THE SECOND STONE AGE.
[Sidenote: The age of polished stone.]
Between the earlier and the later stone age, between man of the drift
period and man of the neolithic era, occurs a vast blank which we cannot
fill in. We bid adieu to the primitive inhabitants of our earth while
they are still the contemporaries of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros,
or of the cave lion and the cave bear, and while the very surface of the
earth wears a different aspect from what it now wears. With a changed
condition of things, with a race of animals which differed not
essentially from those known to us, and with a settled conformation of
our lands and seas not again to be departed from, comes before us the
second race of man--man of the polished stone age. We cannot account for
the sudden break; or, what is in truth the same thing, many different
suggestions to account for it have been made. Some have supposed that
the palæolithic men lived at a time anterior to the last glacial era,
for there were many glacial periods in Europe, and were either
exterminated altogether or driven thence to more southern countries by
the change in climate. Others have imagined that a new and more
cultivated race migrated into these countries, and at once introduced
the improved weapons of the later stone age; and lastly, others have
looked upon the first stone age as having existed before the Deluge, and
hold that the second race of man, the descendants of Noah, began at once
with a higher sort of civilization. Two of these four theories, it will
be seen, must suppose that man somewhere went through the stages of
improvement necessary to the introduction of the newer sort of weapons,
and they therefore take it for granted that the graduated series of
stone implements, indicating a gradual progress from the old time to the
newer, though they have not yet been found, are to be discovered
somewhere. The first and last theories would seem to be more independent
of this supposition, and therefore, as far as our knowledge yet goes, to
be more in accordance with the facts which we possess. It is, however,
by no means safe to affirm that the graduated series of implements
required to support the other suppositions will never be found.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The kitchen-middens.]
Be this as it may, with the second era begins something like a
continuous history of our race. However scanty the marks of his tracks,
we may feel sure that from this time forward man passed on one unbroken
journey of development and change through the forgotten eras of the
world’s life down to the dawn of history. We take the rudest condition
in which we find man to be the most primitive, and we start with him in
this new stone age as still a fisher or a hunter only. He first appears
before us as depending for his nourishment chiefly upon the shell-fish
on certain coasts of northern Europe. In the north of Europe--that is to
say, upon the shores of the Baltic--are found numbers of mounds, some
five or ten feet high, and in length as much, sometimes, as a thousand
feet, by one or two hundred feet in breadth. The mounds consist for the
most part of myriads of cast-away shells of oysters, mussels, cockles,
and other shell-fish; mixed up with these are not a few bones of birds
and quadrupeds, showing that these also served for food to the primitive
dwellers by the shell mounds. The mounds are called in the present day
kjökken-möddings, kitchen-middens. They have been chiefly found in
Denmark. They are, in truth, the refuse heaps of the earliest kitchens
which have smoked in these northern regions;[6] for they are the remains
of some of the earliest among the polished-stone age inhabitants of
Europe. So primitive are the weapons of the Danish kitchen-middens, that
they have sometimes been classed with the old stone age implements. But
I believe some traces of grinding if not of polishing have been found on
them. And at any rate the mammalia contemporary with the kitchen-midden
men are very different from those of the drift or of the caves.
The raisers of these refuse mounds were, we may judge, pre-eminently
fishers; and not generally fishers of that adventurous kind who seek
their treasure in the depths of the ocean. They lived chiefly upon those
smaller fish and shell-fish which could be caught without much
difficulty or danger. Yet not only on these; for the bones of some
deep-sea fish have also been discovered, whence we know that these
mound-raisers were possessed of the art of navigation, though doubtless
in a most primitive form. Among remains believed to be contemporary with
the shell mounds are found canoes not built of planks, as our boats and
as most canoes are nowadays, but merely hollowed out of the trunks of
trees; sometimes these canoes are quite straight fore and aft, just as
the trunk was when it was cut, sometimes a little bevelled from below,
like a punt of the present day; but we believe they are never found
rounded or pointed at the prow. Here, then, we see another discovery
which has been of the greatest use to mankind, whereof the first traces
come to us from these northern shell mounds. That ‘heart with oak and
bronze thrice bound,’ the man who first ventured to sea in the first
vessel, had lived before this time. Whoever he was, we cannot, if we
think of it, refuse to endorse the praise bestowed upon him by the poet;
it required no mean courage to venture out to sea on such a strange
make-shift as was the first canoe. Perhaps the earliest experiment was
an involuntary one, made by some one who was washed away upon a large
log or felled tree. We can fancy how thence would arise the notion of
venturing again a little way, then of hollowing a seat in the middle of
the trunk, until the primitive canoes, such as we find, came into
existence.
In these imperfect vessels men gradually ventured further and further
into the ocean; and, judging of the extent of their voyages by the
deep-sea remains, we may be certain that their bravery was fatal to
many. This is in all probability the history of the discovery or
re-discovery of the art of navigation among savage people generally; in
all cases does the canoe precede the regular boat. I say ‘re-discovery’
because a nation which has settled long inland might very easily lose
the art even if their ancestors had possessed it. For it is a fact that
people rarely begin attempts at ship-building before they come to live
near the sea. As long as they can range freely on land, their rivers do
not tempt them to any dangerous experiments. But the vast plain of the
sea is too important, and makes too great an impression on their
imagination for its charm to be long withstood. Sooner or later, with
much risk of life, men are sure to try and explore its solitudes, and
navigation takes its rise. This art of seafaring, then, is amongst the
most noticeable of the belongings of the fishermen of the shell mounds.
Considering that they had none but rude stone implements, the felling
and hollowing of trees must have been an affair of no small labour, and
very likely occupied a great deal of their time when they were not
actually seeking their food, even though the agency of fire supplemented
the ineffectual blows of their stone weapons. They probably used nets
for their sea-fishing, made most likely of twisted bark or grass. And
they were hunters as well as fishers, for it has been said that the
remains of various animals have been discovered on the shell mounds.
From these remains we see that the age of the post-glacial animals has
by this time quite passed away; no mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, or cave
lion or bear is found; even the reindeer, which in palæolithic days must
have ranged over France and Switzerland, has retired to the north.
The fact is, the climate is now much more temperate and uniform than in
the first stone age. Then the reindeer and the chamois, animals which
belong naturally to regions of ice and snow, freely traversed, in winter
at least, the valleys or the plains far towards the south of Europe.[7]
But as the climate changed, the first was driven to the extreme north of
Europe, and the second to the higher mountain peaks. The only extinct
species belonging to the shell mounds is the wild bull (_bos
primigenius_), which however survived in Europe until quite historical
times. His remains appear in great numbers, as do those of the seal, now
very rare, and the beaver, which is extinct in Denmark. No remains of
any domesticated animal are found; but the existence of tame dogs is
guessed at from the fact that the bones bear traces of the gnawing of
canine teeth, and from the absence of bones of young birds and of the
softer bones of animals generally. For it has been shown experimentally
that just such portions are absent from these skeletons as will be
devoured when birds or animals of the same species are given to dogs at
this day. Dogs, therefore, we may feel pretty sure, were domesticated by
the stone-age men; so here again we can see the beginning of a step in
civilization which has been of incalculable benefit to man, the taming
of animals for his use. The ox, the sheep, the goat, were as yet
unknown; man was still in the hunter’s condition, and had not advanced
to the shepherd state, only training for his use the dog, to assist him
in pursuit of the wild animals who supplied part of his food. He was,
too, utterly devoid of all agricultural knowledge. Probably the
domestication of the dog marks a sort of transition state between the
hunter and the shepherd. When that experiment has been tried, the notion
must sooner or later spring up of training other animals, and keeping
them for use or food. With regard to the dogs themselves, it is a
curious fact that those of the stone age are smaller than those of the
bronze period, while the dogs of the bronze age are again smaller than
those of the age of iron. This is an illustration of the well-known fact
that domestication increases the size and improves the character of
animals, as gardening does that of plants.
There is one other negative fact which we gather from the bones of these
refuse-heaps--no human bones are mingled with them; so we may conclude
that these men were not cannibals. In fact, cannibalism is an
extraordinary perversion of human nature, arising it is difficult to say
exactly how, and only showing itself among particular people and under
peculiar conditions. There is no doubt that, among a very large
proportion of the savage nations which at present inhabit our globe,
cannibalism is practised, and of this fact many explanations have been
offered; but they are generally far-fetched and unsatisfactory; and it
is certainly not within our scope to discuss them here. How little
natural cannibalism is even to the most savage men is proved by the fact
that man is scarcely ever, except under urgent necessity, found to feed
upon the flesh of carnivorous or flesh-eating animals, and this alone,
besides every instinct of our nature, would be sufficient to prevent him
from eating his fellow-men.
We have many proofs of the great antiquity of the shell mounds. Their
position gives one. Whilst most of them are confined to the immediate
neighbourhood of the seashore, some few are found at a distance of
several miles inland. These exceptions may always be referred to the
presence of a stream which has gradually deposited its mud at the place
where it emptied itself into the sea, or to some other sufficient cause
of the protrusion of the coast-line; so that these miles of new coast
have come into existence after the shell mounds were raised. On the
other hand, there are no mounds upon those parts of the coast which
border on the Western Ocean. But it is just here that, owing to a
gradual depression of the land at the rate of two or three inches in a
century[8] the waves are slowly eating away the shore. This is what
happens on every sea-coast. Almost all over the world there is a small
but constant movement of the solid crust of the earth, which is, in
fact, only a crust over the molten mass within. Sometimes, and in some
places, the imprisoned mass makes itself felt, in violent upheavals, in
sudden cracks of the inclosing surface, which we call earthquakes and
volcanoes; but oftener its effect is slight and almost unnoticed. This
interchange of state between the kingdoms of the land and of the ocean
helps to show us the time which has passed between the making of the
kitchen-middens and our own days. There seems little doubt that all
along the Danish coast of the North Sea, as well as on that of the
Baltic, these mounds once stood; but by the gradual undermining of the
cliffs the former series have all been swept away, while the latter
have, as it appears, been moved a little inland; and we have seen that
when there was another cause present to form land between the
kitchen-middens and the sea, the distance has often been increased to
several miles.
Here is another and a still stronger proof of the antiquity of the shell
mounds. If we examine the shells themselves, we find that they all
belong to still living species, and they are all exactly similar to such
as might be found in the ocean at the present day. But it happens that
this is not now the case with the shells of the same fish belonging to
the Baltic Sea. For the waters of this sea are now brackish, and not
salt; and since they became so the shell-fish in it have gradually grown
smaller, and do not now attain half their natural size. The oyster,
moreover, will not now live at all in the Baltic, except near its
entrance, where, whenever the wind blows from the north-west, a strong
current of salt ocean water is poured in. Yet oyster shells are
especially abundant in the kitchen-middens. From all this we gather
that, at the time of the making of these mounds, there must have been
free communication between the ocean and the Baltic Sea. In all
probability, in fact, there were a number of such passages through the
peninsula of Jutland, which was consequently at that time an
archipelago.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The tumuli or barrows.]
As ages passed on the descendants of these isolated fishermen spread
themselves over Europe, and, improving in their way of life and mastery
over mechanical arts, found themselves no longer constrained to trust
for their livelihood to the spoils of the sea-shallows. They made lances
and axes (headed with stone), and perfected the use of the bow and arrow
until they became masters of the game of the forest. And then, after a
while, man grew out of this hunter stage and domesticated other animals
besides the dog: oxen, pigs, and geese. No longer occupied solely by the
search for his daily food, he raised mighty tombs--huge mounds of earth
enclosing a narrow grave--to the departed great men of his race; and he
reared up those enormous masses of stone called cromlechs or
dolmens--such as we see at Stonehenge--as altars to his gods.[9]
The great tombs of earth--which have their fellows not in Europe only,
but over the greater part of the world--are the special and
characteristic features of the stone age. The raisers of the
kitchen-middens probably preceded the men who built the tombs; for their
mode of life was, as we should say, the most primitive; but they were
confined to a corner of Europe. The tomb-builders formed one of a mighty
brotherhood of men linked together by the characteristics of a common
civilization. These stone-age sepulchres, called in England tumuli,
barrows, or hows, are hills of earth from one to as much as four hundred
feet long, by a breadth and height of from thirty to fifty feet. They
are either chambered or unchambered; that is, they are either raised
over a small vault made of stone (with perhaps a sort of vestibule or
entrance chamber), or else a mere hollow has been excavated within the
mound. In these recesses repose the bodies of the dead, some great
chieftain or hero--the father of his people, who came to be regarded
after his death with almost the veneration of a god. Beside the dead
were placed various implements and utensils, left there to do him honour
or service, to assist him upon the journey to that undiscovered country
whither he was bound; the best of sharpened knives or spear-heads, some
jars of their rude pottery, once filled with food and drink, porridge,
rough cakes and beer.[10] And maybe a wife or two, and some captives of
the last battle were sacrificed to his shade, that he might not go quite
unattended into that ‘other world.’ The last ceremony, the slaughter of
human victims to the manes of the dead, was not always, but it must have
been often, enacted. Out of thirty-two stone-age barrows excavated in
Wiltshire, seventeen contained only one skeleton, and the rest various
numbers, from two to an indefinite number; and, in one case at least,
all the skulls _save one_ were found cleft as by a stone hatchet.
At the doors of the mounds or in an entrance chamber many bones have
been discovered, the traces of a funeral feast, the wake or watch kept
on the evening of the burial. Likely enough, if the chief were almost
deified after death, the funeral feast would become periodical. It
would be considered canny and of good omen that the elders of the tribe
should meet there at times in solemn conclave, on the eve of a warlike
expedition or whenever the watchful care of the dead hero might avail
his descendants. From the remains of these feasts, and from the relics
of the tombs, we have the means of forming some idea of man’s
acquirements at this time. His implements are improvements upon those of
the stone age: in all respects, that is, save in this one, that he had
now no barbed weapons; whereas we remember that in the caves barbed
harpoons are frequently met with. Nor, again, had he the artistic talent
of the cave-dwellers: no traces of New Stone-age drawings have come to
light. For the rest, his implements and weapons may be divided into a
few distinctive classes:--
1. Hammers, hatchets, tomahawks, or chisels; an instrument made of a
heavy piece of stone brought to a sharp cutting edge at one end, and at
the other rounded or flat, so as to serve the double purpose of a hammer
and an axe. When these are of an elongated form they are called celts or
chisels. As subspecies to the hammers and celts we have picks and
gouges. 2. Arrow and spear heads, which differ in size but not much in
form, both being long and narrow in shape, often closely resembling the
leaf of the laurel or the bay, sometimes of a diamond shape, but more
often having the lateral corners nearest to the end which fitted into
the shaft. Viewed edgeways, they also appear to taper towards either
end, for while one point was designed to pierce the victim, the other
was fitted into a cleft handle, and bound into it with cord or sinew.
Implements have been discovered still fitted into their handles. 3. The
stone knives, which have generally two cutting edges, and when this is
the case do not greatly differ from the spear-heads, though they are
commonly less pointed than the latter. And to these three important
forms we may add, as less important types, a rounded form of implement,
generally called a scraper, and similar to the scrapers of the
palæolithic era; stones designed for slinging, net-weights, and perhaps
corn-grinders or nut-crushers. A few bone implements have been found in
the tumuli, a pin, a chisel, and a knife or so; but they are very rare,
they are never carved, and have not one quarter of the interest which
belongs to the bone implements of the caves. Finally, we must not omit
to say that in Anhalt, in Germany, a large stone has been found which
seems to have served the purpose of a plough. For there can be little
doubt that if some of the tumuli belong to a time before the use of
domesticated animals--save the dog--they last down to a time when man
not only had tame oxen, pigs, goats, and geese,[11] but also sowed and
planted, and lived the life of an agricultural race; nor will it be said
that such an advance was extraordinary when we say that the minimum
duration of the age of polished stone in central Europe was probably two
thousand years.
Other relics from the mounds, not less interesting than the weapons, are
their vessels of pottery; for here we see the earliest traces of another
art. This pottery is of a black colour, curiously mixed with powdered
shells, perhaps to strengthen the clay, perhaps for ornament. Its
pottery belongs to the latter portion of this age of stone, a period
distinguished not only by the use of domestic animals, but also by the
growth of cereals. We have said that bones of cattle, swine, and in one
case of a goose, have been found among the refuse of the funeral feasts.
But man was still a hunter, as he is to this day, though he had found
other means of support besides the wild game; so we also find the bones
of the red deer and the wild bull, both of which supplied him with food.
Wolves’ teeth, too, have been found pierced, so as to be strung into a
necklace; for personal adornment formed, in those days as now, part of
the interest of life. Jet beads have been discovered in large numbers,
and even some of amber, which seems to have been brought from the Baltic
to these countries and as far south as Switzerland; and it is known that
during the last portion of what is, nevertheless, still the stone
period, the most precious metal of all, gold, was used for ornament.
Gold is the one metal which is frequently found on the surface of the
ground, and therefore it was naturally the first to come under the eye
of man.
The religion of the mound-builders probably consisted in part of the
worship of the dead, so that the very tombs themselves, and not the
cromlechs only, were a sort of temples. And yet they had the deepest
dread of the reappearance of the departed upon earth--of his ghost. To
prevent his ‘walking’ they adopted a strange practical form of exorcism.
They strewed the ground at the grave’s mouth with sharp stones or broken
pieces of pottery, as though a ghost could have his feet cut, and by
fear of that be kept from returning to his old haunts. For ages and ages
after the days of the mound-builders the same custom lived on of which
we here see the rise. The same ceremony--turned now to an unmeaning
rite--was used for the graves of those, such as murderers or suicides,
who might be expected to sleep uneasily in their narrow house. This is
the custom which is referred to in the speech of the priest to
Laertes.[12] Ophelia had died under such suspicion of suicide, that it
was a stretch of their rule, he says, to grant her Christian burial.
‘And but the great command o’ersways our order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
To the last trumpet: for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her.’
* * * * *
The body of him for whom the mound was built was not buried in the
centre, but at one end, and that commonly the east, for in most cases
the barrows lie east and west. It is never stretched out flat, but lies
or sits in a crouched attitude, the head brought down upon the breast,
and the knees raised up to meet the chin. So that the dead man was
generally left facing toward the west--the going down of the sun. There
cannot but be some significance in this. The daily death of the sun has,
in all ages and to all people, spoken of man’s own death, his western
course has seemed to tell of that last journey upon which all are bent.
So that the resting-place of the soul is nearly always imagined to lie
westward in the home of the setting sun. For the rest, there seems
little doubt that the barrows represent nothing else--though upon a
large scale--than the dwelling-home of the time, and we may believe that
the greater part of the funeral rights connected with the mounds were
very literal and unsymbolical.[13] The Eskimo and Lapps of our day
dwell in huts no more commodious than the small chambers of the barrows,
and exceedingly like them in shape; only they keep them warm by heaping
up over them not earth but snow. In these hovels they sit squatting, in
an attitude not unlike that of the skeleton of the tumuli. Of the human
remains the skulls are small and round, and have a prominent ridge over
the sockets of the eyes, showing that the ancient race was of small
stature with round heads--what is called _brachycephalus_, or
short-headed, and had over-hanging eyebrows; in short, their skeletons
bare a considerable resemblance to those of the modern Laplanders.
We are still, however, left in darkness about that part of the stone-age
thought which has left the grandest traces, and of which we should so
much have wished to be informed; I mean the religion. Besides the tumuli
we have those enormous piles of stone called cromlechs, or dolmens, and
sometimes _miscalled_ Druid circles--such as the well-known Stonehenge;
these cromlechs were, we may believe, temples or sacred places. Each
arrangement of the stones is generally like a simple portico, made by
placing one enormous block upon two others; and these porticoes are
sometimes arranged in circles, as at Stonehenge, sometimes in long
colonnades, as at Carnac in Brittany. Lesser dolmens have been found in
most European countries. There can be little doubt that these huge
monuments possessed a religious character. And here is one proof of the
fact. As a rule, the grave-mounds--the tumuli--are built upon elevations
commanding a considerable prospect, and it is rare to find two within
sight. Yet over Salisbury Plain, and the part about Stonehenge, they are
much more numerous, as many as a hundred and fifty having been
discovered in this neighbourhood, as though all the ground about this
great cromlech were a hallowed region, and it were a desired privilege
to be buried within such sacred precincts. Of the worship which these
stone altars commemorate we know absolutely nothing. There seems to be
no reasonable doubt that they belong to the period we are describing.
The name Druid Circles, which has been sometimes given them, is an
absurd anachronism, for, as we shall have occasion to see later on, the
ancestors of the Kelts (or Celts), to whom the Druidical religion
belonged, were probably at this time still living on the banks of the
Oxus in Central Asia; at any rate they had not yet migrated to Brittany
or to Great Britain. Thus, though we must continue to wonder how these
people could ever have raised such enormous stones as altars of their
religion, the nature of that religion itself is hidden from us.
The tumuli and the relics which they contain are the truest
representatives of the second stone age which have come down to us. The
barrows raise their summits in every land, and the characteristic
features of the remains found in them are the same for each. We must
judge that they, that the most genuine stone-age tumuli, arose during
the greatest extension of the stone-age races, before any new peoples
had come to dispute their territory. What the kitchen-middens show in
the germ, they show in its perfection--all the perfection attainable by
it.
We have already enumerated the most important forms of weapons and
implements found in these _tumuli_; and there would be no use in
entering upon a lengthy verbal description of what would be so much
better illustrated by drawings. The books enumerated in the Appendix
give abundant illustrations of the stone-age remains. One caution,
however, we need to give the reader. This second stone age is called, we
know, the age of polished stone. But, as has been already said, that by
no means implies that all the implements made in these days were
polished. On the contrary, certain stone manufactures, notably
arrow-heads, were never polished. They went on being made by chipping,
not only during the whole of the second stone age, but far into the
first metal age, when bronze had been introduced and was used for the
manufacture of numerous weapons and implements. The grinding of the
edges of certain sharp weapons is a more important characteristic than
the polishing of the whole or a portion of their surface. But this
grinding was not universally employed, but used generally only for the
larger implements.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The lake villages.]
And now, having dealt with the remains from the _tumuli_, the flower, as
we may call them, of the second stone period, we pass on to a third
series of remains, which must be in part contemporary with the
stone-using men, and have continued on and been absorbed into the metal
age, which next supervened. These remains came from what are called the
lake-dwellings, and though traces of such dwellings have been found in
many countries in Europe, in our isles among others, still the chief
_provenance_ of the lake-dwellings, so far as our discoveries yet go, is
in Switzerland and the north of Italy. But let it not be supposed that
these lake-dwellings extended over a short period. A variety of separate
pieces of evidence enforce upon us the conclusion that the stone age in
Europe endured for at least two thousand years. Even the latter portion
of that epoch will allow a cycle vast enough for the lives of the
lake-dwellers; for the dwellings did not come to an end at the end of
the age of stone, they only began in it. They were seen by Roman eyes
almost as late as the beginning of our own era.
For at least two thousand years, then, we may say, the men who lived in
the country of the Swiss lakes, and those of Northern Italy, adopted for
the sake of security the custom of making their dwellings, not upon the
solid ground, but upon platforms constructed with infinite trouble above
the waters of the lake. And the way they set about it was in this wise:
Having chosen their spot--if attainable, a sunny shore protected as much
as possible from storms, and having a lake-bottom of a soft and sandy
nature--they proceeded to drive in piles, composed of tree-stems taken
from the neighbouring forests, from four to eight inches in diameter.
These piles had to be felled, and afterwards sharpened, either by fire
or a stone axe, then driven in from a raft by the use of ponderous stone
mallets; and when we have said that in one instance the number of piles
of a lake village has been estimated at from 40,000 to 50,000, the
enormous labour of the process will be apparent. This task finished, the
piles were levelled at a certain height above the water, and a platform
of boards was fastened on with pegs. On the platform were erected huts,
probably square or oblong in shape, not more than twenty feet or so in
length, adapted however for the use of a single family, and generally
furnished, it would appear, with a hearthstone and a corn-crusher
apiece. The huts were made of wattle-work, coated on both sides with
clay. Stalls were provided for the cattle, and a bridge of from only ten
or twelve to as much as a hundred yards in length led back to the
mainland. Over this the cattle must have been driven every day, at least
in summer, to pasture on the bank; and no doubt the village community
separated each morning for the various occupations of fishing, for
hunting, for agriculture, and for tending the cattle. As may be
imagined, these wooden villages were in peculiar danger from fire, and a
very large number have suffered destruction in this way; a circumstance
fortunate for modern science, for many things which had been partially
burnt before falling into the lake have, by the coating of charcoal
formed round them, been made impervious to the corroding influence of
the water. Thus we have preserved their very grain itself, and their
loaves or cakes of crushed but not ground meal. The grains are of
various kinds of wheat and barley, oats, and millet.[14]
It is natural to ask for what object the enormous trouble of erecting
these lake-dwellings could have been undertaken; and the only answer
which can be given is, that it was to protect their inhabitants from
their enemies. Whether each village formed a separate tribe and made war
upon its neighbours, or whether the lake-dwellers were a peaceful race
fleeing from more savage people of the mainland, is uncertain. There is
nothing which leads us to suppose they were a race of a warlike
character, and as far as the arts of peace go they had advanced
considerably upon the men of the tumuli. More especially do the _woven
cloths_, sometimes worked with simple but not inartistic patterns,
excite our admiration. They had their trade too. Ornaments of amber are
frequent, and amber must have been brought from the Baltic; while in one
settlement, believed to be of the stone age, the presence of a glass
bead would seem to imply indirect commerce with Egypt, the only country
in which the traces of glass manufacture at this remote period have been
found.[15] It is believed by good authorities, that the stone age in
Europe came to an end about two thousand years before Christ, or at a
date which is generally considered to be about that of Abraham; and its
shortest duration, as we saw, must also be considered to be two thousand
years.
These men of the lakes stand in no degree behind the mound-builders for
the material elements of civilization. Nay, they are in some respects
before them. Their life seems to have been more confined and simple than
that which was going on in other parts of Europe. Its very peacefulness
and simplicity gave men the opportunity for perfecting some of their
arts. Thus their agriculture was more careful and more extended than
that of the men of the tumuli. Their cattle would appear to have been
numerous; all were stall-fed upon the island home; if in the morning
driven out to pasture over the long bridge to the mainland, they were
brought home again at night. To agriculture these lake-dwellers had
added the special art of gardening, for they cultivated fruit-trees; and
they span hemp and flax, and even constructed--it is believed--some sort
of loom for weaving cloth. Yet for all that, if in these respects they
were superior to the men of the tumuli, their life was probably more
petty and narrow than the others’. There must have been some grandeur in
the ideas of men who could have built those enormous tombs and raised
those wondrous piles of altar-stones. If the first were made in honour
of their chiefs, the existence of such chiefs implies a power in the
stone-age men of expanding into a wide social life; so too the immense
labour which the raising of the cromlechs demanded argues strong if not
the most elevated religious ideas. And it has been often and truly
remarked that these two elements of progress, social and religious life,
are always intimately associated. It is in a common worship more than in
common language that we find the beginning of nationalities. It was so
in Greece. The city life grew up around the temple of a particular
tutelary deity, and the associations of cities arose from their
association in the worship at some common shrine. The common nationality
of the Hellenes was kept alive more than anything in the quadrennial
games in honour of the Olympian Zeus, just as the special citizenship of
Athens found expression in the peculiar worship of the virgin goddess
Athênê. So we may well argue from the great stone remains, that man had
even then made _some_ progress in political life. They show us the
extended conditions of tribal government. But the lake-dwellers only
give us a picture of the simplest and narrowest form of the village
community. It is with them a complete condition of social equality;
there is no appearance of any grade of rank; no hut on these islands is
found larger or better supplied or more cared for than the rest. A
condition of things not unlike that which we find in Switzerland at the
present day; one favourable to happiness and contentment, to improvement
in the simpler arts, but not to wide views of life, or to any great or
general progress.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The civilization of the stone ages.]
And now let us, before we bid adieu to the men of the stone age, recount
our gains, and see what picture the researches of pre-historic science
allow us to draw of the progress of mankind from its earliest condition
to that in which we now find it. We will forget for a moment the great
gap which intervenes between the two stone ages, the age of unpolished
stone and the age of polished stone, and simply following step by step
the changes in human implements much as if we were walking round the
cases of some well-arranged museum, we will note, as we pass it, each
marked improvement or new acquisition in the arts of life.
* * * * *
1. To begin, then, with the men of the river drift--so far as we can
judge, the rudest and most uncultured of all. It is not certain that
these men had so much as wooden handles to their implements of stone,
but it is probable that they had them. As we have said, they had only
two or three marked varieties in these weapons. How little advance there
seems from the state of simply using or hurling the stones in the state
in which they are found! At the same time, it must be said that the
implements of wood or horn, pointed stakes or even javelins, which these
early men _may_ have had would almost certainly have perished.
Nor, again, is there any evidence that the men of the drift period were
cognizant of the use of fire, though here it is more likely that they
were than that they were not.
* * * * *
2. When we come to the cave-dwellers we see marked signs of a higher
civilization. The first and most important of these signs undoubtedly is
the _evidence_ of knowledge how to procure fire. We see a much greater
variety in the implements used by the cave-dwellers. This, no doubt, is
due _in part_ to the disappearance of a portion of the implements of the
drift age; but still we must take things as we find them. And putting
side by side the specimens of the drift-implements and the
cave-implements, we are at once struck by the superiority of the latter
in make and in variety of form.
Thirdly, as has already been pointed out, we have here the earliest
traces of art. On that subject it is not necessary again to dwell.
* * * * *
3. And now pass on to the second stone age, and see what progress man
has made in the interval which separates the two periods. We begin with
the society represented by the kitchen-middens. We do not possess any
certainly polished-stone implements from these refuse-heaps. But I do
not lay any great stress upon the invention of the art of polishing or
even of grinding the stone; though that was not without importance, for
it enabled the men of the second stone age to make use of much harder
and more durable sorts of stone for their cutting implements. The
earliest stone-age men made their implements of all sorts almost
exclusively of flints, because the flint was a stone not difficult to
chip into shape and to give an edge to by chipping. But when it comes to
polishing or grinding instead of chipping an edge upon stones, there are
a variety of other kinds of stone which are much more durable and much
more serviceable than flints are, for the very reason that they are not
liable to chip, and these stones (jade, granite, greenstone, obsidian,
or one or other of the marbles, for example) we find a good deal
employed during the latter stone age.
What, however, is more significant than would be the use of
polished-stone implements by the kitchen-midden men is the evidence of
their use of canoes, and therefore the evidence that they understood the
art of navigation.
Next after that we must place the use of the bow, which also was
probably known to the earliest men of the polished-stone age, but not to
those of the preceding era.
Finally, we have the beginning of domestication of animals in the
domestication of the dog. But we have as yet no beginning of
agriculture.
* * * * *
4. Pass on to the men who raised the tumuli and we find still further
signs of progress. Of these the tumuli themselves are the most
significant. For in them we see the beginning of the art of building. I
do not say that houses were unknown to the kitchen-midden men; only that
we have no proof that they lived in houses; and we are here taking the
evidences of advancing civilization as we come across them. In the case
of the still earlier cave-dwellers we may take it for granted that the
art of house-building was unknown to them, and quite as much so to the
men of the river drift.[16]
True, the tumuli are not houses; they are tombs. But the men who could
raise these tombs could raise houses likewise, and there can be little
doubt that the architecture of the tombs, here and throughout the
history of mankind, was modelled upon the architecture of the houses.
Wherefore we may assume that these last were low and narrow chambers, a
sort of constructed caves, so to speak, which is just what we should
expect the earliest houses to be. We should expect that the first
advance from cave-dwelling or burrowing in the ground would be to raise
an artificial mountain and burrow within that. But soon the insecurity
of this house would become apparent, and the next advance--no mean one,
however,--would be the propping of stones upon others to make a chamber
before the earth was heaped up in the tumulus, and when that step had
been reached the art of house-building had begun.
We might call the next step forward the acquisition of a religion, of
which the first signs are apparent in the cromlechs of this age. In this
case, again, we only follow the testimony of the remains that have been
discovered in the order in which they have come to light. It would be
far too much to say that the earlier stone-age men were without
religious observances. All we can say is, that the first certain
remains of these belong to the time of the tumuli and the cromlechs. The
reasons which lead us to believe that these last, the cromlechs, had a
religious character have been already given.
Commerce was not unknown even to the cave-dwellers, but the first proofs
of anything like a distant commerce come to us from the date of the
grave-mounds.
The domestic animals of the tumuli begin to be numerous--oxen, pigs,
goats, and geese,--though these remains are not found in the earliest
mounds. And there is likewise among them some trace of agriculture.
Finally, traces of the art of pottery-making appear for the first time
in these graves.
* * * * *
5. The village communities show an advance to the most undoubted use of
agriculture, to the planting of fruit-trees, to the weaving of cloths,
and a much more extended practice of domestication than obtained among
the men of the grave-mounds.
Thus we see that as long ago as the stone age, before man had yet
discovered any metal except, maybe, gold, he had advanced so far as to
have discovered the most necessary arts of life, hunting, fishing,
navigation (in some form), the domestication of animals, agriculture,
planting, weaving, the making of garments--not of skin only, but also of
linen or cloth--and the making of pottery.
And now let us note one other thing--the point where the stone age seems
to approach most nearly to the borders of actual history. History begins
in Egypt. For no continuous Biblical history exists for the days prior
to Abraham. But in Egypt, for many centuries before Abraham, we have a
continuous history, or at least continuous chronicles and dynastic
lists, whose authenticity is admitted, and the remains of no mean
civilization in the buildings contemporary with these earliest
chronicles.
Egyptian history may be said to begin with the builders of the pyramids.
But the pyramids themselves are nothing else than the children of the
tumuli of the second stone age. We may call them a sort of crystallized
tumuli--barrows of stone instead of earth. But, in truth, the earliest
pyramids were probably not built of stone. It is generally believed that
the stone pyramids which we see to-day at Gîza and Sakkara were preceded
by pyramids of unbaked brick. And what are such buildings of unbaked
brick save carefully raised mounds of earth? Here, then, we get the
nearest meeting-point between the stone age and the age of history.
Again, the principle upon which were constructed the Egyptian tombs--of
which the pyramids were only the most conspicuous forms--were precisely
the same as the principles which governed the construction of the more
elaborate barrows. These last had not only a chamber for the dead. This
chamber was in many cases approached by a passage also made of stones
covered with earth; and there can be no question that the mouth of the
tomb was used as a sort of ante-room in which the relatives of the dead
might hold their wake, or funeral feast. Here have been found the traces
of fires, the remains of animals, fragments of vessels of pottery, etc.,
used or consumed in the feasts. We may believe that the ceremony was
repeated at stated intervals. The very same principle governed the
construction of the Egyptian tombs. These likewise (in their earliest
known forms) consisted of an inner tomb and of an outer chamber;
generally between the one and the other there was a passage. The outer
chamber is that to which archæologists have given the name of _mastaba_.
In it the relatives of the dead continued year after year to keep a
funeral feast in his memory. Or we may say more than in memory of the
dead--_with_ the dead, we may say. For the essence of the feast, the
fumes of the baked meats, was thought to penetrate along the passage and
reach the mummy himself in his dark chamber.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Ages of bronze and iron.]
Thus we come to the end of the stone age or ages. The next great
discovery which man made was that of the metals. Not iron at first;
before iron was discovered there supervened the age known as the Bronze
Age, when copper and tin were known but not iron, and all the most
important implements were made of that mixture of copper and
tin--bronze, the hardest substance then obtainable. In some countries
the discovery of the metals was natural, and one age followed upon the
other in gradual sequence. But in Europe it was not so. The men of the
bronze age were a new race, sallying out of the East to dispossess the
older inhabitants, and if in some places the bronze men and the stone
men seem to have gone on for a time side by side, the general character
of the change is that of a sudden break.
Therefore we do not now proceed to speak of the characteristic
civilization of the bronze age. As will be seen hereafter, the bringers
of the new weapons belonged to a race concerning whom we have much
ampler means of information than is possessed for the first inhabitants
of these lands; and we are spared the necessity of drawing all our
knowledge from a scrutiny of their arms or tombs. But before we can
satisfactorily show who were the successors of the stone-age men in
Europe, and whence they came, we must turn aside towards another
inquiry, viz. into the origin of language.