[SunkenCiv]

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Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000 by Barry Cunliffe

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[SunkenCiv]

The Sunday Times review by James Fenton Barry Cunliffe offers a survey of European development from the Last Glacial Maximum (10,000 BC) to the beginning of modern history. A sober assessor of evidence, he is also happy to speculate, as when he discusses the strange fact that certain elements of early jewellery, perforated amber spaces for multistrand necklaces, are found only in Wessex and Mycenae. Was this, he asks, "the result of a single journey -- carried perhaps on a Mycenaean boat that had ventured into the Atlantic, or by an enterprising Wessex warrior exploring the wider world? Or could the carrier have been a Wessex woman wearing her finery as she left home as a gift to a Mycenaean prince?" ...Cunliffe is a fan of Herodotus, whose record of the funeral customs of the Scythians turns out to accord well with the surviving evidence. This involves the strangling of "one concubine, a cook, a groom, an attendant and a messenger" to bury with the deceased king, plus, on the first anniversary of the death, 50 strangled attendants (true-born Scythians, for they keep no slaves), attached by vertical stakes to 50 of the finest strangled horses. The dead king is stuffed with frankincense, parsley and anise. The attendant youths and horses are stuffed with chaff.

[SunkenCiv]

reviewed for The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz

[SunkenCiv]

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[vbmoneyspender]

Mountain ranges are important too. The mountainous terrain in ancient Greece enabled the city-states to compete but prevented any particular city-state from becoming absolutely dominant. I would argue that the mountain ranges in Europe (i.e. the Pyrenees and the Alps) along with the English Channel had the same effect on with respect to Western Europe.