Many other elements of culture appear in the Full Neolithic. Houses were dug into the ground and roofed over with timbers and earth. The dead were buried in enduring chambers of stone: “dolmens,” often put together out of enormous slabs; or excavations in soft bed rock. Upright pillars of undressed stone were erected—either singly as “menhirs” or in “alignments”—in connection with religious or funerary worship. Pottery was ornamented in a variety of geometric decorative styles, usually incised rather than painted; their sequences and contemporary distributions in several areas are gradually being determined.
225. The Bronze Age: Copper and Bronze Phases
There is no abrupt break between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Metal was at first too rare, too difficult to mine and smelt and work, to be used extensively. It served for special weapons, tools, and ornaments of the wealthy. The life of the mass of the population went on in much the old channels for generations or centuries after the new material had become known. This was true especially of peoples in oreless regions, or too backward to have learned the art of metal working. To such nations, the first bronze came as an imported rarity, to be guarded as a treasure or heirloom.
Of even less immediate effect than the discovery of bronze, was that of the first metals known, copper and gold. The latter is of course too scarce and too soft to serve for anything but ornaments; and pure copper also, even when hardened by hammering, is of little use for many mechanical purposes. It makes a fairly efficient dagger, a rather mediocre ax, and a poor knife. The result was that a recognizable period of copper preceded the true Bronze Age, yet that it was essentially a last phase of the New Stone Age, with the metal creeping in as something subsidiary. In Italy and Spain it has therefore become customary among archæologists to speak of an “Eneolithic” period as a transition stage in which some copper, and occasionally bronze of low tin content, occur. In central and northern Europe, the equivalent stage falls somewhat later and is sometimes called the Stone-Bronze period.
Bronze is an alloy of tin with copper, harder than the latter, easier to melt, and casting better. In many properties it resembles brass, by which term it is referred to in the English Bible; but must not be confounded with it. Brass is an alloy of zinc with copper, of much later discovery, apparently in Asia, and until recent centuries little used in Europe. As regards bronze, even a two per cent addition of tin to copper results in a perceptible hardening; and five to ten per cent produce a greatly superior tool metal.
The origin of bronze is a problem of some difficulty, because the earliest known users of bronze, the peoples of the Near East, possessed little or no tin. There are said to have been tin supplies in the Khorasan district of Persia, which might have been drawn upon by the pre-Babylonians and thence carried to Egypt. The chief source of the tin of later antiquity was Spain and England. But at the outset of the Bronze Age, the Orientals did not even know of the existence of these countries, while their natives, still ignorant of copper, could not have mined tin for the purpose of hardening that basic metal.
Just how, then, bronze was discovered, is still unknown; but it must have been in Western Asia not later than the fourth millenium B.C. Before 3000 B.C., in the period of the first dynasties ruling over united Egypt, the art had been established in that country, since bronzes low in percentage of tin have been discovered from that era. While ancient Egypt mined its own copper in the adjacent Sinai peninsula, it is barren of tin resources, so that the latter metal must have been imported. Within a few centuries, bronze began to be used in Crete and Troy, and by 2500 B.C. in Italy and Spain, whereas it did not penetrate central and northern Europe until about 1900 B.C., according to the usual estimates. That the use of bronze over these widespread areas is a connected phenomenon, a case of single origin and diffusion, is clear from the manner in which the art spread from its center of invention like a wave which arrived later the farther it had to travel. The spread is confirmed by the fact that certain implement forms such as early triangular daggers and later swords traveled with the material. Had the western natives discovered bronze for themselves, they would have cast it into shapes peculiar to themselves, instead of adopting those long established among the Orientals.
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.