The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

A RECAPITULATION 129
The other movement went to the east, and was probably that great emigration from
Europe to Asia of which dim recollections survived among the Greeks, and which took
the Briges into Asia Minor, where they became Phrygians.* It also carried to Thrace
some, at any rate, of its red-haired people.' It was probably some stragglers from
this group who passed southwards, like knight-errants destroying monsters and
punishing evil doers, and who eventually became kings over the towns of Mycenean
Greece. These were known later as Achseans, and may possibly have included also
stragglers from the group which had passed over to Italy.
It was between 1200 and 1175 B.C. that the next movement began, and this was
mainly to the west and north. Some of these invaders left the Danube basin, crossed
the Rhine, and passing through the Belfort gap, entered France, and over-ran the greater
part of that country. Until the swords of this type have been catalogued and mapped,
it will be impossible to trace their line of advance, or to determine how far they went.
Some of these seem to have passed either down the Rhine or up the east of France, for
they crossed over to Britain, landing for the most part in the Thames and by the Wash,
or else at some intermediate points. They seem to have settled in the east of England,
and subsequently in Wessex, but later waves of them evidently set out for Ireland,
crossing Wales by the upper Severn valley and the Bala cleft. A considerable number
of these seem to have settled in Ireland.
It was about this time that others set out from Hungary through the Moravian
gate, and while some went northwards, the majority passed along Galicia, across the
Bukovina and Podoha, and arrived at length by the banks of the Koban. Here they
settled for a time, and entered into trade relations with a humble tribe, living on the
southern slopes of the Caucasus, from whom they learned the knowledge of iron.
Armed with swords with iron blades, they returned to the Danube basin about iioo B.C.,
and perhaps worked the iron mines at Gyalar, in Transylvania. Then they settled in the
Hungarian plain and in the north of the Balkan peninsula. About 1050 B.C. a large
body of these people from the Koban passed southwards and descended the Vardar
valley. By degrees they passed thence to Thessaly. Then they began that slow but
steady conquest of the Greek states, which is known as the Dorian invasion.
4 Herodotus vii. 73.
5 Xenophanes, quoted by Clement of Alexandria : Stromateis vii. 711b.