Phoenician traders made their way down the coast of Morocco as well as northwards. Their objectives included the collection of murex shellfish, which provided them with the purple dye after which the Greeks had named them Phoinikes. As was their custom, they established themselves on a small offshore island, taking charge of Mogador, or Essaouira, which provided a base from which to trade with the native Berber population. It lies 1,000 kilometres south of Cádiz and it apparently marked the furthest limit of their regular trade. Mogador was probably visited seasonally by traders coming down from Cádiz or out of the Mediterranean, and was as much a camp as a settlement; the traders feasted on shellfish and even whale meat, and left plenty of debris behind. It was very possibly the place named Kerné by Greek writers; if so, we have a credible description of how these merchants operated: they arrived in their big merchant ships, set up booths in which to live, and unloaded the pottery, perfumes and other fine goods they had brought south. These they loaded on to smaller boats, which took the traders and their wares to meet the ‘Ethiopians’ on the African mainland. They bought ivory and the skins of lions, leopards and gazelles in exchange for the products they carried down from Gadir. It was assumed that one simply could not travel beyond Kerné.30
Mogador flourished in the late seventh and early sixth century, but it never proved as successful a settlement as the towns the Phoenicians founded on either side of the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, at Gadir/Cádiz and at Lixus near modern Larache. Yet goods filtered through from as far away as Cyprus and Phoenicia itself; Greek and Phoenician jars arrived in quantity, trans-shipped through Gadir; several carry the name ‘Magon’, who was no doubt a wealthy merchant.31 Gadir, then, was the capital of a network of trade dominated by Phoenician merchants who flourished in the years up to about 550 BC. After that, pressure in the East, from Persians and Assyrians, damaged the trade of the Phoenicians within and beyond the Mediterranean, though this enabled the Carthaginians, themselves of Phoenician origin, to pick up the pieces and create their own flourishing network. However, the Moroccan settlements did not recover.
Mediterranean artefacts did occasionally reach sites in Atlantic Spain other than Gadir, and since what has been found can only be a fraction of what remains to be discovered, which itself must be a fraction of what was originally there, this contact, even in the Mediterranean Bronze Age, should not be ignored. Several sites in Spain and Portugal where Mediterranean goods have been found – Villena, Baiões, Peña Negra – lie inland and could have been reached by following rivers upstream, whether in a boat or along a land trail. And a burial at Roça do Casal do Meiro just south of Lisbon brings us up to the water’s edge. This vaulted tomb contained two people, who were surrounded by grave goods from the Mediterranean, such as an ivory comb and a cloak pin. The date is uncertain and could be as early as the eleventh or as late as the eighth century BC. The tomb may have been a memorial to Mediterranean traders who had reached this far when they died as it is hardly representative of the burials in Bronze Age Portugal. Baiões lies further inland in an area quite rich in tin, which would have attracted Phoenician or other visitors; a hoard found there, and unfortunately hard to date precisely, once again reveals links with the Mediterranean, including bronze wheeled vessels similar to those found in Cyprus and an iron bit attached to a bronze chisel. The chisel is of Atlantic origin, but the bit is Mediterranean, so someone created this composite tool, even before iron-working had begun to spread in Iberia. Nor was this traffic one way. An Atlantic roasting-spit has turned up in Cyprus.
The main candidate for the role of intermediary is the island of Sardinia, because ships entering the Mediterranean from the Atlantic could take advantage of prevailing winds carrying them in that direction. Sardinia, the home of the rich but enigmatic ‘nuraghic’ culture in the Bronze and Iron Ages, looked both west to Spain and east as far as the Levant in the years around 1000 BC (the term ‘nuraghic’ derives from the thousands of prehistoric castles, known as nuraghi, that still dot the island). The typical heavy sword of nuraghic Sardinia followed Atlantic models, even if it was made locally using the plentiful copper of the island; thus the ‘Carp’s Tongue’ extended as far as Sardinia, and Atlantic sickles appear in Sardinia.32 But though much of the copper used in Sardinia was local, the tin was not: they had to obtain it in places such as Spain and southern France, and this would explain the intensity of contact, commercial and cultural, between this part of the Mediterranean and Iberia.
Other Sardinian similarities to the Iberian cultures of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages include stone tombs not vastly different in structure from the Atlantic megaliths – as also in the Balearic islands – and walled villages composed of circular houses arranged in a similar way to the castros and citânias of Atlantic Spain and Portugal, of which more shortly.33 To suggest that the Strait of Gibraltar was not an impenetrable barrier and that the Atlantic world spilled over into the Mediterranean makes sense. Whether this Atlantic world also encompassed the Atlantic coast of Morocco is, however, uncertain, in the present state of knowledge. But it is hard to imagine that Atlantic Morocco, which the Phoenicians penetrated without great difficulty, escaped close contact with the Atlantic culture of Iberia and the great arc stretching up to the British Isles. The idea of Bronze Age Atlantic Europe as an area joined together by a common culture makes good sense; but it is also an unnecessarily Eurocentric approach. Those living in southern Iberia had no concept of Europe, and it was easier to sail back and forth to Morocco than to Sardinia.
One might, and should, dispute the usefulness of the terms ‘Neolithic’, ‘Bronze Age’ and ‘Iron Age’, at least in the Atlantic, for the life of those living along the ocean’s edges changed gradually; the coming of copper and then bronze did not bring traditional stone-cutting to an end by any means. There were changes in burial practices, there was the abandonment of megalithic architecture; there was a new warrior elite, though whether native or immigrant is still far from certain. All the time, though, the awareness that the picture we have is built on little bits of evidence – first funerary, then about bronze weapons – troubles anyone who hopes to understand these societies in the round. Maritime communication was certainly an important feature of life along the Atlantic arc. However, it is only in the Iron Age, roughly from 600 BC onwards, that there is a little more clarity – though not a great deal of clarity – about who the people living along the edges of the Atlantic were. Here at last there is evidence from travellers that bears comparison with the Periplous of the Indian Ocean; and there is the much disputed evidence of inscriptions found in Iberia, as well.
17
Tin Traders
I
By the second half of the first millennium BC the Atlantic arc had ceased to function as a lively network binding together distant parts of the west European coastline; it became the outer margin of a new world whose main centres of activity lay in the heartlands of continental Europe. This was the age of the two successive cultures known as Hallstatt and La Tène that interacted strongly with the peoples of the Mediterranean, such as the Etruscans, and became masters of iron production. Iron remained largely out of favour along the Atlantic edges, probably because it was not as readily available as it was in central Europe; but this itself indicates how the coastline had become disconnected from developments in the hinterland.1 When Etruscan bronze figurines turn up in Devon, Greek coins appear in Brittany or Iberian pin-brooches (fibulae) are found in Cornwall, this is an exciting event in archaeology, for after 500 BC such exotic items had become increasingly rare; and it has been seen that the apogee of the Phoenician penetration into the Atlantic, judging from the case of Mogador, can be dated to the sixth century BC.2
Sea traffic certainly did not cease; but some of the most impressive connections, such as that linking Orkney to the Irish Sea and beyond, either were sundered or became much less regular, to judge from the very limited finds of ‘foreign’, that is, non-Orcadian, goods on Iron Age sites within the Orkne
y archipelago. As along the shores of the Scottish mainland, the coasts of these islands were now dotted with small castles, or brochs, whose function is as much a mystery as the Sardinian nuraghi, to which they bear an outward resemblance.3 Like the nuraghi, they were often surrounded by small outhouses, and became the nucleus of village settlements. Indeed, stone roundhouses, not quite as imposing as the broch towers must have been, characterized settlements all along the Atlantic arc, from Portugal to Shetland.4 More generally, there is a sense that society was turning inwards, and that local communities lived off both the land and sea. In the British Isles these communities based themselves in small settlements that it would be hard to dignify with the title of town, though that would be a suitable description of several of the large settlements that have been discovered along the maritime edges of Galicia and northern Portugal. Brittany may also have possessed a few imposing settlements close to the sea. Writing about his invasion of north-western Gaul, Julius Caesar described the settlements of the Veneti in Brittany as ‘towns’, but he wanted to impress his readers with the scale of his conquests. It would not have sounded quite right if Roman armies had had to struggle to master scattered seaside villages.
Evidence for exchange of goods across the sea is so sparse that the argument for contact up and down the coasts of Atlantic Europe has to depend on cultural similarities all the way from Portugal to northern Scotland. There were broad similarities in the decoration of pottery; there was the common practice of building villages made up of roundhouses constructed on stone foundations. The similarities between the culture of Brittany and Cornwall, and their difference from the rest of France and England, suggest that the links across the sea should not be underestimated.5 Between about 600 and 200 BC, a striking common feature across great swathes of the Atlantic coastline was the construction of promontory forts overlooking the sea; these were lines of walls, generally double or triple lines, that cut off the tip of a small promontory. There is no certainty about their function. It is unlikely that they marked out trading centres, because they are by and large in elevated positions and not close to an obvious harbour. Excavation of the promontories has produced little evidence that they were continuously inhabited. More likely, they were places of refuge and strongpoints to which warriors and their dependants could retreat in times of war. Julius Caesar described the defensive use of promontories in Brittany in his Gallic Wars:
The positions of the strongholds were generally of one kind. They were at the end of tongues and promontories, so as to allow no approach on foot, when the tide rushed in from the sea – which happens every twelve hours – nor in ships, because when the tide ebbed again the ships would be damaged in shoal water.6
On the other hand, they could not all benefit from the tide this way. They generally looked out to the west, from western Ireland, Galloway in south-west Scotland, or the Pembroke peninsula in Wales; they were abundant in Cornwall and Brittany, and they appear on the islands of the north Atlantic: Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man.7 This suggests that they may sometimes have had a religious rather than a defensive use, as points of land on which to propitiate a god of the sea or of the winds, bearing in mind that the prevailing winds came from the west. Another common feature of the northern Atlantic coastal communities was what are known as souterrains, underground corridors built out of stone with some care; and, once again, their function is unclear – maybe they were for storage, maybe for shelter, though they would have been clearly visible above ground, so it is hard to see what advantage that would have brought. Once again, it is the presence of the same subterranean architecture on both sides of the English Channel that suggests mutual influences, rather than any objects found in the ground.
Settlements of varying size made up of roundhouses could be found as far south as Iberia. The castros or citânias of Galicia and Portugal were often substantial settlements occupying good strategic locations. One example is the very substantial citânia at Santa Luzia, high above the modern Portuguese town of Viana do Castelo; unfortunately, a large part of the site was destroyed early in the twentieth century in order to build a luxury hotel, but more than enough remains to indicate that the term ‘town’ rather than ‘village’ would be appropriate here. It overlooked the River Limia where it debouches into the Atlantic; this was a superb defensive position. Whether the inhabitants made much use of their access to the Atlantic is unclear. The site at Santa Luzia eventually acquired three lines of walls; the area within the walls contains dozens of circular houses closely packed together, as well as solid towers built into the retaining walls. The houses, several of which contained vestibules, were entered from the south-west or the south-east, since a southerly entrance was better sheltered from the winds and rain that tended to strike from the opposite direction. While the walls were of stone, the conical roofs of these houses would have been built of wood covered with straw. Loom weights have been found, indicating that weaving was a local industry, as one might expect; otherwise, the main sources of livelihood were agriculture and stock-raising.8
Bearing in mind the cultural similarities between the roundhouse settlements all the way from Portugal to the Scottish isles, the question then arises whether the inhabitants of these places possessed a common origin. Some archaeologists and philologists have seized on the idea that what united these people was a ‘Celtic’ identity. Language and race are quite different things, and people of similar ancestry switch languages, so that it becomes impossible to identify the ‘original’ language of those groups. Indeed, the term ‘Celts’ has several plausible meanings: the peoples called Keltoi by the ancient Greeks, and Galli by the ancient Romans; the assumption that the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures in central Europe were essentially ‘Celtic’ in character; the peoples who spoke Celtic languages, several of which survive to this day.9 A case has been made for the use of Celtic dialects not just in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Brittany but in Galicia. Its modern inhabitants have seized on their ‘Celtic’ identity in the struggle to gain greater autonomy from the government in Madrid, though whether a modern-day fondness for bagpipes proves Celtic identity is a moot point. Beyond that, in south-western Iberia, in the lands rich in silver visited by the Phoenicians, lay the area known to the Greeks as Tartessos.
A significant number of Tartessian inscriptions survive, written in a distinctive script whose remote origins probably go back to the same Phoenicians. If, as John Koch has controversially maintained, they are written in a Celtic language, that only mildly reinforces the argument that the lands of the Atlantic arc shared a number of cultural traits, as well as being somewhat isolated from the cultures of the rest of western and central Europe. It would be good to know that talainon really does mean ‘the country of the blessed headland’, an ambitious extrapolation from a proto-Celtic term assumed to mean ‘having a fair brow’, but with such limited material these efforts at decipherment appear far-fetched.10 On the other hand, a general case can be made for the archaic character of the form of Celtic, known as Q-Celtic, spoken in Ireland and then, partly as a result of later Irish settlement in Scotland, in the far north of Britain as well; and this would imply that in the first millennium BC an ‘Atlantic proto-Celtic lingua franca’ was a feature of a common culture that flourished around the Irish Sea and at least as far south as Brittany, only to be overtaken in Wales and Cornwall, and later on in Brittany, by more recently formed languages that are known as P-Celtic and that were closer to the languages spoken by the ancient inhabitants of Gaul.
Knowing who these people were is certainly desirable. To what extent they saw themselves as people wedded to the sea is uncertain, but it is interesting that the term ‘Armorica’, a latinization of the ancient name for Brittany, means ‘dwellers by the sea’. Some of the peoples encountered by Julius Caesar during the Roman war of conquest in Gaul (58–50 BC) were excellent navigators. A famous passage in Caesar’s boastful memoir of his victories, mentioned already, describes the ships of the Veneti of Arm
orica, which he encountered in 56 BC. They are said to be built quite differently from Roman ships: they have much flatter keels, because they have to deal with tidal waters where the water level changes significantly; they have high prows and sterns, to carry them through rough seas and storms; they have strong cross-beams bolted together with thick iron fastenings; they are made of stout oak that can tolerate the violence of the open sea; they have anchors suspended from iron chains; their sails are made of hides; altogether they are much better suited to the mighty winds and waves of the open ocean than Roman vessels.11
The Boundless Sea Page 44
