National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

already fully developed before the founding of the first settlement known to us
at Anau.

In which part of the world did its traditions—its chain of cultural evolution
originate? From what we know of prehistoric Europe we can now say without
much fear of contradiction, that while Transcaspia contributed wheat and barley
and the "turbary" domestic animals to neolithic Europe, it received nothing in
return until a very much later time. We may, I think, safely say that Africa
contributed none of those cultural elements that find their expression in the works
of man found in the earlier cultures at Anau.

While it is possible that the ancestors of these Anau-li came from Africa, any
such immigration must have entered Asia either before the glacial period, or during
one of the earlier interglacial epochs; that is, before the development of the paleo-
lithic flint-implement civilization, which has left the now desert wastes of northern
Africa, as well as Europe, covered with stone weapons of war and the chase.

We have, then, to do with cultural traditions native to Asia. If now we
search Asia for similarities of primitive cultures, we find only one point at which
archeological research has been pursued with sufficient system and purpose to
throw much light on the collective and comparative elements of civilizations. M.
De Morgan at Susa, and his assistants, Messieurs Gautier and Lampre, in the
neighboring Moussian district, have exposed several superimposed stages of cul-
tures antedating the time of Sargon of Accad. At Tepe Mohamed Djaffar—a
slight elevation in the Moussian district—they found an extensive flint-implement
workshop which had not been occupied since the stone age. In this they found
neither celts nor points of arrows or of lances, but immense quantities of flakes
in the forms of scrapers (racloirs) and elements of sickles. Nor did they, in all
their excavations in the Moussian district, find any points of arrows or of lances
of stone. Awls and drills were rare; percuteurs, saws, scrapers, and the little
blades to form the elements of sickles, like those of early Egypt, were everywhere
in great abundance. At Mohamed Djaffar these were associated with a thick,
hand-made, red, and often burnished pottery, some of which was decorated with
simple designs, either scratched in with a point or painted in lines of dark red.
The stage of transition from the stone age to the copper age is characterized by
thin, wheel-made, yellow or light-green pottery, ornamented with designs in brilliant
black with representations of human, animal, and vegetable forms. The pottery
of the copper age was wheel-made and decorated also with representations of
animals, painted in red and black. This successive order of similar cultures is
repeated in the lower culture-strata of the citadel of Susa. According to De
Morgan, all of these culture stages in Susiana preceded the "archaic" culture
which ended about 4000 B. C. (dating Sargon of Accad at 3800 B. C.), and during
which an Elamitic proto-cuneiform script appears for the first time in Susa.*