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186   THE ARCHEOI,OGICAL EXCAVATIONS IN ANAU.

the Homeric poets, one of them ( Il. v, 393 ; XI, 507) having called the bronze arrowheads rpty2, ,zry (cf. Helbig, Homer. Epos, 2d. ed., p. 341). On the other hand, this form is still unknown in the Mycenean sphere. For us, therefore, the three-edged arrow-point of Anau may indicate a post-Mycenean epoch. Here, too, iron appears for the first time. Among the other finds from the upper strata of the South Kurgan nothing is contradictory to the first half of the first millennium B. c. We may, therefore, date the culture IV approximately woo to 500 B. c. How far back we can go beyond the year 500 B. c. will doubtless appear when the next younger culture period in the city of Anau shall have been explored.

Naturally the upper limit is equally uncertain, for we do not know whether or not the occupation of the place continued uninterruptedly. Since the burial of child skeletons is lacking in the upper culture-strata of the South Kurgan, we should perhaps assume certain disturbances in the continuity of development. In any event, the round date woo B. C. must be set as the terminus ante quem for culture III, and on account of its long continuance we must imagine its brilliant period to have been in at least the second half of the II millennium B. C. This practically corresponds to the flourishing period of the Mycenean culture. Indeed the engraved stone points to an earlier time. The agreements with the .Egean sphere in this way find chronological support. How far back the beginning of the culture reaches we have naturally at present no means of determining.

The cultures of the North Kurgan must be still older. More exact determinations are not possible, since datable objects are wanting which might be compared with the finds of other spheres. For culture II, however, we obtain approximately the first half of the second millennium B. c. ; and for the oldest culture (I) 2000 B. c. as a rough date will certainly not be too high. We will have to imagine the beginnings of the settlement of Anau as having taken place in the III millennium B. C.

Generally speaking, therefore, the absolute chronology of the four culture epochs of prehistoric Anau stands still on a very weak basis ; but the finds hitherto made lead us to expect still better data for its further consideration.*

*In these conservatively suggested datings Dr. Schmidt is guided by the presence or absence of European and Mediterranean analogies among the finds, together perhaps with an unexpressed inclination to seek western origins for the cultures.

The reader who has examined the arguments stated in chapters iii, iv, and v will see that they are based—ist, on evidence advanced to show that the early cultures of Transcaspia were not only of Central-Asian origin, but that they contributed to the cultures of neolithic Europe and of early Babylonia; 2d, on the determination of a law of proximate uniformity of stratigraphie growth of city mounds in dry climates in the absence of the use of stone and burnt brick in construction, and on the determination of the rate of this growth in Anau checked by that in Egyptian mounds; 3d, on the finds, both the artificial objects studied by Dr. Schmidt and the bones of animals which supplied the material for the brilliant discoveries of Dr. Duerst; 4th, on the confirmatory evidence of cyclical climatic changes, which in turn are found to agree with Dr. Duerst's independent conclusions, based on the progressive changes in size, etc., of the domesticated animals.

But most of these elements of the argument could not have been established without the fundamental and scientifically planned work of Dr. Schmidt. It is to this that we owe the knowledge of the exact strati-graphic position of every artificial object and every bone, while to his knowledge of ceramics we owe the ability to use the fragments of pottery, as the geologist uses fossils, in determining the culture periods of the successive alluviations which mark the favorable parts of the climatic cycles.—R. P.