The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

A RECAPITULATION 127
Other steppe-folk seem also to have entered Hungary, probably through the Moravian
gate, and settled on the plain and the eastern foothills of the mountain zone.
Meanwhile the knowledge of copper had been introduced by traders, who had
sailed up the Adriatic, and travelled inland from Fiume. This copper culture reached
the Swiss lake-dwelhngs, and eventually passed down the Rhone as far as Lyons. It was
followed by a bronze culture, which was imported from Italy and the western
Mediterranean.
About 2250 B.C. another drought caused a dispersal of the steppe-folk on a greater
scale. Some went east, into the remotest fastnesses of Turkestan, some perhaps as
far as the head waters of the Yenesei and the region around Minutsinsk, while others
passed on to the Iranian plateau. This last group we hear of about 2100 B.C. as
Kassites, and a few centuries later they conquered Mesopotamia.
Those who went westward seem to have destroyed the Tripolje culture and
driven off its people, unless, indeed, they had already been driven away by the drought.
The bands of steppe-folk divided, some passing north of the Carpathians and some
going south by the shores of the Euxine. This last group crossed the Danube, and
skirting the Balkan mountains arrived at the east end of Thrace. Here they divided,
one band passing to the west by the shores of the ^Egean and then southwards to
Thessaly, where they frightened the inhabitants, who termed them Centaurs. The
other band crossed the Hellespont, destroyed Hissarlik II, and passed on into the
Anatolian plain, where in due course they organised the native Alpine population into
the Hittite empire.
It is not so easy to follow the group which passed north of the Carpathians, but
they seem to have followed the line of sandy heaths across Galicia into Silesia, then
some, probably, entered Hungary through the Moravian gate, while others pushed into
Bohemia. These last found there people who were either refugees from the Tripolje
area or folk closely allied to them. These people, who had been accustomed to a type
of cord vase, had found in Bohemia bell-beakers, which had arrived there via Italy
from Spain. From a combination of both types of ware they had evolved the northern
beaker. When the Nordic steppe-folk arrived from Silesia these Beaker-folk left, and
passed northwards between the Rhine and the Weser, some going to Jutland and some
to HoUand. A few of the latter found a refuge in Great Britain.