The Bronze Age and the Celtic World

by Harold Peake

Constant observations since made on people of this type have shown us that they are remarkably clever, especially at money making, and that they engage more in trade than in manufacture, and that their trade is commonly in oversea commodities, when it is not in money itself. The type seems intermediate between that of the Mediterranean and of the Alpine, and suggests a cross, but the great stature which is sometimes, though not invariably, found among them suggested that the cross was probably between the Mediterranean and the eastern Alpine or Anatolian type, rather than with the short and stumpy western Alpine. It was felt that they had reached the west and north from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region,[158] as had in all probability the cult of megalithic monuments, and certainly the knowledge of metals. Further than this it was not possible to trace them.

Now, as has already been noted, the Prospector type has been noticed not uncommonly in Florence, both among the present population and in the fifteenth century portraits. A glance at some of the pictures on the Etruscan tombs,[159] and the portrait statuettes on the alabaster sarcophagi, shows us a type corresponding very closely to Fleure’s description.

The Etruscans are a mysterious people, and various views which have been expressed as to their origin have led to no little confusion of thought. Leaving out of account such evidence as may have come down from the neolithic and early bronze ages, we find, according to tradition, that the Etruscans arrived from Asia Minor, probably in the eleventh century B.C., or perhaps a little later.[160] About 800 B.C. we have archæological evidence of the arrival of another people from the north, who settled near Bologna, where they developed a culture known as that of Villa-Nova. The Etruscans and the Villa-Nova people certainly exchanged products, and may have to some extent amalgamated. Later traditions suggest that the Etruscans extended their empire over the Villa-Nova area and to the south as well,[161] but this, while true in one sense, may give a very wrong impression.

I would suggest that the Etruscans proper, the Etruscus obesus of the Latin writers, were the people who so closely resemble our Prospectors, and the fact that they are said to have come from the east, agrees well with this view. The Prospectors, wherever we meet them, are merchants and business men, and not the kind of men to lead warlike expeditions, or to bring all Italy within their empire. On the other hand, as I hope to show in subsequent chapters, the men responsible for the Villa-Nova culture were a warlike, conquering type, given to imperial expansion, and it is far more likely that if one or other were the conqueror it would be the men of Villa-Nova.

That such was the case seems to be indicated by the frescoes in a tomb, a copy of which is on view in the garden of the Etruscan museum at Florence. In these we find depicted a country house, with domestic scenes, and a portrait of the owner, a fair man with a narrow face, blue eyes and brown beard, wearing a fox-skin head-dress. This man is totally unlike the Etruscus obesus of most of the other tomb paintings, and seems to be of that fair Nordic type, which, as I hope to show, formed the ruling caste, at any rate, of the Villa-Nova people. It seems probable, too, that the bodies buried in the Regulini-Galassi and other warrior tombs were also of this type.[162] All this seems to suggest that the Villa-Nova people at one time conquered Etruria, then extended their empire as far south as Naples and Pompeii. The Etruscan prospectors would not have been averse to this extension of the dominions of their war-lords, as their trade was doubtless increased thereby.

But it may be argued that megalithic monuments are not to be found in Tuscany, though it was once said that this was the case.[163] This, of course, is true, but the Etruscans are believed not to have entered Italy until after 1100 B.C., when such erections were in most places obsolete. Some of the earliest of the Etruscan tombs, however, look as though they had developed from the dolmen form,[164] though they are made of well-wrought stone, rock-cut tombs are of common occurrence, and dry polygonal walling, which, as we have seen, often occurs in megalithic areas, is not uncommon,[165] and there is a very fine example of this work at Fiesole.

Morris Jastrow junior,[166] in studying the religion of Babylonia, was struck with certain resemblances between the religious practices of that country and those in vogue in Etruria. Here I will only mention three points: the Sumerians, like the Etruscans, lived in city states; the Sumerians were governed by priestly magistrates known as Patesi, while the Etruscans had similar officials called Lucumons; lastly both peoples were addicted to the practice of hepatoscopy, or the art of divining by means of sheeps’ livers, and made models of the livers to aid their students. Such models have been found in Sumer and Etruria, and nowhere else except at Boghaz Keui, on the Halys, the ancient capital of the Hittites.

Relatively few sculptured figures of the Sumerians have come down to us, but those which have been found show us a sturdy people, not very tall, short in the neck and with broad heads,[167] and some of the Etruscan tomb paintings resemble fairly closely some of the Sumerian reliefs.[168] Besides this some of the small statuettes brought by M. de Morgan from Susa,[169] show us heads which bear a close resemblance to those found on the Etruscan alabaster sarcophagi. It is a far cry from Etruria to Sumer, but tradition brings the Etruscans from Asia Minor, and Boghaz Keui may have been an intermediate station, though probably not the only one. But we have seen that the Babylonians were engaged in trading for tin in the Mediterranean region in 2800 B.C., so that it is not altogether impossible that the Prospectors may have come in the first instance from the Persian gulf, where they had been known as Sumerians, though it is, of course, possible that the Prospector was not the only element of that population.

A very natural reply to such a suggestion is that megalithic monuments do not occur in Sumer, or, as I should prefer to state it, have not yet been observed near the Persian gulf. Such absence is not, however, fatal to our hypothesis. As we have seen it seems likely that the dolmen is derived from the rock-cut tomb, and such tombs, and dolmens too, occur in Syria. As yet we know little about the tombs of Mesopotamia before 3000 B.C., and still less of their contents; we may yet find in that region some sepulchre, perhaps built of sun-dried brick, perhaps of slabs of stone, which bears a closer resemblance to the dolmen than does the Egyptian mastaba.

The contention is that several lines of evidence point to the Sumerians, or certain groups of them, as being the traders who travelled the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of Europe in search of precious metals, and who are somehow responsible for the spread of the megalithic culture. Now, as we have seen, the Prospector is normally a merchant, we do not find him as a rule among miners and sailors, yet sailors must have accompanied these expeditions, and perhaps skilled miners also in some cases. It may be that the cult of the dolmen, or the rock-cut tomb which preceded it, belonged to one or other of these humbler peoples, perhaps recruited from the coast of Syria. Or it may be, again, that the Prospector, being unable to bury his dead after the fashion customary by the Persian Gulf, devised another plan more convenient for use in strange lands. The latter is, I am inclined to think, the more likely solution, since dolmens and other megalithic structures are found all round Sumer, in Syria and Palestine to the west[170], in the Crimea and the Caucasus.[171] Stone circles are found to the east in Seistan[172], while both these and dolmens occur further east in India.