As we pass eastwards from the Carpathians the rainfall becomes less and the woodland disappears; we enter the steppe lands which reach far into Asia. This steppe occupies the whole of the Rumanian plain, and north of the Dniester runs in a belt, fifty miles wide, as far west as Lemberg. West of this lie large stretches of glacial sands and gravels, which must have carried an open heath vegetation, and so almost continuous open land stretched at the northern foot of the Carpathians from Odessa by Lemberg and Cracow to Breslau.[186]
In this open region, bounded on the east by the Dnieper and on the north by the Polish forest, we find at the time which we are discussing a very peculiar culture; this has been called the Tripolje culture,[187] from the site near Kief where it was first discovered. The people responsible for this culture lived in pit-dwellings, and set aside certain “areas” for the disposal of their dead. Usually, if not invariably, they burnt their dead and placed the ashes in urns, which they deposited in these areas, but it has been said that they sometimes buried the corpses, though no descriptions of such skeletons have appeared. They made vast quantities of pottery, much of it painted, some of it incised, but they were ignorant of the potter’s wheel. They cultivated the land, at any rate during their later phase, for half-cooked corn has been found among their remains.
This culture is found throughout south-western Russia, south of the Pripet marshes, and west of the Dnieper; it is sometimes found extending, too, east of that river in the governments of Chernigov and Poltava. Southward it is found throughout the steppe region of Rumania, while westward it extends through the open country as far as Breslau. Pottery somewhat resembling that of the Tripolje culture has been found in Serbia, Thrace, Thessaly and the north-west corner of Asia Minor.
FIG. 2.
POTSHERD FROM KOSZYLOWSCE, GALICIA.
The Tripolje culture is of two types, known as A and B. Judging by the pottery, and the terracotta figures of women, which are fairly common on both types of sites, the B culture is the more advanced. On the other hand no metal has been found on these sites, while copper axes and perforated stone axes are not uncommon on the sites exhibiting A culture.
When this culture was first discovered, it was believed by some that here we had the origin of the early painted wares of Greece and Crete,[188] but later on the discoveries at Cnossos showed that at that place painted pottery had developed from plain and incised wares; it was also noticed that the shapes of the pots at these sites were fundamentally different. So all idea of a connection between these two industries was abandoned. There is, however, in the Newbury Museum a potsherd of Tripolje ware, from Koszylowsce in Galicia, which bears a very striking resemblance to another of the second early Minoan period, from the tholos at Haghia Triada in Crete, figured by Mosso.[189] It may be, after all, that, while the suggestion that the Tripolje ceramic is ancestral to that of Crete is erroneous, there may have been some connection and mutual borrowing. This resemblance and the presence of copper axes during period A suggests that there had been trade relations, either direct or indirect, between Crete and the north-western shore of the Euxine, between 2600 and 2400 B.C., and this fits in very well with the trade between Egypt and Transylvania, about 3200 B.C., to which reference was made in chapter III. The Tripolje settlements of Type A belong, therefore, to a period which closed certainly as early as 2400 and perhaps as early as 2600 B.C. For some reason, it would appear, this trade came to an end about this time, and the importation of copper axes ceased. The cause of this interruption is uncertain, but it is perhaps permissible to suggest that the inhabitants of Hissarlik II., like their successors in Hissarlik VI., held the straits and so restricted the traffic through it as to kill it. The disappearance of the type A culture must certainly be equated approximately with the rise of Hissarlik II., for, as we shall see, the disappearance of Type B. culture practically synchronises with the destruction of that city.