The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

52
THE BRONZE AGE AND THE CELTIC WORLD
The band across the country clusters most thickly just north-east of the line,
running through the Carcassone gap, now followed by the canal du midi. This seems
to indicate that a land route through the pass was in use at this time, as a safer
alternative to rounding the Iberian peninsula by sea. From this hue the cult seems to
have spread north-eastwards, though these momunents grow scarcer the further we
leave this line.
Lastly, there are certain islands in which these monuments are foimd, which
do not seem to have produced any wealth of the type required, notably Sardinia and
Malta, We have also an isolated group near Taranto. It seems probable that such
islands, and points en route with good harbours hke Taranto, would have been convenient
points of call to these traders, as Tarentum was afterwards to the Phoenician and
Greek merchants. Here, and perhaps too at Syracuse, they may well have had depots,
but from the wealth of its megalithic monuments we may well believe that Malta was
the base of operations for the western and northern trade. Here we have a small
island, very isolated and with excellent ports, with a population primitive and docUe ;
such a spot would be a safe depot in which to collect and store valuable merchandise,
until it was convenient to ship it through the more traversed and perhaps pirate-infested
seas of the east. Thus, though there are more exceptions to his rule than Perry would
lead us to suspect, these exceptions do not seem to weaken his h3^othesis, but rather
help to prove the rule.
Now in Britain and the north generally these monuments, or at any rate some of
them such as dolmens and long barrows, are beheved to date from the neohthic age,
albeit from its latest phases ; nevertheless there are instances in Scandinavia and
Brittany of the discovery of copper tools and gold beads in these tombs.'' Further
south the evidence of metal in association with them is clearer, but in Malta the only
bronze implements discovered, the hoard found in 1915 in the temple of Hal Tarxien,'*
had been deposited above three feet of silt which had accumulated on the temple floor.
This at first sight seems to mihtate against the theory that these structures were the
tombs and temples of miners.
iJ Sterjna (1910) ; D^chelette (1908-1914) i. 393.
'' Zammit {1917) PI. xxi. fig. 2.