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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

much progress in breaking up the continuity of the loess steppes, and to widen
the distance between habitable areas within the region thus isolated. The reac-
tion did not begin until the inflow of water became insufficient to maintain the
inland sea at its maximum of expansion. After this would come the change to
segregation of communities, first into larger groups of loosely connected units,
then the breaking up of these into smaller groups. Within the wider limits of
the region more or less intercourse could exist between the delta-oases on some
stretches along the piedmont belt, and often still more easily between those on
opposite sides of relatively low mountain ranges. The essential condition was
a sufficient frequency of springs or streams to permit travel on foot.

Under such conditions, continued through thousands of years, the related
peoples, becoming isolated in oases or oasis groups, or in high mountain valleys,
would differentiate, each evolving its own culture along lines influenced by
inherited traditions, environment, and racial character. The development would,
in general, on account of isolation, be peaceful, and, while alone and uninterrupted,
would lack the benefit of acquisition of the new factors that come with inter-
course with unrelated peoples. The growth of population on these restricted
areas was necessarily accompanied by evolution in social organization. We find
the people living in towns, where the long continuance of life under individual
town government, practically without external relations, while developing indi-
viduality, must have given the many separate peoples thus situated certain fun-
damental political characteristics common to all. In the same way, in so far as
the physical environment was similar, certain classes of customs, arts, and occu-
pations must have evolved along similar lines. In so far as the peoples of larger
or minor groups of oases differentiated from the same stock or from the same
language stock, their languages would retain traces of the original generalized
speech. All these are ethnographic data to be carefully searched for in sifting
and analyzing the results of future investigations.

But several data among our finds from this earliest Anau culture show
that more or less intercourse existed with other parts of the oasis-world. Tur-
quoise beads, used as burial gifts with the skeleton of a child, must have come
from Persia, where turquoise is known both to the south of Anau and farther
eastward on the plateau; the same inference is to be drawn from the presence of
copper.

We have at present no means of knowing how the earliest culture of the
settlements at Anau stands in relation to the generalized cultures of Central Asia
before the segregation into isolated communities, for there have been made no
other systematic excavations anywhere to discover traces of the older civilizations,
excepting in Susiana, southwest of the Iranian plateau, to which I shall refer
farther on. The constituents of the earliest culture found at Anau presuppose
a previous evolution during many thousand years. How slow it must have been
is shown by the almost unvarying character of the pottery during the two mil-
lenniums at the North Kurgan.

When we compare this culture with that which succeeded it (No. II) on the
same kurgan, we find both differences and points in common. Each has its own
peculiar technique in pottery and scheme of ornamentation in painted decoration.
The mace and artificially formed slingstones appear. But both cultures had in