RELATION OF ANAU CULTURES I AND II TO EARLY CHALDEA. 75
of which follows upon that of the other and lasts till September.* Further, at the time of the earliest culture at Anau, the Babylonian plain was still under the waters of the Persian Gulf.
There can be no doubt that the people who first subjected these rivers to their use had lived for generations on oases where the conditions, while less difficult, were still such as forced the development of the considerable engineering skill required in attacking this greater problem. This presupposes a long perspective of time, with perhaps several stages of migration in which Susiana may have been the last station on the way to the Euphrates, where the beginning of Babylonian culture may have been contemporaneous with the early life of the South Kurgan copper culture of Anau III. The relation of these cultures to the period and region of isolation from the outside world determines for them an origin eastward from Mesopotamia. The vast central region of the Iranian plateau is eliminated. There remain the long longitudinal depressions on the west, Sistan in the eastern half and northern Khorasan and the Transcaspian oases extending along the Kopet Dagh and into the embayments of the Oxus, Zerafshan, and Fergana on the north. It would seem that the region from which the culture possessing the characteristics common to early Anau and early Susiana radiated must have been in one of these directions.
We know that in the second culture of the North Kurgan the camel and lapis lazuli appeared, together with the dog and goat, and with new varieties of painted pottery. The lack of mention of one-humped camels in Babylonia or Assyria before Salmanesar II, in the ninth century B. c., strengthens the probability that our Anau camel came from the East ; and since the great source of lapis lazuli is in the Hindu-Kush mountains, its presence in Anau would seem to point to a westward drift of migration of a people whose culture was related to that of their predecessors of Anau, and to eastern Irania or Bactriana as the point we are seeking. So also should the fact that the Sumerians knew the lion only after their arrival on the Chaldean plains.f But even if this drift were from the east its starting-points may have been, like Anau and Susiana, points to which an earlier radiation had taken place after the beginning of agriculture and of settled life. For, there can be no doubt that the conditions which we find already existing at the very beginning of the first culture at Anau—settled town life, cultivation of the soil, and a developed potters' art and painted designs—required for their evolution a time-perspective which vanishes in as yet unpenetrated darkness.
As at a later period the natural economic possibilities of the Chaldean plains invited irresistibly the fusion of the surrounding peoples of different ethnic and linguistic stocks into the mold of Sumerian culture, so also it may not be improbable that at an earlier period and in eastern Irania, similar conditions had produced similar fusions from which the Sumerians branched off to the westward.
*Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens u. Assyriens, p. i 86.
1-This is shown by the absence of a Sumerian word for lion (Hommel). Now, while the lion exists in Mesopotamia and in southern Susiana on the one hand, and in India on the other, contrary to current statements it does not exist on the Persian plateau, nor in either Afghanistan, Baluchistan, or Turkestan (Blanford and O. St. John). Oppert (quoted by Elisée Reclus, in L'Homme et la Terre, p. 492) states that " the primitive pictographic signs recall objects belonging in a climate different from that of Chaldea—no lions or leopards; no one-humped camel, but the two-humped Bactrian; no vines or palms, but conifers." The fact that the one-humped camel first appears in the 9th century B. c., on the black obelisk of Salmanesar II, would seem to indicate a late domestication of the Arabian camel.
IIIF Color HighRes
