Europe: A History (19 page)
Interregional trade, especially in minerals, is one of the important features of Bronze Age Europe. The Peninsula’s mineral resources were rich and varied, but their distribution was uneven; and a widespread network of trade-routes grew up
in response to the imbalances. Salt had been sought from the earliest times, either by mining rock-salt or by evaporating brine from seaside salt-pans. Huge rock-salt mountains occur naturally in several locations, from Cardona in Catalonia to the Salzkammergut in Austria or Wieliczka in Poland. Primitive salt-pans or
sali-nae
were located all along the hot southern coast, from the Rhone to the Dnieper. Now, permanent ‘salt roads’ began to function. Best known among them was the ancient Via Salaria, which linked Rome with the salt-pans of the Adriatic coast. Amber, which can be found both on the western shore of Jutland and on the Baltic shore east of the Vistula, was greatly prized as jewellery. The ancient ‘amber road’ ran down the valley of the Oder, through the Moravian Gap to the Danube, and over the Brenner Pass to the Adriatic. Obsidian and lapis lazuli were also in great demand. Copper and tin were the staples. Copper came first from Cyprus— whence its name—later from the Dolomites, and above all from the Carpathians. Carpathian copper found its way northwards at an early date to Scandinavia, and was later sent south to the Aegean. Tin, which was not always distinguished by the ancients from lead, was brought from distant Cornwall. The search for copper and tin seems to have stimulated transcontinental contacts more effectively than the subsequent search for iron, which was found much more readily.
VINO
W
INE
is no ordinary beverage. It has always been associated with lòve and religion. Its name, like that of Venus, is derived from the Sanskrit
vêna
, ‘beloved’. Coming from the Caucasus, it featured in both the daily diet and the religious ceremonies of the ancient world. First cultivated by Noah
{Genesis
ix. 20), it inspired not only pagan bacchanalia but also the communion cup of Christianity.
1
Saint Martin of Tours, born at Sabaria (modern Szombathely) near the Danube, was the first patron saint of wine-drinkers. St Urban and St Vincent (whose name offers a play on ‘reeking of wine’), became the principal patrons of wine-growers and vintners.
Commercial wine-growing in medieval Europe was pioneered by the Benedictines at Château-Prieuré in the Bordeaux region, and at locations such as the Clos Vougeot on the Cote de Beaune in Burgundy. The Cluniacs on the Côte d’Or near Macon, and the Cistercians at Nuits St Georges, extended the tradition. According to Froissart, England’s possession of Bordeaux demanded a fleet of 300 vessels to carry the vintage home.
Bénédictine
(1534) from the Abbey of Fécamp, and
Chartreuse
(1604) from the Charterhouse in Dauphiné, pioneered the art of fortified wine.
Europe’s wine zone cuts the Peninsula in two. Its northern reaches pass along a line stretching from the Loire, through Champagne to the Mosel and the Rhineland, and thence eastwards to the slopes of the Danube, and on to Moldavia and Crimea. There are very few wine-growing districts which did not once belong to the Roman Empire. Balkan wines in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, inhibited by the anti-alcoholic Ottomans, are every bit as ancient as those of Spain, Italy, or France.
The consumption of wine has far-reaching social, psychological, and medical consequences. It has been invoked as a factor in religious and political groupings, such as the Protestant-Catholic divide in Germany, and even in the fate of battles. ‘It was wine and beer that clashed at Waterloo. The red fury of wine repeatedly washed in vain against the immovable wall of the sons of beer…’
2
Nor has St Martin’s homeland lost its viticultural excellence. The volcanic soil on the slopes above Tokay, the hot summer air of the Hungarian plain, the moisture of the Bodrog River, and the most nobly rotten of ‘Aszu’ grapes, form a unique combination. The pungent, velvety, peachlike
essencia
of golden Tokay is not to everyone’s taste; and has rarely been well produced in recent decades. But it was once laid down for 200 years in the most exclusive cellars of Poland, and kept for the death-bed of mon-archs. A bottle of ‘Imperial Tokay’ from the days of Francis-Joseph is still one of the connoisseur’s most prized ambitions.
3
ĠGANTIJA
T
HE
islands of Malta present two historic puzzles—their language and their megaliths. The former is Semitic, of mediaeval Arab provenance. It is the only Semitic tongue to be written in the Latin script. (Romantic philologists once linked it with ancient Phoenician.) The megaliths are far older. The principal sites at the temple of Ggantija on Gozo Island, and at the unique subterranean
hypogeum
or ‘collective burial chamber’ at Hal Saflieni, dating from c.2400
BC.
The earliest rock-cut monuments were constructed a millennium before.
1
The procession of civilizations through Malta reads like a shorthand guide to European history.
2
After the neolithic cave-dwellers, who built the megaliths, and the Bronze Age Beaker Folk, came the Carthaginians (from the seventh century
BC)
and then the Romans (from 218
BC).
Gozo is often identified as ‘Calypso’s Isle’, where Odysseus was stranded. St Paul was shipwrecked in a bay named after him, north of Valletta, in
AD
60. Allocated to the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire in 395, Malta was then ruled successively by Arabs (from 870), by Normans (from 1091), by the Knights Hospitallers (from 1530), by the French (from 1798), by the British (from 1802)—and from 1964, belatedly, by the Maltese themselves.
Special prominence accrued to those districts where several of the desired commodities could be found in close proximity. One such district was the Salzkammergut (Noricum), where the salt mountains of Ischl and Hallstatt lay alongside the metal mines of Noriae. Another lay in the vicinity of Cracow, where
silver, lead, iron, and salt could all be found within a stone’s throw of the upper Vistula. Most productive of all, however, were the islands of the Aegean. Melos yielded obsidian; Paros yielded pure white marble; Kythnos yielded copper; Siphnos, and Laurion on the coast of Attica, yielded silver and lead. The wealth and power of Crete, and later of Mycenae, was clearly connected with the command of these Aegean resources and with their role as the termini of the transcontinental trade routes. They were the focus of what has been called the ‘international spirit’ of the Bronze Age.
DASA
A
POPULAR
history of mathematics states that the advance of the Beaker Folk into neolithic Europe was accompanied by the spread both of the Indo-European languages and of the decimal system. The statement is supported by lists of number words from a selection of Indo-European languages which use the Base-10 or decimal method of numeration. The implication is that prehistoric Europe was familiar with Base-10 counting three millennia before its introduction in written form.
1
It is intriguing, of course, to think that one might reconstruct modes of counting in a remote and illiterate society, for which no direct evidence is available. Yet there can be no certainty that numbers used today have remained constant since prehistoric times; and one must be careful to test the hypothesis against all the most relevant languages:
| | Celtic (Welsh) | German | | Latin | Ancient | Slavonic (Russian) | Sansk |
| 1. | un | eins | I | unus | heis | odin | eka |
| 2. | dau | zwei | II | duo | duo | dva | dvi |
| 3. | tri | drei | III | tres | treis | tri | tri |
| 4. | pedwar | vier | IV | quattuor | tessares | chetyre | katur |
| 5. | pump | fünf | V | quinqué | pente | piat’ | panka |
| 6. | chwech | sechs | VI | sex | hex | shest’ | shash |
| 7. | saith | sieben | VII | septem | hepta | syem’ | sapta |
| 8. | wyth | acht | VIII | octo | octo | vosyem’ | ashta |
| 9. | naw | neun | IX | novem | ennea | devyat’ | nava |
| 10. | deg | zehn | X | decem | deka | decyat’ | dasa |
Sanskrit, meaning ‘perfect speech’, is the second oldest of the recorded Indo-European languages. It was the language of ancient India and, in Hindu tradition, of the Gods. It was employed c.1500 BC for the composition of Vedic literature. Its prime followed shortly after the fall of the Indus civilization, which invented the decimal system.
Sanskrit’s number words were definitely based on decimal counting. Its units 1–10 corresponded with those found in other Indo-European languages. Its teens were simple combinations of units with the word for ten, hence
ekadasa
(1 + 10 = 11) or
navadasa
(9 + 10 = 19). Its tens were combinations of units with the collective numeral for a ‘decade’,
dasat(i)
, hence
vimsati
or
dvimdesati
(2 x 10 = 20) or
trimsati
(3x10 = 30). Its word for 1,000,
dasasata
, meaning ‘ten hundreds’, stood alongside
sa-hasra
, a variation used in the formation of still higher numbers. It had a single word,
crore
for ‘10 million’, and another,
satam
, to express ‘percentage’.
2
Latin numbers, too, are essentially decimal. But their structure bears no relation to Roman numerals, which are based on conglomerates of units, fives, and tens.
The Celtic languages, of which Welsh is the most active modern survivor, once stretched across much of Europe. They belong to the most ancient Indo-European forms in the West. Yet Celtic numerals have preserved elements of counting in Base-5, Base-10, and especially Base-20. Modern Welsh, like Sanskrit, uses decimal units for 1–10; but in the teens it uses numbers similar in structure to Roman numerals. Sixteen is
un ar bymtheg
or ‘one over five and ten’ (XVI); and nineteen is
pedwar ar bymtheg
or ‘four over five and ten’. Above nineteen, Base-20 counting takes over.
Ugain
is the base, and
deugain
(40),
trigain
(60), and
pedwar gain
(80) are all multiples of twenty. Thirty, seventy, and ninety are expressed as ‘ten over’ a multiple of twenty. Fifty,
hanner cant
, means ‘half of a hundred’.
| Welsh | Latin | Sanskrit | ||
| 11 | un ar ddeg | XI | undecim | ekadasa |
| 20 | ugain | XX | viginti | vimsati |
| 30 | deg ar h ugain | XXX | triginta | trimsati |
| 40 | deugain | XL | quadraginta | katvarimsati |
| 50 | hannercant | L | quinquaginta | pankasati |
| 60 | trigain | LX | sexaginta | shashti |
| 70 | deg â thrigain | LXX | Septuaginta | septati |
| 80 | pedwar ugain | LXXX | octoginta | ash it i |
| 90 | deg â phedwar hugain | XC | nonaginta | navati |
| 100 | cant | C | centum | sata |
| 1.000 | mil | M | mille | dasasata/sa-hasra |
Base-20 counting, which started by using toes as well as fingers, is preserved in the English word ‘score’, which derives from the mark cut into counting-sticks. It is also reflected in French
quatre-vingt
, meaning ‘four times twenty’, which is probably a relic of Celtic Gaul.
In all probability, therefore, Europe’s early peoples counted in twos, fives, tens, dozens, or scores as they thought fit. At some point they must also have encountered the Babylonian system of Base-60, which was adopted for counting minutes and seconds. There is little reason to assume that Indo-Europeans in general, or the Beaker Folk in particular, were decimalized from the start.
In fact, Europe had to wait until the thirteenth century
AD
before Base-10 numbers were widely introduced. The key step, the use of 0 for ‘zero’, had first been taken in India. From there, the decimal system found its way into the Muslim world, and through Arabic Spain into Christendom. For several centuries it operated alongside the much clumsier Roman numerals, which could not even be used for addition or multiplication. When it finally triumphed, many Europeans did not realize that their numbers were not European at all.
3
(See Appendix III, p. 1242.)
