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THE EARLIEST SWISS: THE LAKE-DWELLERS: CHARLEMAGNE

To her lakes rather than to her mountains Switzerland owed the beginnings of civilisation. Nowadays, as the curtains of mist are rolled away from the past by geologist and anthropologist, we are coming to a clearer idea of the origins of this wonderful civilisation of ours, which makes the common routine of a plain citizen to-day more full of wonders than any legend told of an ancient god. Science, fossicking in the tunnels of the excavators and scanning closely what they bring up to the surface light, is inclined now to tell us that the beginnings of organised community life were on the lake shores of some ancient age.

The idea would be reasonable in theory even if it had no facts to support it. A lake means shelter, water, fish: it suggests—in this unlike a river—settling down. In a lake the fish teem thick and become big and fat and slothful. (Note how the little fighting trout of the rapid streams grow to the big, stupid, inert things of the New Zealand lakes, fish that come and ask to be caught, fish that a family can feed upon.) It was natural that a lake should stimulate into activity those microbes of civilisation which had infected the primitive nomads. In the Antipodes you may see to-day, in an anthropological record which is contemporary with us in time but with the Neolithic Age in development, the working of what one may call the lake forces, towards civilisation. The Australian aborigines—poor nomads almost without law, architecture, or clothing—when they won to a good steady fishing-ground managed to advance a little towards a higher civilisation. When a coast lagoon gave good supply of crustaceans and other fish, you may note at the old aboriginal camping-grounds timid ventures towards art, certain rock drawings, effective if crude. Stomachs being regularly filled, the minds of these primitives began to work. A step higher in the ascent of man—the Papuans have their most advanced communities in villages built on piles over the beaches of the sea or of the coral lagoons. The surrounding water gives some protection against prowling marauders. Draw up the bridge which makes a way to the hut, and the water at once serves it in the office of a wall. Further, the water is a source of food supply and an easier means of communication than the jungle to other sources of food supply. Finally, the water gives the little community a good drainage system without trouble: rubbish can just be cast down and it is carried away.

The early European, feeling a call to settle down and form a village, thus found in a lake the best of prompting to community life. It offered some security and so appealed to his dawning sense of property. It offered some steadiness of food supply and so appealed to his dawning sense of stability. It appealed also to the new sense of cleanliness which we must credit him with, a very primitive sense truly and many thousands of years behind ideas of modern sanitation, but still a beginning.

Recent discoveries of the remains of lake dwellings in England have established the fact that in many parts of Europe, and perhaps indeed all over the Continent, man in the Neolithic time formed the habit of living in villages built on piles over the shores of lakes, and that he kept this habit during the Bronze Age, and had not wholly abandoned it at the dawn of the Iron Age. But it was probably in Switzerland, the area richest in suitable lakes of all Europe, that the primitive lake-dwellers flourished most strongly. A whole chain of lake settlements have been discovered around Lake Zurich, and recently, when Mr. Ritter, famous for the gigantic scheme to supply Paris with water from the Swiss lakes, "corrected" the meanderings of the river Thiele which conducts the waters of Lake Neuchâtel to Bienne, his engineering feat, besides gaining huge tracts of fertile land, lowered the level of Lake Neuchâtel and led to some further valuable discoveries regarding the lake-dwellers. It seems clear that every Swiss lake was a centre for a thick population in the later Stone Age and the Bronze Age.

LOOKING DOWN THE RHONE VALLEY FROM MONT PELERIN, AT THE EASTERN END OF THE LAKE OF GENEVA.

The first important discoveries regarding these Swiss lake-dwellers were made in 1853, when the waters of Zurich lake sank so low that a stretch of land was laid bare along the shores. The people of Meilen, twelve miles from Zurich, took advantage of this to carry out some public works, and during the operations the workmen encountered obstacles, which proved to be wooden piles. These piles, the tops of which were but a few inches below the surface of the mud, were found to be planted in rows and squares, in great number. There were picked out of the mud bones, antlers, weapons and implements of various kinds. Dr. Ferdinand Keller was sent from Zurich to examine the workings, and he pronounced them to be the site of a lake settlement, probably of some very ancient Celtic tribe. Many marks of a prehistoric occupation had been found before 1853, but no traces of dwellings. The discovery caused a sensation, and gave a great impulse to archæological studies. Dr. Keller called these early settlers Pfahl-bauer, or pile-builders. Since then over two hundred of these villages have been discovered—on the shores of the lakes of Constance, Leman, Zurich, Neuchâtel, Bienne, Morat, and other smaller lakes, and on rivers and swampy spots which had once been lakes. The strictly Alpine lakes, however, with their steep inaccessible banks, show no trace of these settlements.

The early lake dwellings were built on piles driven into the bed of the lake, and as many as thirty or forty thousand of these piles have been found in a single village. The houses were made of hurdlework, and thatched with straw or rushes. Layers of wattle and daub alternating formed the floors, and the walls had a covering of clay, or else of bulrushes or straw. A fence of wickerwork ran round each hut. Light bridges, easily moved, connected the huts with each other and with the shore. Each house contained two rooms at least, and some of the dwellings measured as much as 27 feet by 22 feet. Hearthstones blackened by fire in some huts remain to show where the kitchens had been. Mats of straw and reeds were found, and proofs of an organised worship of some gods.

The lake-dwellers hunted with weapons of bronze. They tilled the ground and had flocks of horses, cattle, and sheep. They wove the wool of animals, and also a fibre of flax, and made a coarse pottery. Men and women wore ornaments of metal, of glass, of leather, of carved stones. Probably the later generations of lake-dwellers were contemporary with the Homeric period in Greece, though their state of culture was inferior to that of the people of the Grecian peninsula.

Some idea, then, we may form of the people of Switzerland in prehistoric times, those times when the fair-haired Achæans were settling in the Hellenic peninsula the issue between themselves and an earlier Canaanitish race, and giving prompting to the stories of the Homeric legends. Celtic migrants, making their way along the great watercourses of Europe, had come to these Swiss lakes resting at the feet of the Alps, and had found there prompting to settle and to begin to cultivate a community life. Seemingly there were three different epochs in the age of the lake-dwellers, of which two were of the later Stone Age and one of the Bronze Age. Switzerland had then, probably, as thick a population as most parts of Europe, and at the earliest stage of the lake-dwellings that population was almost as advanced in culture as were the forefathers of the Grecian and Roman civilisations. But later it was not so. Those nomadic peoples who found places in the Mediterranean sun; and who there came into contact with the civilisations which had grown up on the shores of the Levant, in the valley of the Nile, and on the north coast of Africa; after mingling their blood with the Mediterranean peoples and acquiring their culture, were capable of creating great communities which unmeasurably outstripped the little primitive states of their cousins who had settled at the base of the Alps.

It is probable that, fairly close on the heels of the lake-dwellers, there came other Celtic immigrants to Switzerland, dispossessing the aboriginal peoples of the mountains, fighting with the lake-dwellers, and coming in time to as high a standard of civilisation as they. With the Iron Age the lake-dwellings seem to have been abandoned and the lake-dwellers merged into the general body of the Helvetians. What we know as Switzerland to-day was then occupied by Celts, Rhætians, and Alamanni. Helvetia, as it was known to the Romans, took its name from the Helvetians, a tribe of Celts who had been pushed out of their own territories by the advancing tide of the Teutonic invasion and had colonised lower Switzerland.

Just as the lake-dwellers had set up a higher standard of civilisation than the mountain-dwellers in their age, so the Helvetians, occupying the lower ground of Switzerland, showed much more culture than any of their neighbours. They had adopted the Greek alphabet and kept written records of their doings. Their weapons and armour were good; their cultivation of the soil was skilful, and they had a knowledge of architecture, their fortifications in particular being praised by Roman writers as excellent. Local traditions said that Hercules had once visited Helvetia and taught the Helvetians arts and laws. That was the picturesque way of stating that their ideas of civilisation had come from Greece. These Helvetians were the easily traceable ancestors of the present Swiss, and many Swiss cities of to-day occupy the sites and keep close to the names of the old Helvetian centres—Geneva, Lausanne, Soleure, and Zurich, for examples. But the Helvetians were not strictly an Alpine race. They left the great mountains to wilder people and settled on the foothills and around the lakes.

The method of government of the Helvetians was closely modelled on the aristocratic republicanism of the Greek states. Wealthy nobles owned the land, and the rest of the population was made up of their vassals and slaves. But no one could aspire to be king. The chief Orcitrix, it is told, aspiring to kingly power, was burned to death. The Swiss do not seem to have copied the Grecian religious system, adhering to their ancient Druidical worship. Perhaps the gloomy and savage form which Protestantism was to take in after years among the Swiss, was in part due to the fact that their ancient form of worship seems to have been a particularly fierce kind of Druidism, and was very little subjected to the moderating influence of the pagan culture.

The mountain barriers kept the Helvetii for a long time from hostile encounters with the Roman power. But there is evidence that they got in touch with the Etruscans for purposes of trade through the Alpine passes from a very early age. Their chief warlike trouble came from the north, where the German population was constantly pressing down seeking fresh outlets. The first conflict between the Helvetii and the Romans was when the Tigurini tribe of Switzerland joined with the Cimbri in an attack upon Roman Gaul and defeated a Roman army under Cassius and Piso. That was 107 B.C. The Romans did not make any serious attempt to avenge that humiliation. The next meeting of the Helvetii with the Romans was not until the days of Cæsar (58 B.C.). Then the Helvetii, hemmed in on one side by Roman Gaul and on the other by the swelling floods of the German migration, resolved on a mass move, abandoning their own country completely and seizing some of the rich lands of Gaul.

It was a strange design and was carried out with strange persistency. Two years were devoted to the organisation of the great move, and on the appointed day practically all the Helvetii, men, women, and children, with all their beasts and their property assembled at Geneva. Their old homes were given to the torch, burned so that there would be no temptation for the people to turn back. Julius Cæsar (who followed Thucydides in the ranks of great war correspondents) tells the story: and it was Cæsar who set himself to the breaking up of this great plan. At Geneva the Helvetii found the bridge over the Rhone broken up by Cæsar's order. After useless attempts to cross the river, they turned towards the Jura Mountains, and whilst they were toiling over the steep and rugged Pas de l'Ecluse, Cæsar returned to Italy to gather his legions. Returning to Gaul, he arrived in time to see the Helvetians cross the Arar (Saône). The Tigurini were the last to cross. On them Cæsar fell and almost exterminated them, thus wiping out the old stain on the Roman arms. The Roman legions had crossed the Saône in twenty-four hours, and this feat so excited the admiration of the Helvetians, who had themselves taken twenty days to cross, that they sent legates to treat with Cæsar for a free passage. They promised him that they would do no harm to any one if he would comply with their request, but threatened the full rage of their arms if he should intercept them. Cæsar asked them to give hostages to confirm their promise. "The Helvetians are not accustomed to give hostages; they have been taught by their fathers to receive hostages, and this the Romans must well remember," was the reply.