isolated hillocks; hence the name " Kirk Tepe," or the " Forty Hills." The inclosure inside the walls is practically level and contains but a small amount of pottery. What few potsherds there are consist partly of glazed ware. The resemblance to Ghiaur Kala lies in the fact that here, as in the great city, the northwestern wall is interrupted by an inner circular inclosure with higher walls—an inclosure which appears to have been built before the main walls were erected, as may be seen from the way in which the line of the large square is interrupted in the lower figure of plate 6o. Adjoining the walls of this acropolis are two small platforms, the sites, perhaps, of houses or palaces. In every respect Kirk Tepe seems to be a small and ephemeral imitation of Ghiaur Kala.
The dating of the primitive mounds is even more doubtful than that of the highly developed type. The great change and development that took place from the time of the earliest kurgans, with their unadorned pottery, to the time of the latest, with their glass and glaze, must indicate a considerable lapse of time, measured by many centuries. The most feasible means of dating the earlier ruins seems to lie in connecting them with the remains of other civilizations. At Yaz Tepe, the largest kurgan of the primitive type, three bits of pottery were found bearing a painted design, a sort of highly developed tent pattern, done in brown. The style of pottery and the style of ornament are both quite different from anything else found in the kurgans or in Ghiaur Kala, and the fragments seem like remnants preserved from an earlier time, or else stray bits imported from a distance. To an eye unskilled in ceramics, they appear to belong to the same type as the pottery of the oldest culture-stratum of the older village kurgan at Anau.
This raises the question of the relation between the people who quickly built the kurgans of sun-dried brick at Mery and elsewhere, and those who in neighboring regions slowly built the larger kurgans of ashes, bones, walls of houses, and other remnants of human occupation. At Mery both sorts of mounds have not been discovered. In the vicinity of Lutfabad and Kaaka, however, between Mery and Askhabad the writer noted that along the base of Kopet Dagh in the " atok " or " skirt " of the mountains of northern Persia, two sorts of kurgans exist side by side. The older and larger have very gentle slopes and rounded tops, and show no evidence of any special plan in their construction. They seem to be like those of Anau. The others are, on the whole, smaller, and, by their steeper sides, show that they are younger. Their flat tops and apparently square form show a distinct plan in their erection, and the hasty views obtained from passing railroad trains suggest that they belong to the same class as those at Merv.
Near Askhabad kurgans of the two types exist more clearly side by side. At Anau, it is needless to say, are the two large mounds of the old village type. Half a mile to the southeast of the center of Askhabad stands another smaller kurgan, flat-topped and rather steep-sided, while a mile or more to the east is a second of the same sort that appears flat-topped from below, but is really surmounted by a wall like Ersar Tepe (No. i 3) at Merv. These last two kurgans are square in plan and seem very much like the smaller kurgans at Merv. The exact relation of the various types of mounds can not be determined without extensive excavation.
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