Читать книгу The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study - C. F. Keary - Страница 9

‘And but the great command o’ersways our order,

She should in ground unsanctified have lodged

To the last trumpet: for charitable prayers,

Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her.’

* * * * * * * * *

The body of him for whom the mound was built was not buried in the centre, but at one end, and that commonly the east, for in most cases the barrows lie east and west. It is never stretched out flat, but lies or sits in a crouched attitude, the head brought down upon the breast, and the knees raised up to meet the chin. So that the dead man was generally left facing toward the west—the going down of the sun. There cannot but be some significance in this. The daily death of the sun has, in all ages and to all people, spoken of man’s own death, his western course has seemed to tell of that last journey upon which all are bent. So that the resting-place of the soul is nearly always imagined to lie westward in the home of the setting sun. For the rest, there seems little doubt that the barrows represent nothing else—though upon a large scale—than the dwelling-home of the time, and we may believe that the greater part of the funeral rights connected with the mounds were very literal and unsymbolical.[13] The Eskimo and Lapps of our day dwell in huts no more commodious than the small chambers of the barrows, and exceedingly like them in shape; only they keep them warm by heaping up over them not earth but snow. In these hovels they sit squatting, in an attitude not unlike that of the skeleton of the tumuli. Of the human remains the skulls are small and round, and have a prominent ridge over the sockets of the eyes, showing that the ancient race was of small stature with round heads—what is called brachycephalus, or short-headed, and had over-hanging eyebrows; in short, their skeletons bare a considerable resemblance to those of the modern Laplanders.

We are still, however, left in darkness about that part of the stone-age thought which has left the grandest traces, and of which we should so much have wished to be informed; I mean the religion. Besides the tumuli we have those enormous piles of stone called cromlechs, or dolmens, and sometimes miscalled Druid circles—such as the well-known Stonehenge; these cromlechs were, we may believe, temples or sacred places. Each arrangement of the stones is generally like a simple portico, made by placing one enormous block upon two others; and these porticoes are sometimes arranged in circles, as at Stonehenge, sometimes in long colonnades, as at Carnac in Brittany. Lesser dolmens have been found in most European countries. There can be little doubt that these huge monuments possessed a religious character. And here is one proof of the fact. As a rule, the grave-mounds—the tumuli—are built upon elevations commanding a considerable prospect, and it is rare to find two within sight. Yet over Salisbury Plain, and the part about Stonehenge, they are much more numerous, as many as a hundred and fifty having been discovered in this neighbourhood, as though all the ground about this great cromlech were a hallowed region, and it were a desired privilege to be buried within such sacred precincts. Of the worship which these stone altars commemorate we know absolutely nothing. There seems to be no reasonable doubt that they belong to the period we are describing. The name Druid Circles, which has been sometimes given them, is an absurd anachronism, for, as we shall have occasion to see later on, the ancestors of the Kelts (or Celts), to whom the Druidical religion belonged, were probably at this time still living on the banks of the Oxus in Central Asia; at any rate they had not yet migrated to Brittany or to Great Britain. Thus, though we must continue to wonder how these people could ever have raised such enormous stones as altars of their religion, the nature of that religion itself is hidden from us.

The tumuli and the relics which they contain are the truest representatives of the second stone age which have come down to us. The barrows raise their summits in every land, and the characteristic features of the remains found in them are the same for each. We must judge that they, that the most genuine stone-age tumuli, arose during the greatest extension of the stone-age races, before any new peoples had come to dispute their territory. What the kitchen-middens show in the germ, they show in its perfection—all the perfection attainable by it.

We have already enumerated the most important forms of weapons and implements found in these tumuli; and there would be no use in entering upon a lengthy verbal description of what would be so much better illustrated by drawings. The books enumerated in the Appendix give abundant illustrations of the stone-age remains. One caution, however, we need to give the reader. This second stone age is called, we know, the age of polished stone. But, as has been already said, that by no means implies that all the implements made in these days were polished. On the contrary, certain stone manufactures, notably arrow-heads, were never polished. They went on being made by chipping, not only during the whole of the second stone age, but far into the first metal age, when bronze had been introduced and was used for the manufacture of numerous weapons and implements. The grinding of the edges of certain sharp weapons is a more important characteristic than the polishing of the whole or a portion of their surface. But this grinding was not universally employed, but used generally only for the larger implements.

The lake

villages.

And now, having dealt with the remains from the tumuli, the flower, as we may call them, of the second stone period, we pass on to a third series of remains, which must be in part contemporary with the stone-using men, and have continued on and been absorbed into the metal age, which next supervened. These remains came from what are called the lake-dwellings, and though traces of such dwellings have been found in many countries in Europe, in our isles among others, still the chief provenance of the lake-dwellings, so far as our discoveries yet go, is in Switzerland and the north of Italy. But let it not be supposed that these lake-dwellings extended over a short period. A variety of separate pieces of evidence enforce upon us the conclusion that the stone age in Europe endured for at least two thousand years. Even the latter portion of that epoch will allow a cycle vast enough for the lives of the lake-dwellers; for the dwellings did not come to an end at the end of the age of stone, they only began in it. They were seen by Roman eyes almost as late as the beginning of our own era.

For at least two thousand years, then, we may say, the men who lived in the country of the Swiss lakes, and those of Northern Italy, adopted for the sake of security the custom of making their dwellings, not upon the solid ground, but upon platforms constructed with infinite trouble above the waters of the lake. And the way they set about it was in this wise: Having chosen their spot—if attainable, a sunny shore protected as much as possible from storms, and having a lake-bottom of a soft and sandy nature—they proceeded to drive in piles, composed of tree-stems taken from the neighbouring forests, from four to eight inches in diameter. These piles had to be felled, and afterwards sharpened, either by fire or a stone axe, then driven in from a raft by the use of ponderous stone mallets; and when we have said that in one instance the number of piles of a lake village has been estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000, the enormous labour of the process will be apparent. This task finished, the piles were levelled at a certain height above the water, and a platform of boards was fastened on with pegs. On the platform were erected huts, probably square or oblong in shape, not more than twenty feet or so in length, adapted however for the use of a single family, and generally furnished, it would appear, with a hearthstone and a corn-crusher apiece. The huts were made of wattle-work, coated on both sides with clay. Stalls were provided for the cattle, and a bridge of from only ten or twelve to as much as a hundred yards in length led back to the mainland. Over this the cattle must have been driven every day, at least in summer, to pasture on the bank; and no doubt the village community separated each morning for the various occupations of fishing, for hunting, for agriculture, and for tending the cattle. As may be imagined, these wooden villages were in peculiar danger from fire, and a very large number have suffered destruction in this way; a circumstance fortunate for modern science, for many things which had been partially burnt before falling into the lake have, by the coating of charcoal formed round them, been made impervious to the corroding influence of the water. Thus we have preserved their very grain itself, and their loaves or cakes of crushed but not ground meal. The grains are of various kinds of wheat and barley, oats, and millet.[14]

It is natural to ask for what object the enormous trouble of erecting these lake-dwellings could have been undertaken; and the only answer which can be given is, that it was to protect their inhabitants from their enemies. Whether each village formed a separate tribe and made war upon its neighbours, or whether the lake-dwellers were a peaceful race fleeing from more savage people of the mainland, is uncertain. There is nothing which leads us to suppose they were a race of a warlike character, and as far as the arts of peace go they had advanced considerably upon the men of the tumuli. More especially do the woven cloths, sometimes worked with simple but not inartistic patterns, excite our admiration. They had their trade too. Ornaments of amber are frequent, and amber must have been brought from the Baltic; while in one settlement, believed to be of the stone age, the presence of a glass bead would seem to imply indirect commerce with Egypt, the only country in which the traces of glass manufacture at this remote period have been found.[15] It is believed by good authorities, that the stone age in Europe came to an end about two thousand years before Christ, or at a date which is generally considered to be about that of Abraham; and its shortest duration, as we saw, must also be considered to be two thousand years.

These men of the lakes stand in no degree behind the mound-builders for the material elements of civilization. Nay, they are in some respects before them. Their life seems to have been more confined and simple than that which was going on in other parts of Europe. Its very peacefulness and simplicity gave men the opportunity for perfecting some of their arts. Thus their agriculture was more careful and more extended than that of the men of the tumuli. Their cattle would appear to have been numerous; all were stall-fed upon the island home; if in the morning driven out to pasture over the long bridge to the mainland, they were brought home again at night. To agriculture these lake-dwellers had added the special art of gardening, for they cultivated fruit-trees; and they span hemp and flax, and even constructed—it is believed—some sort of loom for weaving cloth. Yet for all that, if in these respects they were superior to the men of the tumuli, their life was probably more petty and narrow than the others’. There must have been some grandeur in the ideas of men who could have built those enormous tombs and raised those wondrous piles of altar-stones. If the first were made in honour of their chiefs, the existence of such chiefs implies a power in the stone-age men of expanding into a wide social life; so too the immense labour which the raising of the cromlechs demanded argues strong if not the most elevated religious ideas. And it has been often and truly remarked that these two elements of progress, social and religious life, are always intimately associated. It is in a common worship more than in common language that we find the beginning of nationalities. It was so in Greece. The city life grew up around the temple of a particular tutelary deity, and the associations of cities arose from their association in the worship at some common shrine. The common nationality of the Hellenes was kept alive more than anything in the quadrennial games in honour of the Olympian Zeus, just as the special citizenship of Athens found expression in the peculiar worship of the virgin goddess Athênê. So we may well argue from the great stone remains, that man had even then made some progress in political life. They show us the extended conditions of tribal government. But the lake-dwellers only give us a picture of the simplest and narrowest form of the village community. It is with them a complete condition of social equality; there is no appearance of any grade of rank; no hut on these islands is found larger or better supplied or more cared for than the rest. A condition of things not unlike that which we find in Switzerland at the present day; one favourable to happiness and contentment, to improvement in the simpler arts, but not to wide views of life, or to any great or general progress.

The civilization of

the stone ages.

And now let us, before we bid adieu to the men of the stone age, recount our gains, and see what picture the researches of pre-historic science allow us to draw of the progress of mankind from its earliest condition to that in which we now find it. We will forget for a moment the great gap which intervenes between the two stone ages, the age of unpolished stone and the age of polished stone, and simply following step by step the changes in human implements much as if we were walking round the cases of some well-arranged museum, we will note, as we pass it, each marked improvement or new acquisition in the arts of life.

1. To begin, then, with the men of the river drift—so far as we can judge, the rudest and most uncultured of all. It is not certain that these men had so much as wooden handles to their implements of stone, but it is probable that they had them. As we have said, they had only two or three marked varieties in these weapons. How little advance there seems from the state of simply using or hurling the stones in the state in which they are found! At the same time, it must be said that the implements of wood or horn, pointed stakes or even javelins, which these early men may have had would almost certainly have perished.

Nor, again, is there any evidence that the men of the drift period were cognizant of the use of fire, though here it is more likely that they were than that they were not.

2. When we come to the cave-dwellers we see marked signs of a higher civilization. The first and most important of these signs undoubtedly is the evidence of knowledge how to procure fire. We see a much greater variety in the implements used by the cave-dwellers. This, no doubt, is due in part to the disappearance of a portion of the implements of the drift age; but still we must take things as we find them. And putting side by side the specimens of the drift-implements and the cave-implements, we are at once struck by the superiority of the latter in make and in variety of form.

Thirdly, as has already been pointed out, we have here the earliest traces of art. On that subject it is not necessary again to dwell.

3. And now pass on to the second stone age, and see what progress man has made in the interval which separates the two periods. We begin with the society represented by the kitchen-middens. We do not possess any certainly polished-stone implements from these refuse-heaps. But I do not lay any great stress upon the invention of the art of polishing or even of grinding the stone; though that was not without importance, for it enabled the men of the second stone age to make use of much harder and more durable sorts of stone for their cutting implements. The earliest stone-age men made their implements of all sorts almost exclusively of flints, because the flint was a stone not difficult to chip into shape and to give an edge to by chipping. But when it comes to polishing or grinding instead of chipping an edge upon stones, there are a variety of other kinds of stone which are much more durable and much more serviceable than flints are, for the very reason that they are not liable to chip, and these stones (jade, granite, greenstone, obsidian, or one or other of the marbles, for example) we find a good deal employed during the latter stone age.

What, however, is more significant than would be the use of polished-stone implements by the kitchen-midden men is the evidence of their use of canoes, and therefore the evidence that they understood the art of navigation.

Next after that we must place the use of the bow, which also was probably known to the earliest men of the polished-stone age, but not to those of the preceding era.

Finally, we have the beginning of domestication of animals in the domestication of the dog. But we have as yet no beginning of agriculture.

4. Pass on to the men who raised the tumuli and we find still further signs of progress. Of these the tumuli themselves are the most significant. For in them we see the beginning of the art of building. I do not say that houses were unknown to the kitchen-midden men; only that we have no proof that they lived in houses; and we are here taking the evidences of advancing civilization as we come across them. In the case of the still earlier cave-dwellers we may take it for granted that the art of house-building was unknown to them, and quite as much so to the men of the river drift.[16]

True, the tumuli are not houses; they are tombs. But the men who could raise these tombs could raise houses likewise, and there can be little doubt that the architecture of the tombs, here and throughout the history of mankind, was modelled upon the architecture of the houses. Wherefore we may assume that these last were low and narrow chambers, a sort of constructed caves, so to speak, which is just what we should expect the earliest houses to be. We should expect that the first advance from cave-dwelling or burrowing in the ground would be to raise an artificial mountain and burrow within that. But soon the insecurity of this house would become apparent, and the next advance—no mean one, however,—would be the propping of stones upon others to make a chamber before the earth was heaped up in the tumulus, and when that step had been reached the art of house-building had begun.

We might call the next step forward the acquisition of a religion, of which the first signs are apparent in the cromlechs of this age. In this case, again, we only follow the testimony of the remains that have been discovered in the order in which they have come to light. It would be far too much to say that the earlier stone-age men were without religious observances. All we can say is, that the first certain remains of these belong to the time of the tumuli and the cromlechs. The reasons which lead us to believe that these last, the cromlechs, had a religious character have been already given.

Commerce was not unknown even to the cave-dwellers, but the first proofs of anything like a distant commerce come to us from the date of the grave-mounds.

The domestic animals of the tumuli begin to be numerous—oxen, pigs, goats, and geese,—though these remains are not found in the earliest mounds. And there is likewise among them some trace of agriculture.

Finally, traces of the art of pottery-making appear for the first time in these graves.

5. The village communities show an advance to the most undoubted use of agriculture, to the planting of fruit-trees, to the weaving of cloths, and a much more extended practice of domestication than obtained among the men of the grave-mounds.

Thus we see that as long ago as the stone age, before man had yet discovered any metal except, maybe, gold, he had advanced so far as to have discovered the most necessary arts of life, hunting, fishing, navigation (in some form), the domestication of animals, agriculture, planting, weaving, the making of garments—not of skin only, but also of linen or cloth—and the making of pottery.

And now let us note one other thing—the point where the stone age seems to approach most nearly to the borders of actual history. History begins in Egypt. For no continuous Biblical history exists for the days prior to Abraham. But in Egypt, for many centuries before Abraham, we have a continuous history, or at least continuous chronicles and dynastic lists, whose authenticity is admitted, and the remains of no mean civilization in the buildings contemporary with these earliest chronicles.

Egyptian history may be said to begin with the builders of the pyramids. But the pyramids themselves are nothing else than the children of the tumuli of the second stone age. We may call them a sort of crystallized tumuli—barrows of stone instead of earth. But, in truth, the earliest pyramids were probably not built of stone. It is generally believed that the stone pyramids which we see to-day at Gîza and Sakkara were preceded by pyramids of unbaked brick. And what are such buildings of unbaked brick save carefully raised mounds of earth? Here, then, we get the nearest meeting-point between the stone age and the age of history.

Again, the principle upon which were constructed the Egyptian tombs—of which the pyramids were only the most conspicuous forms—were precisely the same as the principles which governed the construction of the more elaborate barrows. These last had not only a chamber for the dead. This chamber was in many cases approached by a passage also made of stones covered with earth; and there can be no question that the mouth of the tomb was used as a sort of ante-room in which the relatives of the dead might hold their wake, or funeral feast. Here have been found the traces of fires, the remains of animals, fragments of vessels of pottery, etc., used or consumed in the feasts. We may believe that the ceremony was repeated at stated intervals. The very same principle governed the construction of the Egyptian tombs. These likewise (in their earliest known forms) consisted of an inner tomb and of an outer chamber; generally between the one and the other there was a passage. The outer chamber is that to which archæologists have given the name of mastaba. In it the relatives of the dead continued year after year to keep a funeral feast in his memory. Or we may say more than in memory of the dead—with the dead, we may say. For the essence of the feast, the fumes of the baked meats, was thought to penetrate along the passage and reach the mummy himself in his dark chamber.

Ages of bronze

and iron.

Thus we come to the end of the stone age or ages. The next great discovery which man made was that of the metals. Not iron at first; before iron was discovered there supervened the age known as the Bronze Age, when copper and tin were known but not iron, and all the most important implements were made of that mixture of copper and tin—bronze, the hardest substance then obtainable. In some countries the discovery of the metals was natural, and one age followed upon the other in gradual sequence. But in Europe it was not so. The men of the bronze age were a new race, sallying out of the East to dispossess the older inhabitants, and if in some places the bronze men and the stone men seem to have gone on for a time side by side, the general character of the change is that of a sudden break.

Therefore we do not now proceed to speak of the characteristic civilization of the bronze age. As will be seen hereafter, the bringers of the new weapons belonged to a race concerning whom we have much ampler means of information than is possessed for the first inhabitants of these lands; and we are spared the necessity of drawing all our knowledge from a scrutiny of their arms or tombs. But before we can satisfactorily show who were the successors of the stone-age men in Europe, and whence they came, we must turn aside towards another inquiry, viz. into the origin of language.