by Farley Mowat
They are especially abundant from the Caspian Sea westward. The most notable concentrations occur in mountain country such as the Caucasus; the highlands of northwestern Iran and northeastern Turkey; the Balkans; the Alpine (originally Albin) massif; the Apennines (Alpes Poeninae); the Carpathians; France’s Massif Centrale; the highlands of the Iberian peninsula; the Cambrian massif in Wales; the English Pennines; and the mountains of northern Scotland.
The name was prominent in classical times, when several fullfledged countries bore some version of it. In addition to British Alba, these included the land of the Albii in the Alborz massif of northeastern Iran; Albania Superior and Albania Inferior in the Caucasus and Armenia; Olbia on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea; Alba in Romania; Elbistan in Turkey; the land of the Albicci in Liguria; Alba Longa in Italy; Alba and Albicet in Spain; and, of course, the Albania, which survives to this day in the Balkans.
The literal meaning and origin of alb remain obscure but, for reasons which will appear, I conclude it was closely associated with, if not the generic name of, the majority of the indigenes who inhabited Europe, Asia Minor, and probably also North Africa, until they were displaced from their lowland territories by largely Indo-European invasions. Thereafter it continued in use by those who survived in mountainous and other physically difficult regions where they were able to withstand the interlopers from the east.1
But who were these people who left their name all across Europe and beyond and who have now mostly vanished out of memory?
In those distant times when most of Europe was still blanketed by thick forests and inhabited by scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, some folk belonging to the mesolithic tradition had already begun domesticating wild animals.
Amongst them were people who had become adept at hunting sheep and goats in the original habitat of these creatures: mountain slopes and plateaus where forests would not grow but alpine pastures flourished.
It was a relatively easy step for them to evolve from hunting to herding. At least as early as ten thousand years ago, men had already begun following these sure-footed animals, not as hunters but as protectors. A symbiotic relationship developed whereby groups of people took it upon themselves to guard wild herds from attack by wolves, bears, and other predators. In exchange, the protectors took their pound of flesh.
In the spring these herdsmen-in-the-making followed retreating snowlines and ascending flocks to flower-fragrant meadows at high altitudes. During the winters they endured blizzards and subarctic conditions when necessary to fulfil their part of the bargain. Their relationship to wild sheep and goats would have been comparable to that of today’s Sami with their reindeer herds.
In 1991 climbers in the high Alps between Italy and Austria came across the freeze-dried body of a man melting out of glacial ice. The discovery of this Ice Man, as he was inevitably dubbed, became a nine-day wonder.
It was, in fact, a five-thousand-year-old wonder that began on an autumnal day around 3000 B.C. when a mountain herdsman climbed to a sheltered little col overlooking the vast panorama of the Alps. It was an ideal place from which to keep an eye on his clan’s sheep; watch for beasts of prey; and, if he was lucky, ambush a wary ibex, king of the wild goat tribe.
About thirty years old, standing five foot two in moccasin-like foot gear, he was lean, but strongly muscled; had long, wavy black hair, a curly beard, dark eyes and skin. He wore a knee-length deerskin jacket; deerskin leggings; and, over all, a long, thick cape woven of downward-pointing grass that would have been equally effective in shedding snow or rain. On his head was a conical bearskin hat.
He was outfitted for a prolonged stay. In a pouch at his waist he carried tinder and chunks of iron pyrites from which sparks could be struck. He had a fish net for taking trout from mountain streams; sinew and fine twine for snaring birds and small mammals; and birch-bark containers for milk—if he could catch a lactating ewe.
He also had a copper-bladed axe, a flint knife, and flint scrapers and drills. His chief weapon was a bow and a quiver full of arrows. The six-foot bow, of mountain yew, was not yet finished. Completing it would have been a task for the long hours when there was not much to do but watch the sheep.
The bow never was completed. One night the herdsman lay down with his cape spread over him—and did not rise again. What happened is unclear or, rather, how it happened is unclear. Perhaps an unseasonable blizzard burst over the high col that night and, before it ended, buried the herdsman to such a depth that he suffocated. Ice formed from that and succeeding snowfalls preserved his body through five millennia.
The life of mountain herdsmen was rigorously demanding. Most existing hillmen, of whom the Kurds and Iranian-Afghani are good examples, are tough, wiry, immensely enduring people of small-to-middle stature, with sharp features, black hair and eyes, and dark complexions. They are characterized by indomitable courage, fierce loyalties, and passionate allegiance to clan and country. They are almost certainly of Alban ancestry.
They have never submitted to outside authority. Lowlanders stigmatize them as intractable barbarians, wild hill dwellers snapping at the heels of civilization. Because they are natural people in a natural world, they do not take kindly to what we so fondly call civilization. However, their own systems of tight clan structures and deep-rooted connections with non-human animals have produced a culture that has sustained them through aeons that have seen the collapse and disappearance of one lowland civilization after another.
During the late autumn of 1966 I flew to Georgia in the USSR seeking a little warmth after spending six weeks travelling through a mostly frozen Siberia. I was welcomed in the capital city of Tiblisi by Givi Cheliz. A dark, slightly built, hawk-visaged man of my own age, Givi was an infantry survivor of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. He was also an authority on the ancient mountain races of this region, from one of which he was himself descended.
Givi had read some books of mine, about my own wartime experiences with the infantry in Italy, and about my travels in the Canadian North. Friendship was born between us and we nurtured it on new wines drawn from huge earthenware vats on local farms.
One day we set out into the Caucasus. With some hesitation Givi’s old Volga carried us to the village of Belokany on the slopes of Mount Dyultydag. The peak, towering to thirteen thousand feet, was clothed in tatters of storm cloud through which we caught glimpses of distant snowfields. The sun was setting and the whole of this world of titans was cloaked in purple and gold. We sat on an outcrop overlooking a dark and fathomless valley, and sipped wine from a leather flask while Givi told me stories about the mountain people. Stories such as this one.
During the summer of 1942, when the German armies were at the northwestern gates of the Caucasus, Givi was detailed to lead a patrol to investigate rumours that a gang of deserters had taken refuge in the labyrinth of colossal gulches surrounding Mount Elbrus (Givi pronounced it Albrus) which, at 18,500 feet, is the highest mountain in Europe.
It took several days for the patrol to penetrate into the interior, scrabbling up water courses, goat tracks, and scree slopes to get there. One evening they smelled the unmistakeable aroma of fires fuelled with goat dung. Following their noses, they came to a cleft in the mountains, at the bottom of which some small stone houses clustered. They descended with weapons at the ready—and found, not a gang of desperados, but five families of mountain people.
“They were Albkhazastani,” Givi explained; “among the oldest folk in the Caucasus. They didn’t speak Georgian or Russian, only their own tongue. Because I have Albkhazastan blood I also have a little of the language. So I found out they knew almost nothing about the most terrible war in history, except there was ‘trouble’ to the north.
“So I told them about the millions of German soldiers, tanks, and planes coming towards them right at that moment. They were not impressed. They cooked a splendid meal for us, roasting two whole sheep on big iron spits. All they wanted to talk about was sheep and goats.
“We spent the night, and when we left in the morning one old fellow walked a little way with us. He pointed north and assured me, ‘Nothing to worry about, my lad. If the folk you speak of come this way, we and the mountains will turn them back. We’ve always done that to those who bring us evil.’
“Da!” Givi concluded, taking a sip from the flask. “And they always will!”
By the time the agricultural revolution began turning lowland forest hunter-gatherers into farmers, highland people had been pastoralists for scores of generations. They had developed other talents as well. Perhaps because good herdsmen are so acutely attuned to the weather or, it may be, because they can bear physical adversity so well, they have always made good seamen. For whatever reasons, the Albans produced a number of seafaring offshoots. Amongst these were the Basques, Aquitainians, and Armoricans of northwestern Spain and the Bay of Biscay. Also to be included were the Alpuani of the southwestern Italian Alps and Liguria who sailed to and settled the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Elba (Alba). Still another maritime-oriented tribe spread from Scotland to all the northern and western islands of that Alba which eventually came to be known as Britain.
Albans were living in their ancient ways when, about 1500 B.C., an outpouring of migrant tribes burst into Europe from the east and southeast. These were the Indo-Europeans, the stock from which the majority of modern Europeans are descended.
By about 1200 B.C. most native lowlanders as far west as the Alps had been overrun and swamped. The invaders shattered the physical fabric of indigenous lowland societies, and smothered cultural identities, replacing native languages with their own. Before many centuries had passed, Indo-European tongues were almost the only ones to be heard in lowland Europe.
This was not so in mountain country or on many remote and rugged islands. Here some natives retained their language—and their freedom. There were notable exceptions. One was a tribe living on what are still called Colli Albani (Alban Hills), an isolated volcanic spur of the western Apennines. Surrounded by Indo-European invaders, these people eventually capitulated. The survivors were herded to the site of a new city being built by their captors and put to work as slaves. The city was Rome. The river flowing through it from the blue reaches of the Apennines had once been the Albula, home to a prophetic water nymph named Albunea. Now it became the Tiber, and the pastoral people who had long lived in the highlands at its headwaters vanished into the shadows. They were amongst the unlucky ones.
Others were more fortunate. In the seventh century B.C. Britain was still home to a Bronze Age society just entering the Iron Age, a society principally composed of lowland farmers and highland pastoralists, together with some tin and flint miners, coastal and island fishermen, and seafarers. Evidently they were a pacific folk for there is little evidence to indicate that warfare or serious internecine strife played much of a role in their lives. Although we do not certainly know what they called their island home, Carthaginian and Greek visitors knew it as Alba.
While British Albans went on about their age-old business, a new fury of Indo-Europeans swept into the western marches of Europe. Fairhaired, pale-skinned, and often blue-eyed, these were the people of Aryan lineage whom the Greeks called Keltoi.
The Keltoi were greatly feared—and with good reason. Ruled by a warrior caste, they were slavers and sometimes head hunters. They raised livestock (or their slaves did) but, in the main, Keltoi men, and some of their women too, lived by, and for, war. They exulted in it and were experts with the weaponry of their time, especially the war chariot. Nurtured on the Druidic religion, which promised a heroic and eternal afterlife to those who died in battle, the Keltoi, or Celts as we currently spell the name, were supremely effective human predators.
By as early as 600 B.C. Celtic war bands were nearing Europe’s western shores. They had experienced little difficulty in overrunning and subduing the native lowlanders of the interior but, near the coast, they met implacable resistance. Although one of their tribes, the Belgae, did succeed in breaking through to the sea, the indigenes south of the mouth of the Seine (whom the Greeks and Romans would call Armoricans) were able to hold their own.
These seafaring people withdrew into fortified enclaves on coastal headlands and islands, or in flooded estuaries. Possessors of big, powerful vessels, they were able to defend their sea-girt bastions from invaders who were essentially landsmen born and bred.
In defending themselves, the Armoricans were also protecting British Alba. But the Belgae, who had occupied the Low Countries to the north of the Seine, could see Alba across the narrow Strait of Dover. They began raiding the coast on the other side of the Channel, doubtless in captured vessels crewed by local men. By the fourth century B.C., they had a foothold in southeastern England.
First occupying capes and islands, the invaders eventually established deep bridgeheads from which they thrust boldly inland. Their weaponry was superlative. In addition to the fearsome Celtic war chariot, the Belgae were armed with iron swords, daggers, and iron-tipped spears, against which the defending Albans could generally pit only bronze, stone, and wood.
Prisoners taken by the Celts who were not massacred were frequently enslaved. Scottish historian Ian Grimble, quoting classical sources, writes that the Celts would barter a slave for a jar of wine, or even for a drink, as though slaves were too readily taken to be of much value. Grimble also notes that iron slave chains used for fastening victims together in batches have been excavated from a number of Celtic sites in Britain.2
No agreement exists as to the scope, nature, and timing of the Celtic invasion and occupation of Britain. What follows is my own reconstruction.
Where the terrain favoured their weapons and tactics, the Celts drove irresistibly forward. Only those natives who lived in, or who fled to, dense swamps, thick forests, or the highlands avoided being overwhelmed.
The Belgae seem to have made their primary bridgeheads along the coasts of what are now Sussex, Kent, and Essex. But by the mid-third century B.C., they, together with other Celtic invaders, had occupied most of lowland Alba south of Morecambe Bay on the west coast and Tynemouth on the east.
Lowland Alba, be it noted. The highlands of Wales, Cumbria, and the Pennines, together with most of the rugged Cornish peninsula, remained bastions of resistance. The autochthones of the Welsh, Pennine, and Cumbrian highlands were never entirely subdued, although, at a much later time when the Celts themselves became refugees from new invaders, Celts and their language inundated the high country.
Cornwall, which seems still to have been free of Celts at the time of Pytheas’s visit, may have held out until as late as the first century B.C. It was probably able to do so not just because of its difficult terrain, but because its people were supported by related Armorican tribes of Brittany, whose naval prowess the Celts were never able to match.
Ireland did not escape. By the end of the third or fourth century B.C. the Celts, having subdued the lowlands of central Britain, reached the shores of St. George’s Channel. Soon they began crossing over to raid the Irish coast. Land-taking followed, and in due course most of Ireland was occupied.
Northward advance of the Celts in England was slowed by the nature of the country. Britain’s interior grows more mountainous as the waist of the great island constricts. Celtic advances by land beyond the Morecambe Bay–Tynemouth line had to be made along ever-narrowing coastal corridors squeezed between highlands and the sea. And the highlands were held by Albans.
The Cumbrian Mountains crowd so close to the western ocean that northbound invaders would have been at constant risk of being attacked on their landward flank and driven into the sea. Some few seaborne Celtic raiders seem eventually to have bypassed the Cumbrian massif to establish a tenuous foothold on the shores of Solway Firth, but that appears to have been their high-water mark.
Map of Scotland.
The eastern invasion route north from Tynemouth was somewhat less formidable, at least in its southern reaches. Here the c
oastal plain was generally broad enough to have permitted war chariots to manoeuvre. However, highlands always loomed threateningly close, and these were held by men able and willing to make an enemy advance difficult and costly.
By about the middle of the second century B.C., the Celtic invasion had dragged to a halt somewhat to the south of the line of the Cheviot Hills, between Solway Firth on the Atlantic and the mouth of the River Tweed on the North Sea.
Much of British Alba was now no longer Alban. The Celtic influx had submerged most of Pytheas’s autochthones, excepting those who were ensconced in highland refuges. And except for those north of the Cheviot line.
Alba still survived in good order in the north. The mainland population of Scotland remained essentially what it had been for millennia: pastoral hillmen in the central and western regions and plainsmen in the east, but stockmen all, with flocks of long-legged sheep and herds of shaggy cattle as their principal terrestrial source of sustenance.
Life in the Northern and Western Islands also continued to unfold as of old. Although the climate had by then become too cool and wet to nurture many crops, the surrounding waters still thronged with fishes, seals, and whales. In season, flightless great auks abounded on offshore skerries, and bird cliffs were crowded with nesting murres, gannets, gulls, and fulmars. In spring and fall migrant ducks, geese, and swans filled freshwater lochs.
The Islanders continued voyaging to Tilli. Orkney traders carried valuta south to the Scillies and brought back foreign goods. Returning southern voyagers may sometimes have been accompanied by Armorican vessels from the Channel coast of France. The presence of the formidable Armorican ships would surely have been welcomed by the Islanders as additional defence against Celtic buccaneers in the Irish Sea.