Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass.
- Victor Hehn
- Date:
- 1891
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass. Source: Wellcome Collection.
471/530 page 471
![inhabitants of the lake-dwellings procured their flax-seeds from Southern Europe ”—the catch-fly being found as a weed among the remains of the flax. According to that, the Swiss cultivation of flax was derived from the Italian. The more developed we conceive the agriculture and fruit-culture of these lake-dwellers to have been, the lower we must place them in point of time. Let us bear in mind that the objects hauled up from the bottom of the lakes, however interest- ing the sight of them maybe, cannot prove anything chronologically ; and that all the guesses made as to the age of this culture have been founded, not on an examination of its remains, but on other, and often very airy, considerations and assumptions. If we were fortunate enough to find a Massaliote coin in the middle of one of these bundles of flax, or if some good fairy would confide to us a few words of the language of these pile-dwellers—such as their names for flax, wheat, plough, etc.—what a flash of light would suddenly dart into that dim world ! We should not wonder if it then turned out that these mys- terious primitive men, with their stone weapons and tools, were no other than the ancestors of the Helvetians, whom we have known so well since Caesar’s time, and that the higher culture of which we find traces among them was derived from the shores of the Mediter- ranean. Note 47, page 150. Movers (Phonizier, 2,3, 157) altogether groundlessly asserts that, “ hemp for ships’ ropes and sails, of the most excellent quality, was procured from Phoenicia.” This could at most be true of the Roman time, when the hemp of the Carian town Alabanda was also greatly valued. The expression a-n-apra for ships’ ropes, which occurs in a single passage in the Iliad 2, 135 : teal dr) dovpa a'tar]7re veu>v Kal cnrapra \s\vvtcil— leaves us in the dark as to what they were made of. If, however, we compare the kindred word <T7rvpig, Latin sfiorta, basket, it becomes credible that anaprov too was spun out of a kind of rush or broom. But the a-Kcipra ttvkvcl tarpappiva on the linen corslets of the Chalybes in Xenophon (Anab. 4, 7, 15) may have been of hempen stuff, as the Chalybes dwelt near those districts and nations where hemp first appears. Note 48, page 151. Besides the common European expression, the Slavs have also a peculiar word for hemp : Russian penka, Polish pienka, Czech. pe?iek, penka. They may have borrowed these, like so many other things, from the Scythians or Sarmatians, for we have in Persic and Afghan](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24874309_0471.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
