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.
Fig. 42. The development of prehistoric civilization in Europe. Simplified from Sophus Müller. His absolute dates are generally considered too low, but their relative intervals are almost undisputed. The diagram shows very clearly the persistent cultural precedence of the countries nearest the Orient, and the lagging of western and especially of northern Europe.