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MANY ages ago, in early Tertiary times, a great forest of conifers covered the bed of the present Baltic Sea. Their copious gummy exudations had the leisure of perhaps some hundreds of centuries to accumulate, and have in fact furnished the greater part of the amber brought into commerce from before the dawn of history until now. The value set on the commodity probably gave the first impulse to the establishment of systematic relations between the north and south of Europe; and supplied means for the diffusion, far up towards the Arctic circle, of many of the secrets of Mediterranean culture. Scandinavia exchanged her amber for bronze, and the improvements that the use of bronze implied and introduced. They travelled in opposite directions, one as the correlative of the other, from the mouth of the Elbe to the mouth of the Rhone,[403] the ever-ready Phœnicians carrying the prized Eocene product eastward. There, much inequality in its distribution was prescribed by variety of tastes. In Egypt and Assyria, it had no great vogue; it is not mentioned in the Bible; but it found a ready market among the younger communities by the Ægean, just then eagerly appropriating the elements and ornaments of civilisation. In the Odyssey, the crafty Phœnician traders who kidnapped Eumæus when a child in the island of Syriê, are represented as diverting attention from their plot by the chaffering sale of ‘a golden chain strung here and there with amber beads’; and ‘a golden chain of curious work, strung with amber beads, shining like the sun,’ was presented by the suitor Eurymachus to Penelope.[404] To critics of an earlier generation, it seemed indeed incredible that a material of such remote and exclusive origin should have been familiar in the Levant nine centuries before the Christian era. But recent experience has enforced, as well as qualified, the maxim _Ab Homero omne principium_[405]: enforced it, by frequent archæological verifications; qualified it, by the disclosure of a pre-Hellenic world, by no means completely reflected in the Homeric Epics.
Genthe, _Ueber den Etruskischen Tauschhandel nach dem Norden_, p. 102.
