22 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



with Mr A. J. Evans' pre-Phoenician Cretan syllabary. On this 

 and other grounds Sergi joins the new school of archaeologists in 

 their demand for an extension of the Metal Ages, remarking that 

 " this script appears in its forms and variants to be extremely old, 

 and in my opinion it seems as if it ought to cause the all but 

 established chronology of the First Iron Age to be set back in 

 Italy and elsewhere 1 ." 



From Hallstatt Prof. W. Ridgeway- believes on good grounds 

 that the use of iron spread to Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, 

 Greece, Eastern Germany, and in fact to the whole of Europe, 

 everywhere largely replacing the bronze tools and weapons which 

 we know from Tacitus were then in common use. 



The Hallstatt period, which is supposed to have reached its 

 bloom about 800 B.C., was continued in Switzerland and some 

 other places quite into Roman times. But during the last 

 centuries of its existence it was replaced in Gaul by a later Iron 

 Age, which from its chief centre is usually referred to as the 

 La Tene period. It was to some extent of local origin, and in 

 great measure independently developed, though not uninfluenced 

 by southern, especially Massilian (Greek) forms. Eventually the 

 La Tene culture superseded the Hallstatt in all the lands of Keltic 

 speech, and the somewhat abrupt transition from one to the other 

 is perceptible in Switzerland, where La Tene forms were intro- 

 duced by later immigrants, also no doubt of Keltic speech. 



Notwithstanding their quite recent date, as compared with the 

 early rise of the Eastern civilisations, all these metal periods must 

 be regarded as strictly prehistoric for Central and Western Europe; 

 they are antecedent to all trustworthy historical records, which in 

 the West with one or two exceptions, such as the foundation of the 

 Greek colony of Massilia (Marseilles, 539 B.C.), go no further back 

 than Roman times. 



That the peoples of those days were physically well developed, 



Man and his ^^ * n a reat P art ^ Europe and Asia already of 



works in the Aryan speech, there can be no reasonable doubt. A 



skull of the early Hallstatt period, from a grave near 



1 Arii e I fa lid, p. 219. 



The Starting Point of the Iron Age in Europe, Paper read at the British 

 Assoc. Liverpool, 1896. 



