48 THE SUCCESSIVE CULTURES AT ANAU.
west to have been received from some people who possessed it, and yet not far enough away to have been beyond the sphere of the primitive peculiar burial custom that was common to this part of Asia ; for I imagine that we must look upon the use of these votives as a custom engrafted on the older idea that underlay the practice of burying children in the contracted position, which simulates that which they occupied before birth. Our slight knowledge of the lower 4o feet of strata of this culture leaves it an open question whether the cult of this goddess was brought to Anau by this people at the time of immigration or adopted by them later. Several of our finds from the later part of the copper culture (Anau III) of the South Kurgan point more directly to relations with Susa than elsewhere. Since Dr. Schmidt's report was written in 1904 I was able in 1906 to examine M. De Morgan's large collection of finds from Susa and the Moussian district of Susiana which has been exposed in the Louvre and described in volume VIII of the Délégation en Perse. There is in these a general similarity in the forms of the tanged copper daggers, etc., to those from Anau and a copper sickle identical in shape with that from Anau III is shown among objects of the " Elamite period." In volume viii M. Jequier represents a winged and bird-headed lion differing but little from that on the three-faced seal from Anau III. It is from an impression on a tablet from the "Archaic" strata of Susa. Since these tablets are considered by Scheil to belong at least in the IV millennium (dating Sargon of Accad at 3800 B. C.) the conception may have belonged to the cult of the people then living in Susa. Susa had the cult of Ishtar (Winckler, 1905) and figurines of the goddess are found in culture-strata, from prearchaic time down, essentially like those from Anau III. Then, too, topographical conditions made Susa as directly and easily accessible as Babylonia.
The objects in question from Anau III belonged to the flourishing part of the copper culture and according to my chronology were about contemporaneous with the great expansion of the Elamite power when Susa was suzerain of Babylonia under Kutur Nahunte, 228o B. C. (Winckler), and when she is supposed by Winckler to have extended her rule far to the north and east.
Dr. Duerst, Dr. Schmidt, and I have approached the chronological side of the question from wholly different sides and without any intercommunication as to this part of the investigation. In his concluding chapter Dr. Schmidt, bringing to the study the knowledge of a comparative archeologist with extensive experience in the field, discusses several of the few finds that appear to show western relations. Among these he lays, naturally, particular stress upon the three-edged arrow-point found in the IV, or iron, culture, and the three-faced seal, and gives an exhaustive review of the literature relating to both classes of objects. As a result he is inclined to assign the arrow-point to the middle of the first millennium B. c., and the seal to a date not long after the middle of the second millennium B. c. The end of the copper culture (III) of the South Kurgan he wóuld place at about moo B. C., and the brilliant period of that culture in the second millennium.
When we come to consider the stages of culture preceding the iron period the finds are not available for western comparisons. Here Dr. Schmidt very naturally differs widely from me, without, however, intending to give any final
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