Note 103 — Chapter XIII · The Symbolism of Jade
Reading edition
The importance attached to jade in prehistoric Europe raises an interesting problem. Jade artifacts have been found associated with the Swiss lake-dwellings, and at “Neolithic sites” in Brittany and Ireland, as well as in Malta and Sicily, and other parts of Europe. Schliemann found votive axes of green and white jade (nephrite) in the stratum of the first city of Troy. It was believed at the time that the European jade artifacts had been imported from the borders of China, and Professor Fischer expressed the wish “that before the end of his life the fortune might be allotted to him of finding out what people brought them to Europe”.103 Professor Max Muller believed that the Aryans were the carriers of jade. “If”, he wrote, “the Aryan settlers could carry with them into Europe so ponderous a tool as their language, without chipping a single facet, there is nothing so very surprising in their having carried along and carefully preserved from generation to generation so handy and so valuable an instrument as a scraper or a knife, made of a substance which is Aere perennuis”.104