ABSTRACT
But westward and southward the original warrior invasions had a different sequel. We have seen how in Central Europe their semi-nomadic mode of life entered in the Baden culture into a material setting of largely Danubian-Aegean origin or derivation; the Schneckenberg and Cojofeni cultures show them definitely dominant in an analogous conflation, and in the latter especially the intrusive corded pottery was here and
there carried deep into the handled and crusted-ware province of South-Eastern Europe. Southward on the Aegean, civiliza tion was in palpable correspondence with that province; in Thessaly crusted ware and other derivatives of Neolithic tradition lived on, subject to encroachment from the Early Helladic civilization of Central Greece, now advanced from Boeotia to the Spercheios valley, and to infiltration from the north and Macedonia, where the ‘ Early Macedonian’ culture was undergoing regional development from its TrojanAnatolian initiation (p. 107). Developed forms of pot-handle, conspicuous in Thessaly, are typical of Macedonia, which remained also in partial contact with the Bulgarian version of Gumelnitza to the east, as it was with the Middle Danube to the north. And the whole North Aegean was open to touch with the region centred upon Troy, whose influence stands over against the southerly civilization of the Cyclades and Crete. On the Greek mainland, the third phase of Early Helladic culture in its northern areas, in the centuries just before 2100 B.C., comes to differ somewhat from the older pattern: there is ‘ light-on-dark’ painted ware, for instance, at Eutresis in Boeotia and Hagia Marina in Phokis, which, seemingly of different implication from the ‘ dark-on-light’ of the Cyclades, recalls Macedonia in suggesting Trojan con nexions. And we have already seen in the third phase of Troy II evidence for intrusion by powerful people from the steppes, which was followed by the city’s sack and destruction about or not long after 2300. It would then be no surprise to find that sequel echoed further round the North Aegean on its European as well as its Asiatic side. And echoes there seem to be. At the end of the Early Helladic III occupation at Eutresis appears a copper axe-adze of intrusive look, and some pieces of corded ware, with Cotofeni or Schneckenberg parallels, which are repeated at Hagia Marina; and with these must be considered the wide distribution of Northern-seeming barrows, in and beyond Macedonia, in Thessaly, and as far south anyhow as Drachmani in Phokis, where, though in general many such barrows may belong to later periods, one contained a contracted burial with plain pottery accompanied by a bronze knife and a painted pot of a kind marking the beginning of the
Middle Minoan or Middle Cycladic I period in the islands, about 2100 B.C. Furthermore, there are barrows also in NorthWest Anatolia, some of them datable in the earliest Bronze Age of about this time, and it is from about 2000 B.C. that Anatolia witnessed the first rise of the Hittites, a people under whose ensuing rule, along with many purely Near-Eastern tongues, a dialect with unmistakable Indo-European affinities was in official use in the second millennium. That an element among the Hittites, whether or no responsible for this ‘ Nasili’ dialect, entered Anatolia from the north-west has often been suggested, and we have now to realize that these same centuries saw the entry of a new civilization, of distinct form but from roughly the same quarter, into mainland Greece.
