Part 12

Next, much to our annoyance, we have what is almost a temporary black-out. According to the system of terminology I favor, our next “assemblage” after that of Ubaid is called the _Warka_ phase, from the Arabic name for the site of Uruk or Erich. We know it only from six or seven levels in a narrow test-pit at Warka, and from an even smaller hole at another site. This “assemblage,” so far, is known only by its pottery, some of which still bears Ubaidian style painting. The characteristic Warkan pottery is unpainted, with smoothed red or gray surfaces and peculiar shapes. Unquestionably, there must be a great deal more to say about the Warkan assemblage, but someone will first have to excavate it!

THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION

After our exasperation with the almost unknown Warka interlude, following the brilliant “false dawn” of Ubaid, we move next to an assemblage which yields traces of a preponderance of those elements which we noted (p. 144) as meaning civilization. This assemblage is that called _Proto-Literate_; it already contains writing. On the somewhat shaky principle that writing, however early, means history--and no longer prehistory--the assemblage is named for the historical implications of its content, and no longer after the name of the site where it was first found. Since some of the older books used site-names for this assemblage, I will tell you that the Proto-Literate includes the latter half of what used to be called the “Uruk period” _plus_ all of what used to be called the “Jemdet Nasr period.” It shows a consistent development from beginning to end.

I shall, in fact, leave much of the description and the historic implications of the Proto-Literate assemblage to the conventional historians. Professor T. J. Jacobsen, reaching backward from the legends he finds in the cuneiform writings of slightly later times, can in fact tell you a more complete story of Proto-Literate culture than I can. It should be enough here if I sum up briefly what the excavated archeological evidence shows.

We have yet to dig a Proto-Literate site in its entirety, but the indications are that the sites cover areas the size of small cities. In architecture, we know of large and monumental temple structures, which were built on elaborate high terraces. The plans and decoration of these temples follow the pattern set in the Ubaid phase: the chief difference is one of size. The German excavators at the site of Warka reckoned that the construction of only one of the Proto-Literate temple complexes there must have taken 1,500 men, each working a ten-hour day, five years to build.

ART AND WRITING

If the architecture, even in its monumental forms, can be seen to stem from Ubaidian developments, this is not so with our other evidence of Proto-Literate artistic expression. In relief and applied sculpture, in sculpture in the round, and on the engraved cylinder seals--all of which now make their appearance--several completely new artistic principles are apparent. These include the composition of subject-matter in groups, commemorative scenes, and especially the ability and apparent desire to render the human form and face. Excellent as the animals of the Franco-Cantabrian art may have been (see p. 85), and however handsome were the carefully drafted geometric designs and conventionalized figures on the pottery of the early farmers, there seems to have been, up to this time, a mental block about the drawing of the human figure and especially the human face. We do not yet know what caused this self-consciousness about picturing themselves which seems characteristic of men before the appearance of civilization. We do know that with civilization, the mental block seems to have been removed.

Clay tablets bearing pictographic signs are the Proto-Literate forerunners of cuneiform writing. The earliest examples are not well understood but they seem to be “devices for making accounts and for remembering accounts.” Different from the later case in Egypt, where writing appears fully formed in the earliest examples, the development from simple pictographic signs to proper cuneiform writing may be traced, step by step, in Mesopotamia. It is most probable that the development of writing was connected with the temple and the need for keeping account of the temple’s possessions. Professor Jacobsen sees writing as a means for overcoming space, time, and the increasing complications of human affairs: “Literacy, which began with ... civilization, enhanced mightily those very tendencies in its development which characterize it as a civilization and mark it off as such from other types of culture.”

While the new principles in art and the idea of writing are not foreshadowed in the Ubaid phase, or in what little we know of the Warkan, I do not think we need to look outside southern Mesopotamia for their beginnings. We do know something of the adjacent areas, too, and these beginnings are not there. I think we must accept them as completely new discoveries, made by the people who were developing the whole new culture pattern of classic southern Mesopotamia. Full description of the art, architecture, and writing of the Proto-Literate phase would call for many details. Men like Professor Jacobsen and Dr. Adams can give you these details much better than I can. Nor shall I do more than tell you that the common pottery of the Proto-Literate phase was so well standardized that it looks factory made. There was also some handsome painted pottery, and there were stone bowls with inlaid decoration. Well-made tools in metal had by now become fairly common, and the metallurgist was experimenting with the casting process. Signs for plows have been identified in the early pictographs, and a wheeled chariot is shown on a cylinder seal engraving. But if I were forced to a guess in the matter, I would say that the development of plows and draft-animals probably began in the Ubaid period and was another of the great innovations of that time.

The Proto-Literate assemblage clearly suggests a highly developed and sophisticated culture. While perhaps not yet fully urban, it is on the threshold of urbanization. There seems to have been a very dense settlement of Proto-Literate sites in classic southern Mesopotamia, many of them newly founded on virgin soil where no earlier settlements had been. When we think for a moment of what all this implies, of the growth of an irrigation system which must have existed to allow the flourish of this culture, and of the social and political organization necessary to maintain the irrigation system, I think we will agree that at last we are dealing with civilization proper.

FROM PREHISTORY TO HISTORY

Now it is time for the conventional ancient historians to take over the story from me. Remember this when you read what they write. Their real base-line is with cultures ruled over by later kings and emperors, whose writings describe military campaigns and the administration of laws and fully organized trading ventures. To these historians, the Proto-Literate phase is still a simple beginning for what is to follow. If they mention the Ubaid assemblage at all--the one I was so lyrical about--it will be as some dim and fumbling step on the path to the civilized way of life.

I suppose you could say that the difference in the approach is that as a prehistorian I have been looking forward or upward in time, while the historians look backward to glimpse what I’ve been describing here. My base-line was half a million years ago with a being who had little more than the capacity to make tools and fire to distinguish him from the animals about him. Thus my point of view and that of the conventional historian are bound to be different. You will need both if you want to understand all of the story of men, as they lived through time to the present.

End of PREHISTORY

You’ll doubtless easily recall your general course in ancient history: how the Sumerian dynasties of Mesopotamia were supplanted by those of Babylonia, how the Hittite kingdom appeared in Anatolian Turkey, and about the three great phases of Egyptian history. The literate kingdom of Crete arose, and by 1500 B.C. there were splendid fortified Mycenean towns on the mainland of Greece. This was the time--about the whole eastern end of the Mediterranean--of what Professor Breasted called the “first great internationalism,” with flourishing trade, international treaties, and royal marriages between Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hittites. By 1200 B.C., the whole thing had fragmented: “the peoples of the sea were restless in their isles,” and the great ancient centers in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were eclipsed. Numerous smaller states arose--Assyria, Phoenicia, Israel--and the Trojan war was fought. Finally Assyria became the paramount power of all the Near East, presently to be replaced by Persia.

A new culture, partaking of older west Asiatic and Egyptian elements, but casting them with its own tradition into a new mould, arose in mainland Greece.

I once shocked my Classical colleagues to the core by referring to Greece as “a second degree derived civilization,” but there is much truth in this. The principles of bronze- and then of iron-working, of the alphabet, and of many other elements in Greek culture were borrowed from western Asia. Our debt to the Greeks is too well known for me even to mention it, beyond recalling to you that it is to Greece we owe the beginnings of rational or empirical science and thought in general. But Greece fell in its turn to Rome, and in 55 B.C. Caesar invaded Britain.

I last spoke of Britain on page 142; I had chosen it as my single example for telling you something of how the earliest farming communities were established in Europe. Now I will continue with Britain’s later prehistory, so you may sense something of the end of prehistory itself. Remember that Britain is simply a single example we select; the same thing could be done for all the other countries of Europe, and will be possible also, some day, for further Asia and Africa. Remember, too, that prehistory in most of Europe runs on for three thousand or more years _after_ conventional ancient history begins in the Near East. Britain is a good example to use in showing how prehistory ended in Europe. As we said earlier, it lies at the opposite end of Europe from the area of highest cultural achievement in those times, and should you care to read more of the story in detail, you may do so in the English language.

METAL USERS REACH ENGLAND

We left the story of Britain with the peoples who made three different assemblages--the Windmill Hill, the megalith-builders, and the Peterborough--making adjustments to their environments, to the original inhabitants of the island, and to each other. They had first arrived about 2500 B.C., and were simple pastoralists and hoe cultivators who lived in little village communities. Some of them planted little if any grain. By 2000 B.C., they were well settled in. Then, somewhere in the range from about 1900 to 1800 B.C., the traces of the invasion of a new series of peoples began to appear.

The first newcomers are called the Beaker folk, after the name of a peculiar form of pottery they made. The beaker type of pottery seems oldest in Spain, where it occurs with great collective tombs of megalithic construction and with copper tools. But the Beaker folk who reached England seem already to have moved first from Spain(?) to the Rhineland and Holland. While in the Rhineland, and before leaving for England, the Beaker folk seem to have mixed with the local population and also with incomers from northeastern Europe whose culture included elements brought originally from the Near East by the eastern way through the steppes. This last group has also been named for a peculiar article in its assemblage; the group is called the Battle-axe folk. A few Battle-axe folk elements, including, in fact, stone battle-axes, reached England with the earliest Beaker folk,[6] coming from the Rhineland.

[6] The British authors use the term “Beaker folk” to mean both archeological assemblage and human physical type. They speak of a “... tall, heavy-boned, rugged, and round-headed” strain which they take to have developed, apparently in the Rhineland, by a mixture of the original (Spanish?) beaker-makers and the northeast European battle-axe makers. However, since the science of physical anthropology is very much in flux at the moment, and since I am not able to assess the evidence for these physical types, I _do not_ use the term “folk” in this book with its usual meaning of standardized physical type. When I use “folk” here, I mean simply _the makers of a given archeological assemblage_. The difficulty only comes when assemblages are named for some item in them; it is too clumsy to make an adjective of the item and refer to a “beakerian” assemblage.

The Beaker folk settled earliest in the agriculturally fertile south and east. There seem to have been several phases of Beaker folk invasions, and it is not clear whether these all came strictly from the Rhineland or Holland. We do know that their copper daggers and awls and armlets are more of Irish or Atlantic European than of Rhineland origin. A few simple habitation sites and many burials of the Beaker folk are known. They buried their dead singly, sometimes in conspicuous individual barrows with the dead warrior in his full trappings. The spectacular element in the assemblage of the Beaker folk is a group of large circular monuments with ditches and with uprights of wood or stone. These “henges” became truly monumental several hundred years later; while they were occasionally dedicated with a burial, they were not primarily tombs. The effect of the invasion of the Beaker folk seems to cut across the whole fabric of life in Britain.

There was, however, a second major element in British life at this time. It shows itself in the less well understood traces of a group again called after one of the items in their catalogue, the Food-vessel folk. There are many burials in these “food-vessel” pots in northern England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the pottery itself seems to link back to that of the Peterborough assemblage. Like the earlier Peterborough people in the highland zone before them, the makers of the food-vessels seem to have been heavily involved in trade. It is quite proper to wonder whether the food-vessel pottery itself was made by local women who were married to traders who were middlemen in the transmission of Irish metal objects to north Germany and Scandinavia. The belt of high, relatively woodless country, from southwest to northeast, was already established as a natural route for inland trade.

MORE INVASIONS

About 1500 B.C., the situation became further complicated by the arrival of new people in the region of southern England anciently called Wessex. The traces suggest the Brittany coast of France as a source, and the people seem at first to have been a small but “heroic” group of aristocrats. Their “heroes” are buried with wealth and ceremony, surrounded by their axes and daggers of bronze, their gold ornaments, and amber and jet beads. These rich finds show that the trade-linkage these warriors patronized spread from the Baltic sources of amber to Mycenean Greece or even Egypt, as evidenced by glazed blue beads.

The great visual trace of Wessex achievement is the final form of the spectacular sanctuary at Stonehenge. A wooden henge or circular monument was first made several hundred years earlier, but the site now received its great circles of stone uprights and lintels. The diameter of the surrounding ditch at Stonehenge is about 350 feet, the diameter of the inner circle of large stones is about 100 feet, and the tallest stone of the innermost horseshoe-shaped enclosure is 29 feet 8 inches high. One circle is made of blue stones which must have been transported from Pembrokeshire, 145 miles away as the crow flies. Recently, many carvings representing the profile of a standard type of bronze axe of the time, and several profiles of bronze daggers--one of which has been called Mycenean in type--have been found carved in the stones. We cannot, of course, describe the details of the religious ceremonies which must have been staged in Stonehenge, but we can certainly imagine the well-integrated and smoothly working culture which must have been necessary before such a great monument could have been built.

“THIS ENGLAND”

The range from 1900 to about 1400 B.C. includes the time of development of the archeological features usually called the “Early Bronze Age” in Britain. In fact, traces of the Wessex warriors persisted down to about 1200 B.C. The main regions of the island were populated, and the adjustments to the highland and lowland zones were distinct and well marked. The different aspects of the assemblages of the Beaker folk and the clearly expressed activities of the Food-vessel folk and the Wessex warriors show that Britain was already taking on her characteristic trading role, separated from the European continent but conveniently adjacent to it. The tin of Cornwall--so important in the production of good bronze--as well as the copper of the west and of Ireland, taken with the gold of Ireland and the general excellence of Irish metal work, assured Britain a trader’s place in the then known world. Contacts with the eastern Mediterranean may have been by sea, with Cornish tin as the attraction, or may have been made by the Food-vessel middlemen on their trips to the Baltic coast. There they would have encountered traders who traveled the great north-south European road, by which Baltic amber moved southward to Greece and the Levant, and ideas and things moved northward again.

There was, however, the Channel between England and Europe, and this relative isolation gave some peace and also gave time for a leveling and further fusion of culture. The separate cultural traditions began to have more in common. The growing of barley, the herding of sheep and cattle, and the production of woolen garments were already features common to all Britain’s inhabitants save a few in the remote highlands, the far north, and the distant islands not yet fully touched by food-production. The “personality of Britain” was being formed.

CREMATION BURIALS BEGIN

Along with people of certain religious faiths, archeologists are against cremation (for other people!). Individuals to be cremated seem in past times to have been dressed in their trappings and put upon a large pyre: it takes a lot of wood and a very hot fire for a thorough cremation. When the burning had been completed, the few fragile scraps of bone and such odd beads of stone or other rare items as had resisted the great heat seem to have been whisked into a pot and the pot buried. The archeologist is left with the pot and the unsatisfactory scraps in it.

Tentatively, after about 1400 B.C. and almost completely over the whole island by 1200 B.C., Britain became the scene of cremation burials in urns. We know very little of the people themselves. None of their settlements have been identified, although there is evidence that they grew barley and made enclosures for cattle. The urns used for the burials seem to have antecedents in the pottery of the Food-vessel folk, and there are some other links with earlier British traditions. In Lancashire, a wooden circle seems to have been built about a grave with cremated burials in urns. Even occasional instances of cremation may be noticed earlier in Britain, and it is not clear what, if any, connection the British cremation burials in urns have with the classic _Urnfields_ which were now beginning in the east Mediterranean and which we shall mention below.

The British cremation-burial-in-urns folk survived a long time in the highland zone. In the general British scheme, they make up what is called the “Middle Bronze Age,” but in the highland zone they last until after 900 B.C. and are considered to be a specialized highland “Late Bronze Age.” In the highland zone, these later cremation-burial folk seem to have continued the older Food-vessel tradition of being middlemen in the metal market.

Granting that our knowledge of this phase of British prehistory is very restricted because the cremations have left so little for the archeologist, it does not appear that the cremation-burial-urn folk can be sharply set off from their immediate predecessors. But change on a grander scale was on the way.

REVERBERATIONS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE

In the centuries immediately following 1000 B.C., we see with fair clarity two phases of a cultural process which must have been going on for some time. Certainly several of the invasions we have already described in this chapter were due to earlier phases of the same cultural process, but we could not see the details.

Around 1200 B.C. central Europe was upset by the spread of the so-called Urnfield folk, who practiced cremation burial in urns and whom we also know to have been possessors of long, slashing swords and the horse. I told you above that we have no idea that the Urnfield folk proper were in any way connected with the people who made cremation-burial-urn cemeteries a century or so earlier in Britain. It has been supposed that the Urnfield folk themselves may have shared ideas with the people who sacked Troy. We know that the Urnfield pressure from central Europe displaced other people in northern France, and perhaps in northwestern Germany, and that this reverberated into Britain about 1000 B.C.

Soon after 750 B.C., the same thing happened again. This time, the pressure from central Europe came from the Hallstatt folk who were iron tool makers: the reverberation brought people from the western Alpine region across the Channel into Britain.

At first it is possible to see the separate results of these folk movements, but the developing cultures soon fused with each other and with earlier British elements. Presently there were also strains of other northern and western European pottery and traces of Urnfield practices themselves which appeared in the finished British product. I hope you will sense that I am vastly over-simplifying the details.

The result seems to have been--among other things--a new kind of agricultural system. The land was marked off by ditched divisions. Rectangular fields imply the plow rather than hoe cultivation. We seem to get a picture of estate or tribal boundaries which included village communities; we find a variety of tools in bronze, and even whetstones which show that iron has been honed on them (although the scarce iron has not been found). Let me give you the picture in Professor S. Piggott’s words: “The ... Late Bronze Age of southern England was but the forerunner of the earliest Iron Age in the same region, not only in the techniques of agriculture, but almost certainly in terms of ethnic kinship ... we can with some assurance talk of the Celts ... the great early Celtic expansion of the Continent is recognized to be that of the Urnfield people.”

Thus, certainly by 500 B.C., there were people in Britain, some of whose descendants we may recognize today in name or language in remote parts of Wales, Scotland, and the Hebrides.

THE COMING OF IRON