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

Mesopotamia, as one may easily perceive in comparing the long-horned cattle
of the Chaldean or Sumero-Accadian times with the Assyrian small, short-
horned and the modern loose and short-horned or hornless cattle. There is,
therefore, no reason for rejecting the assumption or hypothesis that the ox of
Anau, which about 7000 B. C. was undergoing this change of form finally reached
Central Europe, after its migration through Southern Russia and Eastern Europe,
in the stunted form of Bos taurus brachyceros. Nehring* and I† have already
treated of the development of such stunted forms through insufficient nourish-
ment, too early pairing in the free state, and the climatic influences on the desert,
as well as of the reverse process, i. e., the lengthening of hair and horns and increase
of bodily size under more favorable conditions.

After having treated of the outward migrations of the domesticated animals
of the culture-sphere of Turkestan, we may now touch briefly on the contributions
this sphere received from without. Leaving out of consideration Sus palustris,
whose provenience is, as already stated, not yet fully determined, we have, as first
importations, the shepherd-dog, about 5850 B. C., and in the middle of the same
millennium the camel, the goat, and possibly the hornless sheep. As has been
already stated under the respective headings, these importations point to Iran
and even to the Indian sphere as ancestral lands. The regions, which through
2000 years received the tame cattle from Turkestan, now reciprocated with the
domestic animals of their sphere of culture.

It is demonstrable that the shepherd-dog (Canis matris optimæ Jeitteles)
first appeared in Europe between 1500 and 1000 B. C., together with bronze, i. e.,
about 5000 or 6000 years later than the turbary sheep, turbary pig, and turbary
ox. Since this dog appeared at Anau about 5850 B. C., its provenience must
certainly have been outside of Europe and probably, as we have stated, within
the Indian sphere of culture.

We may here at last state briefly a closely related hypothesis concerning the
question of the origin of the Ox-cult. It is known that all peoples who possessed
and in part now possess the long-horned ox practised this cult. Among these we
naturally name foremost the Indians and Egyptians as well as the Babylonians
and Persians. The Assyrians also had the last remains of this cult, which they
had adopted, as appears in the massive schematic representations of the winged
sacred bull on their bas-reliefs. Especially highly developed is the Ox-cult among
the Egyptians and older Indians. As the Egyptians ranked both bulls and cows
among their gods, looking upon the Apis as an incarnation of Osiris, so the earlier
Indians in their sacred books attributed their whole state and their whole life to
the Ox.

May we not draw from this the inference that these religions had the same
ancestral home, and that the initial momentum of their rise lay in the precedent
of domestication? If it were true, as Salomon Reinach once said, "le culte précé-
dait la culture," there could no longer be any doubt as to the origin of the Ox-cult;