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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

It does not seem probable that in the unfavorable part of the first climatic
cycle indicated on plate 5, so soon after the establishment of the turbary breed
of sheep, the development and expansion of shepherd-nomad populations had
obtained to such an extent as to be sufficiently affected by the climatic conditions
to cause migrations beyond the steppes of Asia.

We may perhaps assume, as a working hypothesis, that peoples of the hunter
stage of life received during this period from the oases domestic animals and the
elements of agriculture, and that it was not until within the fourth millennium
B. C. that the renewed trend toward the arid extreme set in motion those move-
ments of nomadic peoples which, during prehistoric and later times, were destined
to sweep in successive waves as far as the Atlantic, and to profoundly affect the
physical and social characteristics of the modern world.

In these outward driftings of peoples, the lines followed by the nomad migrants
would necessarily be over the Eurasian steppes and to the north of the Black Sea.

The agriculturists of the oases would, under an equal necessity, move from
oasis to oasis, conquering or going under. The routes thus affected were those
that ended in Mesopotamia and in Asia Minor.

RELATION OF ANAU CULTURES I AND II TO EARLY BABYLONIA
AND SUSIANA.

Dr. Duerst identifies the long-horned ox of Babylonia with that of Anau.
Therefore, unless we are prepared to assume both that the domestication of the
ox was accomplished independently in different places, and also that at these
different centers there existed the same wild form—Bos namadicus—it follows
that the domestication of this animal at Anau antedates its appearance in Baby-
lonia, and that the first civilization of Anau is older than that stage of Babylonian
culture in which the domesticated ox makes its appearance. And since the archaic
linear form of script, which preceded the wedge-shaped cuneiform, had characters
derived from an earlier pictographic stage, both for a wild bovine ⊕ and for the
domestic ox ⊕, this domestic animal must have been already known during the
pre-Semitic Sumerian civilization, that is, before the time of Sargon of Accad,
who is usually dated at about 3800 B. C., or about 2800 B. C., according to Winckler
and Meyer.

Thus in that remote time, long before Sargon of Accad, when the proto-
cuneiform script was still in the pictographic stage, far away beyond the Iranian
plateau, and about 500 miles north and 600 east of Babylonia, the people of Anau
lived in cities, cultivated the principal cereals that were raised later on the
Euphrates and on the Nile,* and bred cattle which they had domesticated out of
the local wild forms, and which they had, directly or indirectly, transmitted to
Chaldea. This settled agricultural civilization was, excepting cattle-breeding,