纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 028巴斯伊于特酒壶（3）

Many of these objects must have been traded over the Alps; there are Greek pots and vessels, and lots of flagons made in the Etruscan cities of northern Italy. Unkind commentators might call the owners of the Basse Yutz Flagons the Iron Age 'nouveaux riche' - northerners looking to use Mediterranean design and taste to show off their own sophistication and aspirations. Is this where the myth of the divide between an uncouth Northern Europe and a cultured South begins? It's one many of us will still recognise, and I think it's one that over the centuries has done a great deal of damage. Here's Jonathan Meades, cultural commentator and food-writer:

"I don't think there's a single northern European identity more than there is a single southern European identity. However, there has been a marked bias - throughout western European history, that is, - towards the South. The North has looked south; the South has barely looked north, so there is an imbalance. This is largely occasioned by the paramountcy of classics - of Greek and Latin as languages, of Greek and Latin literature, of Greek and Roman architecture."

The bronze, the design and the craftsmanship of the flagons make a nonsense of the Greek myth of these northern Europeans as crude barbarians, and they tell us a great deal about the scope of their world. These people lived in small communities, but the material from which our flagons are made makes it clear that they had plenty of international contacts: for the source materials for making this bronze are copper from the Alps to the south, and the tin comes probably from Cornwall in the far west. Patterns on the base of the flagons are familiar to us from Brittany and the Balkans, while there are shapes inspired by palm fronds found in the art of Ancient Egypt. And then the very idea of a flagon itself is foreign - it's a popular shape created by people living in northern Italy. A feast with these flagons at the centre would leave the visitors to these new rulers in no doubt at all that the people they were visiting were sophisticated, international, cosmopolitan and rich.