Outlines of European History/Chapter 1

by James Harvey Robinson

OUTLINES OF

EUROPEAN HISTORY

CHAPTER I

EARLY MANKIND IN EUROPE

Section I. Earliest Man's Ignorance and Progress

Nature does not equip us with knowledge of civilization A new-born child placed in the wilds of a tropical forest and left there alone would of course die. If, however, we can imagine him possessing the strength to survive until he reached the age of ten years, he would know none of the many things which a boy of ten in your town or city now knows. Hunger would have led him to eat the nuts, fruits, and digestible roots and tubers which he would find in the forest. But if you should show him a chair, he would not know what its use might be. If you placed him in front of a door, he would not know how to open it. He would possess no tools or weapons or implements of any kind, nor any clothing. He would probably never have seen a fire; or, if so, he would not know how to make one or realize that his food might be cooked. Finally, he would not even know how to speak, or that there was such a thing as speech.

Earliest man had to learn everything All these things every child among us learns from others. But the earliest men had no one to teach them these things, and by slow experience and long effort they had to learn them for themselves. Everything had to be found out; every tool, however simple, had to be invented; and, above all, the earliest man had to discover that he could express his feelings and ideas by making sounds with his throat and mouth. At first thought the men who began such discoveries seem to us to be mere animals. Nevertheless the earliest man possessed, among other advantages, three things which lifted him high above the animals. He had a larger and a more powerful brain than any animal; he had a pair of wonderful hands such as no other creature possessed, and with these he could make tools and implements; finally, he had a throat and vocal organs such that in the course of ages he would learn to speak.

Condition of earliest man At first man must have roamed the tropical forests without any clothing, without huts or shelter of any kind, with no tools or weapons, eating roots, fruit or berries where he found them. Occasionally he may have found a dead bird or animal killed by some other creature, and thus learning the taste of flesh he would be led to pursue the less dangerous animals and to lay them low with a stone or a club. His food was of course all raw, for he could not even make a fire, nor did he know that roasted flesh was better food.

Condition of the Tasmanians of modern times Men so completely uncivilized as this no longer exist on earth. The most savage tribes found by explorers have learned how useful fire is and they understand how to make it. The people whom the English found on the island of Tasmania a century or so ago were among the lowest savages known to us. They wore no clothing; they had not learned how to build a hut; they did not know how to make a bow and arrows, nor even to fish. They had no goats, sheep, or cows, no horses, nor even a dog. They had never heard of sowing seed nor raising a crop of any kind. They did not know that clay will harden in the fire, and so they had no pottery jars, jugs, or dishes for food.

Naked and houseless, the Tasmanians had learned to satisfy only a very few of man's needs. Yet that which they had learned had carried them a long way beyond the earliest men. They could kindle a fire, which kept them warm in cold weather, and over it they cooked their meat. In order to secure this meat they had learned to construct very good spears, though without metal tips, for they had never heard of metal. These spears they could throw with great accuracy and thus bring down the game they needed for food, or drive away their human enemies. They could take a flat stone, and by chipping off its edges to thin them they could produce a rude knife with which to skin and cut up the game they killed. They were also very deft in making cups, vessels, and baskets of bark fiber. Above all, they had a simple language, with words for all the things they used, and this language served for everything they needed to say.

It is certain that man has existed on the earth for several Progress of early man traceable by us after he begins to make stone tools hundred thousand years at least. We cannot now trace all the different stages in his progress, which brought him at last as far as the savage Tasmanians had come. We do not know the various steps which finally enabled him to speak. With fire he would become acquainted from the forest fires kindled by lightning, or from the floods of molten lava descending the slopes of the fiery mountains along the Mediterranean. The wooden clubs and other weapons or tools of wood which he made in this stage of his career have, of course, long ago perished. As soon as he began to make stone tools, however, he was producing something which might last for untold thousands of years. This art he first learned in Europe some fifty thousand years ago. After that he left behind him a trail of stone tools, and by these we can follow him through the different stages of his upward progress, as they show us his increasing skill in such matters. We thus find that he passed through three stages: the Early Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, and the Late Stone Age.

Section 2. The Early Stone Age

A few rough and irregular fragments of flint still survive to Early Stone Age tools show us man's earliest attempts to make weapons or tools of stone. The form which he finally adopted as his first successful tool, however, is a roughly shaped piece of flint as long as a man's hand, which we call a fist-hatchet (Fig. I). Its ragged

Fig. I. A Flint Fist-Hatchet of the Early Stone Age

The earliest finished tool produced by man, chipped from a great flake of flint some fifty thousand years ago. The original is about nine inches long, and the drawing reduces it to less than one third. It was grasped in the fist by the upper (narrower) part, and never had any handle. Handles of wood or horn do not appear until much later (compare Fig. 7). See Ancient Times, Fig. 2

edge was sufficiently sharp so that its owner could cut and chop with it. Its maker had not learned to attach a handle, but he grasped it firmly in his fist. The first of these fist-hatchets discovered in modern times was found in England two hundred years ago, but at that time no one understood its enormous age, or guessed who had made it. For the last fifty years such fist-hatchets have been found in large numbers deeply buried under the sand and soil that has gathered since their owners used them along the rivers of France, Belgium, and England. They are found side by side with the bones of tropical animals of vast size, showing that the men who made these stone tools lived in a much warmer climate than that of Europe to-day.

We may call the period of the fist-hatchets the Early Stone Age. The man of that day, some fifty thousand years ago, led the life of a, hunter, roaming about in the shadows of the lofty forests which fringed the streams and covered the wide plains of western Europe. The ponderous hippopotamus wallowed along the banks of the rivers. The fierce rhinoceros with a horn three feet long charged through the jungles of what is now France and England. The hunter fleeing before them caught dim glimpses of mountainous elephants plunging through the thick tropical growth. Herds of bison and wild horses grazed on the uplands and the glades resounded far and wide with the notes of tropical birds which settled in swarms upon the tree tops. At night the hunter slept where the chase found him, trembling in the darkness at the roar of the lion or the mighty saber-tooth tiger.

The coming of the ice For thousands of years the life of the hunter went on with

little change. He slowly improved his rough stone fist-hatchet, and he probably learned to make additional implements of wood, but of these last we know nothing. Then he began to notice that the air of his forest home was losing its tropical warmth. Geologists have not yet found out why, but as the centuries passed, the ice which all the year round still overlies the region of the North Pole and the summits of the Alps began to descend. The northern ice crept further and further southward until it covered England as far south as the Thames. The glaciers of the Alps pushed down the Rhone valley as far as the spot where the city of Lyons now stands. On our own continent of North America the southern edge of the ice is marked by lines of bowlders carried and left there by the ice. Such lines of bowlders are found, for example, as far south as Long Island and westward along the valleys of the Ohio and the Missouri.^[1] The hunter saw the glittering blue masses of ice with their crown of snow, pushing through the green of his forest abode and crushing down vast trees in many a sheltered glen or favorite hunting ground. Gradually these savage men of early Europe were forced to accustom themselves to a cold climate, but many of the animals familiar to the hunter retreated to the warmer south, never to return.

Section 3. The Middle Stone Age

Remains of Middle Stone Age man in caverns Unable to build himself a shelter from the cold, the hunter took refuge in the limestone caves, where he and his descendants continued to live for thousands of years, during the next or "Middle Stone Age."

Fig. 2. Selection of Flint Tools of Middle Stone Age Man

These tools are not only more highly varied than man possessed before (see Fig. I) but they are much more finely finished, especially along the edges, where you can see that tiny flakes have been chipped off in a long row, producing a sharp cutting edge. Many thousands of years elapsed from the time of Fig. I to that of Fig. 2

Archaeologists now find in the caverns of France, Spain, and Italy numerous objects used by these cave men during their long sojourn in the caverns. Rubbish, once even as much as forty feet deep, accumulated on the cavern floor, as century after century the sand and earth blew in, and fragments of rock fell from the ceiling. To-day we find among all this also many layers of ashes and charcoal from the cave dwellers' fire, besides numerous tools, weapons, and implements which he used. These things disclose, step after step, his slow progress and show us that man had now left the old fist-hatchet far behind and become a real craftsman. The industries of Middle Stone Age man We see him at the door of his cave, carefully chipping off the edge of his flint tools and producing such a fine cutting edge that he can use it to shape bone, ivory, and especially reindeer horn. The mammoth furnishes him with ivory, and great herds of reindeer which had come southward with the ice are grazing before the mouth of the cavern. The hunter has a considerable list of tools from which he can select.

Fig. 3. Ivory Needle of the Middle Stone Age

With such needles and with tendons thread the skin clothing of the Middle Stone Age hunters was sewed together by the earliest seamstresses of Europe, twenty or twenty-five thousand years ago

We see at his elbow knives, chisels, drills and hammers, polishers and scrapers, all of flint (Fig. 2); while with these he works out pins, needles, spoons, and ladles, all of ivory or bone, and carves them with pictures of the animals he hunts in the forest (Fig. 4). He now fashions a keen, barbed ivory spear point, which he mounts with such needles and with tendons as on a long wooden shaft. He has also discovered the bow and arrow and carries at his girdle a sharp flint dagger. The fine ivory needles (Fig. 3) show that the hunter's body is now protected from cold and the brambles of the trackless forest by clothing sewed together out of the skins of the animals he has slain.

Life of the Middle Stone Age hunter Thus equipped the hunter of the Middle Stone Age was a much more dangerous foe of the wild creatures than his ancestors of the Early Stone Age. In a single cavern in Sicily archæologists have dug out the bones of no less than two thousand hippopotami which these Middle Stone Age hunters killed. Here too lay even the bone whistle with which the returning hunter announced his coming to the hungry family waiting in the cave. Surrounded by revolting piles of garbage and amid foul odors of decaying flesh our savage European ancestor crept into his cave dwelling at night, little realizing that many feet beneath the cavern floor on which he slept lay the remains of his ancestors in layer upon layer, the accumulations of thousands of years. Middle Stone Age art 8 Outlines of European History It is not a little astonishing to find that these Middle Stone Age hunters could draw and even paint with the greatest skill. In the caverns of southern France and northern Spain their Fig. 4. Drawings carved by Middle Stone Age Man ON Ivory I, marching line of reindeer with salmon in the spaces — probably a talis- man to bring the hunter and fisherman good luck (see p. 9) ; ^, a bison bull at bay (not on ivory but incised in the rock of a cavern wall ; over one hundred fifty caverns containing such paintings and carvings are known in France and Spain) ; j, a grazing reindeer ; ^, a running rein- deer. These carvings are the oldest works of art by man, made fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. The work was done with the pointed and edged tools of flint shown in Fig. 2. See Ancie7it Times, Figs. 9 and 10 paintings have been found in surprising numbers in recent years. Long lines of bison, deer, or wild horses cover the walls and ceil- ings of these caves. They are startling in their lifelikeness and Early Mankind in Europe 9 vigor. Sometimes they are carved in the rock wall of the cavern (Fig. 4, 2) ; again the ancient hunter employed colored earth mixed with grease, and thus produced paintings which still survive on the cavern wall. We may suppose that the hunter believed the presence of this pictured game filling his cavern Fig. 5. Restoration of a Swiss Lake-Dwellers' Settlement The lake-dwellers felled trees with their stone axes (Fig. 7,5) and cut them into piles some twenty feet long, sharpened at the lower end. These they drove several feet into the bottom of the lake, in water eight or ten feet deep. On a platform supported by these piles they then built their houses. The platform was connected with the shore by a bridge, which may be seen here on the right. A section of it could be removed at night for protection. The fish nets seen drying at the rail, the "dug-out" boat of the hunters who bring in the deer, and many other things have been found on the lake bottom in recent times would work magically to aid him in filling it with the real game which he daily sought to bring in there. For the same reason also he decorated the ivory and bone weapons which he used with the figures of the animals he pursued (Fig. 4, z, j, 4). This is the earliest art in the whole career of man, in so far as we know. lO Outlines of European History Section 4. The Late Stone Age The signs left by the ice, and still observable in Europe, would lead us to think that it withdrew northward for the last time probably some ten thousand years ago. The climate again grew warmer and became what it is to-day. Men were soon after mak- ing rapid advances. They had now learned that it was possible Fig. 6. Surviving Remains of a Swiss Lake- Village After an unusually dry season the Swiss lakes fell to a very low level in 1854, exposing the lake bottom with the remains of the piles which once supported the lake villages along the shores. They were thus dis- covered for the first time. On the old lake bottom, among the projecting piles, were found great quantities of implements, tools, and furniture, like those in Fig. 7, including the dug-outs and nets of Fig. 5, wheat, barley, bones of domestic animals, woven flax, etc. (see p. 12). There they had been lying some five thousand years. Sometimes the objects were found in two distinct layers, the lower (earlier) containing only stone tools, and the upper (later) containing byvnze tools, which came into the lake village at a later age and fell into the water on top of the layer of old stone tools already lying on the bottom of the lake (see p. 114) to grind the edge of a stone ax or chisel (Fig. 7) as we now do with tools of metal. They were also able to drill a hole in the stone ax head and insert a handle (Fig. 7). With such an ax they could fell trees and build houses. The common use of the ground stone ax brings in the Late Stone Age. From the forests of southern Sweden southward to Sicily and the heel of Italy, from the marshes of Ireland and the harbors of Spain eastward iCr the Early Mankind in Europe II Greek islands and the shores of the Black Sea, the villages of Late Stone Age man stretched far across Europe. The smoke of his settlements rose through the forests and high over the Fig. 7. Part of the Equipment of a Late Stone Age Lake Dweller This group contains the evidence for three important inventions made or received by the men of the Late Stone Age : first, pottery jars, like 2 and j, with rude decorations, the oldest baked clay in Europe, and /, a large kettle in which the lake-dwellers' food was cooked; second, ground-edged tools like 4, stone chisel with ground edge (p. 10), mounted in a deerhorn handle like a hatchet, or j, stone ax with a ground edge, and pierced with a hole for the ax handle (the houses of Fig. 5 were built with such tools) ; and third, weaving, as shown by 6, a spinning " whorl " of baked clay, the earliest spinning wheel. When suspended by a rough thread of flax eighteen to twenty inches long, it was given a whirl which made it spin in the air like a top, thus rapidly twisting the thread by which it was hanging. The thread when suffi- ciently twisted was wound up, and another length of eighteen or twenty inches was drawn out from the unspun flax to be similarly twisted. One of these earliest spinning wheels has been found in the Swiss lakes with a spool of flaxen thread still attached. (From photograph loaned by Professor Hoernes) lakes and valleys of Switzerland and northern Italy, where his villages of pile dwellings (Fig. 5) fringed the shores of the lakes. His roofs dotted the plains and nestled in the inlets of the sea, 12 Outlines of European History Civilization of the Late Stone Age ; wooden dwellings and wooden furniture Discovery of burned clay and appear- ance of earli- est pottery Flax and woven clothing Seed-bearing wild grasses become do- mesticated grain Domestica- tion of cattle, sheep, and goats Earliest carts Communities organized whence they were strewn far up the winding valleys of the rivers into the interior of Europe. The w^ooden dwellings of the Late Stone Age are the earliest such shelters found in Europe. Sunken fragments of these houses are found all along the shores of the Swiss lakes, lying at the bottom, among the piles which supported the houses of the village (Fig. 6). Pieces of stools, chests, carved dippers, spoons, and the like, all of wood, show that these houses were equipped with convenient wooden furniture. The householder now knows that clay will harden in the fire, and he makes handy jars, bowls, and dishes of burned clay (Fig. 7). Although roughly made without the use of the potter's wheel and unevenly burned without an oven, they add much to the equipment of his dwelling. Before his door the women spin their flax, and the rough skin clothing of his ancestors has given way to garments of woven stuff. Up the hillside stretches the field of flax, and beside it another of wheat or of barley. The seeds which their ancestors once gath- ered from the scattered tufts of the wild grasses, these I>ate Stone Age men have slowly learned may be planted near the dwelling in ground prepared for the purpose. Thus wild grain is domes- ticated, and agriculture has been introduced. On the green uplands above are now feeding the creatures which the Middle Stone Age man once pursued through the wilds, for the mountain sheep and goats and the wild cattle have now learned to dwell near man" and submit to his control. Indeed, the wild ox bows his neck to the yoke and draws the plow across the forest-girt field where he once wandered in unhampered freedom. Fragments of wooden wheels in the lake-villages show that he is also drawing the w^heeled cart, the earliest in Europe. Groups of massive tombs still surviving, built of enormous blocks of stone (Fig. 8), requiring the united efforts of large numbers of men, disclose to us the beginnings of cooperation and social unity. The driving of fifty thousand piles for the lake-village at Wangen shows that men were learning to work together in communities, but a flint arrowhead Early Mankind in Europe 13 Fig. 8. Late Stone Age Tomb in France These tombs are found in great numbers, especially along the Atlantic coast of Europe (but also in north Africa) from Gibraltar to the Norse peninsulas, where they still stand by thousands. One Danish island alone contains thirty-four hundred of them. It was in such a tomb that a dead chief of the Late Stone Age was buried. The stones, weighing even as much as forty tons apiece, were sometimes dragged by his people many miles fr6m the nearest quarry found still sticking in the eyehole of a skull reminds us that War these communities were often at war with one another ; while amber from the north and the wide distribution of a certain Commerce kind of flint found in only one mine of France tell us of the commerce which wandered from one community to another. Such mines reveal very vividly the industries of this remote age. A mine opened by archaeologists in England still contained eighty much-worn picks of deerhorn used by the flint miners ; while in Belgium a fall of rock from the ceiling covered and preserved to us even the body of one of these ancient miners. 14 Outlines of European History The pre- historic traders Ships of the Nile in the far-away East The traders' oriental goods, espe- cially their copper axes and daggers Section 5. Late Stone Age Europe and the Orient There are certain traders whose wares these Late Stone Age villagers inspect with eagerness. They come from the coast and they are already threading the Alpine passes leading northward from southern Europe — roads which are yet to become the great highways of the early world. These traders entertain the villagers of the European interior with the tales which circulate among the coast settlements, telling how huge ships (Fig. 14) — which make their own rude dugouts (Fig. 5) look like tiny chips — ply back and forth in the eastern waters of the Medi- terranean. Such ships have many oarsmen on each side and mighty fir trunks mounted upright in the craft, carrying huge sheets of linen to catch the favoring wind which drives them swiftly, without oars, from land to land. They come out of the many mouths of the vast river of Egypt, greater than any river in the world, says the tale, and they bear crowded cargoes of beautiful stone vases, strings of shining blue-glazed beads (see cut, p. 1 6), bolts of fine linen, and, above all, axes and daggers of a strange, heavy, shining substance, for which these European vil- lagers have no name. They listen with awe-struck faces and rapt attention ; and in their traffic they desire above all else the new axes and daggers of metal which take a keener edge than any they can fashion of stone. Strings of Egyptian blue-glazed beads,^ brought in by traders, wandered from hand to hand and people to people in western Europe ; and we find them now lying in graves among the orna- ments once worn by the men of the Late Stone or early Copper Age in England. In the East the people of a Late Stone Age village on the low hill in northwestern Asia Minor where later rose the walls of Troy (p. 117); likewise the people of another settlement of the same age near the north shore of the Island of Crete, yet to become the flourishing city of Cnossus (p. 120); 1 Examples of these blue-glazed Egyptian beads discovered in prehistoric graves of England will be found in the drawing at the end of Chapter I (p. i6)« Orient (3000 to 2000 B.C.) Early Mankind in Europe 1 5 and other communities scattered through the ^gean islands, — these eastern people have even seen those marvelous ships of the Nile with their huge spars and wide sails and have trafficked with them on the seashore. Thus at the dawn of history, barbarian Europe looked across Stone Age the Mediterranean to the great civilization of the Nile, as our own the"^civnized North American Indians fixed their wondering eyes on the first Europeans who landed in America and listened to like strange tales of great and distant peoples. But these Late Stone Age men. had now (about 2500 B.C.) reached the limit of their re- sources. Without writing (for the records of business, govern- ment, and tradition) ; without metals (save the trader's copper ax and dagger) ; without stanch ships in which to develop com- merce, — they could go no further. Perhaps the- Late Stone Age villagers recalled a dim tradition of their fathers that grain and flax, cattle and sheep, first came to them from the same wonder- land of the far East, whence now came the copper ax and the blue-glazed beads. It was after receiving such contributions as these from the Orient, that Europe went forward to the develop- ment of a higher civilization, and in order to understand the further course of European history, we must turn to the Orient whence came these things by which the life of our European ancestors entered upon a new epoch. Let us remember as we go to the Orient that the age of man's Summary prehistoric career^ lasted some fifty thousand years,. and that in the Orient he began to enter upon a high civilization in the his- to?ic epoch during the thousand years from 4000 to 3000 B.C. (in eastern Europe a thousand years later).^ Civilization is thus between five and six thousand years old. It arose in the Orient, in the eastern Mediterranean region, and civilized supremacy both in peace and war shifted slowly from the Orient west- ward. It was not till about 500 B.C. that the Greeks became the leaders in matters of civilization. They, with the rest of the 1 That is, before he began to leave any written traces of his existence. 2 In western Europe not until after 500 B.C. or even much later. 1 6 Outlines of European History Mediterranean world, were gradually subdued by the Romans, until Roman power was supreme and practically universal not long after 200 B.C. We have therefore first to trace the career of the Orient, and then to follow civilization as it developed among the Greeks and Romans. QUESTIONS Section i . How did early man learn to do things ? Was there any one to tell him .f* Describe the probable condition of the earliest men. What men have actually been found in a state almost as low as this t Describe their possessions. How long has man existed on earth? At what point can we begin to trace his progress ? Section 2. Describe man's earliest tools. How did he live, and what was Europe then like '^. What do we call this age ? What great change brought it to an end ? Section 3. Where did man then take refuge ? Describe his prog- ress ; his home. What art did he possess ? Section 4. When did the ice withdraw for the last time ? What new treatment of his edged tools did man now discover.? Make a list of his new possessions in this age. What remains and evidences of the existence of towns and communities still survive ? Section 5. What wares did the traders bring into the Late Stone Age settlements of inland Europe? How were they brought across the Mediterranean ? What great people already had ships ? Where did high civilization first arise ?

1. Geologists have now shown that the ice advanced southward and retreated to the north again, no less than four times. Following each advance of the ice a warm interval caused its retreat. There were four warm intervals, and we are now living in the fourth. The evidence now indicates that man began to make stone implements in the third warm interval. The last advance of the ice therefore took place between us and them. It is perhaps some thirty thousand years ago that the ice began to come south for the last time.