nities. From these ancient centres of
civilization wholesale migrations must have been impelled from time to
time in consequence of the gradual encroachment of wind-distributed
sand and the increasing shortage of water. At Anau in Russian
Turkestan, where excavations were conducted by the Pumpelly
expedition, abundant traces were found of an archaic and forgotten
civilization reaching back to the Late Stone Age. The pottery is
decorated with geometric designs, and resembles somewhat other
Neolithic specimens found as far apart as Susa, the capital of ancient
Elam, on the borders of Babylonia, Boghaz Koei in Asia Minor, the seat
of Hittite administration, round the Black Sea to the north, and at
points in the southern regions of the Balkan Peninsula. It is
suggested that these various finds are scattered evidences of early
racial drifts from the Central Asian areas which were gradually being
rendered uninhabitable. Among the Copper Age artifacts at Anau are
clay votive statuettes resembling those which were used in Sumeria for
religious purposes. These, however, cannot be held to prove a racial
connection, but they are important in so far as they afford evidence
of early trade relations in a hitherto unsuspected direction, and the
long distances over which cultural influence extended before the dawn
of history. Further we cannot go. No inscriptions have yet been
discovered to render articulate this mysterious Central Asian
civilization, or to suggest the original source of early Sumerian
picture writing. Nor is it possible to confirm Mr. Pumpelly's view
that from the Anau district the Sumerians and Egyptians first obtained
barley and wheat, and some of their domesticated animals. If, as
Professor Elliot Smith believes, copper was first used by the Ancient
Egyptians, it may be, on the other hand, that a knowledge of this
metal reached Anau through Sumeria, and that the elements of the
earlier culture were derived from the same quarter by an indirect
route. The evidence obtainable in Egypt is of interest in this
connection. Large quantities of food have been taken from the stomachs
and intestines of sun-dried bodies which have lain in their
pre-Dynastic graves for over sixty centuries. This material has been
carefully examined, and has yielded, among other things, husks of
barley and millet, and fragments of mammalian bones, including those,
no doubt, of the domesticated sheep and goats and cattle painted on
the pottery.[1