DOI Artikel:
Rykwert, Joseph: Materia and cosmos
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14574#0020
16
JOSEPH RYKWERT
an adze1. Hard stone axes were polished and increasingly refined; in later times they became so sophisticated
that some historians have suggested that they were currency units rather than weapons or carpentry tools.
Metal axes came with horsemen from the east and with merchants across the mountains from the south.
Copper and then bronze ones appeared in the second millennium, so that metal gradually displaced the
cheaper and common, pervasive stone. Polished stone axes sometimes even imitated the more precious
bronze ones - a conspicuous instance of stoffwechsel - as the millennium of bronze gave way gradually to
iron2. The iron axe has been the main wood-working tool in the old world since its first introduction until
the arrivai of the steel one in very modem times.
Wood framing, timber reinforcement, half timbering of every kind was practiced ail over the Old World
and building with axe-cut wood was common enough in classical - Greek and Roman - antiquity: the laws
of Sparta even forbade the use of saws and squared timber in construction3. The Northern Slavs developed
a particular skill, building with crossed tree-trunks into a great art, even though the people who first devised
thèse timber building techniques on the Eastern European plain may not have been Slavs at ail.
During the bronze and early iron - Hallstatt - âge, the people archeologists call Lusatian occupied the
plain of the Vistula. They are variously said to have been Celts, proto-Germans, Illyro-Venetii who belong
to the Balkan Indo-European linguistic ethné - though some few do maintain that they were proto-Slavs.
The ethnicity and linguistic alliances and their relation to archeological finds is still keenly debated and I am
not in a position to take a stand on such matters4. It is elear that the region traded widely: its mined salt was
exported, and its unique resources, a fossilized pine resin now called amber, was already traded throughout
the Mediterranean in the latter neolithic period. One of the largest pièces of it to date was found in the Palace
of Nimrud: a statue of King Assurnasirpal II (885-860 ВС) of Assyria5.
The exporters of amber, the early farmers on the plain between the Elbe and the Bug, built - as did
much of the old world - first in platted withies reinforced with upright pôles, though by the beginning of
the Halstatt period, in late neolithic times, walling was done with logs, crossing the tree-trunks and jointing
corners; this technique, still in use, almost imposed an orthogonal construction. Inevitably, the progress of
this kind of building is obscure: timber rots and burns, and rotted wood makes excellent manure - where
stone and brick remain. But where it does survive, organie materiał carries much more information than
inorganic. We can therefore learn much more about the very few surviving timber builders than about
contemporary stone ones. Certainly, whoever they were, the Lusatians built their monuments in wood.
We know little about Slav origins. However, sometime in the first half of the first millennium AD.
Lusatian territories certainly become the home of various West-Slavonic peoples, sometimes collectively
called "Vends", using the word the Germans applied quite generally to Slavonic speakers6. It is generally
1 On the specialization of the axe from the gênerai paleolithic cutting-tool and its development, see A. Leroi-Gourhan.
Le geste et la parole, Paris 1965, vol. II, pp. 121 ff.; i de m, Milieu et techniques, Paris 1973, pp. 43 ff.
2 As, for instance, the jadeite axe-heads found at Borodino in South Russia; S. P i g g o 11. Ancient Europe, Edinburgh 1965,
pp. 129 ff.
3 Lykurgus. the Spartan lawgiver of mythical famé left two commands - for which Delphic authority was claimed - the Great
and the Small Rhetra. The best sources are late: Plutarch's life of Lykurgus, the Apophthegmeta Lakedemoniae and his essay "Of
the eating of meat". See also the quip of King Agesilaos II of Sparta, on military campaign in Ionia, who looked up at the roof of
a hall in which he was being entertained and asked his hosts if the trees in their country grew square (Apophth. Lyc 210 d. 227 c).
4 On the disputed ethnicity of the Lusatian civilization see K. Jażdżewski. Pradzieje Europy Środkowej. Wrocław etc.
1981, pp. 355 ff., 421 ff. On its linguistic constitution - pp. 554 ff. Lusatia. put to the West of the Silesia, centered on Bautzen, was
named after a Slavonic-speaking "nation" the Lusitii, conquered by King Henry the Fowler in the tenth century ВС.
5 The statue is in the Muséum of Fine Arts, Boston. The power of attracting organie matter, analogous to that of the magnet
- as Thaïes of Miletus had observed (Diogenes Laertios Vitae Phil. I, 24) - is a well-known characteristic of the fossilized tree-resin
which the ancients called лДектроу, electrum; the same name as the alloy of gold and silver - suggesting brightness, shine. From
which William Gilbert coined the term electrica in his De magnete (1600). "Amber" seems to have entered European languages
through Spanish ambra, of Arabie origin. The Polish bursztyn comes from the German Brennstein - other Slavonic names for it go
back to the Lithuanian gentaras. The most éloquent witness to the popularity of amber is the dense concentration of Roman coins
found on the Baltic coast round Królewiec/Konigsberg/Kaliningrad; A. S p e k k e, The Ancient Amber Routes and the Geograplucal
Discovery of the Eastern Baltic, Stockholm 1957, pp. 54 ff.
6Pliny the Elder {Historia naturalis IV, 13) has the Vistula plain inhabited by the Sarmatii, Venedi. Sciri and Hirri. Modern
Wends are the islands of Slavonic speakers in Germany: the Polabs in Hannover and the Sorbs - which last call themselves Serbi
or Luzići and have Bautzen in Saxony as their capital.
JOSEPH RYKWERT
an adze1. Hard stone axes were polished and increasingly refined; in later times they became so sophisticated
that some historians have suggested that they were currency units rather than weapons or carpentry tools.
Metal axes came with horsemen from the east and with merchants across the mountains from the south.
Copper and then bronze ones appeared in the second millennium, so that metal gradually displaced the
cheaper and common, pervasive stone. Polished stone axes sometimes even imitated the more precious
bronze ones - a conspicuous instance of stoffwechsel - as the millennium of bronze gave way gradually to
iron2. The iron axe has been the main wood-working tool in the old world since its first introduction until
the arrivai of the steel one in very modem times.
Wood framing, timber reinforcement, half timbering of every kind was practiced ail over the Old World
and building with axe-cut wood was common enough in classical - Greek and Roman - antiquity: the laws
of Sparta even forbade the use of saws and squared timber in construction3. The Northern Slavs developed
a particular skill, building with crossed tree-trunks into a great art, even though the people who first devised
thèse timber building techniques on the Eastern European plain may not have been Slavs at ail.
During the bronze and early iron - Hallstatt - âge, the people archeologists call Lusatian occupied the
plain of the Vistula. They are variously said to have been Celts, proto-Germans, Illyro-Venetii who belong
to the Balkan Indo-European linguistic ethné - though some few do maintain that they were proto-Slavs.
The ethnicity and linguistic alliances and their relation to archeological finds is still keenly debated and I am
not in a position to take a stand on such matters4. It is elear that the region traded widely: its mined salt was
exported, and its unique resources, a fossilized pine resin now called amber, was already traded throughout
the Mediterranean in the latter neolithic period. One of the largest pièces of it to date was found in the Palace
of Nimrud: a statue of King Assurnasirpal II (885-860 ВС) of Assyria5.
The exporters of amber, the early farmers on the plain between the Elbe and the Bug, built - as did
much of the old world - first in platted withies reinforced with upright pôles, though by the beginning of
the Halstatt period, in late neolithic times, walling was done with logs, crossing the tree-trunks and jointing
corners; this technique, still in use, almost imposed an orthogonal construction. Inevitably, the progress of
this kind of building is obscure: timber rots and burns, and rotted wood makes excellent manure - where
stone and brick remain. But where it does survive, organie materiał carries much more information than
inorganic. We can therefore learn much more about the very few surviving timber builders than about
contemporary stone ones. Certainly, whoever they were, the Lusatians built their monuments in wood.
We know little about Slav origins. However, sometime in the first half of the first millennium AD.
Lusatian territories certainly become the home of various West-Slavonic peoples, sometimes collectively
called "Vends", using the word the Germans applied quite generally to Slavonic speakers6. It is generally
1 On the specialization of the axe from the gênerai paleolithic cutting-tool and its development, see A. Leroi-Gourhan.
Le geste et la parole, Paris 1965, vol. II, pp. 121 ff.; i de m, Milieu et techniques, Paris 1973, pp. 43 ff.
2 As, for instance, the jadeite axe-heads found at Borodino in South Russia; S. P i g g o 11. Ancient Europe, Edinburgh 1965,
pp. 129 ff.
3 Lykurgus. the Spartan lawgiver of mythical famé left two commands - for which Delphic authority was claimed - the Great
and the Small Rhetra. The best sources are late: Plutarch's life of Lykurgus, the Apophthegmeta Lakedemoniae and his essay "Of
the eating of meat". See also the quip of King Agesilaos II of Sparta, on military campaign in Ionia, who looked up at the roof of
a hall in which he was being entertained and asked his hosts if the trees in their country grew square (Apophth. Lyc 210 d. 227 c).
4 On the disputed ethnicity of the Lusatian civilization see K. Jażdżewski. Pradzieje Europy Środkowej. Wrocław etc.
1981, pp. 355 ff., 421 ff. On its linguistic constitution - pp. 554 ff. Lusatia. put to the West of the Silesia, centered on Bautzen, was
named after a Slavonic-speaking "nation" the Lusitii, conquered by King Henry the Fowler in the tenth century ВС.
5 The statue is in the Muséum of Fine Arts, Boston. The power of attracting organie matter, analogous to that of the magnet
- as Thaïes of Miletus had observed (Diogenes Laertios Vitae Phil. I, 24) - is a well-known characteristic of the fossilized tree-resin
which the ancients called лДектроу, electrum; the same name as the alloy of gold and silver - suggesting brightness, shine. From
which William Gilbert coined the term electrica in his De magnete (1600). "Amber" seems to have entered European languages
through Spanish ambra, of Arabie origin. The Polish bursztyn comes from the German Brennstein - other Slavonic names for it go
back to the Lithuanian gentaras. The most éloquent witness to the popularity of amber is the dense concentration of Roman coins
found on the Baltic coast round Królewiec/Konigsberg/Kaliningrad; A. S p e k k e, The Ancient Amber Routes and the Geograplucal
Discovery of the Eastern Baltic, Stockholm 1957, pp. 54 ff.
6Pliny the Elder {Historia naturalis IV, 13) has the Vistula plain inhabited by the Sarmatii, Venedi. Sciri and Hirri. Modern
Wends are the islands of Slavonic speakers in Germany: the Polabs in Hannover and the Sorbs - which last call themselves Serbi
or Luzići and have Bautzen in Saxony as their capital.