Anthropology

227. Iron

Iron was worked by man about two thousand years later than bronze. It is a far more abundant metal than copper, and though it melts at a higher temperature, is not naturally harder to extract from some of its ores. The reason for its lateness of use is not wholly explained. It is likely that the first use of metals was of those, like gold and copper, that are found in the pure metallic state and, being rather soft, could be treated by hammering without heat—by processes more or less familiar to stone age culture. It is known that fair amounts of copper were worked in this way by many tribes of North American Indians, who got their supplies from the Lake Superior deposits and the Copper River placers in Alaska. If the same thing happened in the most progressive parts of the Eastern Hemisphere some 6,000 years ago, acquaintance with the metal may before long have been succeeded by the invention of the arts of casting and extracting it from its ores. When, not many centuries later, the hardening powers of an admixture of tin were discovered and bronze with its far greater serviceability for tools became known, a powerful impetus was surely given to the new metallurgy, which was restricted only by the limitations of the supply of metal, especially tin. Progress went on in the direction first taken; the alloy became better balanced, molds and casting processes superior, the forms attempted more adventurous or efficient. For many centuries iron ores were disregarded; the bronze habit intensified. Finally, accident may have brought the discovery of iron; or shortage of bronze led to experimenting with other ores; and a new age dawned.

Whatever the forces at work, the actual events were clearly those outlined. And it is interesting that the New World furnishes an exact parallel with its three areas and stages of native copper, smelted copper and gold, and bronze (§ 108, 196), and with only the final period of iron unattained at the time of discovery.

228. First Use and Spread of Iron

Some of the earliest known cases of the use of iron were decorative: for jewelry, or as inlay upon bronze. Finds of this sort have been made in Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and the Caucasus. Once however the extraction of the new material had become known, its abundance was so great as to further its employment, which grew fairly rapidly, though held back by several factors. One of these retarding causes was the prevalence of the casting process, which had become definitely established for bronze and was carried on with great skill, whereas iron lends itself to ready casting only in a foundry and for objects of larger size than were in customary use among the ancients. They forged their iron, and this new art had to be gradually learned. At its best, it could not produce some of the finer results of casting; in ornaments and statuettes, for instance.

Wrought iron is comparatively soft. A bronze knife will cut or shave better than a forged iron one. It was not until it was discovered that the iron from certain ores could be converted into steel by tempering—plunging the heated implement into water—that the new metal became a tool material superior to bronze. The invention of tempering seems to have followed fairly soon after the discovery of iron. But some centuries elapsed before this art became at all general.

Finally, conservative fashion operated to delay the undisputed supremacy of iron. Bronze has an attractive goldenish color; it oxidizes slowly and superficially; it was anchored in ritual; and it tended to remain associated with state and splendor, with wealth and nobility, whereas iron crept into commonplace and humble usages. Nearly four centuries after iron became known in the Greek world, the Iliad mentions it but twenty-three times, bronze two hundred and seventy times. In the Odyssey, a more bourgeois epic, and a little later in authorship, the proportion of references to iron is higher: twenty-nine to eighty. The first four books of the Old Testament, the composition of whose older parts is usually placed synchronous with that of the Iliad—about 850 B.C.—but whose outlook is the conservative one of religion, mention iron still more rarely: four times as against eighty-three references to bronze—“brass” the Authorized Version calls it.

Which nation first made iron available to the world has not yet been ascertained. It was almost certainly some people in western Asia. The Hittites of Asia Minor, the Chalybes of Armenia, are prominent contenders for the honor. It could scarcely have been the most civilized people of the region, the Babylonians, because their alluvial country contains neither ore nor stone. The time was probably subsequent to 1500 B.C., but not long after. By the time of Rameses the Great, in the thirteenth century, the metal was known and somewhat used in Egypt, being imported from the Hittites. Contemporaneously, the early Greek invaders who overthrew the Ægean culture of Crete and Mycenæ and Troy were in the beginnings of the Iron Age. Italy learned the new material from the Etruscans about 1100 B.C. Babylonian and Assyrian records seem to refer to it some few centuries earlier. The Jews in the time of Saul, 1000 B.C., are said by the Bible to have had little iron and no steel, a fact that made possible their oppression by the Philistines of the coast. This people, apparently descendants of the Minoan Cretans, have recently been alleged as the discoverers of the art of steel making; though whether with reason, remains to be proved. In central Europe iron became fairly abundant about 900 B.C., and was soon mined and smelted locally. In northern Europe its first sporadic appearance is soon after, but its general prevalence, justifying the use of the term Iron Age, not anterior to 500 B.C.

In the Far East, the history of iron is little known. In India, where it is likely to have been derived from western Asia or Persia, its first mention is at the end of the Vedic period, whose close is variously estimated at 1400 B.C. and 1000 B.C. The metal must have been new then: it was called “dark blue bronze.” The Hindus later carried knowledge of iron and steel-working to the Malaysian East Indies.

When China got its first iron is not known, though it appears to have been comparatively late. By the early part of the seventh century before Christ, iron had become common enough to be taxed. But it was used for hoes, plowshares, hatchets, needles, and domestic purposes only. Not until the fifth century B.C. did steel-making become introduced into China, and bronze begin to be superseded for weapons. Even in the first century after Christ the natives of southernmost China were fighting with bronze weapons in their struggle against amalgamation with the empire. At any rate, the Chou dynasty, the period of the production of the literary classics, from the eleventh to the third century B.C., was still prevailingly a time of bronze, as attested both by native historical records and the evidences of archæology. This lateness of iron in the Far East raises a strong probability that the Chinese did not enter the iron stage through their own discovery but were led into it by the example of Mongol or Turkish peoples of north central Asia, who in turn leaned upon the western Asiatics.

Japan has a definite Iron Age, well known through excavations. It is thought to have begun about the fourth century B.C. This approximate contemporaneity with China, whereas in nearly all the remainder of its culture Japan borrowed from China and followed long behind it in time, suggests that the Japanese or neighboring Koreans may have learned of iron directly from the north Asiatic teachers of the Chinese.

229. The Hallstadt and LaTène Periods

North of the Mediterranean lands, the prehistoric Iron Age of Europe is divided into two periods: that of Hallstadt, named after a site in Austria, and lasting from about 900 to 500 B.C.; and that of LaTène, designated from a famous discovery in Switzerland, which stretched from 500 B.C. until almost the birth of Christ. The Hallstadt period is better developed in middle than in western Europe: it was influenced from Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. It prevailed along the Adriatic and Danube as far as Bosnia and Hungary; over all but northern Germany; in Switzerland; and in eastern France. Its flow was northwestward. The LaTène culture was carried primarily by Kelts, falls into the period of their greatest extension and prosperity, and centers in France. Here it seems to have developed under the stimulus of Greek colonization at Marseilles, to have spread northward to the British Isles, and eastward into central Europe. Its general flow was northeastward.

Considerable iron and bronze work of some technical fineness was made during the Hallstadt and LaTène periods. Fibulas, jewelry, weapons, and cult apparatus were often elaborate. But the quality of the cultures remained homespun, backward, and barbaric as compared with the plasticity and polish which contemporary Greek civilization had attained.

The Hallstadt culture, for instance, was wholly without cities, stone architecture or bridges, paved roads, coins, writing of any sort, the potter’s wheel, or rotary millstone; nor was metal used for agricultural implements. It was a time of villages, small towns, and scattered homes; of sacred groves instead of temples; of boggy roads, of ox-carts and solid wooden wheels; of a heavy, barbaric, warlike population, half like European peasants, half like pioneers; self-content, yet always dimly conscious that in the southern distance there lay lands of wealth, refinement, and achievement.

The LaTène time showed many advances; but, relatively to the civilizations of Greece and Rome—it was the period of Phidias and Plato, of Archimedes and Cicero—the northern culture was as many milestones of progress behind as during the Hallstadt era. The coins in use were Greek, or local imitations of Greek money, their figures and legends often corrupted to complete meaninglessness. Writing was still absent. Some attempts at script began to be made toward the close of LaTène, but they resulted in nothing more than the awkward Ogham and Runic systems. Until perhaps a century or two before Cæsar, there were no cities or fortified towns in Gaul. When they arose, it was on heights, behind walls of mixed logs, earth, and stone, as against the masonry circumvallations which the Ægean peoples were erecting more than a thousand years before. Even these poor towns were built only by Kelts; the Germanic tribes remained shy of them for centuries longer. Society was still essentially proto-feudal and rustic. But there had filtered in from the Mediterranean, and were being wrought locally, holed axes, iron wagon wheels, the potter’s wheel and potter’s oven, rotary mills, dice, tongs, scissors, saws, and scythes—all new to these northern lands, and curiously modern in their fundamental types as compared with the essentially half-primitive, half-barbarian suggestion that Hallstadt manufactures carry.

230. Summary of Development: Regional Differentiation

Two conclusions emerge from the facts reviewed in this chapter and serve to prevent an over-simple and schematic conception of the growth of prehistoric civilization. The first is that successive phases of culture, even in the earliest times, cannot be identified, much less really understood, by reference to any single criterion such as this or that technique of working stone or the knowledge of this or that metal. In every case the culture is complex and characterized by a variety of traits whose combination produces its distinctive cast. The more important of these culture traits, with particular reference to Europe, may be summarized thus:

The second conclusion is that differentiation of culture according to region is too great to be lightly brushed aside. Even for the Palæolithic, which is so imperfectly known outside of Europe, and whose content is so simple, it is clear that the developmental sequences in Europe cannot be correctly interpreted without reference to provincial growths and their affiliations in other continents (§ 214-216). In the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, regional diversity increases. Egypt and China, India and France, present deeply differentiated pictures in 3000 B.C., and again in 1000. Their cultures have throughout a separate aspect. And yet innumerable connections link them. The very bronze and iron that name the later ages, the grains and animals that are the basis of their economic life, were intercontinentally disseminated, and represent in most of the lands that came to possess them an import from an alien focus of growth. And currents usually run both ways. China received metals, wheat, cattle and horses, cotton, architecture, religion, possibly the suggestion of script, from the west; but she gave to it silk and porcelain, gunpowder and paper. Also there are inertias and absences to be reckoned with. The Near East probably gave to Europe most of the elements of civilization which the latter possessed during the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron periods; but much which the Near East had, it failed to transmit. Writing flowed into Europe a full two thousand years after bronze, with which it was coeval in origin. Coinage is far later in the Orient than masonry, but outstripped it and became earlier established in western Europe.

The result is a great tangled web, whose structure is only gradually being revealed by painstaking comparison and intensive study. Often the most convincing evidence as to the composition and direction of the culture currents is provided by highly specialized matters: styles of pottery decoration, shapes of ax heads, forms of ornamental safety-pins. It is not because these minutiæ are so fascinating in themselves that archæologists are endlessly and often tediously concerned with them. It is because these data offer the longest clues through the labyrinth, because on their sure sequences can be strung hundreds of otherwise non-significant or detached facts. But the results are as yet incomplete; they are and promise to remain forever complex; and their systematic presentation in coherent narrative awaits a larger and future treatment. It will be wisest, in a work of the present compass, to outline the whole development of a single area, to serve as a type sample.

231. The Scandinavian Area as an Example

The most satisfactory region for such a purpose is Scandinavia—the peninsula, Denmark, and the Baltic coasts, including much of northeast Germany. This was a glacier-covered area in the Mousterian, and either obliterated or uninhabited in the Upper Palæolithic. It has therefore no Old Stone Age history. During the Magdalenian, the glaciers had shrunk to cover only most of the Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. Denmark was ice-free. But what is now the Baltic stretched as an open sound from the North Sea across southern Finland and northwestern Russia to the Arctic Ocean. From this ocean as well as the remaining glaciers emanated a low temperature, in which there throve arctic forms of life, especially the small shell Yoldia arctica, which flourishes only where the sea bottom temperature ranges between 1° plus and 2° minus Centigrade. This great, chilly sound of some sixteen to ten thousand years ago is known as the Yoldia Sea. Denmark and the German coast must still have been cold, as the remains of the sub-arctic flora show, and were without human inhabitants.

232. The Late Palæolithic Ancylus or Maglemose Period

Around 10,000 B.C., as western Europe was entering upon the Azilian aftermath of the Palæolithic, the land at both ends of the Yoldia Sea was elevated sufficiently to cut this off from the open ocean. The Baltic was thus closed at both ends, instead of neither, as before, or one only, as now. The rivers continued to flow into it; it became brackish and almost fresh, and the fauna changed. The distinctive fossil shell became Ancylus fluviatilis, from which the great lake is known as the Ancylus Lake. The Scandinavian flora once more included real trees, chiefly pines and birches.

Man occupied south Sweden and Denmark in the Ancylus period. At Maglemose have been found his remains during this Scandinavian equivalent of the Azilian. Here he appears to have lived on rafts floating on a lake, which subsequently filled with peat. Whatever fell overboard, became embedded in the growing peat and was preserved. The inhabitants cut their raft logs and firewood with axes of bone and elk horn, some of them perforated for handles. They had bone fish-hooks, harpoons with single and double rows of barbs, and still others with slits for the insertion of minute flint blades, much like saw teeth. Some of the microlithic points have also been found. All of the stone was chipped; there is no trace of polishing other than of bone and antler. They engraved, sometimes in a deteriorated style of Magdalenian naturalism, sometimes with simple geometric ornaments. The dog accompanied these people, perhaps was already half tame. Remains similar to those of Maglemose have been found in several of the Baltic lands.

233. The Early Neolithic Litorina or Kitchenmidden Period

Within perhaps two thousand years, the Baltic opened again as at present, grew saltier, and took on much its present conditions, except for being somewhat larger. The water warmed, and Litorina litorea and the oyster became the characteristic molluscs. The climate was milder than before, and the forests changed from birches and pines to oaks.

The men of this period lived largely on oysters and scallops, whose shells piled up about their habitations by millions, forming ridge-like mounds sometimes hundreds of yards long. These are the Kjökkenmöddings, or Kitchenmiddens, refuse heaps or shell heaps. Among the shells are ashes, bones of the land animals and birds that were hunted, and lost or broken utensils. Some of the Maglemose implements continued to be used, such as bone awls, chisels, and fish-hooks. Others were no longer made: harpoons, the minute flint blades, and engraved objects. But new forms had come in: above all, pottery and the stone ax—evidences that this was an early period of the Neolithic, even though polished stone was still lacking. The ax or “splitter” was chipped—hewn is really a more fitting term—oval or trapezoidal in outline, the cutting edge convex or straight. It seems to have been lashed to an elbow handle: there was no groove or perforation. The pottery was coarse, dark, and undecorated except sometimes for rows of crude dot impressions along the edge. Another new implement was a handled bone comb with four or five teeth. It appears to have been employed for carding rather than hair-dressing. The bow was in use: arrowheads bore a cutting edge in front. The dog was the only domestic or semi-domesticated animal; probably a Spitz-like breed, perhaps of jackal origin. He managed to gnaw most of the bones that have been preserved in the shell layers.

Approximately contemporary with the Danish kitchenmiddens, and similar to them in their cultural repertoire, are a Spanish phase known as Asturian and the Campignian of northern France. The Asturian remains are also shell deposits. Their lower levels contain bones of cattle that had perhaps been domesticated; middle strata add the sheep; and in the uppermost, pottery appears. The northern ax is replaced by a handheld pick. The Campignian possessed hewn axes or splitters similar to the Danish ones; pottery; domesticated cattle; and seems to have made a beginning of agriculture with barley. It would thus seem that pottery and the hewn ax were the characteristic general criteria of this Early Neolithic stage, with domesticated animals and agriculture coming in earlier in southern and middle Europe, whereas the northerners continued to depend longer on shellfish and game.

234. The Full Neolithic and Its Subdivisions in Scandinavia

Two or three thousand years passed, and by about 5500 B.C. the Scandinavian climate had become slightly cooler once more, the oaks gave way to birches and pines, the Baltic lost some of its salt content, and the oyster grew scarcer. The Kitchenmidden or Litorina period of the Early Neolithic was over; the Full Neolithic had arrived. Axes were polished, cattle kept, grain grown. Four Stages of development are discernible.

235. The Bronze Age and Its Periods in Scandinavia

Bronze reached the Scandinavian region late, as a well developed art, and its working soon showed a high degree of technical and æsthetic excellence. But arts that in the Orient had appeared almost simultaneously with bronze—writing, masonry, wheel turning of pottery—did not reach Scandinavia until after bronze had been superseded by iron there. The consequence was that the Northern culture remained on the whole thoroughly barbarous. And yet, perhaps on account of this very backwardness, an aloofness resulted which drove the Scandinavian bronze-workers to follow their own tastes and develop their own forms and styles, often with taste as exquisite as simple. In other words, a local culture grew, much like the analogous local cultures in America which have been traced in previous chapters. Yet the basis of this Northern bronze culture was southern and Oriental invention; and the south and east continued to influence Scandinavia. The northern safety-pin, for instance, underwent the same stages as the southern one: backs that were first straight and narrow, then sheetlike, then bowed, with the ends enlarging to great buckles or disks. But the southern fibula, whatever its type or period, was one-piece and elastic, the northern at all times made of two separate parts, and without real spring.

Connection with other countries is evident from the Northern bronze itself, at least the tin of which, if not the alloy, was imported. Yet the finds of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, numerous as they are, do not contain a single specimen that can be traced to Egypt or to Greece. Even pieces made in middle Europe are rare. And molds, ladles, unfinished castings, prove that the North cast its own bronze on the spot. First knowledge of the art had evidently seeped in from the region of Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary, which in turn derived it from the Italian and Balkan peninsulas, which at a still earlier time had learned it from Egypt or Asia.

It appears, then, that it would be equally erroneous to regard the Scandinavian Bronze Age as an independent development or to regard it as a mere copy or importation from the Orient. It was neither; or, in a sense, it was both. Its origin lies in the great early focal point of civilization in the Near East; its specific form, the qualities which it took on, are its own. The disseminated ingredient, the basis due to diffusion, must be admitted as fully as the elements of local development which mark off a distinct Northern culture-area, or sub-focus of cultural energy.

This interplay of forces is typical also of the Iron and New Stone Ages, and it is the number of local centers of culture growth, their increasingly rapid flourishing as time went on, and the multiplication of connections between countries, that render the prehistory of Eur-Asiatic civilization so difficult. If enough were known of the life of the Palæolithic, it is probable that a similar though less intricate tangle of developments might be evident for that period also.

The resemblance to the interrelations of areas within America is manifest. The Southwest stands to southern Mexico as Scandinavia does to the Orient: suffused by it, stimulated by it, created by it, almost; yet at all times with a provincial cast of its own. The Southwestern specialist can trace a continuous evolution on the spot which tempts him to forget the obvious and indisputable Mexican origins. The Mexicanist, on the other hand, impressed by the practical identity of fundamentals and close resemblance in many details, is likely to see Southwestern culture only as a mutilated copy of the higher civilization to the south. Correct understanding requires the balancing of both views.

Close equivalents of the culture-areas of American ethnologists are in fact recognized by European archæologists. Thus, Déchelette distinguishes seven “geographical provinces” in the Bronze Age of Europe, as follows: 1, Ægean (Greece, islands, coast of Asia Minor); 2, Italian (with Sicily and Sardinia); 3, Iberian (Spain, Portugal, Balearics); 4, Western (France, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, southern Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia); 5, Danubian (Hungary, Moravia, the Balkan countries); 6, Scandinavian (including northern Germany and the Baltic coast); 7, Uralic (Russia and western Siberia).

The fourteen hundred years generally allowed the Scandinavian Bronze Age are divisible into five or six periods,[35] which become progressively shorter.

236. Problems of Chronology

The dating of events in the Neolithic and Metal Ages is of much more importance than in the Palæolithic. Whether an invention was made in Babylonia in 5000 or in 3000 B.C. means the difference between its occurring in the hazy past of a formative culture or in a well advanced and directly documented phase of that culture. If the dolmens and other megalithic monuments of northern Europe were erected about 3000 B.C., they are older than the pyramids of Egypt and contemporaneous with the first slight unfoldings of civilization in Crete and Troy. But if their date is 1000 B.C., they were set up when pure alphabetic writing and iron and horses were in use in western Asia, when Egypt was already senile, and the Cretan and Trojan cultures half forgotten. In the one case, the megaliths represent a local achievement, perhaps independent of the stone architecture of Egypt; in the other event, they are likely to be a belated and crudely barbarian imitation of this architecture.

But in the Palæolithic, year dates scarcely matter. Whether the Mousterian phase culminated 25,000 or 75,000 years ago is irrelevant: it was far before the beginning of historic time in either case. If one sets the earlier date, the Chellean and Magdalenian are also stretched farther off; if the later, it is because one shrinks his estimate of the whole Palæolithic, the sequence of whose periods remains fixed. It is really only the relative chronology that counts within the Old Stone Age. The durations are so great, and so wholly prehistoric, that the only value of figures is the vividness of their concrete impression on the mind, and the emphasis that they place on the length of human antiquity as compared with the brevity of recorded history. Palæolithic datings might almost be said to be useful in proportion as they are not taken seriously.

At the same time, the chronology of the Palæolithic is aided by several lines of geological evidence that are practically absent for the Neolithic and Bronze Ages: thickness of strata, height of river deposits and moraines, depth of erosion, species of wild animals. The Neolithic is too brief to show notable traces of geological processes. Its age must therefore be determined by subtler means: slight changes in temperature and precipitation; the thickness of refuse deposits; and above all, the linking of its latter phases to the earliest datable events in documentary or inscriptional history. By these aids, comparison has gradually built up a chronology which is accepted as approximate by most authorities. This chronology puts the beginning of bronze in the Baltic region at about 1900 B.C., in Spain at 2500, the first Swiss lake-dwellings at 4000, the domestication of cattle and grain in middle Europe around 5500, the first pottery-bearing shellmounds about 8000 B.C. Of course, these figures must not be taken as accurate. Estimates vary somewhat. Yet the dates cited probably represent the opinion of the majority of specialists without serious deviation: except on one point, and that an important one.

This point is the hinge from the end of prehistory to the beginning of history: the date of the first dynasties of Egypt and Babylonian Sumer. On this matter, there was for many years a wide discrepancy among Orientalists. The present tendency is to set 3400 or 3315 B.C., with an error of not over a century, as the time when upper and lower Egypt began to be ruled by a single king, Mena, the founder of the “first dynasty”; 2750 as the date of Sargon of Akkad, the first consolidator and empire-builder in the Babylonian region; and about 3100 as the period of the earliest discovered datable remains from the Sumerian city states.

The longer reckoning puts the Egyptian first dynasty back to about 4000; according to some, even earlier; and Sargon to 3750. This last date rests on the discovery by Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, successor of Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C., of a deeply buried inscription in a foundation wall erected by Naram-sin, son of Sargon. Nabonidus had antiquarian tastes, and set his archæologists and historians to compute how long before him Naram-sin had lived. Their answer was 3,200 years—the thirty-eighth century B.C., we should say; and this figure Nabonidus had put into an inscription which has come down to us. All this looks direct and sure enough. But did the king’s scholars really know when they told him that just 3,200 years had elapsed since his predecessor’s reign, or were they guessing? The number is a round one: eighty forties of years, such as the Old Testament is fond of reckoning with. The trend of modern opinion, based on a variety of considerations, is that the Babylonian historians were deceiving either the king or themselves.

The bearing of the discrepancy is this. The scholars who are in more or less agreement that bronze reached Mediterranean Europe about 2500 and Northern Europe about 1900, were generally building on the longer chronology of the Near East. They were putting Mena around 4000 and Sargon in 3750. This allowed an interval of over a thousand years in which bronze working could have been carried to Spain, and two thousand to Denmark. With the shorter chronology for Egypt and Babylonia, the time available for the transmission has to be cut down by a thousand years. Should the European dates, therefore, be made correspondingly more recent? Or is the diminished interval still sufficient—that is, might a few centuries have sufficed to carry the bronze arts from the Orient to Sicily and Spain, and a thousand years to bear them to Scandinavia? The interval seems reasonable, and is accordingly the one here accepted. But it is possible that if the shorter chronology becomes proved beyond contradiction for Egypt and Babylonia, the dates for the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of Europe may also have to be abbreviated somewhat.

One famous time-reckoning has in fact been made by the Dane Sophus Müller, who, without basing very much on any Oriental chronology, shortens all the prehistoric periods of Europe. His scheme of approximate dating is reproduced, with some simplifications, in Figure 42. It will be seen that he sets the second or dolmen period of the Full Neolithic in Scandinavia from about 1800 to 1400 B.C., whereas the more usual reckoning puts it at 3500 to 2500; his earliest Kitchenmidden date is 4000, as against 8000.

237. Principles of the Prehistoric Spread of Culture

This chronology has much to commend it besides its almost daring conservatism; especially the clarity of its consistent recognition of certain cultural processes. Five principles and three extensions are set up by Müller:

The basic idea of these formulations is that of the gradual radiation of culture from creative focal centers to backward marginal areas, without the original dependence of the peripheries wholly precluding their subsequent independent development. It is obvious that this point of view is substantially identical with that which has been held to in the presentation of native American culture in the preceding chapter.

It is only fair to say that a number of eminent archæologists combat the prevalent opinion that the sources of European Neolithic and Bronze Age civilization are to be derived almost wholly from the Orient. They speak of this view as an “Oriental mirage.” They see more specific differences than identities between the several local cultures of the two regions, and tend to explain the similarities as due to independent invention.

Since knowledge of ancient cultures is necessarily never complete, there is a wide range of facts to which either explanation is, theoretically, applicable. But the focal-marginal diffusion interpretation has the following considerations in its favor.

Within the fully historic period, there have been numerous undoubted diffusions, of which the alphabet, the week, and the true arch may be taken as illustrations. At least in the earlier portion of the historic period, the flow of such diffusions was regularly out of the Orient; which raises a considerable presumption that the flow was in the same direction as early as the Neolithic. On the other hand, indubitably independent parallelisms are very difficult to establish within historic areas and periods, and therefore likely to have been equally rare during prehistory.

Then, too, the diffusion interpretation explains a large part of civilization to a certain degree in terms of a large, consistent scheme. To the contrary, the parallelistic opinion leaves the facts both unexplained and unrelated. If the Etruscans devised the true arch and liver divination independently of the Babylonians, there are two sets of phenomena awaiting interpretation instead of one. To say that they are both “natural” events is equivalent to calling them accidental, that is, unexplainable. To fall back on instinctive impulses of the human mind will not do, else all or most nations should have made these inventions.

Of course it is important to remember that no sane interpretation of culture explains everything. We do not know what caused the true arch to be invented in Babylonia, hieroglyphic writing in Egypt, the alphabet in Phœnicia, at a certain time rather than at another or rather than in another place. The diffusion point of view simply accepts certain intensive focal developments of culture as empirically given by the facts, and then relates as many other facts as possible to these. Every clear-minded historian, anthropologist, and sociologist admits that we are still in ignorance on the problems of what caused the great bursts of higher organization and original productiveness of early Egypt and Sumer, of Crete, of ancient North China, of the Mayas, of Periclean Athens. We know many of the events of civilization, know them in their place and order. We can infer from these something of the processes of imitation, conservatism, rationalization that have shaped them. We know as yet as good as nothing of the first or productive causes of civilization.

It is extremely important that this limitation of our understanding be frankly realized. It is only awareness of darkness that brings seeking for light. Scientific problems must be felt before they can be grappled. But within the bounds of our actual knowledge, the principle of culture derivation and transmission seems to integrate, and thus in a measure to explain, a far greater body of facts than any other principle—provided it is not stretched into an instrument of magic and forced to explain everything.