226. Traits Associated with Bronze
About coincident with bronze there developed in Egypt and Babylonia a flood of new arts and inventions: writing; sunburned brick; stone masonry; sculpture and architecture; the arch; the plow and later the chariot; the potter’s wheel, which turns clay vessels with mechanical roundness; astronomical records and accurate calendars; an enhanced cult of the dead and greater monuments for them. Many of these elements were carried into westernmost Asia and the Ægean Islands; not so many to Italy; fewer still to Spain and France; and a minimum to central and northern Europe. But it would be an error to infer from the continued backwardness of the northern peoples that they were wholly passive and recipient. In their simpler, more barbaric way, they remodeled much of what they had carried to them, altered the form, decorated it in their own style, made much of some item which filled but an insignificant place in the more complex civilization of the southeast. The fibula or safety-pin, for instance, was seized upon with avidity by the central and north European nations, made ornate and tremendously enlarged, until it sometimes measured half a foot in length and more than half a pound in weight with spiral whorls, bosses, pin clasps, or attached rings as big as a palm. The Baltic nations, the farthest reached by this diffusion, in particular threw themselves into the development of the fibula with zest, success, and a large measure of decorative taste.
Even longer is the history of the sword. This has two lines of historic development. The one-edged sword or saber tends to curvature and is essentially a hewing weapon, not intended for thrusting, or only secondarily so adapted. This form is first known in western Asia, is apparently of Asiatic origin, and is the direct ancestor of the Saracen and Indian scimitar, the Malayan kris and barong, the Japanese samurai’s sword. The two-edged sword with point has at all times—until after the introduction of firearms—been the prevailing form in Europe. Its ancestor is the Egyptian bronze dagger, which in turn is probably derived from a copper and ultimately a flint blade of dagger length. The Egyptian dagger never grew to more than half-sword length, but the type was early carried to Crete and Italy and Spain. By 2500-2000 B.C. the latter countries were using triangular wide-bladed daggers of copper and bronze, with a basal breadth not much less than the length. The handle was a separate piece, riveted on. Gradually the length grew greater, the breadth less, the edges more nearly parallel, the point sharper; the half-sword and then the sword evolved out of the dagger. The handle, or its spike, came to be cast with the blade. These drawn-out forms traveling to central and northern Europe, were made there of greater and greater length, especially after iron was known. For three thousand years, and from the southern Mediterranean in its progress to the North Sea, the sword grew longer and longer, but always by gradual modification: the whole series of forms shows a transition in both time and geography. The Greek and Roman sword remained of thigh length, and was used mainly for thrusting; the Keltic and Germanic weapon was for hewing and almost unwieldy; blades so big as to require two-handed swinging finally came to be employed—a barbaric, ineffective exaggeration to which the long-cultured Mediterraneans never descended.
Fig. 41. Prehistoric domed tombs built on the principle of corbelling (§ [116]): a probable example of the spread of a culture device over a continent. Above, Mycenæ, Greece; middle, Alcalar, Portugal; below, New Grange, Ireland. The Mycenæan structure, 1500 B.C. or after, at the verge of the Iron Age, is probably later by some 1,000 years than the others, which are late Neolithic with copper first appearing; and its workmanship is far superior. (After Sophus Müller and Déchelette.)