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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

72   MIGRATIONS.

It does not seem probable that in the unfavorable part of the first climatic cycle indicated on plate 5, so soon after the establishment of the turbary breed of sheep, the development and expansion of shepherd-nomad populations had obtained to such an extent as to be sufficiently affected by the climatic conditions to cause migrations beyond the steppes of Asia.

We may perhaps assume, as a working hypothesis, that peoples of the hunter stage of life received during this period from the oases domestic animals and the elements of agriculture, and that it was not until within the fourth millennium B. c. that the renewed trend toward the arid extreme set in motion those movements of nomadic peoples which, during prehistoric and later times, were destined to sweep in successive waves as far as the Atlantic, and to profoundly affect the physical and social characteristics of the modern world.

In these outward driftings of peoples, the lines followed by the nomad migrants would necessarily be over the Eurasian steppes and to the north of the Black Sea.

The agriculturists of the oases would, under an equal necessity, move from oasis to oasis, conquering or going under. The routes thus affected were those that ended in Mesopotamia and in Asia Minor.

RELATION OF ANAU CULTURES I AND II TO EARLY BABYLONIA
AND SUSIANA.

Dr. Duerst identifies the long-horned ox of Babylonia with that of Anau. Therefore, unless we are prepared to assume both that the domestication of the ox was accomplished independently in different places, and also that at these different centers there existed the same wild forni—Bos namadicus—it follows that the domestication of this animal at Anau antedates its appearance in Babylonia, and that the first civilization of Anau is older than that stage of Babylonian culture in which the domesticated ox makes its appearance. And since the archaic linear form of script, which preceded the wedge-shaped cuneiform, had characters

derived from an earlier pictographic stage, both for a wild bovine   and for the

domestic ox   , this domestic animal must have been already known during the

pre-Semitic Sumerian civilization, that is, before the time of Sargon of Accad, who is usually dated at about 3800 B. C., or about 2800 B. C., according to Winckler and Meyer.

Thus in that remote time, long before Sargon of Accad, when the proto-cuneiform script was still in the pictographic stage, far away beyond the Iranian plateau, and about 500 miles north and 600 east of Babylonia, the people of Anau lived in cities, cultivated the principal cereals that were raised later on the Euphrates and on the Nile,* and bred cattle which they had domesticated out of the local wild forms, and which they had, directly or indirectly, transmitted to Chaldea. This settled agricultural civilization was, excepting cattle-breeding,

*No traces of cereal grains were found in tombs of the older, indigenous Egyptians. De Morgan, "Les Origines de l'Égypte."