In Central Europe, in the district we have called the Celtic cradle, we find two cultures growing up, one consisting of Alpine peasants under Nordic lords, which prevailed in the mountain zone; the other, more truly Nordic, and still pastoral and perhaps nomadic, was limited to the Hungarian plain. After a short interval of interruption, trading was resumed with their Italian neighbours by way of Fiume.
It is about this time that the Nordic steppe-folk of Hungary demanded larger and larger daggers, until at length the earliest leaf-shaped sword was evolved about 1500 B.C. During the following years a few adventurers passed into the Friuli and the Venetian lands, perhaps to trade, or perhaps to settle. Others, few in number, seem to have visited the amber coast of the Baltic, and one, at least, died there and was buried in Schleswig-Holstein. About 1450 B.C. Type B was evolved and spread over the mountain zone. It was carried by traders or invaders towards the Baltic, especially to Denmark. Since this type is found in considerable numbers in the north, and there continued its own local development for many years, we must admit that these swords were not taken there by mere adventurers, but by invaders, few in number, perhaps, who had gone north to Denmark, and perhaps further still, and settled, perhaps as a governing class, among the people they found there.
From 1400 to 1300 B.C., while Type C was dominant, there appears to have been little movement. The exodus of fifty years earlier had perhaps given ample elbow room to those who were left behind. But soon after 1300 B.C. we find two movements, more or less simultaneous, but going in opposite directions.
The first of these movements seems to have started from the valley of the Save, perhaps over the Predil pass into the Friuli, but more probably, as Peet[417] has suggested, through Bosnia and Herzegovina, and across the Adriatic into Italy. If the latter course were taken, the invaders landed not far from Ascoli Piceno, and most of them passed up the valley of the Trento, by the pass through which the Via Salaria afterwards ran, to the valley of the Velino. Here they settled in that fold of the Apennines between lakes Trasimene and Fucino, through which run, in opposite directions, the Velino and the upper waters of the Tiber. This band of invaders must have been a relatively small one, as the area they occupied is not extensive and was very sharply defined.
FIG. 25.—TYPE G
SWORD FROM FINLAND.
The other movement went to the east, and was probably that great emigration from Europe to Asia of which dim recollections survived among the Greeks, and which took the Briges into Asia Minor, where they became Phrygians.[418] It also carried to Thrace some, at any rate, of its red-haired people.[419] It was probably some stragglers from this group who passed southwards, like knight-errants destroying monsters and punishing evil doers, and who eventually became kings over the towns of Mycenean Greece. These were known later as Achæans, and may possibly have included also stragglers from the group which had passed over to Italy.
It was between 1200 and 1175 B.C. that the next movement began, and this was mainly to the west and north. Some of these invaders left the Danube basin, crossed the Rhine, and passing through the Belfort gap, entered France, and over-ran the greater part of that country. Until the swords of this type have been catalogued and mapped, it will be impossible to trace their line of advance, or to determine how far they went. Some of these seem to have passed either down the Rhine or up the east of France, for they crossed over to Britain, landing for the most part in the Thames and by the Wash, or else at some intermediate points. They seem to have settled in the east of England, and subsequently in Wessex, but later waves of them evidently set out for Ireland, crossing Wales by the upper Severn valley and the Bala cleft. A considerable number of these seem to have settled in Ireland.