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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

by its special form as a bovine metacarpus, its dimensions are nearly the same
as those of the Apis bull of the ancient Egyptian tombs of Sakkara, of which there
is a skeleton in the Paris Museum, and are even greater than those of the recent
Indian wild bulls.

It is, therefore, evident that the bone did not belong to a horse, but to a bovine
animal, although it might be still doubtful whether it was of the "bubaline"
or the "taurine" form.

Another confirmation of the correctness of this view is found in the determina-
tion of the bones collected by Professor Pumpelly from the Komorof trench in
the North Kurgan,* during his previous visit to Anau in 1903. These were sent
to Professor Zittel, in Munich, for determination; and among them Zittel deter-
mined a small and well-preserved bone as a right scaphoid of Equus caballus
domesticus Linnæus. Mr. F. A. Lucas, an American zoologist, better versed in
recent comparative osteology than was the great German paleontologist, writes
on the bone another and more exact determination: "Not Equus but Bos, from
a large animal. We have no skeleton of water buffalo (Bos bubalus), but it is
probably this." It follows that we must first decide to which bovine form this
animal belongs, whether to a bubalus or a taurus species. To do this we must
first solve the question as to whether the bovid of the Anau kurgan was a wild
or a tame animal.

More prudence is now shown than formerly in the application of the charac-
teristics given by L. Rütimeyer in recognizing whether bones belong to a wild
or a tame animal.

I judge the Anau bovid in question to have been wild for the following reasons:
(1) because it was much larger than all the other domestic bovine animals, which
were found in great quantities in the higher layers of the Anau North Kurgan;
(2) because the structure of the bones is much heavier and harder than that of
bovine animals in domestication, whose bones are spongy and lighter; (3) because
the other species in the same layers belong undoubtedly to wild animals, and
because this large bovid seems to be wholly wanting in the higher layers of the
kurgan. These are my reasons, and I observe that in several recent publications
on subfossil bones the authors have been contented with only one of these reasons
in attributing bones to a wild or tame form of animal.

Assuming that this bovid was wild, we will inquire what wild bovids were
living in Turkestan or Northern Persia in prehistoric times. The first indications
are those furnished by the ancient Babylonians.

In earlier publications† I have established the fact that two wild bovine
animals lived in Babylonia, and that the language and writing of the Sumero-
Accadians, who are supposed to have immigrated from Iran or Northern Persia,
before these people united with the Semitic race, have only one word for wild
bull. The ideogram of bull was a two-horned bull's head, written ♀ = gud, in