Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 4.-5. 1963-1964 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1965)
Tanulmányok – Abhandlungen - Bóna István: The Peoples of Southern Origin of the Early Bronze Age in Hungary I–II. IV–V, 1963–64. p. 17–63. t. I–XVII.
not be attached to the diffusion of a unitary people, just as the unitary „Megalithic people" has been discarded long ago in connection with the Megalithic graves, rooted in similar imaginations and scattered all over the Atlantic coast. At the same time the appearance of tumulus burial 195 is doubtless the reflexion of social development. Let us look at the Egyptian pyramids, 196 the Majkop tumuli or the tholos graves of the Mediterranean, they are all the monuments of chiefs or clans, having attained a certain power. The tumuli of the steppe came to being on a certain economic and social basis: they were destined to immortalize the power of war chiefs, raising on account of the cattlebreeding ways of the herdsmen, organizing and assuring the defence of the animal stock, subjugating the neighbouring agricultural and other peoples, carving out an unequal large share of the booty. However, we cannot regard the people of the Somogyvár and the Schneckenberg groups as herdsmen, nor was cattle-breeding on a large scale a dominant feature of their life. Their economic background being entirely different from the mentioned ones, it is difficult to define their connections. According to our present knowledge no tumulus burials are known in Anatolia and South —Eastern Thracia before the first millennium В. C. One possibility would remain: we might connect the Somogyvár tumulus burial rite with the tholos burials appearing in Anatolia 197 and Greece in the third millennium already, this would be, however, more than uncertain. One may imagine that the rite was handed over at the time when southern and eastern peoples met in the Danubian region. However, this encounter did not mean the rule of eastern ethnical elements over the southern ones, just the intercourse between neighbour'ng groups having reached the stage of social development in which the power of chiefs served as a foundation for raising such memorials in course, of burials. 195 In the Megalithic (dolmen) cemeteries of Palestine and Transjordania, being the earliest in this species, we often find a tumulus built of stone or earth; this fact alludes to the evident principal identity of the two burial rites, since both are imitating the house of the dead. This Megalithic-tumulus burial may be followed to Early Bronze Age IV (to 2100) in Palestine. About this time the inner dolmens are supplanted by smaller stone rings, covered by tumuli. W. F. ALBRIGHT: op. cit. 63, 78. 196 In Egypt where the evolution of burial forms is by far the best illustrated in all the Ancient East, we find a number of tumulus burials in the centuries near the turn of te fourth and the third millennia, in the period of the First and the Second dynasties. Our types or the rite of Another essential proof for the origin of the Somogyvár group is furnished by the route of its extension, crossing South —Eastern Europe in a direction of SE — NW. As regards its impacts, the route extends as far as Central Germany where Aegean phenomena appear in verified finds later than in the areas more to the South. The same may be said of the Belotic —Bela Crkva —Bubanj —Glina Ш — Gyula— Schneckenberg group, containing the same elements; it is forked in the North, the typical Aegean elements (askoi etc.) alluding to the route S —N. 10. Economy, society, history On the basis of the present finds uniy a general characteristic can be given. The easily defensible mountain settlements may reveal a complex life of peasants, agriculture completed by cattle-breeding. The high standard of pottery bears out a settled agricultural population without doubt. Live-stock may be reconstructed by the mutton bones uncovered in some burial mounds. Both settlement and burial rite present the people of this group as warriors and conquerors, at least they were formed by circumstances in this trend. They not only vanquished the Pécel people, they also expelled it from the area inhabited by the same, a circumstance revealing a relatively large number and the intention to utilize the territory economically. The purpose of the mountain settlements might be imagined as the holding of the remaining Pécel population in check, in lack of connections, however, this is hardly probable. The might of chiefs, valiant in the battles fought for the conquest of the new country, became stronger,they rose over rest of society together with their families, even their female relatives were buried under large mounds. Beside tumulus burial the chieftains were distinguished also by bronze jewels and arms, the tokens of their rule and rank. the Southern Russian pit-grave tumuli are the nearest relatives of the graves of the poorer people in the first place. The skeleton contracted on its left side was deposited in a pit dug in the earth, simetimes lined with bricks, the pit was covered with beams, then a mound of cca 3 m diameter and cca 1 m height was erected above it, using also a stone ring or a stone setting. Also the fact suffers no doubt that the mounds of sand, then of brick, raised above the graves of the kings of the First and the Second dynasties, developped in a straight line to become the piramids of the Third dynasty. W. B. EMERY: Archaic Egypt. (Harmondsworth 1961) 137-147, Figs 82, 85 and 88. 197 S. LLOYD, op. cit. 96. 60
