Before the dawn: the first Europeans

It helps to be a god. As Zeus gazed along the Phoenician shore, his eye fell on a fair princess named Europa, playing on the beach.

Seized with desire, he changed himself into a white bull and sauntered to her side. Entranced by the lovely creature, Europa put a garland around its neck and climbed on its back. According to the poet Ovid, the bull swam out to sea and reached the island of Crete.

Here bull and princess somehow contrived to give birth to the future King Minos, stepfather of the monstrous Minotaur. From this improbable encounter was created a king, a country, a civilization and a continent.

We know little of the earliest occupants of the land to which Europa later gave her name. Prehistoric remains attest that they included both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Their culture embraced humans and animals, as depicted in France's Lascaux caves. Dating back some twenty millennia, these caves are still astonishing works, conveying the urge to depict reality in plastic form and hinting already at a shared humanity. At some point after the seventh millennium Bc, Stone Age settlers either evolved from those crossing the Straits of Gibraltar or moved west from central Asia. They are commemorated in their henges, often gigantic structures such as England's Stonehenge, indicating a remarkable degree of social organization and engineering ability. Bone analysis shows visitors to Stonehenge travelling from as far as Switzerland. Early Europe was already bonded by travel.

Population movement greatly advanced with the discovery that tin and copper could be smelted to produce bronze. This made possible the making of utensils and the fashioning of weapons. Bronze meant trade, most easily by sea, and with it the growth of coastal settlements. Europe's interior was forested and largely impenetrable, but these settlements along rivers and coasts developed an out ward. looking maritime culture, as travel by water was easier than by land.

From the fifth millennium, archaeologists have traced successive movements westwards out of Asia, the so-called Kurgan peoples from Anatolia, speaking proto-Indo-European and, from the third millennium, the incoming Celts. Trade was the lubricant of these movements. Artefacts were exchanged, from north to south and along the shores of the Baltic and North Seas and the Mediterranean. People travelled. People met. People learned.

With the late Bronze Age in the third millennium, Europe saw newcomers from two points of origin: east and south. From the east, people arrived from the Asian steppes and the Caucasus. Germanic peoples brought with them new Indo-European languages, mutating into Brythonic, Germanic, Slavonic, Greek, Italic and others. Their landlocked origins are suggested by having root words for family and farming, but none for sea and sailing. Indo-European offers 3 linguistic archaeology that, together with advances in the study of DNA, is constantly redefining this early period in Europe's story.

Other influences permeated the Mediterranean from further afield. By the second millennium BC, the world's most developed societies were emerging in the valleys of China's Yellow River, India's Indus and the 'fertile crescent of the Euphrates and the Nil.

Long before the stabilization of European settlement, these peoples mastered agriculture, construction, trade, art and, in Mesoporamia, writing. They developed cities and worshipped their ancestors as gods. Their buildings could be colossal. The great pyramid at Giza (C2560 BC) was, at 146 metres, the highest structure on Earth, until topped by Lincoln Cathedral in the fourteenth century.

Europa's supposed son, King Minos, was regarded as founder of the Minoan empire based on Crete. It appears to have lasted at least a thousand years, from c.2500 to c.I450. Though traditionally traced to settlers from Egypt or Mesopotamia, DNA archaeology finds Minoan skeletons more closely related to ancient Greeks. They were a people who traded across the eastern Mediterranean, built palaces, settled colonies and enjoyed athletics and bull-leaping. Their lives appear to have been pacific. Despite the practice of human sacrifice, we know of no warrior caste or cult of military violence. In the murals and ceramics of Minoan Knossos we glimpse the elegant youths of Knossos leading what seems a charmed life, the first deli cate link in the chain of a distinctively European culture.

The Minoan empire is thought to have declined when the island's forests, crucial to bronze production, became exhausted. Its death blows appear to have been a series of natural catastrophes, chiefly the eruption of the island of Thera, radio-carbon dated to around 1630 BC. This great catastrophe produced a tsunami that swept across the eastern Mediterranean and all but eradicated the settlements on Crete. Influence now passed north to the Achaeans of Mycenae, forerunners of the mainland Greeks.

Source ~ A short history of Europe ~chapter I ~ by Simon Jenkins