inor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gauls
in West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of the
Mountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have noted
already, than borderers of the Grassland itself. In particular, they are
all sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratory
Scythian cart-folk in the northern Grassland. The only nomad cart-folk
within the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies,[11] and they seem mainly to
have formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all,
the vast table-land of Persia.

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at present
is that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle to
break up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above all
more rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a man
can barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, except
in irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more,
and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But
it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it
was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of
the large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone,
or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The
presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and even
Egypt, had large cattle from very early times. North Syria seems to
dispute with Babylonia priority in the production of wheat. Somewhere
in this region we may provisionally place the cradle of what I may
perhaps describe as the Bread-and-Cheese culture, in which the staple
foods are provided by grain-plants and cattle, the latter being valued
for their strength and their milk products, but not primarily for their
flesh.

Disseminated westward, the Bread-and-Cheese culture is found to suffer
regional modification. Southward, among the Mediterranean evergreen
flora and old hoe-cultivation, the dearth of summer grass makes the
large cattle useless for milking, as well as for beef; they are bred
exclusively for draught, as their gait and structure show, and while
cheese is supplied by the sheep and goats, butter and animal-fats are
replaced by the vegetable oils, of which the olive is the chief, a
characteristic Mediterranean product, evergreen, deep-rooted against
summer drought, and fleshy-fruited. A