The westward movements I have already dealt with elsewhere,[234] and I need do no more than recapitulate them here. As we have seen, the steppe-folk entered the Tripolje region, and probably occupied this district as far as Breslau. Some of them passed southwards along the western shore of the Euxine, and crossing the Danube, settled in Thrace, where numerous kurgans are to be seen.[235] Others seem to have passed on further south, and eventually reached the Thessalian plain, into which they introduced Dhimini ware and the cult of the horse. It may be that it was the appearance of these strange horsemen in this region which gave rise to the stories of the Centaurs.
Some bands of the latter party seem to have separated from the main body and advanced down the Gallipoli peninsula. These, as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere, destroyed Hissarlik II., among the ruins of which two of their skulls were found.[236] It may be that these were responsible for the rude villages of Hissarlik III., but it seems more probable that they would have passed on to the grassy steppes in the interior of the Anatolian peninsula.
Now the bulk of the people of Asia Minor at this date, as at the present day, were of that eastern Alpine, Anatolian or Armenoid type, best represented by the modern Armenians. These people are not by nature warlike, though they will sometimes fight well to defend their homes; but in no case are they aggressive, unless under the command of a more militaristic type. A few centuries after the events which we have been discussing, we find an aggressive, military power growing up in the peninsula, at first under several chiefs or kings,[237] in which, I think, we may see a military aristocracy. These separate, though perhaps federated, states ultimately coalesced into the great empire of the Khatti or Hittites, who attacked and sacked Babylon in 1746 B.C.[238]
FIG. 4.
CARINATED VASE FROM SPAIN.
Whether or no any of these steppe-folk entered Hungary at this time is not quite clear, for it would seem that some of the long skulls found at Laibach may be of an earlier date. To these we will return later. It seems probable that the grassy steppes of the Hungarian plain would tempt these wandering horsemen, and we can scarcely believe that they would have avoided such rich pastures, unless, indeed, they were already occupied by their distant relatives, who were powerful enough to keep them out. The balance of evidence seems, however, to suggest that, whether or no any Nordic steppe-folk had arrived here earlier, some of these invaders from the steppes must have entered the fertile plain of the middle Danube.
It has been pointed out by Minns,[239] that “in the far west of Russia, between the Carpathians and Kiev, we find in the neolithic period distinct traces of connection with the coasts of the Baltic,” also that there are found “northern types of axes and amber.” Zaborowski,[240] also has drawn attention to the resemblance between some of the contents of the kurgans and the culture by the shores of the Baltic. It was for this reason that in 1916 I suggested[241] that at a date prior to that we have been discussing, perhaps about 3000 B.C., some of these steppe-folk had passed to the shores of the Baltic, and were the long-headed men who are found occupying the lowlands of Belgium[242] about that time. I have elaborated the argument since,[243] but it has not met with the approval of some of the Swedish archæologists.[244] With the evidence at present available it is not easy to make a conclusive case one way or the other, but, as we have seen, the neolithic culture of this area resembles in some points that of the Baltic, Nordic types appear in the Baltic region, in Belgium, in the Rhine basin and pass thence to the Swiss lake-dwellings, while other long-headed types, which may however have appeared later, are found in the west of Hungary and the eastern slopes of the mountain zone. All these points lead one to suspect that at an earlier date some of these Nordic steppe-folk, driven doubtless by a former period of drought, had migrated north-westwards to the colder regions around the Baltic Sea, where the type, already tall, relatively fair and long-headed, developed later these characters to a more pronounced degree.
