14 Outlines of European History The pre- historic traders Ships of the Nile in the far-away East The traders' oriental goods, espe- cially their copper axes and daggers Section 5. Late Stone Age Europe and the Orient There are certain traders whose wares these Late Stone Age villagers inspect with eagerness. They come from the coast and they are already threading the Alpine passes leading northward from southern Europe — roads which are yet to become the great highways of the early world. These traders entertain the villagers of the European interior with the tales which circulate among the coast settlements, telling how huge ships (Fig. 14) — which make their own rude dugouts (Fig. 5) look like tiny chips — ply back and forth in the eastern waters of the Medi- terranean. Such ships have many oarsmen on each side and mighty fir trunks mounted upright in the craft, carrying huge sheets of linen to catch the favoring wind which drives them swiftly, without oars, from land to land. They come out of the many mouths of the vast river of Egypt, greater than any river in the world, says the tale, and they bear crowded cargoes of beautiful stone vases, strings of shining blue-glazed beads (see cut, p. 1 6), bolts of fine linen, and, above all, axes and daggers of a strange, heavy, shining substance, for which these European vil- lagers have no name. They listen with awe-struck faces and rapt attention ; and in their traffic they desire above all else the new axes and daggers of metal which take a keener edge than any they can fashion of stone. Strings of Egyptian blue-glazed beads,^ brought in by traders, wandered from hand to hand and people to people in western Europe ; and we find them now lying in graves among the orna- ments once worn by the men of the Late Stone or early Copper Age in England. In the East the people of a Late Stone Age village on the low hill in northwestern Asia Minor where later rose the walls of Troy (p. 117); likewise the people of another settlement of the same age near the north shore of the Island of Crete, yet to become the flourishing city of Cnossus (p. 120); 1 Examples of these blue-glazed Egyptian beads discovered in prehistoric graves of England will be found in the drawing at the end of Chapter I (p. i6)«
