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

Let us rest a moment and look back at this culture, whose top is marked
by skeletons and whose beginning is buried in the depths of the earth. We look
upon the ghost of a civilization that lasted through two millenniums of remote
time, older than the known cultures of Babylon and Egypt. We see already in
the beginning the busy village life, the women spinning, weaving, cultivating and
grinding grain on mealing-stones and baking bread in the bottomless bake-oven
pots. The potters are fashioning vessels, perhaps uttering incantations as they
place ring after ring of moist clay in position, while others are preparing the ochers
and deftly painting the long-inherited designs. Out on the plains men are culti-
vating the soil while others are hunting the wild cattle and horses with fire-
hardened arrows, pits, or lassos, and tracking the sheep in the mountains.

But even while we look, the centuries have flown by, and lo! the village
has grown high above the oasis. Far out on the plain men are herding cattle,
horses, and flocks of sheep, or tending droves of swine in the woods of the moun-
tain valleys. What we have seen in this view of a long-buried and long-forgotten
people is a true picture of what has never been seen before—the actual transition
of man from barbarism to civilization; we have seen the starting-point of our
domestic animals and the beginning of that control of man over the horse which
enabled him to revolutionize the ancient world.

Culture II.—Anau North Kurgan, Upper Culture.

No potters' wheel. They had hand-made painted ware, both monochrome
No handles to vessels. and geometric patterns.
No burnt bricks. bottomless bake-oven pots.
No glazed ware nor glazed beads. flint sickles and awls; mealing-stones.
maces.
No incrusted ware. slingstones.
No tin-bronze. copper pins.
lead.
No celts. rectangular houses of air-dried bricks, with
No arrow-points of stone or metal. pivotal door-stones.
No spear-points of stone or metal. turquoise beads.
No figures, human or animal. lapis-lazuli beads.
carnelian beads.
spindle-whorls.
No gold or silver found. contracted burials of children, in houses.
the domestic ox, both long and short-
horned, the pig and horse.
The domestic goat, camel, and dog appear, and a new
—hornless—breed of sheep.

Standing in Komorof's trench one can see the beginning of this culture, marked
by a well-defined horizontal line extending, at the level of 25 feet above the plain,
along the side of the trench entirely across the kurgan. Above the level thus
marked, the strata, while equally hard with those below, are, unlike these, honey-
combed by wind-carving on their exposed edges, a condition that may be due to
some difference in the manner of utilizing the clay in constructing the houses.
Our excavations showed that this level marks everywhere the end of culture I and
the base of culture II.