The Jade Axe

    I want you to take a massive step back into the past of Britain, before there was a Britain; before the Roman Empire; before the Greeks defeated the Persians at Thermopolis; even before the Egyptians build the great Pyramids at Giza. These islands were a remote appendage to the Euro-Asian continent, a minor geological entity of no importance. 10,000 years ago agriculture, that harbinger of civilization, had begun in the Fertile Crescent in modern day Iraq. Slowly it had spread its way north and south into what was to become Persia and down to the Nile valley in Egypt. Settlers, in search of fertile land, headed northwest to Eastern Europe. Over the next two millennia these intrepid pioneers worked their way across Europe until they were confronted with the narrow expanse of water that divided the mainland from the misty, mysterious island to the north inhabited by small bands of hunter-gatherers. Their arrival on the southern shores of present-day Kent was our ancestors’ first tentative steps on the road to civilisation.

    With farming came permanent settlements. Britain was covered with a great forest so the first thing they had to do was clear the land. This was done by burning and the employment of that most useful of tools, the stone axe. Farming enable the small communities to produce a surplus of food, which freed a minority of the people to engage in other pursuits – these were the people who built Stonehenge! Trade in the form of barter grew between villages and contact continued between island people and the Continent.

    Sometime around 6,000 years ago a single item of great beauty crossed from Europe and entered these islands – it was a simple axe head. Most axes were made of flint or, very occasionally, obsidian. This was made of JADE. It lay hidden until it popped out of the ground near Canterbury, Kent.

    Approximately 7 inches long and 2 inches wide at its mid-point, it represented an unimaginable amount of work and unprecedented skill. It would have been shaped by other stone implements, polished by rubbing on stone and then with sand, and, finally, constant rubbing with grease and vegetable oil. The result is a piece of art as beautiful as a Raphael Madonna and Child or a fresco by Michelangelo. For a piece of art it most certainly is. There is no indication that it was ever used or even fixed into a shaft. This was a highly valued item of ritual or status.

    The burning question is where did it come from? Jade can be found in China and in a few places in South and Central America. There is, however, one place, and only one place, closer to home where jade has been found. It was not until 2003 that two geologists, Pierre and Anne-Marie Pétrequin, after twelve years of searching, discovered, high in the Italian Alps, the prehistoric jade quarries. The jade exists in great boulders and pieces were worked off by setting fires to fracture small lumps off the original stone. Pieces of jade have a unique geological signature and it has been possible to not only to establish this as the source of the Canterbury axe but also to track down the very boulder from which it came! That boulder still exists!

    The jade axe would have been in the possession of a person of very high status, a tribal chief perhaps, and was probably buried with him to lay hidden for 6,000 years. It represents the earliest work of art to have been found in these islands of ours. Its simplicity of form is unsurpassed.

    You can see the axe above and at the British Museum.