Trade-routes between the Mediterranean and the North
Trade-routes between the Mediterranean and the North
Archæological finds show that as long ago as the Scandinavian Bronze Age, or before, there must have been some sort of communication between the Mediterranean and the northern lands. One of the earliest trade-routes between the Mediterranean and the Baltic certainly went from the Black Sea up the navigable river Borysthenes (Dnieper), of which early mention is made by the Greeks, thence along its tributary the Bug to the Vistula, and down the latter to the coast. We also find this route in common use in later antiquity. When we first meet with the Goths in history they are established at both ends of it, by the mouths of the Vistula and of the Borysthenes. The Eruli, who came from the North, are also mentioned by the side of the Goths on the Black Sea. What the wandering nation of the Cimmerians was we do not know, but, as before remarked ([p. 14]), they may have been Cimbri who in those early times had migrated to the northern shore of the Black Sea by this very route. This trade-route was well known in its details to our forefathers in Scandinavia, which likewise points to an ancient communication. Somewhat later it is probable that men travelled from the Baltic up the Vistula and across to the March, a tributary of the Danube, and so either down this river to the Black Sea or overland to the Adriatic. A similar line of communication certainly ran between the North Sea and the Mediterranean along the Elbe to the Adriatic, and up the Rhine across to the Rhone and down this to the coast, or across the Alps to the Po.
Cromlechs: on the right, in Portugal (after Cartailhac); on the left, in Denmark (after S. Müller)
But very early there was also communication by sea along the coasts of western Europe between the Mediterranean and the North. This is shown amongst other things by the distribution, about 2000 B.C., of cromlechs over Sicily, Corsica, Portugal and the north of Spain, Brittany, the British Isles, the North Sea coast of Germany, Denmark and southern Scandinavia as far as Bohuslen [cf. S. Müller, 1909, p. 24 f.], and perhaps farther. Somewhat later, in the middle of the second millennium B.C., the passage-graves or chambered barrows followed the same route northward from the Mediterranean. That this sea-communication was comparatively active in those far-off times is proved by the fact that cromlechs, which originated in the grave-chambers of the beginning of the Mycenæan period in the eastern Mediterranean, reached Denmark, by this much longer route round the coast, before the single graves, which were an older form in the Mediterranean countries, but which spread by the slower route overland, through Central Europe.
That as far back as the Stone Age there was communication by one way or another, perhaps along the coast between Spain and the shore of the North Sea or the Baltic, appears probable from the fact that amber beads have been found in the Iberian peninsula containing 2 per cent. of succinic acid, a proportion which is taken to indicate its northern (Baltic) origin [cf. L. Siret, 1909, p. 138].
On account of the many intermediaries, speaking different languages, through which it passed, the information which reached the Mediterranean by these various routes was very defective. According to Herodotus [iv. 24] the Scythians on their trading journeys to the bald-headed Agrippæans required no fewer than seven different interpreters to enable them to barter with the peoples on the way. Their first more direct knowledge of northern and western Europe must certainly have reached the Mediterranean peoples through the tin trade and the amber trade. It is worth remarking that it was precisely these two articles, representing two powerful sides of human nature, utility and the love of ornament, that were to be of such great importance also as regards knowledge of the North.
