A History of the World in 100 Objects (18 page)

The British Museum bull sculpture was cast using the lost-wax technique. The artist first models his vision in wax, then he moulds clay around it. This is put into a fire, which hardens the clay and melts the wax. The molten wax is drained off, and in its place a bronze alloy is poured into the mould, so that it takes on the exact form the wax had occupied. When it cools, the mould is broken to reveal the bronze, which can then be finished – polished, inscribed or filed – to produce the final sculpture. Although the bull-leaper is quite badly corroded – it has degraded to a greenish-brown colour – when made it would have been a striking object. It would never of course have been quite as sparkling as gold, but it would have had a powerful, seductive gleam.

The bronze that made sculptures like this one gleam lets our bull move from myth into history. At first sight it is a surprise that it’s made of bronze at all, since neither copper nor tin – both of which are needed to make bronze – are found on Crete. Both came from much further afield, with the copper coming from Cyprus – the very name of which means the ‘copper island’ – or from the eastern Mediterranean coast. But the tin had an even longer journey, travelling along trade routes from eastern Turkey, perhaps even from Afghanistan; and it was often in short supply, because those trade routes were frequently disrupted by pirates.

Within the sculpture itself you can actually see something of that struggle to secure the tin supplies. There clearly wasn’t quite enough tin in the alloy, which explains why the surface is rather pock-marked, and also why the structure is weak, so that the hind legs of the bull have broken off.

But even if the proportions of the alloy were less than ideal, the very existence of the tin and copper – both from outside Crete – tells us that the Minoans were moving around and trading by sea. Indeed, Crete was a major player in a vast network of trade and diplomacy that covered the eastern Mediterranean – often focused on the exchange of metals, and all linked by maritime travel. The maritime archaeologist Dr Lucy Blue, of Southampton University, tells us more:

The small bronze statuette from Minoan Crete is a very good indicator of this key commodity, bronze, that was sought after throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we have only a limited number of shipwrecks to substantiate these trading activities, but one of the shipwrecks that we have is that of the
Uluburun
, which was found off the Turkish coast. The
Uluburun
was carrying 15 tons of cargo, 9 tons of which was copper in the form of ingots. She was also carrying a very rich cargo of other goods – amber from the Baltic, pomegranates, pistachio nuts, and a wealth of manufactured goods, including bronze and gold statuettes, beads of different materials, large numbers of tools and weapons.

There are still many unanswered questions about the rich Minoan civilization involved in this kind of trade. The word ‘palace’, which Evans used to describe the large buildings he excavated, suggests royalty, but in fact these buildings seem rather to have been religious, political and economic centres. They were architecturally complex places, housing a great variety of activities, one of them the administration of trade and produce, organizing the large population of craftsmen who wove cloth and worked the imported gold, ivory and bronze. Without that whole society of skilled artisans our bull-leaper would not exist.

Frescoes in the palace at Knossos show large gatherings of people, suggesting that these were also ceremonial and religious centres. Yet despite more than a century of excavation the Minoans still remain enticingly enigmatic and our knowledge remains frustratingly fragmentary. Objects like this little bronze statue of the bull-leaper tell us a lot about one aspect of Crete’s history – its central role in the mastery of metals which, in a few centuries, transformed the world. It also asserts the perpetual fascination of mythical Crete as the site where we confront in ourselves the most disturbing links between man and beast. When Picasso in the 1920s and 1930s wanted to explore the bestial elements that were denaturing European politics, he turned instinctively to the palace of Minoan Crete, to that underground labyrinth and to that encounter between man and bull that still haunts us all … the battle with the Minotaur.

For the local workmen, it must have seemed as if the old Welsh legends were true. They’d been sent to quarry stone in a field known as Bryn-yr-Ellyllon, which translates as the Fairies’ Hill or the Goblins’ Hill. Sightings of a ghostly boy, clad in gold, a glittering apparition in the moonlight, had been reported frequently enough for travellers to avoid the hill after dark. As the workmen dug into a large mound, they uncovered a stone-lined grave. In it were hundreds of amber beads, several bronze fragments and the remains of a skeleton. And wrapped around the skeleton was a mysterious crushed object – a large and finely decorated broken sheet of pure gold.

This breathtaking object is a gold cape or, perhaps more accurately, a short golden poncho. But we call it a cape. It’s a wrapping in punched gold, for the shoulders of a human being. It’s about 45 centimetres (1.5 feet) wide and about 30 centimetres (1 foot) deep, and it would have been put over the head and lowered on to the shoulders, coming down to about the middle of the chest.

When you look at it closely you can see that it has been made out of a single sheet of astonishingly thin gold. The whole thing was made from an ingot about the size of a ping-pong ball. The sheet has then been worked from the inside and punched out – so that the overall effect is of strings of beads, carefully spaced and graduated, running from one shoulder to another and going all the way round the body. Looking at it now, you’re struck with a sense of enormous complexity and ultimate luxury. It must have astonished the stone-breakers who uncovered it.

The workmen made the discovery at Bryn-yr-Ellyllon in 1833. Undeterred by thoughts of ghosts or goblins, and exhilarated by the dazzling wealth of their find, the workmen eagerly shared out chunks of the gold sheet, with the tenant farmer taking the largest pieces. It would have been easy for the story to end there. In 1833, burials from a distant past, however exotic, enjoyed little legal protection. The location of the burial site, near the town of Mold, not far from the north coast of Wales, meant that the wider world could easily have continued in ignorance of its existence. That this didn’t happen owes everything to the curiosity of a local vicar, Reverend C. B. Clough, who wrote an account of the find that aroused the interest of the Society of Antiquaries, hundreds of miles away in London.

Three years after the spoils from the burial had been divided, the British Museum bought from the tenant farmer the first and the largest of the fragments of gold, which had been his share of the booty. Much that the vicar recorded had disappeared by then, including virtually the whole skeleton. This left only three large and twelve small crushed and flattened fragments of the decorated gold object. It took another hundred years for the British Museum to gather together enough of the remaining fragments (some are still missing) to begin a complete reconstruction of this divided treasure.

What sort of object was it that these fragments had once composed? When had it been made? Who had worn it? As more archaeological discoveries were made in the nineteenth century, it became clear that the Mold burial dated to the newly identified Bronze Age – around 4,000 years ago. But it was not until the 1960s that the gold pieces were put together for the first time. All the conservators had were flattened fragments of paper-thin gold; some large, some small, with cracks, splits and holes all over them, altogether weighing about half a kilo, or just over a pound. It was like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, and solving it took nothing less than the relearning of ancient gold-working techniques that had been lost for millennia.

We don’t know who made this cape, but it’s clear that they were very highly skilled. These were the Cartiers or the Tiffanys of Bronze Age Europe. What kind of society could have produced such an object? Its sheer opulence and intricate details suggest that it must have come from a centre of great wealth and power, perhaps comparable to the contemporary courts of the pharaohs of Egypt or the palaces of Minoan Crete. And the careful drawing and planning necessary for such elaborate design suggests a long tradition of luxury production.

But archaeology has revealed no obvious palaces, cities or kingdoms anywhere in Britain at this time. There are the vast ceremonial monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, and there are hundreds of stone circles and thousands of burial mounds which would have dominated the landscape, but little survives of any dwelling places, and what does remain indicates that these were extremely modest – thatched wooden houses that would normally suggest tribal farming societies, led by chiefs.

In the past, it was easy to dismiss British prehistoric societies as primitive people existing before recognizable civilizations emerged; and with few settlements and only burials to work from, it was often entirely reasonable to make such assumptions. But, partly through the discovery of rare objects like the Mold Gold Cape, in recent years we have come to see these societies very differently. For, while it’s unique in its complexity, the cape is just one example of several precious objects that tell us that societies in Britain must then have been extremely sophisticated, both in their manufacture and in their social structure. They also tell us, like the jade axe from Canterbury (
Chapter 14
), that these societies were not isolated but part of a larger European trade network. For example, the collection of small amber beads that was found with the cape must have come from the Baltic – many hundreds of miles away from Mold.

By studying these precious objects – gold, amber and, above all, bronze – we can track a web of trade and exchange that reaches from north Wales to Scandinavia, and even to the Mediterranean. We can also identify the source of the wealth which made this trade possible. The Mold Cape was buried relatively close to the largest Bronze Age copper mine in north-west Europe, the Great Orme. The copper from there, and tin from Cornwall, would have provided the ingredients for the vast majority of British bronze objects. A peak of activity at the Great Orme mine has been dated between 1900
BC
and 1600
BC
. Recent analysis of the gold-working techniques, and the decorative style of the cape, dates the burial to this very period. So although we can only guess, it’s likely that the wearers of this extraordinary object were in some way linked to the mine, which would have been a source of great wealth, and a major trading centre for the whole of north-west Europe. But was the gold for the cape also traded from far away? Dr Mary Cahill, from the National Museum of Ireland, says:

It has been a huge question – where did the gold come from? We have learnt a great deal about where the early copper sources are, but the nature of gold, especially if it’s coming from rivers and streams – and the early workings can literally be washed away in one flood – means that it’s very, very hard to identify the sites. So what we are trying to do is to look more closely at the nature of the gold ore, to look at the objects, to try to relate the analysis of one with the other, in the hope that this will lead us back to the right type of geological background, the right type of geological environment, in which the gold was actually formed. And then, by doing extensive fieldwork, we hope that we may actually identify an Early Bronze Age goldmine.

A very rich source of gold must have been available, because the quantity of gold used is way above anything else of the period. The gold had to be collected over a long period of time. The object itself is made with exceptional skill. It’s not just the decoration of the object that is skilful, but also the shape of it, the form in which it’s made, so that it would fit on the body – we have to imagine that the goldsmith had to sit down and really work this out in advance: how he was going to form the sheet – which is a very skilful matter in itself – how he was then going to decorate it, and how the whole thing would be brought together to make the cape. And this really demonstrates more than anything the level of skill, and the sense of design, of the goldsmith who made it.

Although the expertise of the maker of the cape is clear, virtually nothing is certain about the person who may have worn it. The object itself provides a few clues. It probably had a lining, perhaps of leather, which covered the chest and the shoulders of the wearer. The cape is so fragile, and it would have so restricted the movement of arms and shoulders, that it can have been worn only rarely. There are definite signs of wear: there are holes in the top and bottom of the cape, for example, that would have been used to attach it to a costume, so it may have been brought out on ceremonial occasions, perhaps over a long period of time.