt went well at first--they took the fortress of Conand--but when Morc arrived with sixty ships the Nemedians were either slaughtered or forced to leave the island. They departed in three groups; two went to the Continent, and they reportedly came back later as the Tuatha de Danaan and the Fir Bolg. The third group, led by Soderic, went to the northernmost part of England and became the Picts. When we next hear of the Picts, in the Roman era, they were the Celtic tribe occupying Scotland, but some historians like J. D. Mackie believe the Picts also had ancestors of non-Indo-European origin, because they used a second language whose origin is no longer traceable.

So far Ireland had not been a lucky place for anybody but the Fomors. As for the Fir Bolg, legends disagree on whether they spent their exile in Greece or in Spain before coming back; wherever they were they existed as serfs, carrying dirt up hillsides in leather sacks to make terraced fields. Fir Bolg is supposed to mean "the people of the leather bags," but it could really mean "the people of the leather boats," since the Celts used hide-covered, tub-shaped boats called curraghs when they went to sea. Anyway, when the Fir Bolg returned to Ireland, they fought the Fomors to a draw, and settled down to build a prosperous community. However, they were subdued in Anno Mundi 3303 (701 or 457 B.C.), by the other returning colony, the Tuatha De Danaan.

Apparently several invasions from the Continent were necessary to create Ireland's Celtic population, of which the Tuatha De Danaan were the most important. In Irish literature they became superhuman, magical beings; the name means "People of the Goddess Danu," referring to the Earth Mother the Celts believed in. Legends reported that they came either from the sky, the land of the dead, the north, an island or group of islands, or an unknown location; take your pick. They brought with them four magical treasures from their original home: the invincible sword carried by their first leader, Nuada; an irresistible spear; a cauldron named Undry that could feed any number of people; and a stone named Lia Fal, that shouted in a human voice when the rightful king stood on it. All were wizards and musicians, and they were later remembered as the chief gods of Celtic mythology. A princess of the Tuatha De Danann, Eriu, named the island after herself; from Eriu we get Erin and Eire, two of Ireland's other names.

Nuada lost his right hand to the Fir Bolg champion, Sreng, at the first battle of Moytura. This forced him to abdicate, because a king was required to be physically perfect, and Bress the Fomor took his place. Bress was handsome, but also miserly and inhospitable; during his reign, both the weather and the crops went bad. He lost his throne because he insulted Cairbre, the bard of the Tuatha De Danaan. When Cairbre visited him, Bress gave him shelter in a miserable dark room with no fire or lamp, and a miserable pallet instead of a bed; the food was equally bad. Cairbre responded with a scathing satire against the king that caused Bress's face to break out in unsightly blotches. That made him unqualified to be king, so he was deposed.

Meanwhile Diancecht, the Danaan physician, made an artificial hand of silver for Nuada. It worked just like a real hand, so Nuada became king again; he was known as Nuada of the Silver Hand from now on. Bress went back to his people, the Fomors, and raised an army to get his throne back. They fought at a second battle of Moytura, in which Nuada was killed, though his side won.

Dagda, the most important figure in Celtic mythology, succeeded Nuada. He was later remembered as a god of the earth and fertility, much like the matriarch Danu; one of his titles was "Lord of Life and Death." Heavy, powerful and grey-haired, he dressed in leather like a peasant, and had a club so heavy that no one else could use it. He dragged his club behind him on two wheels when not using it, could kill nine men with one blow from it, and restore them to life with a touch from the other end. Dagda also owned an oak harp that played by itself, and its music controlled the order of the seasons. Finally he was a fair builder and engineer, for he made fortresses while Bress was king.

Dagda's wife was Boann, the goddess of the Boyne River. Originally she was the custodian and priestess of a sacred spring; nine hazel trees grew around it, and salmon of infinite knowledge ate the nuts which dropped from the trees into the spring. One day Boann neglected her duties and the water of the spring burst forth, and came after her. It flooded all the way to the sea, taking the salmon with it, and that is how the Boyne was created.

The best known of Dagda and Boann's children were Brigit, Angus Og, Mider, Ogma, and Bodh (pronounced Bove) the Red. Both Brigit and her brother Ogma were excellent poets, which the Irish have always considered important; Brigit was also the goddess of fire and the hearth, while Ogma was both the greatest fighter in the family and the inventor of the Ogham alphabet. Mider, who was almost as old as his father, became a god of the underworld; he may have owned a magic cauldron of rebirth, but we're not sure, because of the confusing number of harps and cauldrons in Celtic legends. Angus Og, the youngest, represented love and beauty; no one could hear the music from his gold harp without following the sound, and his kisses supposedly became invisible birds, which flew over the island to inspire others. However, he was cunning, not a lovesick romantic. On one occasion he told Dagda how to get the niggardly Bress to pay him a fair wage for his services. Another time he conned Dagda out of one of his two supernatural homes, since Angus didn't have one at the time. Finally he fell in love with a beautiful woman he had only seen in a dream, but managed to find her and win her hand, even though she had turned herself into a swan and joined a flock of 150 swans; that couldn't have been easy.

Several other members of the Tuatha De Danaan are worth mentioning. There was Dianecht the physician, who we met already; he could cure any wound except an amputation or an injury to the brain or spinal cord. His son and daughter, Miach and Airmid, had even greater medical skills. There was also Goibnu the tribal blacksmith, whose work was very important to everybody, Cairbre the bard, Credne the bronze-worker, Luchtaine the carpenter, Mathgan the wizard, and three terrible war queens named Morrigu, Macha and Nemain. Irish legend boldly declared that the Tuatha De Danaan were the most gifted and attractive people who ever lived; they inspired fear in everyone else and excelled in every art.

Despite all their power and talent, the Tuatha De Danaan fell to the last invaders of prehistoric Ireland. The newcomers called themselves the Milesians; they arrived in Anno Mundi 3500 (504 or 260 B.C.), marched to Tara, the capital of the Tuatha De Danaan, and defeated them just three days after their landing. Their previous home was Spain, though like the Fir Bolg, they may also have been in Greece at some point; the name Milesian suggests that they could have come from Miletus, the main Greek city-state on the eastern shore of the Aegean⁽³⁵⁾. They won because they had enchanted "swords of light" for weapons. This could be a folk memory of the arrival of the main Celtic community, or at least the Hallstatt culture. We saw previously that the Hallstatt Celts had iron and used chariots; Ireland was in the bronze age until now. It appears that after the Milesians took over, they added the stories of the Tuatha De Danaan to their own, making gods of their former opponents.

However, if this is the case, Goibnu the smith and Lugh the sun-god were Milesian to start with, and they never were really members of the Tuatha De Danaan community. Indeed, the story of Lugh makes him the last to join their ranks. According to it, he came to Tara while Nuada of the Silver Hand was celebrating his return to the throne. At the gate Lugh was told that only masters in some art or craft were allowed to enter, so he started listing his skills, only to hear that somebody among the Tuatha De Danaan could do each one already. A carpenter? They had Luchtaine. A smith? Of course they had one. A warrior? No shortage of them. A bard? There was Cairbre, and the rest had some talent for music. An expert cupbearer? They already had nine. A physician? Dianecht did that work. A wizard? They were hip deep in those. Finally Lugh said, "Then ask the king if he has with him a man who is master of all these crafts at once, and if he has, I will agree that there is no need of me in your company." They didn't have a "Renaissance man" like that, so Lugh of the Long Hand came in to join the pantheon.

The most important families of present-day Ireland trace their ancestry to the Milesians. As Cusack explained:

"As the Milesians were the last of the ancient colonists . . . only their genealogies, with a few exceptions, have been preserved. The genealogical tree begins, therefore, with the brothers Eber and Eremon, the two surviving leaders of the expedition, whose ancestors are traced back to Magog, the son of Japhet. The great southern chieftains, such as the MacCarthys and O'Briens, claim descent from Eber; the northern families of O'Connor, O'Donnell, and O'Neill, claim Eremon as their head. There are also other families claiming descent from Emer, the son of Ir, brother to Eber and Eremon; and also from their cousin Lugaidh, the son of Ith. From these four sources the principal Celtic families of Ireland have sprung . . ."⁽³⁶⁾

The Milesian conquest, and the later acceptance of Christianity, drove the old gods and heroes from the world of the living, but they have always remained in the Irish imagination. Recent years have seen a new interest in Celtic art and music, while neopagans have revived the two most important holidays of the pre-Christian era: Beltaine (April 30) and Samhain (October 31, the forerunner of today's Halloween). Gaelic, the ancient language of Ireland, is still used there and in Scotland; the second half of the twentieth century saw a revival of the old languages in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. In England the Celtic talent for storytelling produced the King Arthur legends; Arthur, if he existed, was a Celt, not an Anglo-Saxon. Today's French take more pride in their Gallic roots than in their Roman and Frankish ones; they have Gauloise cigarettes and Asterix comics to remind them of this heritage. In America one of the most popular basketball teams is the Boston Celtics. Thus, in a roundabout way the old culture of the Celts has found new admirers, assuring that it will not be forgotten any time soon.

1. Those who believe the Gibraltar wall theory claim that the strait was re-flooded after the Ice Age ended. According to them, when the Atlantic rose and surged over the wall, it created the greatest waterfall the world had ever seen, until the sea levels of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean reached equilibrium about a century later.

2. "Cave man" is a misnomer. They didn't all live in caves; those on the move were perfectly capable of building tents or lean-tos out of sticks and animal skins. Unfortunately most of their artifacts were exposed to the elements and not preserved for us, so the cave-dweller gets all the credit.

3. We haven't really come that far from the cave man who could paint. Pablo Picasso, the most important artist of the twentieth century, is reported to have said after visiting the famous Lascaux cave, "We have invented nothing!"

4. The late Marija Gimbutas produced several controversial books that rewrote European prehistory, the last one being The Civilisation of the Goddess. In these, she argued that before 2000 B.C., Europeans lived in peace, worshiped a mother goddess, and enjoyed equality between the sexes. From Minoan Crete to Lepenski Vir to the barrows of the megalith builders, Gimbutas saw symbols of the mother goddess everywhere. This near-Utopia ended when the aggressive, patriarchal culture of the Indo-Europeans forced its way in from the east. Gimbutas' ideas are only now finding acceptance in the academic community, but they are popular among feminists and New Agers, who see the society Gimbutas described as similar to the one they would like to create.

5. As the level of the Mediterranean rose the Bosporus was flooded and salt water poured into the Black Sea, killing the fresh-water life it contained. The decomposed remains of these creatures poisoned the water, and today the stagnant lower layers of the Black Sea, rich in hydrogen sulfide and poor in oxygen, are devoid of life below 310 meters (1,020 ft). This is the largest lifeless body of water in the world today. Recently Robert Ballard, an underwater archaeologist, has been exploring the Black Sea, looking for the remains of ships and submerged villages which he expects will be better preserved than those found anywhere else.

6. Jared Diamond claimed in Guns, Germs and Steel that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in history. Not only were people left malnourished and disease-ridden, food could now be stockpiled, allowing some people to do things besides looking for food. These people used their spare time to invent deadlier weapons, soldiers, warfare, class divisions between those who had stored food and those who did not, and inequality between the sexes. A few other politically correct historians have echoed the same sentiment, like Tom Standage, who wrote in An Edible History of Humanity that agriculture is a "profoundly unnatural activity." In defense of farming, we should note that the benefits gained by the elite did eventually trickle down to the peasants, though we have to go to the middle of the bronze age before we see much improvement in their lives (e.g., in Egypt, it happened during the Middle Kingdom, when the pharaohs were no longer spending a big chunk of the country's wealth on pyramid building). We also should remember the old adage from Thomas Hobbes about how the life of the savage is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; those who live by hunting are more likely to die violently at a young age than those living within the boundaries of civilization. Finally, those who believe agriculture is a mistake cannot offer another way to feed today's global population.

7. Besides the benefits of defense and fishing, the presence of fresh water under the lake houses provided an easy solution to the sanitation problem. The residents probably still wore animal skins at this date, but some fragments of woven flax have turned up at the lake house sites, telling us that they already knew the techniques for making cloth and nets.

8. We call this period the copper or chalcolithic Age, because copper and stone tools were used together.

9. Stonehenge shows us that prehistoric Britons knew how to cooperate in large groups to get something done. Another example is "Grime's Graves," a rock quarry in Norfolk county. Here stone age miners dug more than 360 pits, each about eight feet deep, to get flint for tool-making; underground flint was of better quality than flint which had been exposed to weather on the surface. The archaeologist who examined this site in 1971 estimated that it would have taken a team of 6-7 men about 45 days to excavate each hole, and the job would require removing 800-1,000 tons of sand and chalk to produce eight tons of flint.

10. Also dubbed "Oetzi," after the surrounding mountains.

11. The ancestry of the Basques is one of the great unsolved mysteries that anthropologists face. They are not Celts or Iberians; the Basque language is not Indo-European, nor can it be easily grouped with any other modern language. The Basques know they have been a distinct group for an awfully long time, and claim in one of their stories that when God needed some bones to create the first man with, He took them from a Basque cemetery. They call their ancestors the Barskunes, and the Aquitanians, a tribe that lived in southwest France, may be related to them, but when it comes to tracing where the Barskunes came from, your guess is as good as mine. Since this was the area where cave art has turned up, there is also a possible blood connection with the Cro-Magnon artists. Until more solid evidence turns up, it will have to do. A few have suggested that the Basques are related to the Etruscans, who weren't Indo-European either, but since we do not fully understand the Etruscan language we have nothing to go on here.

12. The Greeks gave the Minoans a Middle Eastern origin. In their myths the god Zeus was always chasing pretty mortal women. One of these was Europa, the princess of Tyre. Zeus came to her in the form of a beautiful bull, and when she climbed on him, he jumped into the sea and swam to Crete. Their affair produced several sons, one of which was Minos. Zeus also promised to name a continent after Europa, hence Europe.

13. The volcano left a layer of ash over a large part of the eastern Mediterranean, and some of it may have blown all the way to Egypt. Some think that the date of this event is too close to the date of the Exodus to be a coincidence, and the two are in fact related; the ash may have caused the plague of darkness, for instance.

14. However, when today's mystics and "New Age" gurus talk about Atlantis, they seem to have something completely different in mind. Their Atlantis sounds more like Babel or the Antediluvian civilization. See The Genesis Chronicles, Chapters 9 and 12, for details on those.

15. The behavior that got heroes into epic literature would not serve them well in a more civilized society. If you had them for neighbors, chances are that you would not want such ruffians to come to your party!

16. Philologists have identified several words of non-Greek origin in the Greek language, which they believe came from the Pelasgians or Minoans. Many of them end in thos, like Korinthos (the city of Corinth), hyacinthos (hyacinth), minthos (mint), and agaminthos (bath); the last one suggests that the first Greeks didn't bathe!

17. Arthur Custance suggested that the Pelasgians were Semites, descended from a patriarch named Peleg (Genesis 10:25); he also ventured that the Hebrus River in Macedonia was named after Peleg's father, Eber. See Noah's Three Sons, Grand Rapids, MI, Zondervan Publishing House, 1975, pgs. 115-117.

18. Bronze Age Greeks have several names in history books. Homer called them Achaioi, or Achaeans, while those who give archaeology precedence over literature prefer Mycenaeans, after the name of their main city.

19. One of Schliemann's clues was a scene from the Iliad where Achilles chased Hector around Troy three times. Since both heroes wore armor, it must have been a small town!

20. This may have been a kidnapping, but judging from Helen's behavior, she liked Paris better anyway. Herodotus reported that in the Egyptian version of the story, when Paris left Greece a storm blew blew him to Egypt; he and Helen are brought before an angry Pharaoh, who is disgusted at the behavior of these wife-stealing barbarians. Paris was ordered to leave, but Pharaoh kept Helen in Egypt until her husband came for her. There she stayed for ten years, while the Greeks were fighting to get her out of Troy! After the war Menelaus found out the Trojans were telling the truth when they protested that Helen wasn't there, and went to Egypt to fetch her. Herodotus concluded that Homer rejected this story because it was less exciting than the one he used.

21. Actually, some of the most famous details of the Trojan War, like the death of Achilles and the Trojan Horse episode, do not appear in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Whatever Homer had to say about the events between the two epics may have been lost, or perhaps he did not bother to talk about them because in his day they were common knowledge. To fill in this gap we have to rely on Quintus of Smyrna, an obscure Roman author from the 3rd century A.D.

22. Palmer, Leonard R., Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961, ch. 5, "The Last Days of Pylos."

23. On the Greek island of Lemnos, a controversial inscription was found in 1885. The language is unknown, but bears a strong resemblance to Etruscan. Some believe it is a Pelasgian inscription; if this is true, the Etruscans and the Pelasgians were related. Another possibility is that Etruscan pirates had a base on Lemnos.

24. This makes sense to the author, since the Romans believed the Latins were descended from Aeneas, a survivor of the Trojan War who moved to Italy after Troy was burned.

25. Both the Hallstatt and La Tene styles spread across the Continent within a generation or two, but they took much longer to cross the English Channel. Hallstatt-era artifacts first appear in England around 500 B.C., La Tene items about 220 B.C. In Wales and Ireland they arrived even later, and in Scotland they scarcely arrived at all, probably for the same logistical reasons that would keep the Picts free from the Romans. In fact, the Picts themselves didn't reach Scotland until 100 B.C.

26. Some Celts may have migrated to the Far East as well. The language of the Tocharians, the founders of the Central Asian kingdom of Kushan, has been identified as Celtic. When we first hear of them, around 200 B.C., they were living near the western end of the Great Wall, in China's Gansu province. Now it looks like they left the cemeteries of Caucasian mummies that were recently discovered in the Tarim Basin. For the author, the clincher was the report that some of the mummies had simple plaid designs on their clothing, resembling the style of early Celtic fashions in Europe. Contrary to what comedian Steve Martin once said, in northwest China dead men do wear plaid!

27. Lugdunensis, Belgica and Aquitania; we don't count the Mediterranean shore because it had already been under Roman rule for several decades.

28. In 1999 archaeologists found that London Bridge is much older than we thought; they discovered the remains of a 3,500-year-old wooden bridge that once spanned the Thames. Considering the technology of the day, this must have been an awesome achievement.

29. The word for England in the modern Welsh language is still Lloegr.

30. Ancient Laws of Cambria, London, 1823.

31. Whatever it was, Geoffrey of Monmouth called it a belua.

32. In Tudor England, Spenser wrote about Ireland's special nature: "Lord, how quickly doth that country alter one's nature!"

33. Cusack, M. F. (translated by Conell MacGeoghegan), The Illustrated History of Ireland, 1868, pg. 20. Reprinted by Bracken Books, London, 1987.

34. This means Partholan came to Ireland in 1484 B.C. if Archbishop Ussher's date for the Creation is correct; if you follow the Jewish calendar, the date becomes 1240 B.C. Personally I think they may have been counting from the Flood, rather than the Creation, which would make the late date closer to the mark; see Chapter 11 of The Genesis Chronicles for more details.
There is also a report of Brutus displacing an indigenous race of "giants" when he settled Britain. This could be the same race as the Fomors, or a closely related one. The Fomors could also have been the last Neanderthals in Europe; in The Genesis Chronicles I list other possible interactions between cave men and the civilized world.

35. The Roman name for Ireland was Hibernia. It seems to have come from Iberia, the ancient name for Spain, and was transferred to Ireland as a result of the Milesian migration.

36. Cusack, op. cit., pg. 82.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball