IN the course of the thousand years before the Christian era, economic life in the Eastern Mediterranean went through brilliant and fruitful stages, both before and after the conquest of the East by Alexander. Already organized in a collective form in the society depicted in the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the poems of Hesiod, it advanced from stage to stage, as the field of action of Greek civilization extended, until it acquired a remarkable amplitude, variety, and complexity. The monarchical conception of the State inherited from the old Eastern empires had a very special influence on the economic organization of the Hellenistic period, and that influence continued to be felt for many centuries.
The regions surrounding the Western Mediterranean present a different spectacle during the same period. No doubt, at certain points of that basin, the influence of the East and Greece contributed to the development of economic life. The presence of certain Greek colonies like Marseilles, the power of the Carthaginian Empire in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, and the brilliance of the Etruscan civilization do not affect only the history of Greece, Carthage, and Etruria; they have played an essential part in the history of the whole West. Nevertheless, almost down to the Christian era, this history of the West almost belongs to prehistory. Here one can follow, better than on the banks of the Nile or the Euphrates and better than on the shores and islands of the Ægean, the successive stages, rapid and slow, of economic progress from the earliest Stone Age to the time when these countries, long isolated and little known, were brought by the Roman conquest into the main stream of the economic life and civilization of antiquity.
In Palæolithic times, when his dwelling was a cave or a shelter under a rock, man lived entirely by hunting, fishing, and gathering a few wild plants or fruits. He did not yet practise agriculture or stock-breeding.
But industry already existed. It consisted chiefly in chipping flint, working in bone and ivory, and preparing the hides of beasts. From the primitive axe known as the coup de poing of the Chellean epoch to the Solutrean blades and spear-heads shaped like willow and laurel leaves, the working of flint and other hard stones was perfected. This industry supplied man, not only with the weapons needed for fighting wild beasts, but with several implements— knives, punches or drills, engraving-tools, scrapers. From hard materials of animal origin—bone, ivory from the tusks of mammoths and elephants, reindeer-horn—he trained himself to make a number of articles, the use of which is not always easy to determine—harpoons, assegai-heads, needles with eyes, pins, spatulas, spear-throwers, bâtons de commandement, and perhaps even ornaments. There was no spinning or weaving, but man could prepare the skins of beasts for use as clothing, and it has also been supposed that he made leather vessels. He had observed, lastly, that certain natural substances gave things a colour, and used them to tattoo himself. Pottery, even of the clumsiest kind, seems to have been almost unknown; at least, it has not been found on the Palaeolithic sites, except at a few stations in Belgium.1
How was this primitive industry organized? We do not know. It seems likely that every man, every head of a family, was able to chip flint, carve bone, ivory, and stag or reindeer horn, and prepare the skins of beasts. We do not find in the distribution of the Palaeolithic dwelling-places anything which suggests the specialization of industry. The various stations have all yielded products of this industry in similar form and in similar proportions. A genuine workshop is, however, reported at St. Acheul in the French Department of the Somme.1 On the other hand, the works of art of the Quaternary period—cave-paintings, bone and ivory figurines, engravings on bone and reindeer-horn—testify to the technical skill and sense of life and style reached by their creators. Can we admit that, in a world in which art was so developed, economic activity was confined to the individual manufacture of weapons and tools as they were needed, from one day to another? It is wisest not to give a definite answer to the question.
Also, did the tribes of Palæolithic times have any knowledge of trade? "On several occasions," Monsieur J. Déchelette writes, "stations of the Reindeer Age have yielded pierced shells, used as ornaments, which are proved by their scientific class to have come from distant places." So, too, "some Quaternary flints in the Belgian stations have been observed to be of foreign origin." But, the learned archaeologist adds after mentioning several facts of the same kind, it is not possible "to determine for certain whether this transport . . . was due to a true trade or merely to the many migrations of the Quaternary tribes."2 Monsieur J. de Morgan, on his side, while admitting the existenpe of commercial relations as early as the Palæolithic period, of exchanges carried out between clan and clan, between tribe and tribe, does not believe that any trace has been left of these operations. With reference to the discovery in caves in the centre of France of shells from the Ocean and the Mediterranean, he asks whether they should not be explained as spoils taken from conquered enemies.3
So, according to recent observations, the economic activity of Palæolithic man may be defined as follows: no agriculture or stock-breeding; rudimentary industry; very doubtful commercial exchanges.
The Neolithic Age, which, according to the specialists, is chiefly distinguished, in respect of stone implements, by the substitution of polished stone for chipped or simply flaked stone, made one of the most important advances in the economic evolution of mankind.
Agriculture made its appearance. Man no longer relied for his food on hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants and fruit. He knew and doubtless cultivated corn—wheat, barley, millet, rye, oats. Fruit had a big place in his diet; nuts, sloes, and strawberries were doubtless provided by nature spontaneously, but apples, pears, and grapes seem to point to artificial growing.1 The tilling of the soil had come into being, though under what influences we cannot determine or even guess.
The domestication of animals, and consequently stock-breeding, developed at the same time. The dog entered upon his role of faithful comrade, helper in the chase, and watchful guardian. Man began to make use of the strength and speed of the horse. The bovine, ovine, and porcine races supplied him with meat, milk, leather, and wool, and perhaps oxen already served as beasts of burden.2
Closer bonds than before were established between man and the soil on which he lived, and from which he obtained at least part of his own food and that of the beasts which he collected about him. Caves and rock shelters were abandoned for dwellings built in the open, artificial constructions placed together in what were often fairly big agglomerations. On the dry land, they were round or rectangular huts with a hole dug below the floor level in the middle to hold the hearth and walls made of wicker hurdles covered with clay. The villages formed by these huts were often built on promontories or spurs in a naturally strong position; elsewhere they were surrounded by defence-works, regular ramparts. It was not only on dry land that human habitations arose and collected. For better protection against wild beasts, which were still a danger, or against hostile tribes and pillaging neighbours, men settled in lakes, on piles. This was the age of the lake villages or palafittes. Even the dwellings of the dead underwent the same evolution; funerary megaliths, galleries (allées couvertes), and dolmens constituted veritable necropoles, cities of the dead. There is no doubt that society developed in the Neolithic Age, that men became more and more accustomed to come together, and that economic life was thereby affected.
The birth of agriculture and stock-breeding and the progress—relative, no doubt, but real and significant—of comfort in domestic and in collective life led to the birth and development of several industries.
Stone, wood, bone, and horn served for the manufacture of all kinds of things, weapons, tools, utensils, and pendants and other articles of adornment. The polishing of stone, the cutting of wood, and the working of bone and horn furnished Neolithic man with the materials and implements needed for an existence which had become almost sedentary and industrious—axes of many shapes, clubs, adzes, gouges, chisels; the piles of their platforms, the still rudimentary roof-timbers and floor-boards of their dwellings, the handles of their tools and weapons, even dug-out canoes and a few bowls; daggers, drills and punches, arrow-heads, javelin-heads, pins, needles, and crude trinkets; picks for use in the flint-beds, barbed harpoons, etc. The mere list of these articles, short as it is, shows the great importance assumed by peaceful and productive occupations by the side of hunting, fishing, and fighting. The character and horizon of life were transformed.
The ceramic and textile industries began to play a big part in economic life.
The earthenware vases at that time were made "of ill-refined clay mixed with grains of quartz, which perhaps served to give it more consistency. The colour is rarely even all over the surface of the vase. At breaks, the clay, which the imperfect firing has not penetrated equally all through, often presents a more or less reddish colour on the two faces and a grey colour inside, . . . The vases were fired in the open air, not in a kiln. . . . The use of the wheel being unknown, the potters made all their goods by hand."1 It is not known whether this industry was specialized or domestic at the time. The primitive nature of the plant and methods of manufacture, the crude simplicity of the ornament, which usually consisted of lines or dots incised to various depths, and the clumsiness of most of the shapes given to these vases do not suggest a highly developed technique. It is very likely that the vases in common use were made in each village, perhaps in each family. In spite of many recent discoveries and discussions, there is still much obscurity in the history of Neolithic pottery.
The textile industry was no more advanced than the ceramic. Flax and wool were spun and woven. Remnants of tissues, ropes, and fishing-nets have been found in lacustrian stations in Switzerland, besides several of the implements used, such as whorls and bobbins of terra-cotta.2
Lastly, we should mention—though one cannot describe these occupations as industries—the production of flour by means of stone querns, or rather crushers, and the use of flat polished stones for the crushing of colouring matter, especially red and yellow ochre, intended for painting and tattooing the body.3
The evolution which transformed economic life in the Neolithic Age affected the relations of peoples with one another, and therefore trade. In Palæolithic times, men had generally been content with the food and materials which nature provided in the immediate neighbourhood of their dwellings, whether caves, rock shelters, or stations on headlands, flat hills, or alluvial ground beside rivers. Moreover, the hunters, in their wanderings after game, had been able to obtain, sometimes far away from their starting-point, objects which they then carried miles away with them, such as the sea-shells from the Atlantic or the Mediterranean which have been found in various inland stations. It may be said that in that age it was man who moved about and went to the places of production.
With the more settled life which marks the Neolithic Age, with the development of agriculture, stock - breeding, and industry, and with the predominance of peaceful, industrious activity, the opposite movement set in. Henceforth man was more stationary; he attracted to his dwelling, to the centres of consumption, the natural and manufactured products which he needed. The many observations to which the study of the Neolithic deposits has given rise allow one to state that a very big trade distributed various materials of mineral origin over areas some of which were quite extensive. Flints chipped in the workshops of the Grand Pressigny in Touráine were exported to Brittany, the north of Gaul, and even Switzerland.1 Jade, which was used for making polished axes, is not found in a raw state in Western Europe except in certain parts of Switzerland and Styria; jade axes have been found in Brittany.2 Obsidian, too, the deposits of which can be placed exactly, in view of its volcanic origin, travelled over a wide area.3 The trade in amber and callaïs extended still further. Amber, or more exactly yellow amber, comes in Europe from the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea. As early as Neolithic times, it was used for making necklaces, not only in Scandinavia, but in various parts of central and southern Gaul.4 The question of callais is less clear, because we do not know exactly from where it came; it is, however, certain that this substance, which was very rare and has now disappeared altogether, was conveyed to many regions a long way from one another, since beads of it have been found in Morbihan, in Provence, at the foot of the Pyrenees, and in Portugal.5
We see, from these examples, which are the best known up to the present, that Neolithic trade went on over big areas, since the flints of the Grand Pressigny spread far to the north-east and to the east, from the banks of the middle Loire to the country of the Scheldt, the Meuse, and the Jura; since the jade from the Eastern Alps reached Brittany; since the amber gathered near the mouths of the Vistula, Oder, and Elbe was already conveyed to the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
It is probable that this already active trade travelled overland. "The genius of the Romans did not create the road-system of the conquered provinces, lock, stock, and barrel. Rome did not have to pioneer all the great trade-routes routes of her empire. The monumental causeways which she built of lasting materials took the place of tracks which had long been drawn, in the course of the ages, at the cost of infinite efforts, by the ancient inhabitants of Europe. They were modest tracks, but they had facilitated the diffusion of primitive civilization, and the patient discoveries of prehistory are gradually rediscovering them under their covering of Roman flagstones."1
At the same time as these tracks, the rivers were used. One is, at least, entitled to assume this from the fact that Neolithic man used dug-out canoes and that, according to classical tradition, the amber came to the Mediterranean by a river which Herodotos calls the Eridanos. It has been supposed, with justice, that the Vistula and Dniester in the east, the Elbe and Moldau in the middle, and the Rhine and Rhone in the west were the chief routes of the amber trade.2
Did navigation by sea yet play any part in commercial relations? To explain the diffusion of amber in Western Europe, M. Déchelette adds to the river-routes mentioned above "the great sea-route by the Atlantic and the Strait of Gibraltar"; he admits, however, that in Neolithic times this route was only of secondary importance.3 M. de Morgan, on the contrary, believes that men only ventured on the waves to fish. "Their vessels were far too unstable to warrant the risk of long voyages along coasts that were often very inhospitable."4
Primitive and rudimentary as the methods, equipment, and organization of economic life still were in those distant days, a very important stage had been passed by man. Agriculture, the domestication and rearing of animals, many industries, and, lastly, commerce had come into being. The essential forms of economy had appeared. They might afterwards develop, become more complex, and be perfected; but they existed. Man had them, knew them, used them.
The Neolithic Age is marked by the appearance of agriculture, stock-breeding, and the textile and ceramic industries; the two distinctive features of the following period are the birth of metal-working and the development of commercial relations, both among all the countries of Central and Western Europe and between those countries and the regions washed by the Eastern Mediterranean. Economic life all over the West then took on an activity previously unknown, which would endure and increase from century to century, and would not enter upon a new stage until the time of the Roman Empire.
About agriculture and stock-breeding there is nothing to say, except that its progress is proved by the extension of the use of the sickle, by rock-carvings of ploughmen driving ploughs drawn by two oxen, and by the abundance of woven stuffs, chiefly wool, found, in a marvellous state of preservation, round several skeletons.1 At the end of the protohistoric period, although huge, dense forests still existed, the greater part of the ground, at least in Gaul and the Peninsula, was covered with various crops and pastures. We know this from various Greek and Roman authors, such as Caesar, Strabo, and Diodoros.
On the other hand, the use of the metals does not seem to have had any perceptible effect on the general conditions of habitation. Writing of Gaul, M. Déchelette says: "Not only was all attempt at luxury and comfort banished from them, but down to Caesar's time they were built of light materials—bits of wood, planks, or a mixture of mud and branches, coated over with clay and roofed with thatch."2 One should, however, mention a few walls of dry-stone combined with wooden beams found, for example, at Bibracte and Alesia.3 But this was hardly an advance, and M. Déchelette's remarks are not in any way weakened. It is, moreover, probable that they apply to the whole of the West.
One should remember, too, that during the centuries just before the Christian era big migrations took place north and west of the Alps. Some of these migrations ended in permanent settlements, like that of the Celts in Gaul, Switzerland, and northern Italy; others were temporary invasions, accompanied by looting and destruction, like those of the Cimbri, Teutones, and Suevi. While the settled, industrious life of many tribes encouraged economic progress of every kind, the intermittent or habitual nomadism of others opposed and hampered it. This was the case in Germany, where wandering bands never ceased moving about through forests and swamps,1 and it was the case in North Africa, except in the parts which came directly under the influence of Carthage.
The textile and ceramic industries continued to advance. The potters learned to use the wheel, and in the shape and decoration of their vases they tried, still very feebly, to imitate the works brought from Crete and Greece by Ægean, Phœnician, and Greek mariners. They emphasized their incised ornament with crude colours. Those of the Iberian Peninsula painted their wares with the brush, covering the belly and neck with geometrical patterns and floral and animal decoration but very rarely attempting the human form.2
We have less information about the progress of the textile industries. We do not know at all whether they lost their domestic character and became specialized. They do not seem to have undergone the influence of the East to the same extent as pottery and metal-working. M. Déchelette thinks that the Gauls may perhaps have taken the most characteristic part of their costume, their trousers, from the Scythians and Persians. What is certain, is that the draped garments usual among the Greeks and Romans were not introduced amone them until after the Roman conquest.
Whatever may have happened in the ceramic and textile industries, the great economic novelty of the time was metalworking. What were the origins of this craft in the West? The opinion most generally accepted among prehistorians is that the revolution started in the Mediterranean and Asiatic East. The two metals earliest known and used were copper and gold. "It would seem to be definitely proved today that the knowledge of copper reached Gaul simultaneously from the South and the East, that it came from the Black Sea and the Ægean, a district where this industry—according to specialists in iEgean questions—began towards the early part of the third millennium before our era; though naturally it took long centuries before it was propagated as far as the British Isles and Scandinavia."1 It is not impossible that gold, which appears in the Egyptian and Chaldsean tombs at the same time as copper, followed the same route. The knowledge of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was likewise transmitted from the jEgean lands to the West.2 Still later, finally, it was perhaps from Western Asia and the Mediterranean East that iron-working spread to Central, Northern, and Western Eurone.
However one may attempt to solve these problems of origin, once the initial impetus was given there is no doubt that the metal industries found a very propitious soil everywhere in the West. The metals were supplied by very numerous and very rich deposits. To mention only the most important, there was copper in the Peninsula, tin in Portugal, Brittany, and Cornwall, iron in Illyria, Istria, Noricum, Lorraine, Burgundy, Berry, the Pyrenæan region, etc., and argentiferous lead in the south of Spain, and there were mines and placers of gold all over Gaul and Ireland. This is not the place to recall in detail all the chronological and economic phases through which the metal industries passed from their appearance in the West down to the Christian era, Special works, particularly Déchelette's Manuel d'archéologie préhistorique and de Morgan's Prehistoric Man, will give the reader full information about the Bronze Age and its subdivisions, the first Iron age or Hallstatt period, and the second Iron age or La T&ne period. Here we have simply to try to see the influence exercised on ancient economic life by the progress of metal-working in the centre and west of Europe.
First of all, the first result of that progress was to place a large quantity of ores at the disposal of man. It was not only the population of the country where the copper, tin, argentiferous lead, iron, or gold was found that benefited by these hitherto unexploited and unproductive riches. At an early date the Phœnicians, and after them the Carthaginians, took advantage of the silver-mines of the Peninsula and the tin-mines dotted along the Atlantic seaboard from Lusitania to Britain. The silver obtained from Iberia was used by the Carthaginians to pay their army of mercenaries. The tin of the Atlantic regions was transported both by sea and across Gaul to the Mediterranean, and brought on Phœnician ships to the great industrial centres of the classical East. Iron spread practically everywhere in the west and north of Europe. This diffusion of metallic raw materials of western or northern origin was an economic phenomenon of great importance.
The discovery and exploitation of these raw materials had as a result the organization and development of new industries almost all over Europe. No doubt, Neolithic man had extracted flint with his rudimentary apparatus, and Dé lette writes, "Our knowledge of Neolithic industry justifies as in saying that the art of mining was earlier than that of metal-working";1 but that primitive art, practised with tools of stone or staghorn, cannot be compared, even remotely, to the technical methods, already complex and almost scientific, used in mining copper, tin, gold, and silver. Long before the Christian era, miners in the Peninsula, in Gaul, in Britain, and at the foot of the Alps were digging galleries to reach the strata and veins of ore, draining off the water which constantly threatened to flood those galleries, and extracting the precious or base metals from the enclosing gangue of stone by washing and smelting, and had observed that a mixture of various metals in the right proportion produced alloys. It may not be certain that the alloying of arsenic, antimony, and zinc with copper was consciously practised by the ancients; but at least it is undeniable that they had recognized the union of copper with tin, and practised it with great skill. In the Bronze Age, and still more in the Iron Age, foundries and forges became numerous. On the site of these metal-works, crucibles, blast-pipes, ingots, and moulds have been found; and the examination of the articles manufactured has revealed the usual processes of the dustry—the use of rivets, and then of solder, to join and fit separate pieces and the invention and progress of engraving, chasing, stamping, repousse-work, and enamelling.1
From foundries and forges there poured forth, in hundreds and in thousands, offensive and defensive weapons and armour, swords, spears, daggers, axes, arrow-heads, javelin-heads, helmets, breast-plates, shields, arm-guards, and chariot wheels and fittings; tools and implements of all kinds, sickles, knives, adzes, chisels, files, saws, punches, hammers, and anvils; harpoons and fish-hooks; many utensils, such as vases of various shapes and sizes, spits and forks for roasting meat, fircdogs, ploughshares, and bits; ornaments and toilet articles, bangles, rings, necklaces, pins, fibulas, and combs; fetishes and amulets, the most popular of which seem to have been disks. Bronze, iron, gold, silver, and lead were, simultaneously or successively. used in making all these things.
This metal industry was not at first uniform in all parts of Central, Northern, and Western Europe. At the beginning of the Bronze Age, prehistorians make a distinction in this respect between several provinces. Apart from the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy, they distinguish an Iberian province, a Western province, comprising France, the British Isles, Belgium, Switzerland, and South Germany, a Hungarian province, and a Scandinavian province. Gradually, under the influence of the increasingly active relations which grew up between these regions, differences tended to disappear. Goods manufactured in countries very far apart came together. Huge migrations, like those of the Celts from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, carried types of weapons and tools which were at first only in local use to very distant places. At the same time, the increasing importation of Greek manufactures and works of art had a similar effect on the aforesaid provinces, or at least on most of them, and may have helped to reduce regional differences during the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era.
At that time, as later, the interdependence of trade and industry was one of the characteristic features of economic life. The wealth of Western Europe in ores and metals, the deposits and production of which were fairly definitely localized, gave rise to a very big current of exportation. In addition to the amber trade and its routes, which had been established in the Neolithic Age and grew steadily more active, there were now the tin, bronze, iron, and salt trades and their routes. The new trade and routes did not only run from north and west to south and east, from Central and Atlantic Europe to the Mediterranean countries; they brought Iberia, Gaul, and the British Isles into touch with Scandinavia and Central Europe. Tin was carried by sea from the shores of the Atlantic both to the Mediterranean and, by the North Sea, to the Baltic; by land, it crossed Gaul from north-west to south-east. Ingots of bronze from the countries rich in copper and tin mines went over the passes of the Alps. It is probable that the iron of Noricum and Styria travelled northwards and westwards as well as southwards. The salt trade had become very important; the general directions which it took were determined by its nature and source, running chiefly from the coasts where it was obtained to the interior.
Like raw materials, manufactured goods travelled over the west and centre of Europe. "One could make up a whole list of the objects of the Bronze Age found in our (Gallic) provinces or in the Swiss lake villages, having been imported there from abroad. I have spoken of the British gold ornaments, the Italic helmets and daggers, the Iberian or Scandinavian war-hammer of Kersoufflet, the gold pin of Serrigny, other pins of the Bronze Age imported into Gaul from Central Europe, and many other objects of foreign origin. A few more discoveries which are no less significant may be mentioned. Archaeologists have long recognized the Scandinavian origin of a hanging-vase and the half of a fibula found in 1878 at Corcelette, on the Lake of Neuchatel. ... A sword, of a type characteristic of the Hungarian Bronze Age, is said to have been found at Beynost in the French Department of the Ain. Another sword of the same type . . . has been found at La Plaine near Martigny in Switzerland."1 These currents of trade went on in the Iron Age. "It was in great part to this internal and external trade that the La Tene civilization owed ... its wide diffusion into regions where the Celts had not penetrated."2
Internal and external trade—indeed, it was during the metal age that Western and Central Europe began to entertain frequent and continuous relations with the already brilliant civilizations of the Mediterranean, with Italy and Greece. When, near Montlaures and Enserune, between Narbonne and Beziers, cemeteries were discovered whose furniture consisted partly of Greek vases adorned with painted figures and Campanian and Italo-Greek wares dating from the sixth century n.c, at the earliest, it was readily believed that these finds revealed the first penetration of a still barbarous Gaul by the products of Hellenic industry and art. M. Piroutet has recently shown that this belief is incorrect, and that long before the sixth century many objects, particularly metal objects, had been imported from the Mediterranean world, not only into the coast-districts close to the Greek eolonies, but far into the interior of Europe, all over Gaul and into Switzerland and South Germany.1 M. Déchelette had, moreover, pointed out that, even in the Bronze Age, pigs and ingots of copper which were certainly of Ægean origin had gone as far as the Rhone and the Danube.2 In the Iron Age, this trade extended, reaching the west and north of Europe, whither it took, among other goods, bronze vases, superior pottery. coral, and glass trinkets.3
This traffic took two main directions. From the top of the Adriatic, where the Romans afterwards founded Aquileia, it went either up the valleys of the Po and its affluents, in particular the Adige and Ticino, or due north up the Tagliamento and Isonzo, until it came to the chief passes of the Alps, the Great St. Bernard and Simplon in the west and the Brenner and Predil in the east. North of the Alps, it spread out like a fan, as it were, towards the middle Rhine, the upper Danube, the Moldau, the Elbe, and the Oder. From the mouths of the Rhone, especially after the foundation of Marseilles, Italo-Greek imports followed the long corridor of the Rhone and Saône and then spread by the Loire and Seine, by the Meuse and Moselle, all over western and northern Gaul. In the Peninsula, roads doubtless ran to the interior from the Greek colonies and the Phœnician and afterwards Carthaginian ports. Emporne (Ampurias) at the foot of the Pyrenees and Gades (Cadiz) on the Atlantic must have been ports of distribution for goods coming from the East. To these land-routes one should add the great sea-route which went out of the Mediterranean by the Strait of Gibraltar and then followed the coast of Portugal and western France to Brittany and Britain.
With this development of trade went a remarkable and continuous progress in the organization of exchanges. So far as prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology can tell at present, the instruments of exchange used in Western Europe were at first metal objects, single or double bronze axes and then disks; in Britain, iron bars of a fixed weight were used for the same purpose. In the fifth century B.C., money appeared. The Greeks introduced coins which came from their mother-country into Gaul and the Peninsula; the famous treasure of Auriol, found near Marseilles in 1867, contains coins of Phocæa, Lesbos, Ægina, and other Greek cities. Later, Macedonian staters penetrated fairly far into Gaul. The coins issued by Marseilles and by Rhode and Emporiæ in Spain travelled far and wide. It was in imitation of the Greek coins that the Gauls and Iberians started, in the last centuries before the Christian era, to strike native coinages. We need not enter into a discussion of numismatics here. But we should note that the use of money, which became general in Western and Central Europe before the Roman conquest, was taught to the native populations by the Greek traders, and that it was a necessary consequence of the extension of Greek and Italo-Greek commerce in those regions.
So, then, at the time when the various countries of Western Europe were made subject to Rome and combined by her in a single state, they had passed some essential economic stages. Agriculture and stock-breeding were practised almost everywhere. There were many industries, which made use of the abundant raw materials which man was able to extract from the soil or to produce by his labour. An active trade had grown up between the regions of that vast territory, many of them far away from one another, and all, directly or indirectly, had relations with Italy and Greece.
While the barbarous countries of Europe were passing through the successive phases of this economic evolution, two other countries, which had long stood outside Hellenic civilization, were taking a preponderant place in the Western Mediterranean—North Africa and central and northern Italy. Two cities there played the chief role—Carthage and Rome—until the day when Rome, having triumphed over Carthage, became the unchallenged mistress, first of the West and then of the whole Mediterranean world.
1 XIX, vol. i, pp. 169 ff.; LXXVIII, English p. 66.
1 Ibid., English p. 41.
2 XIX, vol. i, pp. 175 ff.
3 LXXVIII, English p. 269.
1 XIX, vol. i, pp. 342 ff.
2 Ibid., pp. 337 ff.
1 XIX, vol. i, pp. 545 ff.
2 Ibid., pp. 570 ff.
3 Ibid., pp. 565 ff.
1 Ibid., p. 629.
2 Ibid., pp. 627 ff.
3 Ibid., pp. 628 ff.
4 Ibid., pp. 623 ff.
5 Ibid., pp. 620 ff.
1 XIX, vol. i, pp. 629 ff.
2 Ibid., p. 626.
3 Ibid., loc. cit.
4 LXXVIII, English p. 274.
1 XIX, vol. ii, 1, pp. 266 ff., 497, 307 ff.
2 Ibid., pp. 111 ff.
3 J. Toutain, in Pro Alesia, N.S., vol. xi (1925).
1 Cæs., Gall. War, vi, 21 ff.; E. Babelon, Le Rhin dans l'histoire, i, pp. 114 ff.
2 P. Paris, L'Art et l'industrie de l'Espagne primitive, vol. ii, pp. 1 ff.
1 LXXVIII, English p. 105; cf. XIX, vol. ii, 1, p. 2.
2 LXXVIII, English pp. 114-15; XIX, vol. ii, 1, p. 3.
1 XIX, vol. i, pp. 355 ff.
1 XIX, vol. ii, 1, pp. 175 ff.
1 XXX, vol. ii, 1, pp. 305 ff.
2 Ibid., 3, p. 1574.
1 Congrès de Rhotlania at Avignon (Sept., 1924), pp. 92 ff., no. 954.
2 XIX, vol, ii, 1, p. 400.
3 Ibid., 3, pp. 1573 ff.