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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

PREFACE.   XXXIII

support nomadic shepherd life, could not have begun until all of Central Asia had become peopled up to the limit of that capacity.

We may imagine the great area to have been by this time portioned out among peoples of varied racial origin and having different degrees of culture, varying from nomads in the arid regions to more or less settled pastoral peoples with elementary agriculture in the more favored lands north of the Black Sea. The waves of movement, beginning in the drier eastern region, should seem to have progressed outward, the central peoples pushing the next outer ones outward, and so on till the climatically favored peripheral regions, including Europe, were successively submerged by one migration after another, ending with the purely Turanian inroads of our era.

These migrations were destructive wherever they came in contact with cultures higher than their own.

The reader will see that in tracing back to Central Asia the source of the fundamental elements of western civilization, in finding the traces and cause of the inland sea, in discovering evidence of progressive desiccation (and in this the cause of the migrations that revolutionized the world), the dream has to this extent been realized.

On the other hand, as regards the Aryan problem, we have contributed only some fragments which may be useful in further speculation. The solution of the great problem awaits much more extended archeological, anthropological, and philological research.

Our indebtedness is indeed very great for aid and hospitality received

on this expedition, as it was in that of 1903. In England our ambassador, the Hon. Joseph H. Choate, smoothed the way through Turkey with a letter from, the Turkish ambassador. Prince Hilkof again placed at our disposal for the season a commodious private car. In St. Petersburg my plans were again generously furthered in many ways by Messrs. Tschernyscheff, Director, and Karpinski, Bogdanovitch, and Andrusof, members of the Imperial Geological Survey, while General Artamonof, of the General Staff, kindly aided me in getting War Office maps of Turkestan. I am under deep obligation to Count A. Bobrinski and Mr. Latichef, of the Imperial Archeological Commission, and Professor W. Radlof, President of the Central Committee for Central-Asiatic excavation, for the obtaining from the Government permission to excavate. Mr. Salemann kindly examined the few Uigur and Pehlevi inscriptions found at Merv, and to Mr. Markof we owe the important determination of the coins found at Merv.

In Tiflis the personnel of the expedition were delightfully entertained with dinners and a ball by the Georgian Prince and Princess Begtabegof. In Turkestan at Kraznovodsk we enjoyed again the hospitality of Colonel and Madame Volkovnikof. At Askhabad General Ussakofski, governor of