monuments
of this culture, in which hoe and ox-plough are equally conspicuous, are
the 'meraviglie' rock-carvings above Ventimiglia.[10] The fine flower of
it is the Minoan civilization of the Crete and the South Aegean.
Egyptian agriculture is also in great part hoe-work.

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in the
great plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different regime; vast
featureless and treeless grasslands, extending past the Black Sea and
Caspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs of
the Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all,
he must be master of tame animals which can eat the grass, and in turn
sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain
Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the
Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor'
of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies another
group of grasslands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable of
sustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round their
margins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations now
and then.

From the human point of view, the profound difference between the
northern and the southern group of these grasslands, which collectively
lie athwart the great east-and-west mountain zone of the Old World, is
this. The southern grassland sustains sheep and goats almost
exclusively; it acquired its domesticated horses recently (at earliest
about 2000 B.C.) and from the north-east; and it relies, for transport,
on camels and asses, not on wheeled vehicles. The northern, on the other
hand, has sufficient perennial pasture to permit of oxen; it uses horses
habitually; and it has utilized the timber of its parkland margin, where
it passes over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts and
ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization,
wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north
again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and
perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary
centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons
for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial
pasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsed
chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hittite chariot-users of
Asia M