Tears for Phaeton in the Baltic

A short paper was recently presented at the Amber Expo in Poland.  It's linked below with an excerpt.  Since amber was crack for Early Bronze Age Europeans and especially Beakers, a little proto-historic background might illuminate their beliefs about it in the pre-historic period.

In classical times, amber was called electrum or elektron, in Latin, Greek rsp., meaning 'the shining sun'.  Our modern word for electricity basically comes from this pho-Latin name devised by William Gilbert noting its ancient reputation from attracting particles and dander.  (ie. static to spindle whorls, etc)

Proto-Indo-European lexical and mythological reconstructions offer some insight into Greek elektron (J. Paul Getty Museum of Amber):

"The standard Greek word for amber was elektron.[52] The derivation of this word is uncertain, although scholars have suggested that it might have connections with helko, meaning “to draw or attract,” or with aleko, meaning “to ward off evil.”[53] The word is certainly associated with elektor, used in the Iliad to mean “the beaming sun,”[54] and is most likely derived from an Indo-European verb with the root-meanings “brilliant” or “to shine.” This quality of beaming, or reflecting the sun, is also suggested by the Germanic word for amber, glaes or glese, recorded in some ancient Latin sources as glaesum, the same word used for glass in this period.[55] The Indo-Germanic root for this word, *ghel, means “lustrous, shimmering, or bright” and gives us words such as glisten, glitter, glow, and yellow in English..."

Using Greek or Celtic mythology as proxies, amber was formed by the teardrops of Apollo Helios or his daughters at the tragic death of his son Phaeton or the Celtic equivalent.  Since Phaeton's mother was an Oceanid, amber washes up on salty beaches.  That amber attracts particles to it, shows how amber is of divine origin.

In many ways, the material evidences and habits of Beaker customs foreshadow European religion in the proto-historic period.  The comment that caught my attention is the ritual destruction of some artifacts.  I suspect the fragmentation is part of a wider phenomenon of sentimental bead exchange and deconstruction for family and friends upon burial.  If the beads are intentionally crushed, then that is something else.  In that case it might appear similar to some potteries which were also destroyed in some deposits.


Amber as one of the determiners of “elite” prestige in the eastern part of Central Europe in the Late Stone/Early Bronze Age. A contribution to the research on the extraction, working and use of amber, DARIUSZ MANASTERSKI1 , KATARZYNA KWIATKOWSKA, (2015)  Amber Expo
[Link]

"At the end of the Neolithic, amber artefacts are known mainly from the amber workshops and burial sites of the Globular Amphora and Złota Cultures, where they expressed a collective manifestation of the entire group’s prestige... The tradition of Late Neolithic use of amber artefacts cannot be seen at the turn of the Early Bronze Age any more. These artefacts differ in both their shape and the layout of their components, but most of all they are related to specific individuals rather than to a community (see Renfrew 2001). Moreover, they are usually broken in pieces (through ritual destruction) and fragmented while being placed in ritual sites–including those of a funerary nature (Renfrew, Bahn 2002). Therefore, such behaviour may be considered an expression of new cultural trends which would reach the areas under consideration from broadly understood Western Europe and which were related to individual, rather than communal, prestige (Renfrew 2001). By identifying the cultural components visible in both amber artefacts and other accompanying items, one can infer the cultural environment related to the Bell Beaker Culture (see Manasterski 2009; Januszek, Manasterski 2012; Wawrusiewicz 2013). Some of these items, culturally alien to this area yet symbolising the “social standing” of their owners, may be interpreted as evidence of certain cultural patterns and behaviours being “imported.”"

The Smith, the Smithy and Bagpipes

This is a paper about the smithies of Bronze Age Britain.  The author seeks to better understand the shop, the tools and the techniques of the early smiths.

The center of the shop was certainly the anvil.  It is by far the oldest tool in the smithy and central to a lame god poisoned by what we know today is arsenic.  Many smaller anvils have survived in Britain and the Netherlands. [examples: Drenth, 2013]  Most of these, like that of the Amesbury archer, where IMO carried around by those who needed to frequently re-shape practical, everyday tools.

The smithy anvil was probably a much larger stone secured to a tree stump.  There would have been a large whetstone, a flat standard, a furnace and a work bench.  Fregni illustrates some of the basic skills and terminology in the British metalwork of the Bronze Age.

One point Frengi throws a wet towel on is the idea that early European smiths were itinerant (traveling doers of good metallurgical deeds).  This was first proposed by Gordon Childe and is very often repeated as a catalyst for the spread of Beaker culture.  He uses a few ethnographic examples to show how even itinerant African smiths generally service villages within a radius of their own village.

I got sidetracked as usual with the description of the early blast furnace bellows.  Here Frengi describes the earliest as probably 'wine skins and reeds tipped with refractory'.  I did some quick google searching on the origins of bagpipes and thought for certain that someone, somewhere has made the association between furnace bellows and bagpipes, but haven't found anything yet.

Regardless, it is no accident that bagpipes historically overlay the CMP area.  I would imagine that a reed was placed at the base of the blast tube (drone) so the smith workers could hear changes in airflow to the base of the furnace.  In my own furnace, the different sounds of a hairdrier was indicative of different airflows for different temperatures.  (I melted the hairdier ((and the furnance)), but it worked for aluminum)

I would guess pipes would have been a development of the regular bronze age when metal moves from simple ornaments and weapons to stressed pieces in caldron rings and chariot components.  It's not impossible that a certain tube length and diameter would resonate a particular key for a certain temperature/airflow.

The mythology surrounding witches and smiths is a good start to understanding Beaker religion in my view. 

The Compleat Metalsmith: Craft and Technology in the British Bronze Age. ELPIDIA GIOVANNA FREGNI, 2014 [Link]

**Footnote Update**

Here's an interesting etymology for the "bellow" as descended from PIE through various languages.

bellows descends form Middle English belwes which means 'leather bags, bags or belly' which appears to have been usually plural.  It was apparently shortened from blaestbaelg, apparently 'blast bag'.  (as a side note 'blast' is generally referred to as the induction of a blast furnace or blast cooled generators, etc)
Blast and Bladder apparently descend from a common word blase or blaze (Skeat), which reconstructed forms various words in IE languages for blowing a trumpet or similar. (2)

to bellow (v.) similarly comes from Old English bylgan from PIE bhel, meaning to roar, blow or bleat (generally of a ruminant animal, in modern usage a doe or non-bovid ruminant cow).  The last point is interesting in that most commercial bleats and grunts for hunting are reeds inserted in a small tube.

to bleat also descends from the same root of bhel via PtG blētijanan (1) and Old English blǣtan, again meaning the cry of an animal, more appropriately from hot does or cows.

Various other reconstructions can be made from Slavic, Celtic and Latin.

John Koch presentation (Celtic from the West)

Quick presentation by Koch on his theory of the development of Celtic [Link]

Beakers in the world

If I understand correctly, Koch theorizes that Proto-Celtic is partially defined by the kind of errors that a speaker of Proto-Iberian or Proto-Basque* would make when learning Indo-European.  Both languages had similar reduced consonantal systems (p-less) theoretically making IE sound Celtic.

In "Celtic from the West", Cunliffe and Koch theorize that Proto-Celtic was refined in Atlantic Europe in the Middle Bronze Age rather than being an import by warriors riding unicorns from Central Europe.  

Atlantic Celtic has several strong arguments

1)  It is demonstrable that languages spoken in Spain and France, regardless of their inter-relation, had common reduced consonantal systems in their ancient forms and that Celtic happens to be reduced from Indo-European in similar ways. 

2)  On the same token, the sound changes that made Celtic "Celtic" cannot equally be explained on a theoretical basis by any known substrate in Central Europe, that is if we were to assume external factors.   

As mentioned on Genetics (Page 1), we have upper and lower limits for what is possible in the development of Late Western Europe.  It's like burning a candle at both ends.

Linguistically, there aren't a whole lot of plausible options as to what languages Bell Beaker people spoke.  There's really three plausible scenarios:

1 Beakers spoke Vasconic but eventually changed to IE.  The map above doesn't help this scenario.

2 Beakers spoke a mixture of Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.   If Beakers came from the African Steppe, and particularly Southern Algeria and Morocco, then their IE may have already had a slight Afro-Asiatic substrate. [here]

3 Beakers spoke the very basal Italic and Celtic languages, both being sufficiently detached from further developments/refinements by seclusion in the African steppe, post SPR.