at the hill fort at the Heuneburg on the upper Danube. Contact with the steppe communities on the eastern flank of the Celtic world also continued, and by this route goods from the Far East could reach central Europe. This is well illustrated by the discovery in a burial mound beside the Heuneburg site of textiles embroidered with Chinese silk.
Among the chief exports to the Mediterranean from this period onwards was slaves, which raised the status of warriors who were able to trade prisoners of war for prestige goods from Etruria and Greece. This “West Hallstatt system” collapsed when the Etruscans started to make direct contact with the area around the Marne and Moselle. The same period also saw the emergence of a distinctive decorative aristocratic style known as “Celtic” art. Spectacular finds have been made at sites such as Somme-Bionne and Basse-Yutz.
The Celts are the first peoples of northern Europe to appear in the historical record. They are mentioned by several Greek and Roman historians, and these writings give us some insight into their social organization and their religious practices—although they have to be used with caution. Later Celtic traditions are recorded in the epic literature of Ireland and Wales, but it is not clear how much they can tell us about early Celtic Europe. What is not in question is the Celtic interest—and skill—in warfare.
After 600 BC, Celtic war-bands spread out from central Europe into Italy and Greece—Rome was attacked in 390 BC, Delphi in 279 BC—and settled as far south as Galatia in Anatolia and Galicia in Spain. Other areas, such as western France and Britain, were absorbed into the Celtic world by peaceful means, with the native aristocracies adopting the new continental fashions of art and warfare. From the 3rd century BC fortified urban settlements known as “oppida” became more common, and unified Celtic states began to appear.
Celtic social organization was increasingly influenced by the growing power of Rome, and the Celts were the first peoples of northern Europe to be incorporated within the Roman empire. Already by the end of the 2nd century BC the Mediterranean part of Gaul was a Roman province. Julius Caesar’s conquests in Gaul then brought the western Celtic world under Roman control as far as the English Channel by 50 BC. Thus the most economically advanced areas of the barbarian world were rapidly integrated within the Roman world.
900 BC–AD 700
AFRICA
Written sources from this period increasingly help to reconstruct the history of north Africa, the Nilotic Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. For the rest of Africa, archaeology remains the primary source and, since research and evidence are currently meagre, for large parts of the continent the past still awaits discovery.
In the last millennium BC, north Africa was inhabited by the ancestors of the modern Berbers. At the coast these people came into contact with a variety of foreigners. The first were the Phoenicians, seafaring merchants who established trading settlements westwards from Tripoli and founded Carthage towards the end of the 9th century. Egypt at this time was politically weak and succumbed to a variety of foreign powers, among them the kingdom of Kush, based at Napata, whose kings ruled as the 25th Dynasty (c. 770–664). From the 3rd century BC, Rome began to assert its power in the region, successfully challenging Carthaginian supremacy in the western Mediterranean. Thereafter Roman control was extended along the north African coast and, in 30 BC, Egypt was conquered. By the time the Roman empire began to weaken in the 4th and early 5th centuries AD, Christianity was widespread in its African provinces and remained unchallenged until the Arab invasions of the 7th century brought Islam to Africa.
By the 4th century BC the Kushite kingdom had moved south to Meroë, where it flourished until the 2nd century AD. Its subsequent decline was probably owed, in part, to the rise of the Aksumite kingdom in northern Ethiopia. In the mid-4th century, Aksum adopted Christianity as its official religion. Although Christian influences must have spread southwards from Egypt into Nubia towards the end of the Meroitic period, it was not until the 6th century that Christianity was introduced into the region. In the following century, the Arab invasion of Egypt began a process of Islamization that spread slowly southwards into Nubia. The rise of Islam was also a factor in the decline of Aksum, which had ceased to exist as a political entity by about AD 700.
IRON-WORKING AND FARMING
Almost certainly it was the Phoenicians who introduced bronze- and ironworking to north Africa. In west Africa, iron was being used by the mid-first millennium BC. The development of an urban settlement at Jenne-Jeno from about 250 BC onwards, was probably facilitated by the use of iron tools, which helped agriculturalists to till the heavy clay soils of the inland Niger delta. The earliest evidence of iron use in southern west Africa is associated with the Nok culture, famous for its terracotta sculptures. The early iron-using communities of eastern and southern Africa show such a remarkable degree of homogeneity that they are viewed as a single cultural complex, which first appeared on the western side of Lake Victoria around the mid-1st millennium BC and had spread as far south as Natal by the 3rd century AD. In addition to iron technology, this complex is associated with the beginnings of crop cultivation, livestock herding and settlement. South of Tanzania it is also linked to the manufacture of pottery. In Namibia and Cape Province, which were not settled by these ironusing farmers, some groups had acquired domestic sheep as early as the first two centuries AD. At about the same time a distinctive Cape coastal pottery appears, but others continued with their ancient way of life, living in mobile groups, hunting, gathering and making stone tools.
TO 31 BC
THE EXPANSION OF ROMAN POWER
Rome, a city-state governed by aristocratic families leading an army of peasant soldiers, came to control an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Euphrates and from the English Channel to the Sahara. But military success brought social disorder; rivalries between warlords led to civil war; and republican institutions became an autocracy.
The city of Rome grew up on the Tiber at the lowest point the river could be bridged. Although several of Rome’s hills were settled from around 1000 BC, the earliest signs of urbanization date from the 7th century. According to tradition, Rome was ruled by a line of seven kings, and the expulsion of the last of these in 511 BC resulted in the creation of a republic ruled by two annually elected consuls or magistrates. It is probable, however, that the government of the emerging city-state was less formalized than tradition suggests and that republican systems reached their developed form only in the 4th century BC.
Consuls held office for no more than a single year and ruled with the support of the Senate, a council of former magistrates and priests. Legislation proposed by them had also to be ratified by a popular assembly. However, their main task was to protect the city, which in effect meant to lead military campaigns. Success in war brought material gains to the people of Rome and prestige to the commanders making imperialism an inevitable feature of Roman policy.
THE PUNIC WARS
By 264 BC Rome controlled the whole of the Italian peninsula and had emerged as a powerful confederacy and the principal rival to the other major power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. The Romans were forced to develop naval skills to defeat Carthage in the First Punic War (264–241 BC), in which Rome drove the Carthaginians out of Sicily; soon after Corsica and Sardinia were seized as well. In the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), Rome was invaded from the north, when Hannibal brought his army and elephants from Spain over the Alps into Italy. Though Rome suffered devastating defeats at Lake Trasimene (217 BC) and Cannae (216 BC) it was able to draw on great reserves of Italian manpower to drive Hannibal out of Italy and defeat him at Zama in north Africa (202 BC). With Spain added to Rome’s provinces, the city now commanded the whole of the western and central Mediterranean.
EXPANSION TO THE EAST
In the
