Barbarian Europe and Early Iron Age Greece

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the nature of the relationship that existed between Central Europe and the Aegean area in the early 1st millennium B.C. Interest in Aegean-continental connections has been strong for a considerable time, but has been intensified, particularly from the continental standpoint, in the past fifteen years. Although some of these studies have been concerned with the contacts between 2nd millennium (Late Bronze Age) Greece and the north, others have examined in detail the evidence for the links between the Urnfield culture and Greece during the 10th, 9th and 8th centuries. For Greece, this is an utterly different period from the preceding one; the evidence for foreign contacts suddenly becomes scarce and that for military disasters is virtually non-existent. Yet some scholars have reached very similar conclusions, involving the transmission of objects and of the people who carried them from Central Europe into Greece, for this period as for the preceding Late Bronze Age. Such arguments have a recent exponent in Professor W. Kimmig, whose paper Seevölkerbewegung und Urnenfelderkultur ranges over the whole period from about 1200 to 700. His list of objects and practices in this period, which he considers to have been donated by the Danube-Balkan peoples to the Mediterranean world, is comprehensive indeed: it would include bronze shields and body armour, the equipment of Goliath, the knobbed ware of Troy VII B, the practice of cremation in the Iron Age, the ritual spoliation of weapons in graves, iron swords, spears, knives, bits, lugged axes, spits, fire-dogs, bronze personal objects generally, clay idols, the maeander pattern and the swans of Apollo.