A connection between the Nordics and the Mediterranean in the bronze age?

[Micael]

In Kivik in southern Sweden lies a peculiar grave, featuring pictographic carvings on stone slabs. The grave is believed to date to the older bronze age in Scandinavia, that is to say 1700-1100 BC. What makes it interesting is what’s on these stone slabs, because the illustrations have by some archeologists and other observers been found to have peculiar similarities to Hittite designs in some cases, and Mycenean in others. Here’s some of the remaining slabs along with a double axe one that has been lost:

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One design element that is less frequently mentioned is the appearance of what seems like sideways Omega-signs:

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Now the Omega didn’t appear in a Greek alphabet until after the presumed dating of the grave, only in the late 6th century. However I would suggest that the two may still be connected, as I would suspect that the sign existed as a symbol prior to becoming included as an alphabet character. That the Omega was placed at the end of the alphabet and has been associated with an ending of sorts since at least that time may hint at what the purpose of the symbol could have been prior to being used for alphabetic writing. I would therefore suggest that it may have denoted death. That could make sense in the way is is utilized on this slab, as carvings os this kind most likely tell a story — fictional or historic — and in this case the ending moght depict a total of eight people dying at two separate occasions. As the opening of the symbol faces the figures one might further hypothesize that its appearance is supposed to denote the entering of the realm of the dead in some fashion. Naturally speculative but I think it is an interesting matter to speculate on.

Then we get to how it seems to be some sort of Nordic/Mediterranean connection here. People who believe so have speculated along two lines. Either people from the Mediterranean came up here, or people from here went down and returned. I would rate the latter as more plausible, especially as there appears to be designs related to at least two different cultural spheres represented. If people from the eastern Mediterranean came here and carved these one would presume that they’d carve designs from one specific culture, that is to say their own. People from here who travelled down and returned, and passed through areas of multiple cultures, may however well have incorporated elements from more than one culture into a set of carvings such as these. That they are using designs from other cultures I believe also hints at at least a portion of the carvings being intended as a record of a voyage down to the eastern Mediterranean, a remembrance of those souls lost along the way, laying out the manner of their unfortune, and in that way represent a much older forerunner of the memorial runestone tradition of the Viking era some 2,000 years later. A thought which I at least find a bit tantalizing.

Using the elements of Hittite, Mycenean, and adding to those the Omega which first appeared as an alphabet character in the Ionian cities we may also be able to paint something of a route map. This map marks the Ionian area. To the west of it lies modern Greece, with its mainland and islands which also corresponds fairly well with the extent of the Mycenean culture of antiquity. Further to the East, in current day central and eastern Turkey as well as the Levant is where the Hittites ruled. In other words we get something of an East-West axis with three points on it. A possibility could then be that our hypothetical travellers went down the same river systems of eastern Europe that their later viking descendants would use to reach the Black Sea, made it into Anatolia where they encountered the Hittite culture, headed west to the (later) Ionian parts, and reached at least the shores of the Mediterranean where they picked up the Mycenean elements. Furthermore if we build onto the idea that the Omega symbols represent the death of the figures also depicted one might suppose that it was in the area where this symbol was in use where said deaths occurred, in other words possibly somewhere in the general vicinity of the marked area on the above map. Again, a lot of speculation, but one of the beauties of writing in a casual setting rather than in an academic one is that you can let your hair out a bit and think aloud.

Even if we scale back the basic premise to ”potential direct contact between the Nordic and Mediterranean regions during the bronze age” that’s still a rather interesting notion in itself. It speaks to a certain degree of interconnectivity over large distances even in a far removed past, and I think that when studying cultures of that era we have to be observant of influences over larger distances than has traditionally been done. Perhaps that is the main takeaway that should be stressed.

[Nik_SpeakerToCats]

IIRC, isotope analysis has shown Cornish Tin was traded as far as Eastern Med.

Probably teamed up with Cyprus' Copper.

Western Med, Iberia and Atlantic Coast seem to have got their Copper from Great Orme in N. Wales...

[Micael]

Yeah, but there has been a faction of academia that has strongly pushed the idea that trade such as this took place via many intermediaries and without direct contact between the end points. I believe that this is just true for some cases, and that there was also cases of direct contact over long distances going back a long time. As perhaps the above post indicates.

[Jotun]

IIRC, isotope analysis has shown Cornish Tin was traded as far as Eastern Med.

Probably teamed up with Cyprus' Copper.

Western Med, Iberia and Atlantic Coast seem to have got their Copper from Great Orme in N. Wales...

I once partially read a book named "Where Troy once stood", and the author tried to make a case for Troy to have been located in southeastern Britain.

That said, the likely ethnic/genetic variations of the battle of the Tollense Valley in ca. 1300 - 1200 BC suggests the north/south trade routes were more than just incidental. Interestingly, the battle itself coincides with the end of Mycenean Greece, the Sea peoples invading Egypt and a handful of other Mediterranean and Levant civilizations collapsing.
Ripple effect? Coincidence? I believe the ancient world was a LOT more inerconnected than modern academia would like to think.

[kdahm]

IIRC, isotope analysis has shown Cornish Tin was traded as far as Eastern Med.

Probably teamed up with Cyprus' Copper.

Western Med, Iberia and Atlantic Coast seem to have got their Copper from Great Orme in N. Wales...

I once partially read a book named "Where Troy once stood", and the author tried to make a case for Troy to have been located in southeastern Britain.

That said, the likely ethnic/genetic variations of the battle of the Tollense Valley in ca. 1300 - 1200 BC suggests the north/south trade routes were more than just incidental. Interestingly, the battle itself coincides with the end of Mycenean Greece, the Sea peoples invading Egypt and a handful of other Mediterranean and Levant civilizations collapsing.
Ripple effect? Coincidence? I believe the ancient world was a LOT more inerconnected than modern academia would like to think.

Let's presume for a moment that some people get wandering feet, even (or especially) in the ancient world. Numberswise, probably in the range of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 young men who have the drive and the means to actually get away and start moving. How many of them will travel more than 4000 li (里)? How many will either return, or send messages back? Over the course of a century, that adds up. Over a few centuries, I'd rate it as a certainty that some travelers have gone from the Nordics to the Middle East, and more have gone from the Middle East to China, and vice versa for both.

Cultural contamination over long time scales shouldn't be considered a rarity, it should be questioned if it's not found.

[Johnnie Lyle]

A more modern example is how the only universally accepted coin currency in Ethiopia in 1868 were Austrian Maria Theresa thalers. We should absolutely be surprised if we don’t see objects and knowledge being traded back and forth across cultures with transportation interconnections, even if the interconnections are entirely through intermediaries.

I’m more skeptical of some of the art motifs presented above being proof of direct communication and transfer. Concurrent evolution is also reasonable, especially because most of the shapes shown are pretty basic.

[Belushi TD]

And not only are the shapes basic, they're considered basic today because they were (usually) the most efficient way to get the job done back in the day with their lack of industrial base.

I think a lot of academics today buy into the hypothesis that people back in the day were less intelligent than those around today, because "Why didn't they do X thing in Y manner? Since they didn't, they're obviously not smart.", forgetting that the technology to allow you to do X thing in Y manner didn't exist until the widespread use of process/material Q, W, U, S and &.

People are smart, clever, and lazy. And by lazy I mean they'd rather spend an hour doing/making something that will knock two hours off a task, than just doing the task.

Belushi TD

[Micael]

I’ve been meaning to get back to this earlier but ah, life.

I think what needs to be considered here is also the following:
We know that the bronze age in Europe was cyclic in terms of war and peace. There were clearly periods, probably fairly extended such, where hostilities were more limited and trade blossomed as a result. Because the safer it is to transport goods more of them will be transported and over greater distances.

From the Scandinavian perspective we see from much later that lucrative trade also dampens hostile activities. Before the era commonly referred to as the Viking age we see a period of significant wealth built on trade. It is believed by some scholars that a key factor in causing the Viking age was a sharp curtailing of trade between Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe, this due to the now Christian continent becoming increasingly unwilling to trade with the Norse religion adherers up north. As a result after a period of decline us folks up north decides that if people won’t trade with us we’ll just have to get the wealth by other means, that is to say raiding everyone mercilessly.

But even during this era, and taking into account the significant religious friction, the polities in current day Sweden kept up trade, alongside of raiding, into eastern Europe, through the river networks. The Orthodox Christians appear to have been a bit more open to trading with the Norse than the Catholics were, as well as hiring them as mercenaries ie Varangian Guard, which probably played a role here.

If we then rewind back to the bronze age in Scandinavia we can have a look at what similarities and differences there are to later eras, and cautiously extrapolate a bit from that. We know that there were individuals here in Sweden that were able to accumulate significant wealth, attested through hidden treasure finds of silver and gold. We know that the people of the time had ships that appear as well suited to going down the river systems of eastern Europe as those during the Viking era. As mentioned above we know that there were periods during the bronze age more characterized by trade than warfare in Europe. We also know that items were traded between the Mediterranean and Scandinavia at the time, an interesting example of this is some glass beads found in Denmark and which were able to be determined to have been made by the same Egyptian workshop as ones found in the tomb of Tutankhamum. A high status item in other words.

The question we then have to ask ourselves is what reason would there be for people from Scandinavia to not travel down to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean themselves? Trade when done without middle men is far more lucrative than when a string of said middle men each takes a cut, they had the means to get down there, and the obvious drive to accumulate wealth.

So, in my opinion, I believe that one has to view direct contact between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean cultures as the lead hypothesis, the one that makes the most logical sense based on known conditions. As such you can view the symbols I posted about in the thread start as a potential reinforcement of that, something that you could reason that it’s not impossible that it was symbology/designs inspired by memories from ones observed during a trading mission down into the Mediterranean, because logically people from that area should have undertaken such expeditions at the time. As I explained earlier the use of the symbols makes further sense if one hypothesize that the imagery was intended as a memorial of sorts of people lost during the voyage there, indicating with designs particular to a specific area where they died and in which numbers.

If I went on a journey to Paris in the current day with a friend, he dies there, and when I get back I want to mark this loss by carving into a rock in nature but I happen to be illiterate, what might I do? Well I might try to carve a depiction of the Eiffel tower along with a depiction of him, as well as a symbol I believe represent death. In the current day that might be a cross. In that day the ”omega” might have been something they noted was used to represent death/ending around where the people memorialized died, and found it fitting to use in the memorial. That may be reinforced by what we know of the Norse religion much later on, an apparent belief that gods were to a degree localized geographically, with apparent acceptance that for instance the Christian god was strong down on the continent but the Norse gods were strong up here in the North. This appears to be a result of their polytheistic view of religion wherein the notion that there were gods beyond those they sacrificed to seems to have been uncontroversial, and that the real of the gods was a sort of mirror of the mortal realm in which you have kings that rule different geographically delineated polities, so they thought that this was also the case with the gods. If this ”sideways omega” was somehow perceived by them to have been connected with a god of the dead in the area they were in when their comrades fell it may have seemed natural to mark their deaths with that symbol, as they may have believed that it would have been that god that ”claimed” those dead, and not a god of their own religious pantheon.

[kdahm]

In the middle ages, I think that there is also the Fall of Constantinople as an inflection point. The decline of those traveling as mercenaries must have had an effect.

[rtoldman]

Is there any information on how far indigenous people in north america traveled or were aware of the entire geography of the continent?