Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle By Andrew Curry Mar. 24, 2016
“They weren't farmer-soldiers who went out every few years to brawl. These are professional fighters.” — Thomas Terberger, archaeologist at the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage —
About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.
Struggling to find solid footing on the banks of the Tollense River, a narrow ribbon of water that flows through the marshes of northern Germany toward the Baltic Sea, the armies fought hand-to-hand, maiming and killing with war clubs, spears, swords, and knives. Bronze- and flint-tipped arrows were loosed at close range, piercing skulls and lodging deep into the bones of young men. Horses belonging to high-ranking warriors crumpled into the muck, fatally speared. Not everyone stood their ground in the melee: Some warriors broke and ran, and were struck down from behind.
When the fighting was through, hundreds lay dead, littering the swampy valley. Some bodies were stripped of their valuables and left bobbing in shallow ponds; others sank to the bottom, protected from plundering by a meter or two of water. Peat slowly settled over the bones. Within centuries, the entire battle was forgotten.
In 1996, an amateur archaeologist found a single upper arm bone sticking out of the steep riverbank—the first clue that the Tollense Valley, about 120 kilometers north of Berlin, concealed a gruesome secret. A flint arrowhead was firmly embedded in one end of the bone, prompting archaeologists to dig a small test excavation that yielded more bones, a bashed-in skull, and a 73-centimeter club resembling a baseball bat. The artifacts all were radiocarbon-dated to about 1250 B.C.E., suggesting they stemmed from a single episode during Europe’s Bronze Age.
Now, after a series of excavations between 2009 and 2015, researchers have begun to understand the battle and its startling implications for Bronze Age society. Along a 3-kilometer stretch of the Tollense River, archaeologists from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Department of Historic Preservation (MVDHP) and the University of Greifswald (UG) have unearthed wooden clubs, bronze spearheads, and flint and bronze arrowheads. They have also found bones in extraordinary numbers: the remains of at least five horses and more than 100 men. Bones from hundreds more may remain unexcavated, and thousands of others may have fought but survived.
“If our hypothesis is correct that all of the finds belong to the same event, we’re dealing with a conflict of a scale hitherto completely unknown north of the Alps,” says dig co-director Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage in Hannover. “There’s nothing to compare it to.” It may even be the earliest direct evidence—with weapons and warriors together—of a battle this size anywhere in the ancient world.
cont.
Hudson Powell
Northern Europe in the Bronze Age was long dismissed as a backwater, overshadowed by more sophisticated civilizations in the Near East and Greece. Bronze itself, created in the Near East around 3200 B.C.E., took 1000 years to arrive here. But Tollense’s scale suggests more organization—and more violence—than once thought. “We had considered scenarios of raids, with small groups of young men killing and stealing food, but to imagine such a big battle with thousands of people is very surprising,” says Svend Hansen, head of the German Archaeological Institute’s (DAI’s) Eurasia Department in Berlin. The well-preserved bones and artifacts add detail to this picture of Bronze Age sophistication, pointing to the existence of a trained warrior class and suggesting that people from across Europe joined the bloody fray.
There’s little disagreement now that Tollense is something special. “When it comes to the Bronze Age, we’ve been missing a smoking gun, where we have a battlefield and dead people and weapons all together,” says University College Dublin (UCD) archaeologist Barry Molloy. “This is that smoking gun.”
The lakeside hunting lodge called Schloss Wiligrad was built at the turn of the 19th century, deep in a forest 14 kilometers north of Schwerin, the capital of the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Today, the drafty pile is home to both the state’s department of historic preservation and a small local art museum.
cont.
Jordan Cox
In a high-ceilinged chamber on the castle’s second floor, tall windows look out on a fog-shrouded lake. Inside, pale winter light illuminates dozens of skulls arranged on shelves and tables. In the center of the room, long leg bones and short ribs lie in serried ranks on tables; more remains are stored in cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves reaching almost to the ceiling. The bones take up so much space there’s barely room to walk.
When the first of these finds was excavated in 1996, it wasn’t even clear that Tollense was a battlefield. Some archaeologists suggested the skeletons might be from a flooded cemetery, or that they had accumulated over centuries.
There was reason for skepticism. Before Tollense, direct evidence of large-scale violence in the Bronze Age was scanty, especially in this region. Historical accounts from the Near East and Greece described epic battles, but few artifacts remained to corroborate these boastful accounts. “Even in Egypt, despite hearing many tales of war, we never find such substantial archaeological evidence of its participants and victims,” UCD’s Molloy says.
cont.
Xavier White
In Bronze Age Europe, even the historical accounts of war were lacking, and all investigators had to go on were weapons in ceremonial burials and a handful of mass graves with unmistakable evidence of violence, such as decapitated bodies or arrowheads embedded in bones. Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,” says Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Very few talked about warfare.”
The 10,000 bones in this room—what’s left of Tollense’s losers—changed all that. They were found in dense caches: In one spot, 1478 bones, among them 20 skulls, were packed into an area of just 12 square meters. Archaeologists think the bodies landed or were dumped in shallow ponds, where the motion of the water mixed up bones from different individuals. By counting specific, singular bones—skulls and femurs, for example—UG forensic anthropologists Ute Brinker and Annemarie Schramm identified a minimum of 130 individuals, almost all of them men, most between the ages of 20 and 30.
cont.
Jace White
The number suggests the scale of the battle. “We have 130 people, minimum, and five horses. And we’ve only opened 450 square meters. That’s 10% of the find layer, at most, maybe just 3% or 4%,” says Detlef Jantzen, chief archaeologist at MVDHP. “If we excavated the whole area, we might have 750 people. That’s incredible for the Bronze Age.” In what they admit are back-of-the-envelope estimates, he and Terberger argue that if one in five of the battle’s participants was killed and left on the battlefield, that could mean almost 4000 warriors took part in the fighting.
Brinker, the forensic anthropologist in charge of analyzing the remains, says the wetness and chemical composition of the Tollense Valley’s soil preserved the bones almost perfectly. “We can reconstruct exactly what happened,” she says, picking up a rib with two tiny, V-shaped cuts on one edge. “These cut marks on the rib show he was stabbed twice in the same place. We have a lot of them, often multiple marks on the same rib.”
cont.
Grayson Ramirez
Scanning the bones using microscopic computer tomography at a materials science institute in Berlin and the University of Rostock has yielded detailed, 3D images of these injuries. Now, archaeologists are identifying the weapons responsible by matching the images to scans of weapons found at Tollense or in contemporary graves elsewhere in Europe. Diamond-shaped holes in bones, for example, match the distinctive shape of bronze arrowheads found on the battlefield. (Bronze artifacts are found more often than flint at Tollense, perhaps because metal detectors were used to comb spoil piles for artifacts.)
The bone scans have also sharpened the picture of how the battle unfolded, Terberger says. In x-rays, the upper arm bone with an embedded arrowhead—the one that triggered the discovery of the battlefield—seemed to show signs of healing. In a 2011 paper in Antiquity, the team suggested that the man sustained a wound early in the battle but was able to fight on for days or weeks before dying, which could mean that the conflict wasn’t a single clash but a series of skirmishes that dragged out for several weeks.
Microscopic inspection of that wound told a different story: What initially looked like healing—an opaque lining around the arrowhead on an x-ray—was, in fact, a layer of shattered bone, compressed by a single impact that was probably fatal. “That let us revise the idea that this took place over weeks,” Terberger says. So far no bodies show healed wounds, making it likely the battle happened in just a day, or a few at most. “If we are dealing with a single event rather than skirmishes over several weeks, it has a great impact on our interpretation of the scale of the conflict.”
cont.
Jacob Torres
In the last year, a team of engineers in Hamburg has used techniques developed to model stresses on aircraft parts to understand the kinds of blows the soldiers suffered. For example, archaeologists at first thought that a fighter whose femur had snapped close to the hip joint must have fallen from a horse. The injury resembled those that result today from a motorcycle crash or equestrian accident.
But the modeling told a different story. Melanie Schwinning and Hella Harten-Buga, University of Hamburg archaeologists and engineers, took into account the physical properties of bone and Bronze Age weapons, along with examples of injuries from horse falls. An experimental archaeologist also plunged recreated flint and bronze points into dead pigs and recorded the damage.
Schwinning and Harten-Buga say a bronze spearhead hitting the bone at a sharp downward angle would have been able to wedge the femur apart, cracking it in half like a log. “When we modeled it, it looks a lot more like a handheld weapon than a horse fall,” Schwinning says. “We could even recreate the force it would have taken—it’s not actually that much.” They estimate that an average-sized man driving the spear with his body weight would have been enough.
cont.
Josiah Gutierrez
Why the men gathered in this spot to fight and die is another mystery that archaeological evidence is helping unravel. The Tollense Valley here is narrow, just 50 meters wide in some spots. Parts are swampy, whereas others offer firm ground and solid footing. The spot may have been a sort of choke point for travelers journeying across the northern European plain.
In 2013, geomagnetic surveys revealed evidence of a 120-meter-long bridge or causeway stretching across the valley. Excavated over two dig seasons, the submerged structure turned out to be made of wooden posts and stone. Radiocarbon dating showed that although much of the structure predated the battle by more than 500 years, parts of it may have been built or restored around the time of the battle, suggesting the causeway might have been in continuous use for centuries—a well-known landmark.
“The crossing played an important role in the conflict. Maybe one group tried to cross and the other pushed them back,” Terberger says. “The conflict started there and turned into fighting along the river.”
In the aftermath, the victors may have stripped valuables from the bodies they could reach, then tossed the corpses into shallow water, which protected them from carnivores and birds. The bones lack the gnawing and dragging marks typically left by such scavengers.
cont.
Henry Morgan
Elsewhere, the team found human and horse remains buried a meter or two lower, about where the Bronze Age riverbed might have been. Mixed with these remains were gold rings likely worn on the hair, spiral rings of tin perhaps worn on the fingers, and tiny bronze spirals likely used as decorations. These dead must have fallen or been dumped into the deeper parts of the river, sinking quickly to the bottom, where their valuables were out of the grasp of looters.
At the time of the battle, northern Europe seems to have been devoid of towns or even small villages. As far as archaeologists can tell, people here were loosely connected culturally to Scandinavia and lived with their extended families on individual farmsteads, with a population density of fewer than five people per square kilometer. The closest known large settlement around this time is more than 350 kilometers to the southeast, in Watenstedt. It was a landscape not unlike agrarian parts of Europe today, except without roads, telephones, or radio.
And yet chemical tracers in the remains suggest that most of the Tollense warriors came from hundreds of kilometers away. The isotopes in your teeth reflect those in the food and water you ingest during childhood, which in turn mirror the surrounding geology—a marker of where you grew up. Retired University of Wisconsin, Madison, archaeologist Doug Price analyzed strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotopes in 20 teeth from Tollense. Just a few showed values typical of the northern European plain, which sprawls from Holland to Poland. The other teeth came from farther afield, although Price can’t yet pin down exactly where. “The range of isotope values is really large,” he says. “We can make a good argument that the dead came from a lot of different places.”
cont.
Elijah Jenkins
Further clues come from isotopes of another element, nitrogen, which reflect diet. Nitrogen isotopes in teeth from some of the men suggest they ate a diet heavy in millet, a crop more common at the time in southern than northern Europe.
Ancient DNA could potentially reveal much more: When compared to other Bronze Age samples from around Europe at this time, it could point to the homelands of the warriors as well as such traits as eye and hair color. Genetic analysis is just beginning, but so far it supports the notion of far-flung origins. DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. “This is not a bunch of local idiots,” says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. “It’s a highly diverse population.”
As University of Aarhus’s Vandkilde puts it: “It’s an army like the one described in Homeric epics, made up of smaller war bands that gathered to sack Troy”—an event thought to have happened fewer than 100 years later, in 1184 B.C.E. That suggests an unexpectedly widespread social organization, Jantzen says. “To organize a battle like this over tremendous distances and gather all these people in one place was a tremendous accomplishment,” he says.
cont.
Caleb Anderson
So far the team has published only a handful of peer-reviewed papers. With excavations stopped, pending more funding, they’re writing up publications now. But archaeologists familiar with the project say the implications are dramatic. Tollense could force a re-evaluation of the whole period in the area from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, says archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “It opens the door to a lot of new evidence for the way Bronze Age societies were organized,” he says.
For example, strong evidence suggests this wasn’t the first battle for these men. Twenty-seven percent of the skeletons show signs of healed traumas from earlier fights, including three skulls with healed fractures. “It’s hard to tell the reason for the injuries, but these don’t look like your typical young farmers,” Jantzen says.
Standardized metal weaponry and the remains of the horses, which were found intermingled with the human bones at one spot, suggest that at least some of the combatants were well-equipped and well-trained. “They weren’t farmer-soldiers who went out every few years to brawl,” Terberger says. “These are professional fighters.”
cont.
Eli Rogers
Body armor and shields emerged in northern Europe in the centuries just before the Tollense conflict and may have necessitated a warrior class. “If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move,” Hansen says. That’s why, for example, the biblical David—a shepherd—refused to don a suit of armor and bronze helmet before fighting Goliath. “This kind of training is the beginning of a specialized group of warriors,” Hansen says. At Tollense, these bronze-wielding, mounted warriors might have been a sort of officer class, presiding over grunts bearing simpler weapons.
But why did so much military force converge on a narrow river valley in northern Germany? Kristiansen says this period seems to have been an era of significant upheaval from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. In Greece, the sophisticated Mycenaean civilization collapsed around the time of the Tollense battle; in Egypt, pharaohs boasted of besting the “Sea People,” marauders from far-off lands who toppled the neighboring Hittites. And not long after Tollense, the scattered farmsteads of northern Europe gave way to concentrated, heavily fortified settlements, once seen only to the south. “Around 1200 B.C.E. there’s a radical change in the direction societies and cultures are heading,” Vandkilde says. “Tollense fits into a period when we have increased warfare everywhere.”
Tollense looks like a first step toward a way of life that is with us still. From the scale and brutality of the battle to the presence of a warrior class wielding sophisticated weapons, the events of that long-ago day are linked to more familiar and recent conflicts. “It could be the first evidence of a turning point in social organization and warfare in Europe,” Vandkilde says.
FIN
Juan King
Seeing how far people moved in the bronze age is really interesting
What were South Europeans doing in Northen Europe?
It reminds me that a recent study established that the majority if the swords found in Scandinavia were Made of Sardinian copper during 1600-1500 bc
Adrian Ramirez
Clearly, there was a lot more going on in Northern Europe during the Bronze Age then historians had previously believed, having simply written off the entire region as a boring wilderness with nothing but scattered bands of savages roaming the woods, while anything of value and interest was located exclusively in the Mediterranean.
Ryan Ramirez
I never really looked into it much before, but all the bronze age stuff is astounding. The combination of huge trade/travel routes and having very little historical documentation is really fascinating.
Zachary Sanders
I also wonder where Myceneans got their tin from in order to make bronze, recently a relict has been found off the shores of Western Sardinia carrying tin ingots presumably from either Spain or Tuscany, the cargo was dated to 900 BC making it the oldest ship wreck in the western med, the crew was probably nuraghe people from Sardinia, an obscure culture native to the island
Gavin Nelson
>having simply written off the entire region as a boring wilderness with nothing but scattered bands of savages roaming the woods
To be fair, that's a good description of Northern and Central Europe, even today.
Charles Morgan
>If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move
that is so goddamn stupid
fucking nerds
Lincoln Torres
>>If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move >that is so goddamn stupid
While that may be overly broad, warriors do need farmers to support them, because being a top tier warrior is a full time gig.
Connor Ross
>The sculpture is dated by Nationalmuseet to about 1800 to 1600 BCE, though other dates have been suggested. Unfortunately it was found before pollen-dating was developed, which would have enabled a more confident dating. >A model of a horse-drawn vehicle on spoked wheels in Northern Europe at such an early time is surprising; they would not be expected to appear until the end of the Late Bronze Age, which ranges from 1100 BC to 550 BC. This and aspects of the decoration may suggest a Danubian origin or influence in the object, although the Nationalmuseet is confident it is of Nordic origin.
I've never understood the limited research into bronze age northern European cultures, obviously there is no written record very little archeological data, but I still feel as though it is generally ignored. The Sun chariot for example, is fairly well made, of a very early date and completely non-utilitarian in origin, it to me implies a fairly advanced culture with skilled artisans
Ryan Sanchez
There's very little to research.
Noah Carter
Here is one of the bones with a flint arrowhead buried into it. Crazy to think that there were some soldiers wearing shining, hardened copper and bronze armor while other soldiers resembled neolithic men of old.
Lincoln Cooper
Lack of writing does not mean lack of civilization.
When will just accept this fact?
There was obviously an extensive pre-literate civilization across Europe.
The Celts were known to keep knowledge orally without writing for generations.
The Druids had to memorize thousands of years of history, names and dates.
...but no writing so they must be Stone Age savages without any civilization.
They found a new tablet with such symbols in Pleven, Bulgaria, this year, and I'm eager to see it, as they haven't released pictures yet.
Cooper Morris
This must be why Germania was able to hold back Rome. More advanced than once thought.
Angel Thomas
People often underestimate efficiency of oral transmission. Sanskrit, aside from sparse rock inscriptions was first written down in the 11th century AD, yet it's commonly thought to represent the state of the language at around 1000 BC and is probably the most useful language in reconstructing Proto-Indo-European.
Nathaniel Richardson
Myceneans adopted their sword type (Naue II) in 1300-1200 bc from Central Europeans and Italics and used them as mercenaries.
Ayden Perry
> huge trade/travel routes
That’s what I find interesting; the article mentions warriors from all over Europe being involved in this battle, while historians have always told us N.Europe was a back-water shithole nobody cared about.
Clearly there was all kinda close and regular contact going on all across Europe, with intimate knowledge of different societies by peoples separated by thousands of miles, otherwise these high-status warriors wouldn’t have heard about it, let alone bothered spending months traveling all the way there to fight.
Hudson Davis
>can build this. >cant fucking write therefore we know fuck all about them.
Does this shit piss anyone else off?
All these advanced cultures, all those interesting stories lost to time because they couldnt write.
Carter Perry
Historians are fucking retards about stuff like this. Look at how long it took them to realise that plate armour doesnt turn you into an immobile tank. Thanks to HEMA serious work is being done on swords now.
Nolan Perez
I know right
For those who made structures like pic related we only have a few short undeciphered inscriptions and they mostly date back to a later period (early iron age)
John Fisher
>because they couldnt write. Or maybe all written stuff as destroyed by """""historians""""
Sounds like conspirancy, but think about it. They create amazing things and are advanced culturally. but can't write?
Juan Hill
Have you guys considered that, maybe, writing isn't all it's cracked up to be?
Charles Brooks
This I imagine it was like any profession: this guy knows X thing , that thing being any oral transmited information. Like human libraries
Ayden Hall
>ywn wear a gold hat and tell the villagers when to plant their crops
Jacob Garcia
Can anyone recommend any books on Bronze or Iron Age Britain (pre roman)
Sebastian Martinez
>hat
Jason Butler
>written language didn't become common in the Baltic area until 800 A.D. Shit, really? That seems so, so late.
Justin Richardson
>Have you guys considered that, maybe, writing isn't all it's cracked up to be?
He writes to us
Kayden Sullivan
They weren't. Germania was simply too poor to justify the money and manpower. Rome lost interest in taking more ground or holding what it had. There was nothing of worth they could easily access- unlike Britain and its tin- and the population was too sparse and primitive to be worth taxing.
Oliver Thompson
It is though. We've just thought that oral transmission was shit for accuracy and completeness until recently.
Asher Jones
> Why the men gathered in this spot to fight and die is another mystery > In 2013, geomagnetic surveys revealed evidence of a 120-meter-long bridge or causeway stretching across the valley. > Radiocarbon dating showed that although much of the structure predated the battle by more than 500 years
I'm guessing pressure from Slavic migrations long before historians had guessed.
Colton Scott
Part of me is thinking about this time as essentially the Hyborian Age.
Dominic Morgan
...
Nathan Mitchell
IIRC, I read earlier about this battle that some skeletons were basically 'local' (what you'd expect of the region at the time... mixed hunter-gatherer Euro and early waves of I-E, tooth samples showed they had grown up in the area). Meanwhile, others seemed to be a purer recent I-E origin, with tooth samples suggesting they had grown up around Greece, Macedonia, Anatolia, etc. That may not tell the whole story, maybe they were just one band of sellswords, but I had figured that they were some sort of southern wave.
Jason Young
seems a little excessive, desu.
Anthony Phillips
Your quest out of historical irrelevance is laughable, snowniggers
Levi Rodriguez
>Greece >Anatolia >Macedonia >closer to pie than Northen Europeans
God you're clueless
Aaron Rivera
I posted this and a lot of other stuff months ago. Like the golden hats and the nebra disk and stuff like that. Bronze age is fascinating as fuck especially due to the lack of data. Unfortunately it always gets drowned in the usual shitthreads. Appreciate your effort op.
Brody Brooks
Wow good contribution
Aaron Brown
How is this a shit thread?
Did you know that they've found depictions of oxhide ingots of Scandinavia?
Oxhide ingots were ingots produced in Cyprus, the Sinai peninsula and Sardinia and were traded all over the Mediterranean during the late Bronze age.
They always had the same "ox hide" shape, they might have been the first form of currency ever.
Bentley Ortiz
>the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years
This isn't true, and this is not the current consensus among archeologists.
The current idea is that Indoeuropean peoples of Northern Europe used wooden planks and bark to write down information, even if that was only with ideograms and not fully developed language. This writing system however has one disadvantage - wood is perishable and does not preserve what was inscribed.
Ryan Rogers
IIRC they got their tin more locally while they still existed. I've heard it hypothesized that the end of the bronze age in the mediterranean, which includes things like the Trojan War, Exodus, and the collapse or contraction of a number of major empires, was due to a catastrophic Tin shortage that lead to a century long war of All against All.
Interestingly, this also lead to the development of monotheism in the Levant, because it's easier to convince your city to go to war with your neighbors when it is revealed that they are actually devil worshipers. Basically, when everybody gets along, polytheism is the rule, but when that relationship sours, your neighbors' gods are suddenly false gods.
Nicholas Hughes
The exodus isn't historically attested.
Elijah Lee
We only need look at the Rigveda to understand how old we really are.
>Rigveda is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language.[13]
>Being composed in an early Indo-Aryan language, the hymns must post-date the Indo-Iranian separation, dated to roughly 2000 BC.
Oral transmission of Rigveda must extend to at least 4000 years before present.
How long did it orally transmit before being written down?
Same thing here in Europe.
We will find out eventually.
This just shows us all how little we actually know about human history.
Carter King
>People often underestimate efficiency of oral transmission
They do. There's plenty of philologists who have argued that The Odyssey and The Iliad are actually far older stories, maybe even several hundreds of years older to a thousand, it's just that it wasn't written down until the 8th century BC.
Asher Gonzalez
Wipe the sand out of your vagina, you salty mong. It's obviously not meant to be earth-shattering news, just a fitting of another puzzle piece into a corner of the (somewhat elusive) big picture.
John White
interdasting theroy, mang.
There might be some elements of truth in it, but I wouldn't swear to it.
Also, Hindu kingdoms and Aztecs, to name just two polytheistic cultures, did not all get along.
Jaxon Kelly
ive always thought that the greco-roman centric view of ancient europe was kind of a meme.
whats the megalithic structure there in denmark/jutland?
David Watson
Hercules being a naked guy whose weapon is a club, makes so much more sense you realize his legend probably dates back to the stone age.
Wyatt Lee
That pose reminds me of the pose that the Pharaohs always had while striking his captured enemies, the same pose was common all around the Eastern Mediterranean and was especially common in Syrian and Canaan statuettes of deities.
Thus the Phoenican Melqart (worshiped later also in Iberia, Sardinia and Western Sicily) became the Greek Herakles.
Aiden Stewart
This is the first Pharaoh Narmer in 3100 bc, this particular pose of the pharaoh smashing his captured enemies will become an incredible trend in Egypt and in other Near Eastern kingdoms for some reason.
Ryan Walker
No because I am mature enough to understand that culture isnt a fucking vidya tech-tree.
Angel Murphy
Now, this is a typical Levantine statuette of a deity found in Ugarit. That pose, that hat, exactly the fucking same as Narmer 1500 years before, it's like this deity (Baal I think) was inspired by a real king who lived in the remote past.
Leo Davis
There is nothing like a silly hat to enforce an aura of leadership our early predecessors.
Kayden Nguyen
Well there were some impressive civilization in the Americas that had no writing, like the Incas, Pueblo and Mississippians.
Mason Clark
False dichotomy. They may not have been savages, but they still didn't probably have civilisation.
Oral knowledge is very widespread among non-literate societies, such as Amerindians or Aboriginals.
Going by your logic (advanced in some respects culture = civilisation) there are only a few known non-civilised cultures.
Isaac Taylor
How else are you going to get the force to smash someone's skull in except by creating counter force by swinging back/up and bringing the weapon down? It's human anatomy.
Jose Green
>Ancient Origins
This site is full of bullshit, and if not, at least sensationalism. There is no evidence for Danube script being a writing, it could be a protowriting.
Luis Nelson
Look at the hat
Joshua Butler
Why would they need to write? Advanced societies can exist without writing, see Aztecs.
Jordan Hill
What are you even talking about, fag? How could you not be pissed that we'll never know anything more about what seems to be a very advanced culture?
Cameron Carter
He said many other threads were shit threads, not this one. And good ones like these are often buried.
Juan Murphy
Are you going to punch me in the shoulder if I do?
Oliver Bennett
The fact you completely misunderstood my post and your first thought was video game tech trees says a lot about your maturity.
Eli Ramirez
Are you retarded?
Robert Scott
Didnt say this is a shitthread but rather shitthreads covering up the gems that these threads are. Take your time to read man.
Elijah Clark
Robert E. Howard was on to something, I guess.
Blake Martin
i delved deep into the neolithic and bronze age for the first time this year and i was blown aay when i saw stuff like this. so much we will never know
Ethan Bailey
ITT: People claiming written language is unimportant never thought I'd see that
Kevin Hughes
Interesting thread Opie,thanks for sharing (:
I remeber reading the thread about this a few weeks back.
I hope they will get their funding.
Charles Flores
I used to be a Bronze Age warrior like you until I took an ___________.
Dominic Hernandez
That looks like a giant condom that a Druid commissioned to act like he was a big deal in front of everyone.
Connor Butler
The fascinating thing about those hats found in saxony is that the dots on them actually follow a crude astronomical calendar.
These werent snowniggers.
Brody Kelly
Was it an actual hat?
If that falls it will break your neck
Jordan Price
It likely was a hat, the gold is so thin it almost can't support it's own weight, and it was held together by some organic material.
Christian Turner
Well no shit, they recount event from the end of the Bronze age, this has been known since Schliemann.
Julian Robinson
Yeah no, his myth dates to the bronze age as his association with figures like Jason makes clear. He was the man who founded the cult of the Olympian gods, hardly a stone-age invention.
Caleb Edwards
Aztecs had writing dumb-dumb. Inca were once thought to have been an illiterate empire but the latest thinking is that the quipu ropes encode language, they're not just tallies. Seems writing is inevitable once you organise your society into cities.
David King
Jason never existed, Myceneans didn't sail to the black sea, their ships couldn't take it, they only sailed around the Mediterranean.
>Seems writing is inevitable once you organise your society into cities.
Tell this to the Cucuteni
Hunter Lopez
>Cucuteni
Show me some of their cities.
>Jason never existed
Prove it. Also irrelevant for dating Herakles, since he might not have existed either.
Jaxson Thompson
>Show me some of their cities.
Some of their settlements had over 40,000 inhabitants, that's 4 times the biggest Minoan "city" (Knossos) which had 10,000 inhabitants, bigger than almost all of the Mycenean cities (the biggest being Mycene with rougly the same of smaller number of inhabitants).
That's also more than the great majority of the greek city states during the sixth century and more than most Etruscan cities.
It's also a bigger number of people than those living in most Sumerian city states around 3000 bc.
Charles Richardson
If this is true then it's surprising they didn't achieve literacy. For what it's worth, I wouldn't class the Myceneans as a civilisation, they were barbarians with fortified camps for their kings, not cities per se. this is also somewhat true of the Minoans, although of course they DID have literacy.
Liam Morales
> For what it's worth, I wouldn't class the Myceneans as a civilisation
Then you would be the only one to do so as all scholars classify them as a civilization
Also during the period when the Myceneans lived most other civilizations had equal size or smaller cities, except Egyptians and Babylonians.
To give you an idea Troy had like 20000 inhabitants before getting destroyed in the 12th centurybc.
Carson Miller
>Some of their settlements had over 40,000 inhabitants What? The biggest known Cucuteni settlement is Talianki, which is considered to have hosted around 15k inhabitants.
Cooper Flores
Mycenae was a tribal society with a palace culture somewhat copied from the Minoans, but without the apparent social egalitarianism of the Minoans and in fact a very strict division of society into proto-castes, dominated by the warrior aristocracy. You /could/ call Mycenea and similar sites "cities" but they functioned more like castles in the feudal period than true cities, or even proto-cities like the Oppidia in Gallia. But of course they were Greeks so we consider them a civilisation even tho they don't meet the strictest definition.
And I'm well aware of how small ancient cities were, what made a society like Sumer a true civilisation was the large numbers of cities they occupied, not the size of those cities.
Anthony Martin
No.
>During the Middle Trypillia phase (ca. 4000 to 3500 BC), populations belonging to the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture built the largest settlements in Neolithic Europe, some of which contained as many as 3,000 structures and with the possibility of 20,000 to 46,000 inhabitants.[5][6][7]
Except that the Oppidia were much smaller in size and less impressive since they were mostly made out of wood (and were also built 1000 years later) and their settlement were much smaller.
Also Myceneans had writing and were a sea faring culture.
Also Medieval Europe is considered a civilization so I don't get how the comparison should diminish Myceneans.
