by Karin Bojs
Real boats presumably looked much like the ones depicted in the rock art. Although these are often highly stylised, their shape is clearly reminiscent of the Hjortspring boat. Prow and stern alike are elongated into points. The prows are sometimes adorned with an animal head. In many cases there are a series of short lines sticking up out of the boat, representing oarsmen. The large petroglyph at Vitlycke, just a few hundred metres from the museum, includes an image in which a number of rowers, all clearly distinguishable, are raising their oars in greeting. Lur players and acrobats performing backflips can be seen on other boats. There is absolutely no doubt about the existence of bronze lurs, which are a type of long blowing horn; 60 or so have been found, particularly in Denmark and southern Sweden, many having been placed in lakes and bogs. In most cases they were used in pairs. Some can still be played, giving us an inkling of how Bronze Age music may have sounded.
The most celebrated image on the Vitlycke rock represents a man and woman kissing. Their sexual organs are also joined. A common interpretation is that the couple in the picture are deities engaged in ‘the holy wedding’. Such ritual weddings and fertility rites are known from much of Asia and Europe, from India to Iceland. In Greek mythology, it is Zeus and Hera who are thus united. In the Poetic Edda, the servant Skírnir describes how the god of fertility, Freyr, woos the giant (jötunn) Gerðr, who eventually yields. The Edda text is written like a play, according to modern experts in literature. One can picture the culmination of the final act in the trysting grove, with Freyr and Gerðr in the main roles.
Even more often than boats, the rock engravings feature what are known as cup marks – small, round dimples in the rock. Archaeologists believe such marks are particularly often associated with burial places. They are often linked with death, burial and rebirth. Cup marks can thus also be viewed as a kind of fertility symbol. And there is some actual evidence for that interpretation in Swedish history, according to an anecdote from Tisselskog, Dalsland, from the years of poor harvests in the 1860s. The farmers went to church and implored God to help them – in vain. But when the harvests continued to fail, they arranged for a young man and woman to have intercourse, in public, on an ancient rock pocked with cup marks. The young man’s semen was collected and mixed with seed in one of the cups.
A more peculiar type of fertility rite is intercourse between people and animals. This, too, can be seen in the Vitlycke rock carving, which features a scene where a man is having sex with a horse. Here, too, there are clear parallels with ancient myths that recur throughout the Indo-European language area. Sex between man and beast is a variant of the holy wedding; the mare is actually an avatar of the fertility goddess.
Vedic scriptures from ancient India – contemporaneous with the Swedish Bronze Age – tell of a ritual called the Ashvamedha. This involved making white stallions compete with each other, after which the victor was throttled. Strangling the horse was believed to be more honourable than cutting it with sharp implements. The dead horse was placed on a bed under a capacious cover. While the corpse was still warm, the queen crept under the cover and feigned intercourse by placing the stallion’s penis between her thighs.
As late as the twelfth century, the monk Gerald of Wales describes a pagan rite that he observed in Ireland. The local clan was to choose a chieftain. The man selected as chieftain was obliged – according to Gerald – to have intercourse with a white mare first, in front of the whole clan. The mare was then killed, cut into pieces and cooked in a cauldron. The new chieftain was obliged to bathe in the cauldron and eat some of the meat. The rest of the meat was shared out among the onlookers.
Incidentally, it is interesting that white horses appear to have held such significance for Bronze Age people. Leif Andersson, a geneticist from Uppsala working on domestic animals, has identified a gene borne by horses whose coat greys over the years, eventually turning completely white. He has clear evidence that people began to breed horses early to accentuate that particular trait.
There is some uncertainty about when domesticated horses first arrived in western and northern Europe. It is unclear whether there were any horses at all in Sweden and Denmark during the Battleaxe period. However, horses were definitely present in the Bronze Age, and they were very important, not least in mythology. As mentioned earlier, the oldest known vestiges of horse-drawn wagons with two wheels were found at the River Tobol in western Siberia. They are approximately 4,000 years old. But it was not long before very similar vehicles reappeared in the Bohuslän rock engravings.
The Vitlycke rock engraving includes a man driving such a two-wheeled chariot, clearly drawn by a horse. The man holds the horse’s reins in one hand and a hammer in the other. Before him, a flash of lightning can be seen. The most likely interpretation is that the man is a thunder god – the Bronze Age counterpart of the god later known to the Vikings as Thor. The thunder god’s attribute was an axe or a hammer, with which he would strike to produce thunder and lightning.
The Celts called the god of thunder Taranis, while the Romans called him Jupiter and the Greeks Zeus. But everything suggests that the god of thunder and weather is far older, and that he was already known to the early Indo-Europeans. According to a reconstruction by linguists, the Indo-Europeans’ sky god was called something like ‘Diyéus’ – quite similar to the Russian word for ‘day’, день (pronounced ‘dyen’), and the French for ‘God’, Dieu. In Lithuanian, the sky god is called ‘Dievas’. The early form of this Indo-European god seems to have been a father figure responsible for the sky and the day.
There was also a divine sun. Often, the sun was depicted as a wheel. The ancient Vedic scriptures of India contain many such references, which also occur in Greek plays and the Poetic Edda from Iceland. The Swedish rock engravings include many images showing how the sun moves during the day and at night, often borne by a ship.
Another common motif shows the sun riding in a horse-drawn vehicle. The most spectacular example is the Trundholm sun chariot, now displayed at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. It was found in a bog and probably dates back to the early Bronze Age. A horse cast in bronze stands on a little chariot. It is pulling a huge sun in the shape of two bronze discs, one side of which is gilded. One interpretation is that the gilded side represents day, while the disc made only of darker bronze symbolises night.
There are also images showing horses drawing the sun forth during the day, when it is light, while it is carried through the underworld by boat at night.
My thoughts turn to the Sun Salutation, which I learned on a yoga course a few years ago and still perform several times a week. It is a good way to stretch the muscles in your back and legs and strengthen your shoulders and arms. When I was on the course at a yoga institute in Stockholm, I found the religious aspects of the teaching quite irksome. Before we started our yoga practice, we were supposed to recite verses from ancient Vedic scriptures, and the instructors made a big thing out of the fact that we were learning to perform movements going back several thousands of years. Personally, I was only interested in the physical exercise, especially balance and suppleness, aspects that yoga emphasises more than modern Western exercise programmes. Now, reading the literature on early Indo-European myths, I realise that the Sun Salutation may well have the same origins as the Trundholm chariot and the suns in the rock carvings.
The acrobats of the Bronze Age must have put a great deal of effort into improving their balance, strength and suppleness. Tiny bronze statuettes of acrobats performing backflips, like those in the rock carvings, have been found in Denmark. To judge by their appearance, there were both male and female acrobats. The female ones wore a special kind of short skirt made of woollen cords and clinking bits of bronze.
These acrobats probably played a set role in rites and provided entertainment at great feasts held by Bronze Age rulers to consolidate their power. Just as important were the poets – or the bards, to use the Celtic word. Today, poetry is often viewed as something elevated abo
ve the rest of society. But in the Bronze Age, poets were an essential part of the apparatus of power. They played a kind of PR role. It was the court poet’s job to sing the praises of his lord and master as eloquently and convincingly as possible.
Two important objects used at ritual feasts out of doors were camping chairs and drinking vessels. Pictures of folding chairs have been found from Egypt to Scandinavia, and physical remains have been found in Danish bogs. Drinking vessels were sometimes made of bronze, rarely of glass, but more often of finely polished and decorated pottery. It seems clear that they contained alcohol.
And there is a fair bit of chemical evidence of what Bronze Age rulers used to raise a toast when sitting on their folding chairs, listening to poets and lur players and watching acrobats perform. The US anthropologist Patrick McGovern, the world’s leading expert on the history of alcoholic beverages, has analysed shards of drinking vessels from Denmark and Gotland. He has come up with a recipe for what he calls ‘Nordic grog’.
His research covered grave finds from four sites, the oldest from the early Bronze Age, the most recent (on Gotland) from the beginning of the Iron Age. All the beverages contained honey, produced by bees from flowers including lime tree blossom, dropwort, white clover and heather. Some drinks also contained vestiges of barley or wheat, as well as traces of cranberries, lingonberries, bog myrtle, yarrow, juniper berries, and spruce and birch resin. In two cases – the older of which is 3,100 years old – traces of wine made from grapes can also be detected.
McGovern’s conclusion is that pure mead brewed using only honey was a status symbol drunk only by the highest-ranking people. However, Bronze Age people often mixed that exclusive honey with barley or wheat. In other words, they brewed a mixture of mead and beer, to which they added herbs and berries. ‘Nordic grog’ was also spiced up with wine on occasion. This wine was probably imported from the south along trade routes used for amber and other wares. The wine mixed into these beverages is yet another piece of evidence of the extensive networks that already existed in Europe by the Bronze Age.
For me, there is no doubt that boats and metal were two of the main driving forces behind the growth of Bronze Age networks within Europe. But the book by US archaeologist David Anthony is called The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. He chooses to emphasise the role played by domesticated horses in dispersing Indo-European languages and the Bronze Age lifestyle throughout Europe. Apart from trading in metal, this lifestyle included a new mythology, a heavily stratified class-based society and woollen clothing. Large flocks of sheep were part and parcel of the pastoralist culture, which spread from the steppes in the east. People began to wear clothing made of wool, rather than just of hides and plant fibres. The custom of showing group allegiance through particular colours and checked patterns may even have arisen at this early stage. This thought occurs to me on observing the marketing of tartans by Scottish-themed boutiques and firms like Burberry today.
David Anthony may well be right that horses played a decisive role in historical development. Admittedly, there are only a few finds of horses that show signs of having been domesticated from the Corded Ware period in central and northern Europe. There are rather more from the Bell Beaker period. But a little later, once the Bronze Age was well under way, horses became much more common. No doubt it was horses that took the Indo-European culture eastward and southward, for example to India.
Burials of people belonging to haplogroup R1a have been found in Kazakhstan and Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. These are between 3,800 and 2,300 years old and appear to represent the equestrian culture of the steppes on its way to the east.
Multiple factors were involved when the new networks and the new class system took over in Europe and parts of Asia: wheels, wagons, boats, bronze, woollen cloth, Indo-European languages, horses and amber. And we should not forget that they included trading in slaves.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Iron and the Plague
The arrival of iron was a serious blow to the networks of the Bronze Age. Conditions changed. Control over rare copper and tin mines no longer conferred the major advantage that it once had.
The raw materials for producing iron were available in many places. The nearest lake often yielded bog ore. Iron has a higher melting point than bronze. But people were quick to learn how to use bellows to pump in air during the smelting process. After that, bronze no longer had the same importance. Although iron was perhaps less attractive than golden-yellow bronze, it could be forged more easily and was more useful for tools and weapons alike.
In the Mediterranean region, the Iron Age culture emerged during the Roman era. Roman rule was to expand, taking over much of Europe and becoming one of the most powerful and influential cultures the world has ever seen. Of course, the Roman Empire and iron also affected the Nordic peoples. However, in many ways life there continued much as before, at least in southern Scandinavia.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire about 1,600 years ago ushered in that part of the Iron Age we know as the time of the great migrations or Völkerwanderung. The groups concerned migrated in different directions, and traces of their migrations can often be detected in the DNA of modern populations. This is particularly marked in certain regions, notably Great Britain and eastern Europe. Germanic tribes migrated from Denmark and north-west Germany to England. They came to be so dominant that the Anglo-Saxon dialects they spoke displaced longer-established Celtic languages, forming the basis for English. Groups speaking Slavic languages dispersed in all directions from their heartland between the Dnieper and the Dniester. The Sami languages probably came from the east to the areas where they are now spoken, and this was probably linked with the use of iron.
However, as I have tried to explain in this book, migrations of ethnic groups are not a phenomenon confined to that specific period. Such migrations have occurred ever since we anatomically modern people first arrived in Europe, over 40,000 years ago.
According to the latest DNA research, the population of today’s Europe bears the stamp of three great waves of migration, above all: hunters who came here during the Ice Age, farmers who came from the Middle East bringing the earliest agriculture, and a third wave from the steppes in the east, who brought Indo-European languages with them.
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During the Iron Age, the climate became somewhat cooler than it had been during the Bronze Age. A number of historical sources speak of the ‘Fimbulwinter’, which seems to have arrived around AD 536. This was a period without summers, during which the harvests failed for several consecutive years. Texts such as Snorri Sturluson’s Edda from Iceland and the Finnish Kalevala describe how the sun could barely be glimpsed behind the clouds. And there is scientific evidence of several unusually cold years around AD 536 – in fact, it was the most severe period of cold for several thousand years. Tree rings show a virtual hiatus in growth for several seasons around that time. Greenland ice cores reveal traces of particularly high sulphuric acid levels, pointing to a volcanic eruption.
As luck would have it, I chanced to meet Michael Baillie, the retired professor of geology who shares a small study at Queen’s University, Belfast, with James Mallory, the expert in the origins of the Indo-European languages. Baillie told me it was he who first noticed that annual growth rings provided evidence of a period of extreme cold around AD 536. He published articles on this back in the 1980s and still has a strong interest in the subject.
The dominant theory is that the Fimbulwinter was caused by a huge volcanic eruption that may have taken place in today’s El Salvador. Baillie believes that several discrete events took place more or less simultaneously, at least one of them probably being the impact of a comet. The details are somewhat vague, but scientists are beginning to fill out the ancient tales with facts, revealing what actually happened to the summers after AD 536. What is clear is that they were far colder than usual for a number of years.
More data is also emerging about a great epidemic that raged immediately after
the Fimbulwinter and had a radical impact on our history – an early outbreak of the plague.
The plague used to be regarded more as a mediaeval scourge that struck hardest in the fourteenth century. The plague epidemics that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages are described in detail in a number of historical sources. The first wave is usually known as the Great Mortality, the Great Plague or the Black Death. It reached the Crimea in 1346 and spread through Europe in the years that followed, killing about one person in every two. The disease ran its course rapidly; most of those infected were dead within a matter of days. They suffered from headaches and high fever, and their lymph nodes swelled up into great boils or buboes, hence the name ‘bubonic plague’. In many cases this was accompanied by subcutaneous haemorrhages that turned the skin dark blue. Sometimes the bacteria affected the lungs, causing pneumonic plague. This variant has a mortality rate of nearly 100% and is highly infectious.
The epidemic continued to break out in waves over several centuries, during which it gradually became less deadly. Over time, people’s ability to withstand the plague grew. They learned how to deal with infection by such means as quarantine. This was also a biological process; over many generations, those whose immune system was least well adapted to combating plague microbes died, while those whose immune system happened to be specifically resistant to them survived and had children. This adaptation has left lasting traces in Europeans’ genetic material.
In the past, researchers questioned whether the Black Death really hit Sweden as hard as the plague-ridden countries of southern Europe. But historians have now been able to confirm that it did. Janken Myrdal, for instance, an expert in agrarian history, has compiled an extensive range of evidence including letters, invoices and wills, abandoned farms and newly built houses. One particularly striking piece of evidence is a report from an area of Skåne where virtually all ecclesiastical art ceased for nearly a century. That is testament to how the Black Death scourged society at many different levels.
