Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

57. In her book The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 6500 to 3500 BC, Op. cit., Marija Gimbutas also explores links between these original ideas and the ideas of the Greeks in regard to their gods. In particular, she finds that the Great Goddess survives as Artemis: the rituals surrounding her worship recall the ceremonies hinted at in the ancient statues of Old Europe (for example, Artemis Eileithyia – ‘child-bearing’), pages 198–199.

58. Matson, Op. cit., page 141.

59. Ibid., page 143.

60. Leslie Aitchison, A History of Metals, London: Macdonald, 1960, page 37.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., page 38.

63. Ibid., page 39. See Clark, Op. cit., page 92, for a discussion of Susa pottery and the adoption of metallurgy.

64. Aitchison, Op. cit., page 40.

65. Ibid., pages 40–41.

66. Ibid., page 41.

67. One explanation for this rapid dispersal of technological knowledge has been put down by James Muhly to the invention of writing, which we will come to in Chapter 4. See Theodore Wertime et al. (editors), The Coming of the Age of Iron, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, page 26. But there are other possibilities. The earliest true bronzes – tin bronzes – that occur in any quantity are found at Ur, in Mesopotamia, just before the middle of the second millennium BC, though the suggestion has been made that, since the Sumerians were immigrants from further east, and since the same metallurgical advances were also found at Mohenjo-Daro, on the Indus, perhaps the Sumerians first appreciated the principle of bronze-making in their original homeland, and the knowledge then spread in both directions, but needed the discovery of substantial tin deposits before it could find proper expression: Aitchison, Op. cit., page 62. This theory is further supported by the fact that Sumer’s bronze period lasted for only 300 years, then dropped off, as local tin deposits became exhausted: Wertime, Op. cit., page 32.

68. Aitchison, Op. cit., page 78.

69. Ibid., page 82.

70. Ibid., page 93. See Clark, Op. cit., pages 179 and 186 for illustrations showing daggers lengthening into swords.

71. Aitchison, Op. cit., page 98.

72. Wertime, Op. cit., pages 69–70 and 99.

73. Ibid., page 100.

74. Ibid., page 101.

75. Ibid., page 17.

76. Ibid., page 102. See Clark, Op. cit., pages 185f for a wider discussion of the impact of iron technology and for an illustration of a Greek iron-smith taken from a black-figured vase.

77. Wertime, Op. cit., page 103.

78. Ibid., page 82.

79. Ibid., page 116. Clark, Op. cit., page 186 discusses the cheapness of later iron.

80. Wertime, Op. cit., page 121.

81. Ibid., page 194.

82. Ibid., page 105.

83. Ibid., page 82.

84. Ibid., pages 197 and 215. Clark, Op. cit., page 170, discusses the role of gold as embellishment in armour.

85. Wertime, Op. cit., page 198.

86. Jack Weatherford, A History of Money, New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997, page 21.

87. Ibid., page 27.

88. Ibid., page 31. See Clark, Op. cit., page 194 for illustrations of early Greek coins.

89. Mithen, After the Ice, Op. cit., pages 67–68.

90. Weatherford, Op. cit., page 32.

91. Ibid., page 37.

92. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978, page 152.

CHAPTER 4: CITIES OF WISDOM

1. H. W. F. Saggs, Before Greece and Rome, London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 62. Petr Charvát, Mesopotamia Before History, London: Routledge, 2002, page 100. (First published as: Ancient Mesopotamia – Humankind’s Long Journey into Civilization by the Oriental Institute, Prague, 1993)

2. Renfrew, Before Civilisation, Op. cit., page 212, and Rudgley, Op. cit., page 48.

3. Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia, London: Penguin, 2002, page xviii. For Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar, see: Graham Lawton, ‘Urban legends’, New Scientist, 18 September 2004, pages 32–35.

4. Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, pages 5 and 71. Charvát, Op. cit., page 134.