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

Culture I.—Anau North Kurgan.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EARLIEST CULTURE.

No potters' wheel. They had hand-made painted ware, with only
geometrical designs.
No glazed ware nor glazed beads. They cultivated wheat and barley.
No burnt bricks. They had rectangular houses of air-dried bricks.
No handles to vessels. They made awls and straight-edged flakes of flint
No incrusted ware. and mace-heads of stone.
They had bone awls.
No gold or silver found. spindle-whorls.
No tin. some knowledge of copper and lead.
No celts. mealing-stones.
No arrow-points of stone or metal. turquoise beads.
No spear-points of stone or metal. only wild animals at first, out of which
No lapis lazuli found. were locally domesticated the long-
horned ox, the pig and horse, and
successively two breeds of sheep.
No representations of men, animals, or burials of children in contracted posi-
plants. tion in homes.
They hunted the following wild animals, proba-
No dog. bly all for food: ox, sheep, gazelle, deer,
No camel. horse, fox, wolf, boar.
No goat.

A horizontal section through the North Kurgan, taken at the level of the
plain, would have an area of less than 2 acres. This, however, does not at all
represent the size of the settlement at the time of its foundation; for the shaft
sunk about 330 feet west of the center of the kurgan went through culture-strata,
showing a breadth of at least 480 feet between this shaft and the east side of the
hill. No other shafts were sunk to show what extent of settlement lies buried
beneath the younger growth of alluvial sediments, but it would seem to have
occupied at least 5 acres, and possibly nearly 10.
In this settlement the inhabitants appear, from the beginning, as dwellers in
rectangular houses, built of air-dried uniform bricks. They were skilled in making
hand-made pottery, both coarse ware and finer for special uses. These potters
possessed already a definite stock of geometrical designs, which are analyzed by
Dr. Schmidt. The reader will see the forms of this pottery represented on plates 18
(figs. 1–6), 20 (fig. 1), and 21, while plates 22–30 inclusive and plate 31 (figs. 1 and 2)
exhibit practically the whole range of ornamental design possessed by the potters
of this culture. It would be interesting to know what range of designs they had,
if any, in woven stuffs or in basket work; for this is, I think, the oldest painted
ornamentation that has come to light out of buried antiquity. They had also
the art of spinning, for whorls abound from the lowest strata upward. The
abundant mealing-stones show that they ground a vegetable food.
But the most important fact, as we shall see in discussing its broader signifi-
cance, is that they cultivated cereals from the beginning, as is shown by Professor