Before Rome
Ancient Europe. By Stuart Piggott. (Edinburgh University Press, 42s.) Prehistoric Societies. By Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott. (Hutchinson, 50s.)
Iv my own The Idea of Prehistory I said: 'We still await a good book telling the public what went on in Europe before the Roman conquest
• . . to the best of my knowledge, there does not exist a book setting out impartially, authori- tatively, and simply the prehistory of Europe.' Those words, originally spoken in a lecture in Birmingham ten years ago and first printed in 1962, can now be eaten.
We now have a good book : Ancient Europe is a very good book indeed, and it sets out impar- tially, authoritatively and simply the prehistory of Europe. Of course, when I wrote in 1962 there did exist four books in the English language which dealt with some parts or aspects of pre-Roman Europe, Childe's Dawn of European Civilisation and his Prehistoric Migrations in Europe, Chris- topher Hawkes's The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, and Grahame Clark's Prehistoric Europe : the Economic Basis, and to all these books, as he readily admits, Piggott is indebted. But his is the first book that deals with all aspects of ancient Europe from, to quote its sub- title, 'the beginnings of Agriculture to Classical Antiquity.'
It is thus a landmark in the development of literature about .prehistoric Europe. Many books dealing with ancient Europe will appear in the Years to come, but none that appears in the next twenty years can fail tb be indebted to this Pioneer effort of scholarly synthesis. It is very welt produced, with fifty-one plates and 143 line illustrations, including no fewer than thirty- 1\,i) distribution maps, well done by I. G. Scott --so often maps in books on ancient history and arebaeology are poor. The line illustrations other than the maps were done by Mrs. D. D. A. S'MPson and deserve a very special word of Praise. There is a large and comprehensive bibliography, in itself of very great value, and the introduction of a reference system which is new to me: notes and references are printed at the end of each chapter, but, as the pub- lishers explain in a note, `To assist the reader, the page on which the notes appear is given, in square brackets, on the headline to each text page.' All in all, not only a very good book, but a very good piece of book-making which re- flects great credit on the Edinburgh University Press, and astonishingly good value at two guineas for its 350 packed pages.
Ancient Europe began as the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology, given to the Society of Anti- quaries of Scotland in November 1962. In their printed form the author has tried to do two things; to keep the chapters readable to that mythical person the general reader, and to put the detail and references required by student and scholar in the notes. It seemed to me that in doing this he was attempting the impossible, but in achievement it is nearly success. The chapters are not vulgar enough—if we have 'got round to using vulgarisation in ordinary English. They will still be hard reading for the general public, but then knowledge of this kind cannot be had easily, and there is no easy book—yet. At the end of his life Penguins persuaded Gordon Childe to do .them a simple version of his Dawn: the result, not entirely satisfactory, was The Prehistory of European Society (1958). Perhaps the Edinburgh University Press can persuade Stuart Piggott to do them a comparable version of Ancient Europe.
Prehistoric Societies is an interesting rather than an exciting book. It is a publishing event: the first volume in a new series of books called The History of Human Society, edited by Dr. J. H. Plumb,' Indeed, Dr. Plumb contributes a long preface to this volume, and says some rather strange things in it. There will be, he tells us, `two volumes devoted to Russia but none to Germany. There will he histories of China and Japan but not of Indonesia. The Jews have a volume to themselves, the Parsees do not . . . we are Western men writing for Western men.' This is very curious occidentrocentrism: has Dr. Plumb forgotten Lowie's brilliant aphorism that though Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, Singapore was lost in its classrooms? Then in discussing the content of this first volume in his series, he says, first, that 'for the bulk of mankind leisure vanished with the Neolithic Revolution' (oh, those delicious leisurely days when we were hunting at Les Eyzies and painting at Altamira!), and then speaks of the two great revolutions—the neolithic and the industrial. What has happened to the Urban revolution? Surely it was the independent creation of civilisation in Sumeria, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mexico, Guatemala and Peru that was the most important and revolu- tionary event in human history. Without this process of synoecism we should all still be Neo- lithic barbarians.
Prehistoric Societies is a bibliographical curi- osity. Nowhere are we told which of the two authors wrote which chapters, though it is clear to me on internal evidence that the first seven chapters were written by Grahame Clark and the last six by Stuart Piggott, and, indeed, Plumb in his preface refers to the individual authors as responsible for certain parts. A second edition should make this clear; it should also give an opportunity for removing some of the errors and misprints. Tuc d'Audoubert not Tuc d'Adou- bert, and Angles-sur-L'Anglin, and Aztecs not Andes (p. 177); the bird-headed man at Lascaux is not prostrate; text-references to figs. 24-28 seem to have gone haywire, and Plate III (a) is not a rock-engraving: it is one of the most famous and well known paintings at Lascaux. The book seems to have been a most unconscion- able time publishing. The authors declare they completed the manuscript in 1963, but there are parts which read as if they were completed even earlier. Archaeology moves fast and there have been fascinating discoveries in the Near East in the last three years and also a fascinating new look at the origins of American agriculture and the whole content of the American Formative period.
But, these difficulties apart, we have here a useful book on man in what used to be called the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods of human history, the beginnings of farming, and the bar- barian background of civilisation and history in Europe and Asia. It is doubtful whether any better authors or author could have been found by Dr. Plumb for this first volume. It is just that somehow it hasn't quite come off, as if the authors were tired and driving themselves to do a piece of writing against the cloek, in Piggott's case something he has done so much better in Ancient Europe. And the prejudices and limita- tions of the authors are only thinly veiled. Grahame Clark is not really interested in Upper Palaeolithic art, and Stuart Piggott doesn't warm to the early civilisations of North America. 'We cannot escape feeling,' he writes, 'that Meso- american culture, even at its highest, is no more than (to adopt a phrase of the seventeenth- century writer Roger North) "such as an extra- ordinary high-spirited judicious Barbarian might be supposed originally to invent." '
But all the seven early civilisations of man were invented by barbarians; this is one of the important lessons which a history of human society should teach all men, Western and Eastern, African and American.
GLYN DANIEL
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