borders and frontiers: Europe the islands of modern Japan as well, while people long inhabited the more arable valleys, the abundant mountains served to inhibit interaction and cooperation among tribes By the third century c.e small states had come into existence, but even the largest occupied only a loosely defi ned portion of the southernmost Japanese island, Kyushu The fi rst significant Japanese court did not appear until the sixth century c.e EUROPE BY KIRK H BEETZ Most of the territory of ancient Europe consisted of unsettled wild lands The practice of agriculture probably came to Europe from the Near East, passing through Anatolia in modern Turkey, the Balkans, and then north and west throughout Europe, ending in southern Sweden, with all the people farther to the north remaining hunter-gatherers By 4000 b.c.e almost all of Europe had adopted agricultural ways It was a period in which different cultures could mix with only rare conflicts Thus people could move among settlements in Europe with little hindrance This would continue to be the case until about 2500 b.c.e., but by then what is now called the megalithic culture had begun to change how Europeans regarded territory The culture that built the megaliths was probably the first to establish anything recognizable as a single group’s territory The word megalith means “large stone,” and the megalithic people built huge stone monuments such as Stonehenge in England In about 3000 b.c.e Europeans north and west of the Alps and all the way south through Portugal began building burial chambers constructed of stones that were often 13 feet in height These impressive burial chambers could have been built by large families or clans as ways to let other people know that they claimed the nearby territory and were showing their claim by burying their dead in a tomb that could be seen for miles By about 2000 b.c.e burial chambers for only one person were being built, indicating that a tomb was honoring a leader, perhaps a chief or a priest Other megalithic structures such as Stonehenge were being erected not only to mark burials but also for worship These building projects involved transporting stones weighing several tons for many miles, probably by boat along the Atlantic coast of the Continent and the west coast of Britain and both coasts of Ireland Planning and building such huge projects required the cooperation of hundreds of people over long periods and probably involved the cooperation of several villages, all part of a chiefdom that ruled over hundreds of square miles of land Such interaction suggests recognition that one group of people could own territories consisting of many villages In southern and eastern Spain ca 2340 b.c.e people began building fortresses Tin was mined in southern and eastern Spain, and tin was one of the two metals required for making bronze, the other being copper Of the two met- 145 als, tin was the harder to find, and merchants from the Near East would sail all the way to Spain to trade for it To protect their tin mines and themselves, the peoples of the region built walls and towers of stone These structures meant that they were claiming territories for themselves In the 600s b.c.e Carthage, a city on the coast of North Africa southwest of the island of Sicily, began conquering the southern coast of modern Spain By 264 b.c.e the Carthaginians controlled almost all of Spain’s trade in tin From 237 to 218 b.c.e they conquered the land north, beyond the Guadalquiver River in southern Spain and along Spain’s east coast to the Ebro River, displacing Celtic tribes On the east coast in 218 b.c.e they conquered the town of Saguntum, an ally of Rome, and this conquest started the Second Punic War (218–201 b.c.e.) between Carthage and Rome When Rome invaded Spain, the Romans found two kinds of Celtic peoples: one still in the process of shift ing from nomadic lives to living in towns and cities and the other living settled urban lives in Carthaginian territory At the end of the war, Rome made its newly won Spanish territory into the province Hispania, using the Pyrenees mountain range as its northern border North of that border was Gaul, which was populated by Celts Celt is the name given to the majority of Europeans by the Greeks; the Romans called them Gauls Anyone speaking one of the Celtic languages is called a Celt (pronounced “Kelt”) The Celts originated in either central Asia or central Europe They were a violent people ruled by warriors Individual Celtic tribes often held ill-defined territories in which farmers worked to serve the warriors Other tribes packed everything they owned onto large carts pulled by horses and traveled across the land They routinely waged war against each other and raided territories for loot and slaves In 390 b.c.e Celts raided Italy and sacked the city of Rome When Julius Caesar (100–44 b.c.e.) set out to conquer Gaul in 58 b.c.e., Rome already controlled portions of the region in modern-day southern France and northern Italy, with borders through the Alps and along the headwaters of several southern rivers In central France, Caesar found many Celts living in towns and cities made of wood, and there were some small kingdoms with ill-defined frontiers To defy Rome, in 52 b.c.e some of these kingdoms united under one of the kings, Vercingetorix—perhaps the first time they had thought of themselves as one people; however, they were defeated at the town of Alesia In the north, near the Rhine River, Celtic tribes still tended to be nomadic, organizing themselves around the carts that carried their possessions when they traveled To Caesar, the Rhine was a natural border To the north of the river lived another ethnic group of people, the Germans Caesar believed that the Germans were migrating into northern Europe from Asia Some historians contend that the Germanic peoples developed within Europe, perhaps in modern-day Poland, but in general they have much in common with ancient central Asian tribes They were territorial, and they had small realms