[Illustration: Beads from Bronze Age Barrows on Salisbury Plain
The large central bead and the small round ones are of amber; the long plain ones are of jet; and the long segmented or notched beads are of an opaque blue substance (faience).]
Dr. H. R. Hall, of the British Museum, who discovered, at Deir el-Bahari in Egypt, "thousands of blue glaze beads of the exact particular type of those found in Britain", says that they date back till "about 1500 B.C.". He noted the resemblance before Professor Sayce had written. "It is gratifying", he comments, "that the Professor agrees that the Devizes beads are undoubtedly Egyptian, as an important voice is thereby added to the consensus of opinion on the subject." Similar beads have been found in the "Middle Bronze Age in Crete and in Western Europe". Dr. Hall thinks the Egyptian beads may have reached Britain as early as "about 1400 B.C.".[79] We have thus provided for us an early date in British history, based on the well authenticated chronology of the Empire period of Ancient Egypt. Easterners, or traders in touch with Easterners, reached our shores carrying Egyptian beads shortly before or early in the fourteenth century B.C. At this time amber was being imported into the south of England from the Baltic, while jet was being carried from Whitby in Yorkshire.
[79] The _Journal of Egyptian Archæology_, Vol. I, part I, pp. 18-19.
After the introduction of bronze working in Western Europe the natives began to work and use metals. These could not have been Celts, for in the fourteenth century B.C. the Celts had not yet reached Western Europe.[80] The earliest searchers for metals who visited Britain must therefore have been the congeners of those who erected the megalithic monuments in the metal-yielding areas of Spain and Portugal and north-western France.
[80] It may be that Celtic chronology will have to be readjusted in the light of recent discoveries.
It would appear that the early Easterners exploited the virgin riches of Western Europe for a long period--perhaps for over a thousand years--and that, after their Spanish colonies were broken up by a bronze-using people from Central Europe, the knowledge of how to work metals spread among the natives. Overland trade routes were then opened up. At first these were controlled in Western Europe by the Iberians. In time the Celts swept westward and formed with the natives mixed communities of Celtiberians. The Easterners appear to have inaugurated a new era in Western European commerce after the introduction of iron working. They had colonies in the south and west of Europe and on the North African coast, and obtained supplies of metals, &c., by sea. They kept the sea-routes secret. British ores, &c., were carried to Spain and Carthage. After Pytheas visited Britain (see next chapter) the overland trade-route to Marseilles was opened up. Supplies of surface tin having become exhausted, tin-mines were opened in Cornwall. The trade of Britain then came under the control of Celtiberian and Celtic peoples, who had acquired their knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation from the Easterners and the mixed descendants of Eastern and Iberian peoples.