LO-1 Blog

In LO-1 Gavin Lewis talks about the earliest Europeans and how they lived their long, warlike, nomadic lives. Even though these people were hunters and gatherers they still progressed just as fast as the Sumerians in the Fertile Crescent did. By c. 3500 B.C. people in West Europe were numerous enough to construct Megalithic Structures such as Stonehenge. Megaliths are massive rough cut stones used to construct monuments and tombs. Constructing Megalithic Structures is not an easy task it would take a lot of man power and skills. I found the same link that Cameron found on how Stonehenge was built and my question is, would the earliest Europeans have thought of that technology to make a pulley system on a ramp. These early Europeans were barbarians in the sense that they kept no written records had no towns or fixed structures of government. These people traveled around with tribes made up of their families friends and people with common interests as the rest of the group. These Indo-Europeans didn't define themselves as barbarians but were instead given the name by the Greeks who called them barbaros which meant "non-Greek". They were Indo-Europeans because their ancestors had descended from the steppes of southern Russia. They migrated from the steppes into Europe which is why they are called western. Western describes that they are in the west of the Eurasian continent that Greece was part of and they were west of the Fertile Crescent. This is an outdated map of the east and west empires, but it gets the point across.

The way that we describe barbarians in modern times is people who did not live normal lives that we do but instead roamed around causing trouble and sacking villages, much like outlaw biker gangs. They're big, hairy and cause trouble just like early barbarians.