Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/475

] was in the Bronze age while another was in the Neolithic age, and that iron gradually penetrated northwards, until it arrived in Denmark at the beginning of the Christian era; and it has been impossible for us to shut our eyes to the traces of civilisation coming in from the Mediterranean area. Egypt, Assyria, Etruria, Greece, and Phœnicia were the seats of a high civilisation for many centuries before Christ, and when the written record began were not in the Bronze but in the Iron age. It is a question equally interesting to the historian and to the archæologist, to ascertain the extent to which the light of their culture penetrated the darkness of central, western, and northern Europe, and to see whether it be possible to picture to ourselves the condition of Europe as a whole at one time; to see whether we can bring the Historic period in the Mediterranean region into relation with the Prehistoric period north of the Alps which has hitherto engaged our attention. This overlap, as it may be termed, of history with Prehistoric archæology may best be studied by treating each of these influences separately.

In the earliest records which we possess we find a civilisation put prominently before us of a high and complicated kind, not much inferior to any that have succeeded it, and which dates so far back that the history of all the European peoples is in comparison