The Penguin History of the World

Except in the Balkans and Thrace, the movements of these peoples affected the older centres of civilization only in so far as they affected access to the resources of the areas into which they moved. This was above all a matter of minerals and skills. As the demands of the Middle East civilizations grew, so did Europe’s importance. After the appearance of the first centres of metallurgy in the Balkans, developments in southern Spain, Greece and the Aegean and central Italy had followed by 2000 BC. In the later Bronze Age, metal-working was advanced to high levels even in places where no local ores were available. We have here one of the earliest examples of the emergence of crucial economic areas based on the possession of special resources. Copper and tin shaped the penetration of Europe and also its coastal and river navigation because these commodities were needed and were only available in the Middle East in small quantities. Europe was the major primary producer of the ancient metallurgical world, as well as a major manufacturer. Metal-working was carried to a high level and produced beautiful objects long before that of the Aegean, but it is possibly an argument against exaggerated awe about material factors in history that this skill, even when combined with a bigger supply of metals after the collapse of Mycenaean demand, did not release European culture for the achievement of a full and complex civilization.

Ancient Europe had, of course, one other art form which remains indisputably impressive. It is preserved in the thousands of megalithic monuments to be found stretching in a broad arc from Malta, Sardinia and Corsica, around through Spain and Brittany to the British Isles and Scandinavia. They are not peculiar to Europe but are more plentiful there, and appear to have been erected earlier – some in the fifth millennium BC – there than in other continents. ‘Megalith’ is a word derived from the Greek for ‘large stone’ and many of the stones used are very large indeed. Some of these monuments are tombs, roofed and lined with slabs of stone; some are stones standing singly, or in groups. Some of them are laid out in patterns which run for miles across country; others enclose small areas like groves of trees. The most complete and striking megalithic site is Stonehenge, in southern England, whose creation is now thought to have taken about 900 years to its completion in about 2100 BC. What such places originally looked like is hard to guess or imagine. Their modern austerity and weathered grandeur may well be misleading; great places of human resort are not like that when in use and it may be that the huge stones were daubed in ochres and blood, or hung with skins and fetishes. They may well often have looked more like totem-poles than the solemn, brooding shapes we see today. Except for the tombs, it is not easy to say what these works were for, though it has been argued that some were giant clocks or huge solar observatories, aligned to the rising and setting of sun, moon and stars at the major turning-points of the astronomical year. Careful observation underlay building like that, even if it fell far short in detail and precision to what was done by astronomers in Babylon and Egypt.