Note 699 — Chapter IV

M. Salomon Reinach (L’Anthr., iv, 1893, pp. 688-90), if I do not misunderstand him, although he admits that the British Isles in the Bronze Age were connected by trade with Scandinavia, thinks it probable that the spiral reached the former by way of Spain. He observes that among Scandinavian rock-sculptures there are no spirals; that certain designs—for example the boat—are common to sepulchral monuments in Brittany and in Ireland; that there are striking points of resemblance between the bronze culture of Ireland and Spain; and that designs which have been found in the East Riding of Yorkshire represent Aegean types which also appear in the departments of the Marne and the Gard (see p. 200, infra). These arguments seem unavailing against those stated in the text, and especially against the almost complete absence of the spiral from Spain, Gaul, and Southern England. If the figure does not appear on Scandinavian rocks, it abounds on Scandinavian weapons and ornaments; and on rocks boats are frequently represented (O. Montelius, Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, 1888, pp. 46, 73-6). Nor is M. Reinach’s reasoning sound when he goes on to argue that we have no right to trace the Bronze Age spiral of Western Europe to an Egyptian source because the same design has been found engraved on mammoths’ tusks in the Pyrenaean cave of Espélungues at Arudy (L’Anthr., xv, 1904, p. 146, fig. 24; xvi, 1905, p. 5, fig. 4). As Dr. Arthur Evans remarks (Report of ... the Brit. Association, 1896, p. 913), ‘the earliest cultural strata of Europe, from the Neolithic period onwards, betray an entire absence of the recurring spiral motive. When we find it later propagating itself as a definite ornamental system in a regular chronological succession throughout an otherwise inter-related European zone, we have every right to trace it to a common source.