The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part II - European Races In History
Chapter
3
The Neolithic and Bronze Ages
ABOUT 7000 B.C. we enter an
entirely new period in the history of man, the Neolithic or New Stone Age,
when the flint implements were polished and not merely chipped. Early as is
this date in European culture, we are not far from the beginnings of an
elaborate civilization in parts of Asia. The earliest organized states, so
far as our present knowledge goes, were the Mesopotamian empires of Accad and
Sumer-though they may have been preceded by the Chinese civilization, whose
origin remains a mystery, nor can we trace any connection between it and
western Asia. Balkh, the ancient Bactra, the mother of cities, is located
where the trade routes between China, India, and Mesopotamia converged, and
it is in this neighborhood that careful and thorough excavations will
probably find their greatest rewards. However, we are not dealing with Asia, but
with Europe only, and our knowledge is confined to the fact that the various
cultural advances at the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the
Neolithic correspond with the arrival of new races. The transition from the Paleolithic to the
Neolithic was formerly considered as revolutionary, an abrupt change of both
race and culture, but a period more or less transitory, known as the
Campignian, now appears to bridge over this gap. This is but what should be
expected, since in human archaeology as in geology the more detailed our
knowledge becomes, the more gradually we find one period or horizon merges
into its successor. For a long time after the opening of the
Neolithic the old fashioned chipped weapons and implements remain the
predominant type, and the polished flints so characteristic of the Neolithic
appear at first only sporadically, then increase in number, until finally
they entirely replace the rougher designs of the preceding Old Stone Age. So in turn these Neolithic polished stone
implements which ultimately became both varied and effective as weapons and
tools continued in use long after metallurgy developed. In the Bronze Period,
of course, metal armor and weapons were for ages of the greatest value. So they
were necessarily in the possession of the military and ruling classes only,
while the unfortunate serf or common soldier who followed his master to war
did the best he could with leather shield and stone weapons. In the ring that
clustered around Harold for the last stand on Senlac Hill many of the English
thanes died with their Saxon king, armed solely with the stone battle-axes of
their ancestors. In Italy also there was a long period known
to the Italian archaeologists as the Eneolithic Period, when good flint tools
existed side by side with very poor copper and bronze implements; so that,
while the Neolithic lasted in western Europe four or five thousand years, it
is, at its commencement, without clear definition from the preceding
Paleolithic, and at its end it merged gradually into the succeeding ages of
metals. After the opening Campignian phase there
followed a long period typical of the Neolithic, known as the Robenhausian,
or Age of the Swiss Lake Dwellers, which reached its height about 5000 B. C.
The lake dwellings seem to have been the work exclusively of the round skull
Alpine races and are found in numbers throughout the region of the Alps and
their foothills and along the Danube valley. These Robenhausian pile built villages were
in Europe the earliest known form of fixed habitation, and the culture found
in association with them was a great advance on that of the preceding
Paleolithic. This type of permanent habitation flourished through the entire
Upper Neolithic and the succeeding Bronze Age. Pile villages end in
Switzerland with the first appearance of iron, but elsewhere, as in the upper
Danube, they still existed in the days of Herodotus. Domesticated animals and agriculture, as
well as rough pottery, appear during the Robenhausian for the first time. The
chase, supplemented by trapping and fishing, was still common, but it
probably was more for clothing than for food. Of course, a permanent site is
the basis of an agricultural community, and involves at least a partial
abandonment of the chase, because only nomads can follow the game in its
seasonal migrations, and hunted animals soon leave the neighborhood of
settlements. The Terramara Period of northern Italy was
a later phase of culture contemporaneous with the Upper Robenhausian, and was
typical of the Bronze Age. During the Terramara Period fortified and moated
stations in swamps or close to the banks of rivers became the favorite
resorts instead of pile villages built in lakes. The first traces of copper
are found during this period. The earliest human remains in the Terramara
deposits are long skulled, but round skulls soon appear in association with
bronze implements. This indicates an original population of Mediterranean
affinities swamped later by Alpines. Neolithic culture also Nourished in the
north of Europe and particularly in Scandinavia, now free from ice. The
coasts of the Baltic were apparently occupied for the first time at the very
beginning of this period, as no trace of Paleolithic industry has been found
there, other than the Maglemose, which represents only the very latest phase
of the Old Stone Age. The kitchen middens, or refuse heaps, of Sweden, and
more particularly of Denmark, date from the early Neolithic, and thus are
somewhat earlier than the lake dwellers. No trace of agriculture has been
found in them, and the dog seems to have been the only domesticated animal. >From these two centres, the Alps and
the North, an elaborate and variegated Neolithic culture spread through
western Europe, and an autochthonous development took place little influenced
by trade intercourse with Asia after the first immigrations of the new races.
We may assume that the distribution of
races during the Neolithic was roughly as follows: The Mediterranean basin
and western Europe, including Spain, Italy, Gaul, Britain, and the western
portions of Germany, populated by Mediterranean long heads; the Alps and the
territories immediately surrounding, except the valley of the Po, together
with much of the Balkans, inhabited by Alpine types. These Alpines extended
northward until they came in touch in eastern Germany and Poland with the
southernmost Nordics, but as the Carpathians at a much later date, namely
from the fourth to the eighth century A. D., were the centre of radiation of
the Alpine Slavs, it is very possible that during the Neolithic the early
Nordics lay farther north and east. North of the Alpines and occupying the
shores of the Baltic and Scandinavia, together with eastern Germany, Poland,
and Russia, were located the Nordics. At the very base of the Neolithic, and
perhaps still earlier, this race occupied Scandinavia, and Sweden became the
nursery of the Teutonic subdivision of the Nordic race. It was in that
country that the peculiar characters of stature and blondness became most
accentuated, and it is there that we find them to-day in their greatest
purity. During the Neolithic the remnants of early Paleolithic man must have
been numerous, but later they were either exterminated or absorbed by the
existing European races. During all this Neolithic Period
Mesopotamia and Egypt were thousands of years in advance of Europe, but only
a small amount of culture from these sources seems to have trickled westward
up the valley of the Danube, then and long afterward the main route of
intercourse between western Asia and the heart of Europe. Some trade also
passed from the Black Sea up the Russian rivers to the Baltic coasts. Along
these latter routes there came from the north to the Mediterranean world the
amber of the Baltic, a fossil resin greatly prized by early man for its magic
electrical qualities. Gold was probably the first metal to
attract the attention of primitive man, but, of course, could only be used
for purposes of ornamentation. Copper, which is often found in a pure state,
was also one of the earliest metals known, and probably came first either
from the mines of Cyprus or of the Sinai Peninsula. These latter mines are
known to have been worked before 3800 B. C. by systematic mining operations,
and much earlier the metal must have been obtained by primitive methods from
surface ore. It is, therefore, probable that copper was known and used, at
first for ornament and later for implements, in Egypt before 5000 B. C., and
probably even earlier in the Mesopotamian regions. With the use of copper the Neolithic fades
to its end and the Bronze Age commences soon thereafter. This next step in
advance was made apparently about 4000 B. C., when some unknown genius
discovered that an amalgam of nine parts of copper to one part of tin would
produce the metal we now call bronze, which has a texture and strength
suitable for weapons and tools. The discovery revolutionized the world. The
new knowledge was a long time spreading and weapons of this material were of
fabulous value, especially in countries where there were no native mines, and
where spears and swords could only be obtained through trade or conquest. The
esteem in which these bronze weapons, and still more the later weapons of
iron, were held, is indicated by the innumerable legends and myths concerning
magic swords and armor, the possession of which made the owner well-nigh
invulnerable and invincible. The necessity of obtaining tin for this
amalgam led to the early voyages of the Phoenicians, who from the cities of
Tyre and Sidon, and their daughter, Carthage, traversed the entire length of
the Mediterranean, founded colonies in Spain to work the Spanish tin mines,
passed the Pillars of Hercules, and finally voyaged through the stormy
Atlantic to the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles of Ultima Thule. There, on the
coasts of Cornwall, they traded with the native British, of kindred
Mediterranean race, for the precious tin. These dangerous and costly voyages
become explicable only if the value of this metal for the composition of
bronze be taken into consideration. After these bronze weapons were elaborated
in Egypt, the knowledge of their manufacture and use was extended through
conquest into Palestine, and about 3000 B. C. northward into Asia Minor. The effect of the possession of these new
weapons on the Alpine populations of western Asia was magical, and resulted
in an intensive and final expansion of round skulls into Europe. This
invasion came through Asia Minor, the Balkans, and the valley of the Danube,
poured into Italy from the north, introduced bronze among the earlier Alpine
lake dwellers of Switzerland, and among the Mediterraneans of the Terramara
stations of the valley of the Po, and at a later date reached as far west as
Britain and as far north as Holland and Norway. The simultaneous appearance of bronze about
3000 or 2800 B.C. in the south as well as in the north of Italy can probably
be attributed to a wave of this same invasion which reached Tunis and Sicily,
passing through Egypt, where it left behind the so-called Giza round skulls.
With the first knowledge of metals begins the Eneolithic Period of the
Italians. The introduction into England and into
Scandinavia of bronze may be safely dated about one thousand years later,
around 1800 B.C. The fact that the Alpines only barely reached Ireland, and
that the invasion of Britain itself was not sufficiently intensive to leave
any substantial record of its passing in the skulls of the existing
population, indicates that at this time Ireland was severed from England, and
that the land connection between England and France had been broken. The
computation of the foregoing dates, of course, is somewhat hypothetical, but
the fixed fact remains that this last expansion of the Alpines brought the
knowledge of bronze to western and northern Europe and to the Mediterranean
and Nordic peoples living there. The effect of the introduction of bronze in
the areas occupied chiefly by the Mediterranean race along the Atlantic coast
and in Britain, as well as in North Africa from Tunis to Morocco, is seen in
the wide distribution of the megalithic funeral monuments, which appear to
have been erected, not by Alpines, but by the dolichocephs. The occurrence of
bronze tools and weapons in the interments shows clearly that the megaliths
date from this Bronze Age. But their construction and use continued at least
until the very earliest trace of iron appeared, and in fact mound burials
among the Vikings were common until the introduction of Christianity. The knowledge of iron as well as bronze in
Europe, centres around the area occupied by the Alpines in the eastern Alps
and its earliest phase is known as the Hallstatt culture, from a little town
in the Tyrol where it was first discovered. This Hallstatt iron culture
flourished about 1500 B. C. Whether or not the Alpines introduced from Asia
or invented in Europe the smelting of iron, it was the Nordics who benefited
by its use. Bronze weapons and the later iron ones proved in the hands of
these northern barbarians to be of terrible effectiveness, and were first of
all turned against their Alpine teachers. With these metal swords in their
grasp, the Nordics first conquered the Alpines of central Europe and then
suddenly entered the ancient world as raiders and destroyers of cities, and
the classic civilizations of the north coasts of the Mediterranean Sea fell,
one after another, before the "Furor Normanorum," just as two
thousand years later the provinces of Rome were devastated by the last wave
of the men of the north, the Teutonic tribes. The first Nordics to appear in European
history are tribes speaking Aryan tongues, in the form of the various Celtic
and related dialects in the west, of Umbrian in Italy and of Thracian in the
Balkans, and these tribes, pouring down from the north, swept with them large
numbers of Alpines, whom they had already thoroughly Nordicized. The process
of conquering and assimilating these Alpines must have gone on for long
centuries before our first historic records, and the work was so thoroughly
done that the very existence of this Alpine race as a separate subspecies of
man was actually forgotten for thousands of years by themselves and by the
world at large, until it was revealed in our own day by the science of skull
measurements. The Hallstatt iron culture did not extend
into western Europe, and the smelting and extensive use of iron in south
Britain and northwest Europe are of much later date and occur in what is
known as the La Tene Period, usually assigned to the fifth and fourth century
B. C. Iron weapons were known in England much earlier, perhaps as far back as
800 or 1OOO B.C., but were very rare and were probably importations from the
Continent. The spread of this La Tene culture is
associated with the Cymry, who constituted the last wave of Celtic-speaking
invaders into western Europe, while the earlier Nordic Gauls and Goidels had
arrived in Gaul and Britain equipped with bronze only. In Roman times, which follow the La Tene
Period, the three main races of Europe occupied the relative positions which
they had held during the whole Neolithic Period and which they hold today,
with the exception that the Nordic species was less extensively represented
in western Europe than when, a few hundred years later, the Teutonic tribes
flooded these countries; but on the other hand, the Nordics occupied large
areas in eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Russia now occupied by the
Slavs of Alpine race, and many countries also in central Europe were in Roman
times inhabited by fair haired, blue eyed barbarians, where now the
population is preponderantly brunet and becoming yearly more so. |
Continue on to Part 2, Chapter 4 - The Alpine Race