国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

40   THE SUCCESSIVE CULTURES AT ANAU.

of Mesopotamia and on the Nile, the moisture of the earth would perhaps have caused complete decay.

In his concluding chapter Dr. Schmidt gives some instances of the custom.

To these I may add that the Andamanese buried children under their houses, and the adults outside of the villages (Quatrefages, Les Pygmées). Mr. Jesse Benedict Carter has kindly given me the following notes from classical writers concerning the burial of children in Rome :

(I) Children who had not yet cut their teeth were buried, not burned (cf. Pliny, N. H., 7, 72, who says, " It is a custom in general practice that a human being who has not yet grown his teeth should not be cremated ; " and Juvenal, 15, 140, who speaks of a child buried in the earth, being too young for the funeral pyre).

(2) The early practice of burying children in the houses rests on Fulgentius (De princip. rerum, 7, 560) : " The bodies of children not yet 4o days old were buried under the eaves of the house."

There are three kinds of materials among the finds from this culture that

point to external relations. They are beads of turquoise, objects of copper, and others of lead. Specimens of all of these were found among burial gifts. The turquoise could come only from Persia, where it has been mined from remote times at points to the south and southeast of Anau. The source of the copper is undetermined, but there can be little doubt that it too, as well as the lead, came from some part of Central Asia. Analyses made in the laboratory of Professor Gooch, of Yale University, show no trace of tin. The presence of galena together with the lead indicates a certain knowledge of metallurgy among the people who produced the objects found. While fragments of copper implements occurred at a low level in the side of the kurgan where some doubt attached to their age, others occurred in well-authenticated positions in the upper layers of this culture, beginning 6 feet or more—i. e., several centuries—below its upper limit.

This earliest culture occupied the kurgan until this had reached a height

of 45 feet above its base. Its slowly accumulated strata are thin and closely compacted. And while there can be no doubt of the many centuries of the existence of this culture at this point, one can not help being impressed by its long persistence. One great mark of progress is recorded in its débris in the evidence of the domestication of animals accomplished by the inhabitants. The only other marked change that was noted is the absence, above the lowest 8 or ro feet, of a peculiar kind of excellently made and painted ware which Dr. Schmidt thought sufficient to characterize a separate culture, until he found that the lowest layers in North Kurgan west shaft i contained also the peculiar ware and decoration that characterizes the culture-strata from the base to 45 feet above it.

As far as we have read the record, this people, while themselves making

new acquisitions of culture, retained those which they brought with them with the unchanging persistence that would seem to presuppose a background of long perspective, during which they had assumed a traditional sacredness. We have in this an evidence of the insufficiency of time acting alone in overcoming the conservatism of tradition.