PREHISTORIC
PART 1 – Ch.II
The Neolithic Period
The Neolithic invasion. The ancient
Pelasgian current
The diluvial times have
passed, and we enter the second prehistoric period, so-called of the polished
stone. This epoch constitutes a new era of fundamental moral and social
transformation of the ancient world. A new ad unexpected civilization flows
over Europe.
The Neolithic epoch
is especially characterized by the introduction of domestic animals, by the
culture of the cereals and textile plants, by the art of navigation, by a
greater ability in fabricating the stone tools; finally, by the first religious
dogma, by funeral tumuli, by megalithic monuments and by a strong social
organization. But this entire material and moral civilization of the Neolithic
epoch in Europe, belongs to a new people, immigrated in these parts from
another continent, and not at all to the primitive indigenous races. This new
ethnic immigration in Europe constitutes the so-called Neolithic invasion, the most expansive invasion known to history.
Even around the
beginning of the Neolithic epoch, appear in Europe new ethnic types, two races
of men, one of which especially, dolycho-cephalic, was endowed with a more
superior intelligence, with great ideas, with strong actions and with social
instincts more developed. From what the science of archaeology has established,
and from the moral patrimony which they brought with them, it is know that
these people came to Europe from the
central lands of Asia. The first Neolithic masses, composed of immense
pastoral and agricultural tribes, coming from the Altai mountains in Central
Asia, after leaving it, probably even during the Paleolithic epoch, and after
staying for some hundreds of years near the Caspian Sea and the Lower Ural mountains, continued slowly their migration
westwards, along the northern shores of
the black Sea; then attracted towards south by a sweeter climate and a more
abundant vegetation, these bellicose,
mostly pastoral populations flowed, with their countless flocks, over
the plains and the fertile valleys of Moldova and the Romanian Country.
Here, at the Lower Danube and especially in the
countries of Dacia – this fact is
certain – formed and coalesced the
great and powerful centre of the Neolithic population in Europe; the centre
of a new race of people, of a tall and vigorous stature, with an old
patriarchal organization, with severe religious ideas and with a passion,
brought probably from Asia, to sculpt in live rock the enormous statues of its
divinities. These new conquerors of the ancient world brought with them to
Europe the new civilizing elements, founded here the first organized states,
and gave a new direction to the fate of humanity. IN the course of many
hundreds of years, this active and laborious race, endowed with a miraculous
power of growth and expansion, continued its migrations from the Lower Danube
toward the southern regions. From the summits, valleys and plains of the
Carpathians, countless new pastoral tribes continuously crossed the great river
of the ancient world, and flowed in compact and organized groups over the
entire Balkan Peninsula. This is the great southern
current, or Carpatho- Mycenic current which, coming from
Central Asia, had formed its first European country at the Carpathians, where
it had put in place the first moral basis of the new civilization, which later developed
so strongly in Greece and on the shores of Asia Minor. In other words, this is
the ancient Pelasgian or Palaeochton
current, or of the ancient earth
dwellers (earthlings) (TN – vechii pamanteni), or of the people born straight from the earth
(gegeneis),
as they called themselves [1].
[1. We call the memorable migration,
which had extended over continental and
insular Greece, the Carpatho-Mycenic
current. This is the only name which corresponds, from a cultural and
geographical point of view, to this movement, and this name is even more
justified, when we discover the Mycenae, legendary metropolis of ante-Hellenic
culture, had as sacred emblem a prehistoric monument from the countries of
Dacia (to be seen in the following chapters). Mycenae reduces therefore its
ancient origins to a population arrived in Argos from the valleys and summits
of the Carpathians.
The lands of Greece appear to have
been conquered by the new current in Neolithic times. The Paleolithic tool
industry on the territory of ancient Hellada is not represented. On the other
hand, remains of Neolithic civilization are to be found in the most antique
Pelasgian centers of Greece, from Tyrinth to Mycenae and Orchomenos, although
not in such a great measure as at Hissarlik (near Troy) in Asia Minor (Perrot, La Grece primitive, p. 58,
115). This Neolithic population of Greece was Pelasgian (Reinach, Les
origins des Aryens, p. 113). “From traditions and historical probabilities… it
can be said that the Hellenic Pelasgians had descended to Greece from the northern regions. After having crossed
Thrace and Macedonia, they had occupied Epirus
and Thessaly, from there they
reached, little by little, central
Greece and the Peloponnesus (Duruy, Histoire des Grecs, I. 1887, p.
44). This powerful ethnic current of the Neolithic epoch, descended from the
Balkan peninsula, not only to Greece and Asia Minor, but also to Syria and
Egypt. In North Africa, and especially in Upper Egypt, writes the erudite
archaeologist Morgan, the Neolithic civilization presents an European
character. The same types of the new tool industry are common to Egypt, central
and southern Europe and Syria. Even the shape of the arrow points is identical
in Egypt and in Europe (Morgan,
Recherches sur les origins de l’Egypte. L’age de la Pierre et les metaux,
Paris, 1896).
The Pelasgians had an ancient tradition that their genus was born
straight from the earth (gegeneis). Eschyl (Supplices, v. 250) presents Pelasg, their national patriarch, speaking towards Danaos the
following words: “I am Pelasg, the son
of the ancient earth dweller, the
one born from the earth”. And Asius
writes: “Pelasg, the one who resembled the gods, was born by the black earth, on
the summits of those lofty mountains, to
be the beginner of the race of the mortals (Pausanias, Descriptio Graeciae, VIII. 1. 4; Dionysios of Halicarnassus, Antiq. Rom. I. 36; Quintillianus, Inst. III. 77). In fact, this archaic tradition has
been preserved to this day with the Romanian people. Romanian legends tell us that the inhabitants
of this country are a new type of people, who have “emerged” on earth after the destruction by flood of the first race
of humans. And in a Romanian spell, the sick man is called ”earthling” (TN – pamantean), word which is identical by its meaning with gegeneis
(Lupascu, Medicina babelor, p. 13)].
But this powerful
Neolithic migration forms only one part of the great ethnic invasion which
characterizes this epoch. Other pastoral tribes, other social groups, which
also came from Asia towards Europe, following in the steps of the first
Neolithic current, being unable to reach the Lower Danube, advanced across
Basarabia and upper Moldova and, taking the direction of the northern arch of
the Carpathians, reached Bukovina, Galitia, Silezia, Moravia, Bohemia and lower
Austria (Szombathy,
Correspondenzblatt der deutschen Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie, XXV, 1894, p.
98). A significant part of these new Neolithic masses turned then southwards.
Some tribes passed over the northern Carpathians a d settled in the upper parts
of Tisa, while others descended on the March valley and spread over Pannonia,
Noric, Upper Dalmatia and then advanced towards the Alps and Italy. Finally,
the rest of these masses of migrants pushed on by new colonists, who came at
their rear, continued their westwards migration along the northern bank of the
Danube and, passing over Bohemia and Germany, advanced towards Gaul, the
Pyrenees, Belgium and Brittany, leaving everywhere in its wake scattered tribes
and traces of its primitive tool industry and cult.
This is the second Neolithic or central current,
which in Europe presents two well established branches, the
Carpatho-Pannonic-Alpine and the Carpatho-Gallic (Bertrand, La Gaule avant les Gaulois, p. 206, 256). This current
introduced then in central and western Europe the same uniform Neolithic
culture, similar to that from the Carpathians of Dacia, the same industrial
progress, the same pastoral life, the same practice of agriculture, the same
religious doctrines, the same organization of the cult and the society, and
finally, the same idiom or common language of the first Neolithic currents.
But the mass ethnic
movement towards Europe, begun in Asia, continues during the course of this
entire epoch. Apart from the first two great Neolithic currents, which had
brought into Europe an immense population, other new groups, but less
considerable, which had also left the regions of ancient Asia in unknown
circumstances, appear at the eastern gates of Europe [2].
[2. About this extraordinary number of people in the prehistoric times, the
scholiast of Homer writes: “It is said that the earth, oppressed by the immense
multitude of the people lacking in piety, had asked Jove to relieve her of this
load. With this purpose, Jove firstly incited the Theban war, in which many
died. Then, although Jove could have destroyed all these people with the
lightning and the floods, but because Momus (a son of the night) had been
opposed to this, Jove followed his advice and planned the war between the
Greeks and the Barbarians (Trojans), by which war the earth was relieved,
because many were killed”. This tradition, Homer’s scholiast tells us, could be
found in the Cypric Songs of the
poet Stasin (Homer Carmina, Ed. Didot, p. 591, 592). And the poet Valerius Flaccus in his Argonautics
(VI. 33), speaking about the regions near the Riphaei mountains (Dacia and
Scythia), says; “These countries, which stretch under the constellations of the
two dippers and the gigantic dragon, are the most populated, compared to any
other region”. And finally, Herodotus
(V. 3), speaking about the populations from the north of Greece writes: “the Thracians are, after the Indians, the
most numerous nation on the face of the earth, and if they were governed by a
single man, and if they could unite among themselves, then they would never be
defeated, the most powerful among all peoples”.
In Romanian folk lore has been
preserved until today the memory of this great multitude of peoples, which once
lived in the lands of Dacia. Quite a long time ago, says a tradition from the
village Zelisteanca, Buzeu district, there was in these places an enormous number of people, and
because of that it was called “Puedia”;
those people were destroyed by the will of God (I. Voiculescu). And from the
village Vasesci, Falciu district, it is related: “By the word Poedia, the old people understand such
a multitude of people, that there was no more room for them to live together.
It is said that at the time of Poedia there were many villages on the territory
of the village Schiopeni. What happened with those peoples? The old men say
that God must have destroyed them, because they were too many (I.
Ghibanescu).
So, this is in essence the same
tradition as that of the cyclic poet Stasin: the divinity had intervened to
relieve the earth from this burden of people. Finally, “the abandoned tilled land in the
mountains”, another tradition from the village Calinesci, Valcea district,
tells us, are from the time when there were too many people on earth, and the
fields on the plains were not enough to support them”].
These new invaders,
being unable to follow the ancient road of migration, were forced to take an
entirely abnormal direction for these tribes, in search of a new and happier
country. They advanced upwards, on the banks of the Nipru (Dnepr) river,
towards the Baltic Sea, occupied the lands of Lithuania, and from there, one
part extended westwards along the shores of northern Germany, while other
tribes crossed to Sweden and Norway.
This is the third, northern Neolithic current, called by some French archaeologists, hyperborean [3].
[3. The name of hyperborean current, applied to the Neolithic tribes from near the
Baltic Sea, does not correspond either to geographical, or to historical truth.
The Hyperboreans (Pelasgian people),
who played in prehistoric times such an important cultural role, appeared in
their epoch of greatness as dwelling on the northern side of the Lower Danube
and in the Carpathian (Riphaei) mountains. Later on, the name of Hyperboreans,
because of their ethnic homogeneity, has been applied by Greek authors to other
different Pelasgain tribes, whose places of habitation have never been well
defined].
The first two
currents or Neolithic migrations, present in everything the same common basis
for their civilizations, the same way of life and the same cult, and they
belonged by their ethnic type (dolycho-cephalic) and by the elements of their
idiom, to one and the same race of humans, who, in a remote prehistoric epoch,
had lived in the inner regions of Asia, in a social and a religious community.
On the other hand, the northern or hyperborean current appears in the history
of those primitive times more as a series of various ethnic migrations, which
had not even departed from inner Asia at the same time; a current composed in a
large part by two distinct races of peoples, one dolycho-cephalic, pastoral and
agricultural, from the same branch of the two preceding currents [4], the other
brachy-cephalic, with a round head and a much smaller stature. The latter did
not know how to be either shepherds or farmers, but were simple hunters and
fishermen, and had no importance in the history of the civilization of this
epoch.
[4. In the prehistoric tumuli of east Galitia, in those from the region
of
Of all these
Neolithic migrations though, the
southern current or palaeochton (Carpatho-Mycenic) has
played the most important role in the history of European civilization.
The first place
occupied in an enduring way by this Neolithic current were the countries of
ancient Dacia, endowed from nature with extensive and fertile plains, with
valleys and magnificent woodlands, crossed by countless rivers. Here was formed
the great centre of the multitude of Neolithic population, the first adoptive
country for the great masses of shepherds who came with their leaders, their
tribes, their gods, and their flocks from Asia towards the Danube.
We have presented
in these pages the origin, progress and character of the Neolithic conquest,
which populated and civilized the vast regions of
But, when we talk
here about this extended and powerful Neolithic invasion in Europe, we don’t
refer at all to the anachronistic migration of the so-called “Arii”, with whom modern philology is
preoccupied, and whose hypothetical conclusions do not match either the results
of the archaeological investigations, or the findings of anthropology; but on
the contrary, we talk about a movement much older than the epoch of metals (or
of the so-called Arians), a movement
which had happened a lot earlier than the migration to Europe of the Greeks,
the Celts and the Germans, a movement which had left real traces about its
ante-Hellenic and ante-Celtic culture, in all the countries which it occupied
or touched [5].
[5. The so-called “Arii” (the Indo-Iranians, Armenians,
Latins, Greeks, Celts, Germans, Slavs and Albanians) with which are preoccupied
the representatives of linguistics, have
never constituted an ethnic family, as far as history could elucidate.
Namely, it is written about the Greeks
that they were a later migration than that of the Pelasgians, and that they had
borrowed from them the elements of prehistoric civilization. And even the
Greeks themselves considered the Pelasgians
as the oldest people on earth. Similarly, the Celts, and after them the Germans,
have settled a few thousand years ago over the vast and archaic Pelasgian
substratum of central, northern and western
The homogeneity, either somatic, or
linguistic, of these populations, can’t be accepted in any instance].
ADDITIONAL NOTES: (TN – somewhat
shortened)
1. The Neolithic tool industry in Dacia. The stone and bone artifacts.
A great number of stone weapons and
tools, as well as objects, manufactured from animal bones and horn, have been
found in all the regions of ancient Dacia (Romer,
Mouvement archeologique, p. 9). Especially in Transylvania and northern
Hungary, the Neolithic industry of stone tools appears to have been greatly
developed. At the Paris prehistoric congress, 1876, writes Romer, “I was the
first to present a piece of obsidian
obtained in Transylvania. Until then, everybody thought that obsidian had
been imported to Europe from Mexico, because only a few specimens brought from
there, and a few from Italy, were known”.
As for the Romanian Country, and especially the Vadastra prehistoric site, Cesar
Boliac writes “…in two days, a few men extracted from a place, on the
surface of which there was nothing to betray the hidden deposits, from a depth
of one, to one and a half metre, over
three thousand flint objects, arrow, knives, axes, hammers, hatchets,
perforated hammers, …about three hundred
clay objects … and about three
hundred objects made of bone, from which about seventy were intact…
(Analele Soc. Acad. X. R. p. 270).
In Bukovina the most significant Neolithic site is Siret, but there were many discoveries
made in other localities (Kaindl,
Geschichte der Bukovina, 1896, I. p. 6-10).
The industry of Neolithic man in
Dacia is in large part indigenous.
Almost the entire material from which the stone weapons and tools were made
presents a local character (flint, serpentine, obsidian, calcareous marl,
sandstone, quartz schist, clay schist, jasper, porphyry, bloodstone, red
marble, etc), and was extracted from the nearest rocks of the Carpathians. We
could even say that we are witnessing a first beginning of mining in Dacia.
Even without considering future
discoveries, we can establish here, on the basis of the archaeological
documents which we have so far, the following positive fact: The working of stone in Dacia, judging
by the archaeological collections of the museums across the Carpathians, was
flourishing in the countries of Dacia during the Neolithic epoch. Moreover, it
had a more extensive and advanced development than it appears in Austria,
Germany, France and Italy. We find represented in the countries of Dacia both
halves of the Neolithic epoch, the beginning, with weapons and tools not yet
polished and perforated, and the second part, or the last, which is
characterized by weapons and tools polished, perforated, with varied and
perfected shapes. Also, judging by the enormous number and the geographical
distribution of these objects, it can be ascertained that during the Neolithic epoch, a dense and industrious population lived in
the parts of Dacia, scattered all over the plains, valleys, hills and even
over the summits of the lofty mountains. Finally, the different centers of
Neolithic fabrication, discovered at certain places in Dacia, from the Danube
to the sources of Tisa, prove that the manufacture of stone and bone tools and
weapons in that epoch was not individual, but that in our countries an
industrial manufacture and a material traffic with these artifacts had begun,
traffic which had expanded far beyond the frontiers of this country.
We reproduce here various
characteristic types of the stone industry of this epoch in
(TN – in the original text a list of
artifacts follows, which then are shown on four attached plates)
THE NEOLITHIC
INDUSTRY IN
(
THE NEOLITHIC INDUSTRY IN
(
2. Prehistoric ceramic of
The Neolithic ceramic is
characterized by two distinct classes.
The first class is formed by older Neolithic pottery. In those initial Neolithic times,
the ceramic was generally rough, the clay was impure, combined with grains of
quartz and sand, and poorly baked. The objects are usually reddened by fire
only on the surface, while
the rest is grey, black
or yellowish-grey. The shape of the vases, in those first Neolithic times is
more spherical or semi-spherical. They don’t have a flat bottom, but they have
a curved or ovoid shape underneath. Also, the vases of this class have no
handles, they have only a sort of perforated ears, in order to be hung. In this
class of Neolithic ceramic appear also some beginnings of ornamentation. It is
formed by straight lines or dotted lines, executed less regularly
and only with the nails or the fingers.
The second class of the Neolithic ceramic is characterized generally by a finer and
better mixed material. The pottery presents more symmetry in shapes, a more
advanced technique and a wide diversity of types. Finally, the ornamentation of
this class is much more regular. It is composed more of geometrical figures
formed in straight lines, later in curved lines, and executed with a
stylus, or other special instruments. Everywhere though, the entire pottery of
the Neolithic epoch is handmade, without a wheel or other mechanical procedure.
Even during the first times of the
bronze epoch, the ceramic of
This entire system of ornamentation is Pelasgian, and this type of decoration
is represented even today in almost all its forms, in our domestic industry, in
the weaving and embroidery practiced by the Romanian women. This ornamentation
presents often certain symbolic signs,
based on some pre-antique religious representations, like the circle as the sun’s disk, like the sign of the cross, the triangles,
or the mysterious, but favorable sign of the
swastika, the symbol of the supreme divinity of the Pelasgians, Jupiter
Tonans, representing the lightning, or the light, the life, health and wealth,
sign which has been preserved until today in the sewing of the Romanian women
from Transylvania. This sign is totally unknown to
(TN – A list of ceramic vases
follows in the original text, which are presented on three attached plates,
with examples of prehistoric pottery from
EXAMPLES OF PREHISTORIC CERAMIC OF
(
SPECIMENS OF PREHISTORIC
ORNAMENTATION
(