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Bronze Age Scandinavia

17 May 2016
Archaeology

Bronze tools found in Sweden dating to 1600BC were made using copper from the Mediterranean region. This is perhaps not surprising as a shipwrect off the coast of Devon a few years ago contained bronze oxhides with a possible origin in Iberia – and if oxhides were coming to Britain they were also reaching the Baltic as they had an important item of exchange and barter – highly prized amber. Copper was also exploited on Cyprus, Sardinia and Sicily, and any of these places could have exported oxhides to northern climes (or boats from the north could have visited the general Mediterranean area). Scandinavia has long been part of international trade routes (by sea and by river across Europe) and glass beads with a provenance in New Kingdom Egypt were recently discovered in a grave in Denmark.

At https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/the-luwian-civiliz… … the Luwian Studies Foundation is based in Zurich but appears to have a fond spot for western Turkey (or what was the homeland of the Luwian language group). See www.luwianstudies.org … and they are said to be concerned with Aegean history, variously between 3000 and 1200BC (the Bronze Ages). The aim is to look for cross cultural parallels in western Anatolia that may have influenced the Balkans etc. It sort of sets out to downplay the importance given to Greece and the Minoans by eurocentric historians. There is a of course a reason for this and that is that Turkey has in the past not produced the archaeologists to dig holes in the ground to find evidence of Luwians or anyone else in the region. It was 19th century Europeans that dug out Troy (if Troy was at Hissarlik) and Europeans that maintained a strong interest in the Achean Greeks that settled in western Anatolia. Therefore bias is to be expected – how could they avoid it. Little is known of the Luwians and the foundation is an attempt to bring them into the limelight. They spoke an IE tongue and some of them moved in large numbers to south east Anatolia and were a component of the Hittite empire.

The comment following the link is from an indignant Greek. He objects to the idea that Luwain 'civilisation' is projected as outlasting the LB collapse whilst the Greeks experienced a 500 year dark age and lost all knowledge of writing. As he points out this theory avoids the fact that people spoke and wrote Greek prior to the dark age and spoke and wrote Greek after the dark age. This was of course one of the reasons Velikovsky sought to do away with the dark age – not just in Greece but in Anatolia and other lands. This was because the chronology was based on a textual history of Egypt (and not on the spade), a chronology that still dominates ancient history studies. The mystery here is how do they get the Luwians intact through the 500 year dark age when to all intents and purposes it has long been recognised that large numbers of Greeks migrated across the Aegean sea at the end of the LB age – colonising the lands of the Luwians (even those lands in SE Turkey). Did the Greeks exist in limbo for 500 years? I see a necessity here to explore the web site further (so watch out for further news items on the subject of Luwians).

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