"… and those floating in the waters came to the ground …"
(Wisdom of Solomon 19:18)
But now we will digress a little from the history of copper and bronze metallurgy and turn to such a science as culturology. After all, we are constantly talking about the culture of ancient societies and, therefore, must imagine a possible solution to the diversity we have already encountered in this culture. How not to get lost in this diversity and what can be done for this? Maybe somehow classify, group? It is with such an attempt that the concept of typologization of culture is connected.
Drawing by J. Rava. Eneolithic Cycladic settlement and its inhabitants.
"Atlantists" and "Continentalists"
We have to come across the term "type" all the time. In mathematics, these are types of problems and examples, in mechanics - types of transmissions, in literature - types of characters in various works that have something in common, etc. Well, and by the method of scientific knowledge, with the help of which all the diversity of cultures existing on our planet is ordered, it is classified and grouped by types, and it is called typology. And what methods of typologizing cultures have not been invented by experts in this field: truly, how many people - the same number of opinions on this issue. This is a very diverse phenomenon - the culture of human society, and therefore the criteria for distinguishing different types of culture can be very different. This is also an ethnographic criterion, when culture is viewed through everyday life, economic structure, language and customs. Spatial-geographical, based on regional typologies of cultures: Western European, African, Siberian, etc. Chronological-temporal criteria determined by the time of existence of a particular culture (“culture of the Stone Age”, “culture of the Bronze Age”, “culture of the Renaissance”, modern and postmodern) also have a right to exist. Well, someone is trying to generalize the disparate characteristics of a particular culture in the form of such a generalized dichotomy as "East - West", "North - South", even if in the latter case this division is more geopolitical than cultural, or, for example, as F. Nietzsche did, he proceeds from the “Apollonian” or “Dionysian” principles in certain cultures of the past and present.
House from the village of Lemba. For some reason, all the ancient houses of the Neolithic and Eneolithic times have a round shape, both in Cyprus and … in Portugal, in the fortress of the Vila Nova culture.
At the same time, the same culture, depending on the point of view of the researcher, can be included both in one type of culture, as well as in another. As you know, V. I. Lenin singled out the types of bourgeois and proletarian culture, basing this typification on class differences. But weren't there elements of bourgeois culture in the proletarian culture, and weren't practically all the inhabitants of pre-revolutionary Russia Orthodox (not counting foreigners, of course), that is, belonged to the same Orthodox culture?
Houses in Lemba were close to each other and had flat roofs. Everything is like in the village of Khirokitia, only the difference in time between them is not years, but centuries. How slow was life back then?
That is, it is understandable why there are many typologies of cultures, and what types of them have not been invented by culturologists. Within the framework of historical and ethnographic typology, these are, for example, anthropological, household and ethnolinguistic. And they, in turn, are subdivided into numerous subspecies. There are models of a number of well-known scientists, about which too much has already been said to be repeated again. These are the typologies of N. Ya. Danilevsky, O. Spengler, F. Nietzsche, P. Sorokin and K. Jaspers.
"Lady from Lemba"
Many typologies represent dichotomies, for example, “forest and steppe culture”, “urban and rural”, “culture of farmers and pastoralists”. But if we take as a basis the principle of settling people not only in forests and steppes, but in proximity to the sea or distance from it, then we will get another dichotomy and, accordingly, the division of peoples living in different places into an "Atlantic" culture (that is, seaside, people who lived on the shores of the seas and oceans) and “continental” culture - people who lived far from the sea and did not know how to build ships. That is, the former are people living along the shores of the seas and oceans, and the latter are living in the depths of the continent. The former are more tolerant, since they have the ability to sail on the sea. It is easy for them to visit other lands, get acquainted with the life of people different from their own culture and at the same time show tolerance towards them, otherwise they simply will not go ashore then. The peoples of the continental culture are much more xenophobic. Their slogan is “Die on your native land, but don’t leave it”, because apart from this very land they have nothing. Not so with the "Atlantists", who also have their own "native land", but there is also a deck of the ship, and the ability to always sail away if for some reason the enemy's invasion could not be repelled. And here, since we in this chapter will talk about the ways of advancing metalworking around the planet, we should think about how exactly the spread of ancient metalworking technologies could have occurred, and which cultures, let's say, are most responsible for it.
Another "lady from Lemba" is now in close-up.
For example, all the same inhabitants of the ancient Chatal-Huyuk lived far from the sea and clearly did not have navigation skills. But maybe they shared them with those who traded with them overland? Did you reveal to them the secrets of their production, showed them what and how to do to get exactly the same product? At the very least, such behavior would be strange.
Many "ladies from Lemba". Archaeological Museum of Cyprus in Nicosia.
That is, when we draw arrows on the map along which "metallurgical ideas" spread to all four cardinal directions - namely, such a scheme of diffusion of metallurgical knowledge in the Old World was invented by R. Forbes, already known to us, we will have to think three times about how it was in reality. Because drawing an arrow on a map is one thing, but then going through mountains and ravines, and the lands of distrustful, and even openly hostile tribes to strangers, is something completely different!
Tableware from Enkomi, 2300 - 2075 BC, but the story about this village is still ahead.
It will be much easier if the ancient metallurgists had access to the sea and directly communicated with the peoples of the "Atlantic culture". Those, having adopted their skills, could relatively easily transfer them to other places, create new centers of metallurgical production there, which in turn created the basis for other centers.
English archaeologists at work. All the same Lemba village.
Well, the main goal of the voyages to "distant places" was … in search of all the same copper! After all, the inhabitants of Western Asia were not as lucky as the Indians who lived on the shores of Lake Superior and in other places rich in native copper were lucky. However, there was a place where there were so many copper ore deposits that they even gave this place an appropriate name, and this place is the island of Cyprus!
Lempa - "the village of a woman with outstretched hands"
On the pages of this book, we have already got acquainted with the ancient Cypriot village of Khirokitia, whose inhabitants knew how to build houses and make stone dishes, but never mastered the art of metal working. However, this does not mean that there was no Chalcolithic on this island, that is, the Copper Age was absent on it. Quite the opposite, because it is here, about four kilometers north of the city of Paphos, and in a very fertile area where even bananas are grown today, is the village of Lempa, or Lemba, which is believed to be the first village on the island belonging to to the Eneolithic era (c. 3800 - 2500 BC). That is, its inhabitants already knew metal, well, and they also made a large number of cross-shaped female figurines carved from stone and symbolizing some kind of local goddess of fertility. Their houses were also round, as in Choirokitia, although they were built much later.
This is how the oldest copper axes looked like. They did not yet have eyelets and were inserted into the split of the L-shaped handle. It was with such an ax that the "ice man" Ozi was also armed.
In 1982, Lemba was converted into an Experimental Village in order to host various historical events and study the technologies of the past. With the assistance of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, as well as the mayor and residents of this village, the project has become an important resource for attracting tourists, as well as a place for testing various hypotheses in experimental archeology. Another village of Erimi is located on the southern coast of the island, and that's where a copper chisel was found - the oldest copper product in Cyprus.
Over time, these copper skins began to be valued "worth its weight in gold."
It is important to note not even the antiquity of this find, but the fact that the people who made this chisel could only get here by sea, and not by land, because Cyprus is an island, and it is simply impossible to be there in any other way.
But how did they get here? On papyrus boats, a model of one of which is exhibited in the Maritime Museum of Ayia Napa? But on such a flimsy little boat you cannot sail far, you cannot take away both livestock and property on it. So this can only mean one thing: already in the Eneolithic era, the people who lived on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea had enough capacious ships on which they could sail from the shores of modern Syria and Palestine, at least to Cyprus. Why exactly from here and not from Egypt? Yes, because these ships could be made only of wood, but not of papyrus, so that the famous Thor Heyerdahl would not prove there with his papyrus boats. The ships were built where the equally famous Lebanese cedars grew, and from here the travelers sailed towards the islands of the Aegean archipelago and mainland Greece. At the same time, some peoples who already knew how to process metal were also moving there by land, as evidenced by archaeological finds of the corresponding time. A very small number of chisels, hooks and decorative items made of pure copper have come down to us, but one of them contains a small admixture of tin, which may indicate a connection with Anatolia, where copper processing originated earlier. All the signs of the ancient copper-stone age, according to experts on prehistoric Cyprus, finally took shape on it around 3500 BC. e., and it lasted until about 2500 - 2300 years. BC NS. It is interesting that, again, judging by the data of archaeological research, the end of the Eneolithic on the same island of Cyprus in different parts of it did not come at the same time. In the area of the city of Paphos, he lingered, and copper was used there, but in the northern part of the island at that time they already learned how to melt bronze. And here an interesting question arises: did the ancient navigators who got to this island stay on it, or at least some of them went further?
Papyrus boat papirella from the Museum of the Sea in Ayia Napa, Cyprus.
Cyclades - "islands lying in a circle"
And yes, indeed, they sailed even further west and there they met the island of Crete, and sailing from it directly to the north, they reached the Cyclades (from the Greek Cyclades, which just means "lying around") islands lying around the island of Delos. Moreover, they reached them back in the Middle and Late Paleolithic (V-IV millennia BC), when they did not know the metal yet, but they knew very well the obsidian that they mined on one of these islands and then exchanged it throughout Eastern Mediterranean. However, not only obsidian. In Egypt, for example, a zoomorphic vessel made of marble from the island of Paros, one of the islands of the Cyclades archipelago, was found in a grave of the early Dynastic period, so even the stone at that distant time was the object of trade of the islanders living on it with Egypt!
Inhabitants of the Cyclades. Drawing by the same J. Rava. People are depicted a little fantastically, but everything that concerns the depicted objects is 100% reliable. Pay attention to the spearheads. They are flat, but they have side holes through which they were tied with leather straps to the spear shaft, and the tip itself was inserted into the cut made in it. Axes and daggers of characteristic shape with a rib in the middle - all of this was found among the burial items of more than … 20 thousand (!) Burials found on these islands.
And then the inhabitants of the islands learned the technology of processing copper, and they began their own copper-stone age, which left a memory in itself in the form of … 20 thousand burials containing a lot of copper and silver jewelry and products. That is, we may well talk about a rather developed civilization that existed there in the period 2800-1400. BC. and only later absorbed by the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures. But this happened later. And at a time when pure copper without any impurities was processed in Cyprus, the same technology was used in the Cyclades, and in other places, and the metal products themselves were very similar to each other.
Arrowheads of the Vila Nova culture from Portugal.
And not only products: archaeologists note that, in particular, the rampart on the island of Syros around 2400 - 2200. BC. very similar to the underhead building of the Vila Nova de São Pedro culture in Portugal! It is also the culture of the Chalcolithic (or Eneolithic) era, which got its name from the archaeological site of the same name in Extremadura, Portugal, where a large number of arrowheads were found among the ruins of a fortified settlement. The chronological framework of the emergence of metallurgical cultures on the island of Cyprus, the Cyclades and here in Portugal, roughly coincides, that is, people who lived on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and owned the technology of processing copper (and from whom they learned it, if not from the same Chatal Huyuks or those who inherited them in this region?), already at that time far from us, made long voyages across it and visited not only Cyprus, Crete and the Cyclades, but also the islands of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, as well as the lands of modern Italy, Spain and Portugal! And at the same time, they either settled there themselves, or shared their knowledge with the natives. After all, how else to explain then the similarity in the cultures of the Cyclades and Vila Nova, which caught the eye of archaeologists?
One of the oldest ships in the Mediterranean is just a "little child" compared to the ships that had already sailed this sea 1000 years before the Trojan War! Museum of the Sea in Ayia Napa, Cyprus.
That is, the spread of the most ancient metalworking technology, as it turned out, was most closely associated with the art of navigation, and the carriers of the "Atlantic culture" spread it in the Mediterranean basin. But how then did those peoples who belonged to the continental culture become acquainted with the art of processing copper, how did it spread among the peoples of the continental culture, for whom xenophobia was almost the basis of their entire life?
(To be continued)
Previous materials:
1. From stone to metal: ancient cities (part 1)
2. The first metal products and ancient cities: Chatal-Huyuk - “a city under a hood” (part 2) https://topwar.ru/96998-pervye-metallicheskie-izdeliya-i-drevnie-goroda-chatal-hyuyuk-gorod- pod-kolpakom-chast-2.html
3. "The real copper age" or from the old paradigm to the new (part 3)
