Although these would have been entirely military expeditions, after their
domination was established the men would have fetched their wives, children and
faithful retainers. Because the military forces must have come from far to the east,
where Indo-European languages were apparently widespread, I will suggest that
the militarizing of Transylvania, western Romania and eastern Hungary ca.
1600 BCmay have been the starting point for the Keltic, Italic and Germanic
subgroups of Indo-European, as well as for Albanian and for extinct but once-
important languages such as Venetic and Dacian.
Swords, spears and axes in southern Scandinavia
The trail of Apa swords and of other weapons leads out of the Carpathian basin,
rich in metals, to Denmark and southern Sweden. Although southern Scandinavia
had no metals, it was a primary source of amber. Baltic and North Sea amber had
been prized in northern Europe all through the Neolithic period, and ca. 1600 BC
it began to make its way to the Mediterranean and the Near East.
A military takeover ca. 1500 BCseems to have occurred in northern Germany,
Denmark and Sweden, but not on the Polish and Lithuanian-Latvian coasts of the
Baltic, where amber was at least as plentiful as along the Danish and Swedish
coasts. In all of Poland and Lithuania the only battle weapon dating so early as
the middle of the second millennium BCis a sword found recently in a tumulus
burial, at Gorzyca, a village on the Oder river that separates Poland from
Germany.^94 A map created by Helle Vandkilde, a specialist on the Nordic Bronze
Age, shows very clearly the swath of influences and imports leading from the
Carpathian basin to Denmark and southern Sweden, but not affecting the lands
along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic.^95
In contrast to the absence of weapons farther east, nine find-spots of the Apa
sword lie in northern Germany, Denmark and southern Sweden. A tenth find-spot
of Apa swords came to light in 1999, when treasure hunters at Nebra, in east-
central Germany, came upon two short swords in a hoard that contained the “Nebra
sky-disk” that quickly caught the world’s attention.^96 The hilting of the two
swords is very similar to that of the Apa swords. The Nebra hoard seems to have
been deposited early in the fifteenth century BC. Although six swords of the Apa-
Hajdúsámson type had earlier been found in southern Scandinavia (primarily in
Denmark) a sensational find in 1993 added eight more. These came from a hoard
discovered in a potato field near Dystrup, on a Jutland promontory into the
Kattegat sea.^97 Although in most Apa swords the blade and the hilt were cast
separately, in the Dystrup swords the blade and hilt were cast together. The earliest
Apa swords from Denmark seem to be contemporary with those from Nebra, and
on the chronology followed here would date from shortly before or shortly after
1500 BC.^98
The rapid spread of the Apa sword from Romania through Germany to
Denmark is remarkable, and must be taken into consideration in discussions of
the Indo-Europeanizing of southern Scandinavia. With stimuli from the Carpathian
basin the Nordic Bronze Age began in a “breakthrough,” as has now been argued
156 Militarism in temperate Europe