ORIENTAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE LIBRARY
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THE
CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY
EDITED BY
J. B. BURY, M.A., F.B.A. S. A. COOK, LITT.D. F. E. ADCOCK, M.A.
4448
VOLUME I
EGYPT AND BABYLONIA
TO 1580 B.C.
SECOND EDITION
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1928
FIRST EDITION 1923 SECOND EDITION 1924 .J REPRINTED 1928
|fi!W^l>r* V&M8Y
4 v
~ '••- «'•*""
3PJRINTEI) IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Cambridge Ancient History is designed as the first part JL of a continuous history of European peoples. The last part, the Cambridge Modern History^ has long since been complete, and the middle section, the Cambridge Medieval History^ is in course of publication, Starting with the remote and dim beginnings, upoh which some new rays of light fall every year, the Ancient History will go down to the victory of Constantine the Great in A»D. 324, the point at which the Medieval lakes up the story,
-The history of Europe begins outside Europe* Its civilization is so deeply indebted to the older civilizations of Egypt and south-western Asia that for the study of its growth the early history of those lands is more important than the barbarous life which Celts, Germans, and others lived within the limits of Europe* Europeans, who wish to follow the history of their own development from its origins, must first of all become acquainted with the civilizations of Egyptian, Sumerian, Hittite, Semitic and other peoples of north-eastern Africa and south-western Asia, and therefore our first volume is concerned mainly with these peoples,
Behind the civilizations of Babylon and Egypt lies a vast and still little known tract of time during which man was gradually toiling up towards that relatively high stage of civilization he had reached when he first appears to us in his written records* The discoveries which have rewarded the geologists, geographers, *md anthropologists of the last few decades have made it feasible to attempt a reconstruction of the story of man in Europe and its environs throughout those prehistoric millenniums. The story of the land-masses prior to the formation of the present con- tinental system can in some measure be written down and its significance apprehended. It is not out of place to recall -that the written history of one of the peoples of Palestine, which represents only the unscientific ideas of an Dearly age, was up to very recent 1|mes thought by learned tfaejx to furnish an authentic account of the beginnings of the earth and the 'human race, £
To-day a large though scattered mass of geological and archado^ logical facts supplies us with a little genuine knowledge p^Sit our ancestors were doing and making at a time wheii; ift£a and water and climate differed appreciably from what th^^te how, a time long anterior to that once commonly thougfit to be the date
VI
PREFACE
of the creation of the universe itself. To ignore what is now known, little as it is and precarious as it may be, about palae^- lithic and early neolithic man, would be indefensible in a work which aims at explaining how Europe came to be what it is to-day. The activities of the palaeolithic age have helped to build modern Europe, and its effects persist; individuals of 'Ami- gnacian' descent, physically true to type, are among us stilL The first two chapters of this volume, by Professor Myres, show how the story of primitive man may be read by his latest descendants, and how the darkness before the 'dawn of history* may be illuminated by a brilliant interpreter.
Chapter m, on the history of Exploration and Excavation, is designed to give the reader some notion of the arduous, qjid some- times romantic, work of a century which has revolutionized cmr knowledge of the Near East, In an account, necessarily brief, of archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, the Hittite and Aegean areas, and Cyprus, the writer, Professor Macalister, shows how archaeological data have been classified and interrogated, and how unknown scripts have been deciphered and forgotten languages recovered.
It seemed desirable to state the fundamental chronological problems which face the historian in regard to the early history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine, and Greece; to show how archaeological and historical evidence have been co-ordinated; and in the case of conflicting systems of chronology to explain which has been adopted and why. Chapter iv will help the reader who is not familiar with prehistoric research to understand how it has been possible to frame a definite chronological scheme, especially when the data, as in the case of Crete, are purely archaeological,
Thus the first four chapters are preliminary. In chapter v Dr S. A* Cook gives a general account of the Semitic area, famous as a stepping-stone between three continents and as the home of three great religions. This chapter is a prelude to the later history of the Semites* It describes generally the mind of the Semite as revealed in his beliefs and practices, in his history and his treat- ment of history, while it tells what is known about the early history of Syria and Palestine down to the close of the Hyks<y period, circa 1580 B.C., the lower limit of this volume,
In the four chapters (vi to ix) devoted to Egypt, Professor Peet treats the early predynastic age on the basis or the archaeo- logical evidence, and describes Egyptian life and thought under the Old and Middle Kingdoms (chapters vi> ix), while the his- torical events, and the historical sources, the administration and
PREFACE
vn
the social conditions., of these two kingdoms, are dealt with by Dr H, R. Hall (chapters vn and vm).
Three chapters (x to xn) on the earlier period of Babylonian history, by Professor Langdon, include an account of the interest- ing culture of ancient Susa and a discussion of the problem of the Sumerian invaders, and portray the history of the notable con- querors Sargon and Naram-Sin, in what may be called the Golden Age of the Sumerians. Mr Campbell Thompson (chapters xin to xv) continues the story, and also contributes a full description of the Golden Age of the Semitic Babylonians — the age of Hammurabi and his Code of Laws, the discovery of which (in the winter of 1901—2) threw a brilliant light on the character of society in that part of the Near East, four thousand years ago.
* Ifi the chapter (xvi) on early Egyptian and Babylonian Art Dr HalPs wide knowledge of ancient art and his familiarity with the collections in the British Museum have enabled him to illustrate the aesthetic temperaments of the peoples concerned, to discriminate the periods of artistic freshness and decline, and to throw light on the difficult problems of borrowing and foreign influence. The Editors regret that it was impossible to provide illustrative plates without unduly increasing the price of the volume; but in the Bibliography to this chapter the reader will find references to illustrated books.
Finally, Mr Wace has contributed the chapter on the early civilization of Aegean lands. Thirty years ago the chapter would have been a blank, because there was absolutely nothing to say. One of the finest triumphs of archaeological research has Jbeen the discovery in Crete of a wonderful and unsxispected civilization in contact with Egypt and Asia. This ancient meeting of ea$ft and west offers problems which unite the classical and the Sepiitic scholar, the Egyptologist and the student of 'Bible-lands/ \
Our first volume, then, while it contains a survey of the &arly history of a large network of inter-related lands, down to the occupation of Egypt by the Hyksos and of Babylonia by the Kassites (events which may perhaps be associated with sweeping movements in Indo-European lands to the north), may also be Regarded as a general introduction to those that will follow it. In the next volume a new age opens up, an age characterized by what we may perhaps call internationalism : Greeks whose names were well remembered in Greek records will come upon the $tage and the curtain will rise upon Old Testament history.
Any exposition of the history of early ages down to 3000 years ago and even beyond, must be in a very hig|i degree provisional*
viii PREFACE
This is due to the fortunate circumstance that new evidence is continually and rapidly accumulating- Conclusions historians draw to-day from the records at their disposal about Babylonia", Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Aegean may be upset, corrected, amplified, or transformed by a new discovery to-morrow. Since the writing of this volume was begun, writers who had completed their contributions have seen cause to change some of their state- ments in the light of new evidence which happened to be revealed in the meantime. Obviously there is a limit to this and experts must not expect to find a reference in every case to the npwyettes de Ijt^derniere heure* Even as we are writing, Sir Arthur El^ans publishes the news that his latest excavations at Cnossus (the spring of 1922) have disclosed the fact that the end of the second phase of the c Middle Minoan ' civilization was due to lin efrtih- quake. We may note that this disaster was not contempor- aneous with the volcanic eruption which wrought ruin in Them and Therasia (see below, p. 603) 1.
The appearance of some new evidence, to enable us to decide finally between conflicting views of the chronologies of Egypt and Babylonia, is much to be desired. In accordance with the opinion of the great majority of scholars we have adopted the * shorter' dates (see chapter iv, i, iii). It is desirable to impress upon the reader that the precision with which the dates are assigned is based partly upon ancient lists and computations assumed to be tmstworthy, but partly also upon modern calcula- tions of a few crucial dates as to which there is no definite unanimity. The date adopted here for Hammurabi is not accepted by some high authorities. And as to Egypt, Dr Hall is unable to accept the view of Professor E. Meyer and other historians who follow him, that the Xllth Dynasty ended in 1788 B.C*; and he puts back the date by more than two centuries. This view affects both the earlier Egyptian dates and the chronology of the early Aegean periods which depend on Egyptian synchronisms* 'Early Minoan HI/ which the latest investigations of Sir Arthur Evans have shown to extend from the Vlth to the Xlth Dynasty,, is on our chronological scheme 200 years earlier than it is on the scheme which he has adopted. See pp. 173, 656 syy,
In a co-operative work of this kind, no editorial pains coma avoid a certain measure of overlapping; and in fields, where there
* Weidner's recent discussion of Sargon's expedition to the west, and of the oldest historical relations between Babylonia and the Hittite area, may- be mentioned as another example of the progressive character of studies in this field (see p. 647, 6).
PREFACE
IX
Is so much uncertainty and such wide room for divergencies of Xiews? as in the first two volumes, overlapping must mean that occasionally different writers will express or imply different opinions. It has not been thought desirable to attempt to eliminate these differences, though they are often indicated or discussed. Such inconsistencies may sometimes be a little inconvenient for the reader's peace of mind, but it is better that he should learn to take them as characteristic of the ground over which he is being guided than that he should be misled by a dogmatic con- sistency into accepting one view as authoritative and final.
It will easily be understood that it is not possible to give chapter and verse for every statement or detailed arguments for every opinion, but it is hoped that the work will be found service- able to professional students as well as to the general reader. The general reader is constantly kept in view throughout, and our aim is to steer a middle course between the opposite dangers, a work which only the expert could read or understand and one so * popular' that serious students would rightly regard it with indifference.
In this connexion, the problem of transliterating occurs, and a quite satisfactory solution has not been found. Conventional and accepted spellings have been retained, but where usage varies the more correct are used (for Instance Mohammed, Nebuchad- rezzar), For classical Greek names the Latin forms are adopted (as in the yournal of Hellenic Studies). In regard to oriental names, we have thought it reasonable to assume that general readers are indifferent to what experts know; and experts do not always agree as to the precise spelling. We have followed generally Breasted, Hall, and King, and the Encyclopaedia Biblica, but attention has been paid to the lists drawn up by the Royal Geographical Society, and to the transliteration of Arabic recom- mended by the British Academy (vol. vm). The difficulty of transliterating unvocalized Egyptian names and of Interpreting names in cuneiform is commented on below (pp. 119, 126), Some modern technical transliterations are as formidable-looking as the hieroglyphs themselves. In Egyptian and in the other languages «}h is adopted instead of s or the like; s for £, ts, etc.; k for q, etc.; and kh for the harder guttural fc, &. But Hatti and Habiru haye been written because *Hittite* and * Hebrew* are so familiar; a$d Hammurabi is now well enough known to dispense even ^ith a diacritical point. Names when they first occur are sometimes written with their proper vowel-lengths, etc.; but as a rule dia- critical marks have been avoided (although :, Kaahshi may be
x PREFACE
thought clumsier than Kassi), and more or less conventional spellings (e.g. Ashur) have been freely employed. On the? other hand, an attempt is made in the Index to register some of the more correct spellings which for one reason or another deserve attention, but could not be introduced into the text without making it unduly technical1,
We wish to express our indebtedness to contributors for their readiness in carrying out editorial suggestions, in avoiding archaeological and other technicalities and in restricting the use of footnotes; for advice on questions of transliteration and on other difficult questions which arose from time to time; and foFthe preparation of the bibliographies and the lists of kings,
Mr Wace is indebted to Sir Arthur Evans for his kindness in reading the chapter on the Aegean and Early Greece,, imcr the Aegean section of the chapter on Chronology. Professor Myres wishes to express obligations to Professor H. J. Fleure, to Mr Harold Peake, F.S.A., and to Mr L. H, D. Burton. Dr Cook wishes to thank Dr H. R. Hall, Professor Kennett and Dr Nicholson for help in revising chapter v. He is particularly indebted to Professor A. A. Bevan, who read two proofs, and made many valuable criticisms and suggestions. But for the views put forward in that chapter the writer has sole responsibility.
Special thanks are due to Professor Myres for the Table facing p. 660, and for the preparation of Maps i— 6* For permission to use Maps 7, 8 and 1 1 we are indebted to the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Biblica^ Messrs A. & C, Black; to Messrs Chatto & Windus for Maps 9 and 10 (from the first and second volumes of the late Dr Leonard W. King's A History of Babylonia and Assyria from Prehistoric Times to the Persian Conquesi)\ and to Messrs Methuen & Co. for the plan of Babylon on p. 504 (from Dr H. R, Hall's The Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis)* The index has been made by Mr W. E. C, Browne, M.A., former scholar of Ernmamiel College.
The design on the outside cover represents Hammurabi, king of Babylonia, and is from the head of the stone monument on which is inscribed the famous code now known after his namdt on the original he is depicted standing in the conventional attitude of adoration before the sun-god, Shamashu, the god of righteousness and justice*
J. B- B, 8. A. C. F, E. A. * See the letters a, c, d, g, h> j, k, q, s, t and z in the Index.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
^ ||" ^HE demand for a new edition of the first volume of the JL Cambridge Ancient History has come much sooner than the Editors ventured to anticipate, and they have not been able to do more than make some corrections and modifications which could be effected without disturbing the paging*
TSe remarks which they made at the top of page viii of the Preface have been amply justified since the volume was first sent to press. j[n Egypt, the Aegean, Babylonia, Palestine and Syria, excavations have continued and interesting discoveries have been made. At Byblus, for instance, new information has been gained touching the extensive relations between Egypt and Phoenicia during the Middle Kingdom (see below, p. a 2 6), The successful diggings at el-'Obeid and Kish have supplied archaeological and historical data, of which the bearing on the period covered in this volume cannot yet be justly estimated. We may point to Mr C. L. Woolley's report (The Times^ Jan. 19, 1924) of a monu- ment of A-an-ni-pad-da, son of Mes-an-ni-pad-da (on whom see below, p. 367), and Professor Langdon's addition to the kings of Kish (tb. Jan. 22, 1924). But the information which is thus being accumulated must be submitted to a careful criticism, and that takes time, as experience shows that the full significance of fresh material cannot be evaluated at once. This is especially true of the problems of chronology, which for the early Sumerian period have assumed a new aspect through Professor Langdon's publi- cation of a very important list of the early kings. Although, with the ever-present prospect of other historical inscriptions coming to light, we cannot treat this document as decisive, yet, as its im- portance is unquestionable, it seemed desirable that some account of it should be given in this edition, and on page xiii sq* will be found a statement drawn up on the basis of Professor Langdon's publication and of some notes which he has kindly sxijpplied.
A fly-sheet containing all the more important corrections and additions to this volume will also be issued separately with volume ii.
Some reviewers made the justifiable criticism on volume i that it suffered from the absence of illustrations. The Editors are glad to be able to state that the Syndics of the University Press have
Xll
agreed to publish a volume of plates which, it is hoped, will appear in the course of I fit,,
It remains for the Editors to express their cordial thanks to the contributors for help in the preparation of the new edition, particularly to Mr A, J, B.Iace in the account of excavations in the Aegean (Chap, in Section vi), and to Mr Campbell Thompson for the translation of the Kassite names thich is given on p. xv.
JIB, SIC, Fl'i
NOTE ON THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE EARLY SUMERO-BABYLONIAN PERIOD
PROFESSOR LANGDON has recently published an important inscription, part of the Weld- Blundell collection1 in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. It is a large prism with eight columns of closely-written chronological material which gives the entire Sumerian lists of dynasties before and after the Flood to the end of the Isin dynasty in 2076 B.C. A small tablet in the same collection contains the names of the ten kings who reigned before the Flood, for which period it gives 456,000 years. The dynastic prism aas only eight kings before the Flood and assigns to them a duration of 241,200 years. Other important dynastic lists in fragmentary condition have been found in the Nippur Collection. These agree with the Oxford prism in giving twenty dynasties from t&e Fld%d to the Isin dynasty inclusive, and 125 kings.
The first dynasty reigned at Kish (p. 365, 1. 18 from end). It included 23 kings, who are said to have reigned 24,510 years, 3 months and 3^ days. The figure recalls the 'World-year' of 25,920 years, the approximate period of the sun's apparent revolution through the twelve signs of the zodiac; but it is unlikely that the precession of the equinoxes was known even in the age of the most advanced Babylonian astronomical knowledge (Langdon, op, tit* p. 3, n. 6, cf. Kugler, Stsrnkunde und Sterndienst in Babel, u, 24—32). The longest and shortest reigns of this dynasty are 1500 and 140 years respectively; the names differ somewhat from the list on p. 665, and the name of Zukakipu (the 'scorpion') is replaced by Daggagib. The first dynasty of Erech (p. 366) counted twelve kings, reigning 2310 years. The name of the second king of the dynasty of Ur (p. 367, 1. 19) may preferably be read Meskem-Nannar. The dynasty of Awan (the identification with Awa& should be omitted on pp. 366, L 21 sf.9 438, L 14, from end) had three kings ruling 3 56 years.
The details on p. 367 (lower half of the page) are considerably affected by the new prism. A list of seven kingdoms now intervenes between the semi-historic period and the northern Semitic kingdom of Akshak. The second dynasty at Kish, which succeeded that at Awan, may be placed about 3700 B.C.; to its eight kings the prism assigns 3195 years. The next dynasty ruled at Kharnazi and its king Khadanish is said to have ruled 360 or 420 years, the figures are presumably errors for six: or seven years* The sovereignty then returns to Erech in the south (c* 3400 B*C.), where the name of only one king, Enugduanna, is known. It is probable that the names of Lugalkigubnilakh and Lugalkisalsi are to be inserted here. After this second kingdom of Erech we reach the second kingdom of Ur, where four kings ruled 1 08 years. The capital now shifts to Adab for a period of 90 years, and then far to the north at Maer, where a dynasty of six kings (Ansir, [Lugaltar]zi, the rest are mutilated) reigned 136 years. It seems evident from the texts that the two succeeding kingdoms of Kish (the third) and Akshak were contemporary.
If, therefore, we may follow the new source, it may be computed that these djpiasties were founded about 2967—6 B.C., in which case the first approximately fixed date in Sumero-Babylonian history will have to be placed more than 200 year* lower than that given on p. 367, L 4 from end.
Moreover, it would now seem that the old third dynasty of Kish disappears (sec p. 667 [8], and n. 4); the two kings Urzaged and Lugal-tarsi belong to the second dynasty of Erech, and Mesilim possibly to the Awan dynasty (Langdpn, opf cit.
1 Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts, n. The Weld~$lundett collections, vol. ki. Historical inscriptions, containing principally the chronological prism, W-B 444. Oxford, 1923.
C.A.H.I.
xiv CHRONOLOGY OF SUMERO-BABYLONIAN PERIOD
p. 6 /f.). The first kings of ELish of whom we have contemporary records apparently belonged to other kingdoms, and claim the title because of its dignity. Oa p. 3^3,^ L 9 jf. read: who followed the second kingdom at Kish and the brief dynasty of Khamazi (r. 3400).
The third (not/0«r/j£) dynasty of Kish was founded by Kug-Bau, as the name should now be read instead of Azag-Bati (p. 370 last par., and 1. 7 from end). Ur-Nina was contemporary with the rulers of Maer, not Akshak (p. 379, L 14 from end). On p. 380, 11. 9—o? omit the words: convincing evidence. * * dynasty, and ib. 1. 6 from end, for Uruazagga the better reading now is Uru-kugga,
Rimush (p. 408, L 19 from end), according to the Oxford prism, reigned nine years. Manishtusu was his elder brother (p. 409, L 21 Jf.). Naram-Sitx was his son (contrast /^,), although Babylonian tradition calls him son of Sargon (p. 4r^foot)1. For 22 read 24 (/<£.last line); and note that the prism gives a much lower figure for his reign — probably 38 years (p. 413, L 6).
The fifth dynasty of Erech contains only one king, Utukhegal, to whom is ascribed a reign of 7 years, 2 months and 7 days (p. 434, last par.). T o Dungi^p. 43^, L 6) is ascribed a reign of 47 (not 58) years, and Langdon reduces all the figures in his reign (11. 4—18, and also p. 456, 1. 21 from end) by eleven. The length of the reign of Bur-Sin (p. 4575 L 20) is given as nine (not «<gvijf) years.
Finally, on the basis of the Oxford prism and other evidence Langdon arrives at dates generally lower than those adopted in this volume. Starting from Kegler's brilliant interpretation of the tablet of observations of the planet Venus for the twenty- one years of the reign of Ammi-zaduga, the tenth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, and in consultation with the Oxford astronomer, Dr Fotheringham, he now holds that the beginning of this dynasty may be placed at 2 1 69 E.G. The astronomical calculations in themselves are not entirely final, and the argument also turns upon the precise beginning of the year in certain contracts relating to the division of the date-harvest and the renting of fields in the seventh-eighth months. The date which Langdon now adopts is fifty-six years lower than that adopted in this volume (pp. 404, 1. 3, 479, 67.3)> but he definitely rejects the much lower dates for the dynasty which are held by Weidner (viz. 2057, see p. 672, xu i) and Kugler (viz. 2049),
Langdon maintains the date 2357 for the beginning of the dynasty of Isin (pp* 471, 672); but, besides the modification of the earliest approximately fixed date (viz. 2967—6, see above), other important changes are suggested arising out of the Oxford prism. Thus, the Maer-Akshak-Kish domination (p. 373^ L 14) may be dated 3 103-2777, For the Kug-Bau dynasty (/£„ L 7) he suggests 2967-2873, and a similar reduction of about 120 years becomes necessary on p, 378, L 12 (viz. 2967-2873)* So the date of Sargon becomes 2752 (pp. 368, L 16 from end, 403, 1. 8). Lugal-zaggisi begins to reign in 2777 (pp. 39 5, L 21, 402, L %), The fourth dynasty of Erech Is dated 2571-2542 (p, 423, L 9), and that of Gutium becomes 2541-2416 (pp. 423 f$.9 670). Ur-Bau's date is 2620 (p. 373, L 26). The end of the last dynasty of Ur is fixed at 2328 (p. 377, L 13), and Dungi and Bursin are dated respectively 2391 and 2345 B.C. ,(pp, 437, 1 5, 457, L 19),
These dates indicate the complexity of the chronological problems, and the difficulty of obtaining conclusive results, owing to the serious differences among tfce ancient souf ces themselves and the frequently very intricate character of the astro- nomical and other questions. They are not to be regarded as final, but it seemed desirable that a general statement of the evidence published by Prof* Langdon should be made accessible in this edition.
1 Prof. Lang-don adds that Sargfon claims to have collected ships from Melukhkha, Magan and Diknun at the quay of Agade (addition to p, 404, L 14),
ON
i i ^ i
ring is a translation of the Babylonian renderings of the names of tie twenty-one kings, diiefly Kassites, mentioned on p, ^ of volume i;
'J)
"Traeiin"
'Offspring of k Lord of Us'
'Servant o or 'Help of Bel
"
s
Jil
<(
U
Protect(ion) of [Stall]11 ion)oftkLordofknJs]'
eiiDotieW
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME
BY JOHN L. MYRES, O.B.E., M.A., D.Sc., F.S.A. Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, Oxford
PAGE
I. JUKE SETTING OF THE STAGE i
Definition of History I
Nature and Man ..»,.,.„. 2
IL PRE-GLACIAL GEOGRAPHY 3
Theseaof 'Tethys* 4
Tertiary mountain-building 6
Crust movements ..,,,.... 8
Beginning of the Mediterranean * 9
Tertiary flora and fauna . . , . . . . . r I
Africa separated from Asia 13
The Highland Zone 14
Relation to the Southern Flatland 16
African fauna , . . . . . . * * 17
III. THE GLACIAL CRISIS 1 8
Effect upon flora and fauna . . . , . . . 19
IV. THE PRINCIPAL HUMAN RACES 21
Mongoloid man »,..»,».. 22
His extension 24
African fauna and African man * . * , * • • 2 5
Sequence of human types 27
The white races , ,..,,.. 28
V. PALAEOLITHIC MAN IN THE SOUTH AND EAST , , * . 31
The Nile Valley ......... 33
Domesticated plants and animals . * , . . * 35
Links between Egypt and Europe 36
Man in Syria and Arabia 37
The Semites 38
Palestine 39
The Euphrates and Mesopotamia ...... 40
V L THE ICE AGE IN THE NEAR EAST ,,..., 42
Conditions in Armenia and Iran .43
VII. THE ICE AGE IN EUROPE 45
Mousterian man ......... 4^
Later types * ... .*..«» 48
Later palaeolithic cultures * S°
VIII. THE CLOSE OF THE OLD STONE AGE „ . . • • • 52
The kitchen-middens « . - * , , * , • S3
Swamp and forest in north-west Europe 54
xviii CONTENTS
CHAPTER II
NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE CULTURES BY J. L. MYRES
PAGE
L THE HIGHLAND ZONE AND ALPINE MAN « . » . . 57
The forests . 58
Varieties of man .*.»..... 59
Forest culture and polished implements . ... - 63
II. CHARACTERISTICS OF NEOLITHIC CULTURE . 5 5
Inventions ......... $7
Eurasian and Eurafrican cradle-lands . . . ^9
Pottery and pottery styles ....... 70
III. REGIONAL TYPES OF NEOLITHIC CULTURE: ALPINE EUROPE . „ 71
The lake-dwelling 73
IV. REGIONAL TYPES: THE DANUBE BASIN . , . . . 75
Daimbian pottery ......... 77
South-eastern Europe and Asia Minor 79
V. REGIONAL TYPES: THE TRIPOLJE CULTURE . .... 80 VI* TKE CULTURE OF THE NORTH-EASTERN STEPPE . . , . . 82
Waggon-dwelling culture; languages ...... 84
VII* THE CULTURE OF ANAU AND SUSA . , . * . . . 85
Contact with the west 4 88
VIII. THE RE0-WARE CULTURE OF THE NEARER EAST .... 89
The influence of Cyprus and Syria ««*... 90
IX. THE CULTURE OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN . * . . 92
Early Aegean culture ..... 93
X. THE CULTURE OF THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN AND ITS OFFSHOOTS * 94
'Megalithic* origins . <, * . * » „ * 95
XI. THE CULTURE OF THE BEAKER-FOLK: . , * . . xoo
XII. THE COMING OF BRONZE . . . . . „ . .103
Aegean influence . „ . f , . . . .105
XIIL THE HALLSTATT CULTDRE . . . . « . . 106
The horse . . . . * , . * . 107
First appearance of iron . . . . . . . 109
Cremation . . . . . . , . . j to
CHAPTER III EXPLORATION AND EXCAVATION
BY R. A. STEWART MACALISTER, L,iTT*D.> F.S.A. Professor of Celtic Archaeology, University College, Dublin
I. THE RELATION op ARCHAEOLOGY TO HISTORY . . » . . r 1 a
Petrie's pottery test . . . . . . . , * XI4
II. EGYPT : (a) Surface exploration , . . . , . .116
(&) Decipherment * . . . . . „ ,117
(c) Excavation , ,120
III. MESOPOTAMIA:
(a) Surface exploration . . . „ , , » 122
(ff) Decipherment , . » . , . » • . 123
(r) Excavation . , m , , , ^ ,127
CONTENTS xlx
IV* STRIA AND PALESTINE: PAGE
(a) Surface exploration. . . . . „ . .130
(<£) Decipherment . . . . . . ...132
(<r) Excavation . . . . . . . .132
V. THE HITTITE EMPIRE . . . . . . . . • *35
VI. THE AEGEAN CIVILIZATION . . * . . » * .136
The work of Schliemann , , . . . . 137
Periods of Cretan culture. . , . . . . .139
VII. CYPRUS ........... 142
Decipherment of Cypriote , . . . . . 1 44
CHAPTER IV CHRONOLOGY
I. MESOPOTAMIA
BY STANLEY A. COOK, Lrrr.D.
Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Introduction ........... 145
Mesopotamian usage . . . . . . . . . .147
The limmu lists ........... 148
The testimony of Berosus . , . . . . . . .150
Assyrian data » * . . . . . . . . .153
Dates of Hammurabi and Saigon . . . . . . . .155
Table of dates 156
II. THE OLD TESTAMENT
BY S. A. COOK
Character of data . . . . . » . , . .156
Period of the monarchy . . . . . . . . .158
Exilic and post-exilic period . . . . « . . * ,162
Pre-monarchical period > . . . . . . . .163
General character of the chronology . . „ . . . .165
Table of dates 1 66
III. EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY BY H. R. HALL, D.LITT., F.S.A.
Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum
Direct sources .... ....... 166
Sothic cycle ........... 168
Date of Xllth Dynasty . , 169
Date of Menes . . „ . . . . . . . .171
Institution of the calendar, 4241 B.C. ....... 172
Table of dates 173
IV. PREHISTORIC GREECE BY A. J. B. WACE> M.A.
Formerly Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge j Late Director of
the British School of Archaeology, Atb*™
Archaeological periods , ... tyrj
Early and Middle Minoan 175
Late Minoan . . . . . . . . , ^ , [76
Greek legend and tradition . . '. . . , *"- , 178
Helladic and Minoan co-ordinations . . , . . ,179
Thessalian periods ..*.., ...180
xx CONTENTS
CHAPTER V
THE SEMITES
BY S. A, COOK
PAGE
I. PEOPLE, LANGUAGE AND MOVEMENTS . , - . . 1 8 1
Geographical limits . . . . . - - ,182
The * sons7 of Noah: Shem 184
The Semitic languages . . . . . - , .186
The alphabet 189
Migrations and trading movements - „ , . . .190 Semitization of immigrants . . . . . . * ' 192
Influence of Arabia , . .193
II. TEMPERAMENT AND THOUGHT ....... 194
Psychology of the languages . „ . . - .195
Religious characteristics »....- . 197
Polytheism and Monotheism . . . . . . .199
Semitic and non-Semitic thought .*.,.. 203
The extremes of the Semites . . , . , . .205
IIL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT ...... 206
The^W 207
Attitude to the divine powers „ . . , „ . .209
Fundamental ideas , . . , . . . . ,210
Men and the gods , . . . . . . „ .213
The sanctity of kings . . . . . . . .214
Historical vicissitudes , . . , . . . ,216
IV. TREATMENT OF HISTORY- . . . . . . . .2x7
Treatment of tradition . . . . , * . ,219
Attitude to development . . . . . . . .231
The writing of history , . . , . » . ,222
Historical ideas . , . * , * „ . ,223
V. SYRIA AND PALESTINE * .... , . ... . 225
The story of Sin tihe . * , „ . . * ,226
Amor and Mesopotamia . * . . . . . ,230
Amorite gods P . * . . . » . .231
The Hyksos 233
Native Palestinian traditions . , , . » , .234
Genesis, chap, xiv , . . . . . . . .236
Paucity of historical material , . , » ^ . .237
CHAPTER VI EGYPT: THE PREDYNASTIC PERIOD
By T. ERIC PEKT, M.A* Professor of Egyptology, Liverpool University
L THE EVIDENCE OP THE CEMETERIES „ » . „ , ,238 Predynastic burial .....»»», 239 Predynastic settlements . . , , , . , ,241 Pottery and stone vases .»,.*.*, 243
Physical type, language and religion . - „ „ . 244
CONTENTS
XXI
PAGE II. JC^iTA FOR HISTORY ......„., 247
Introduction of tlie Calendar ....... 248
Sources for the predynastic period . , * . , .250 Historical slate palettes . . . . . . . .251
Ivory- knife-han die from Gebel el- Arak . „ . . .252 Original home of the predynastic Egyptian . * . . .254 Indications of eastern origin , , . „ . . .255
CHAPTER VII
THE UNION OF EGYPT AND THE OLD KINGDOM By H. R, HALL
L THE LISTS OF KINGS: DYNASTY I . . . „ . ,257
Sources . . . . . . . , . .258
Infiltration of aliens . . . . . . . . 261
Hamites and Armenoids ........ 262
Kingdoms of the north and south . . . . . .265
Pre~Menic kings ......... 266
The originals of Menes . . . . . . .267
Narmerza .......... 268
The court of Semti ......... 270
The dead and mummification ..,..,. 272
II. DYNASTIES II— IV . . . . . . , , .274
Zos&r and the first pyramid ...»**. 276 The age of Snefru ......... 278
Pyramids of Gizeh. . . . . . . . 28 r
Zenith of Egyptian art . . . . . . . .282
Mycerirxus . . , . , * " . , . .282
III. THE CLOSE OF THE OLD KINGDOM . . . . . . .284
The 'son of the Sun-god* 285
Art and religion . . . . . . . . .286
The 'admonitions of Ptahliotep' . , . . . .288
Unis and the pyramid at Sakkarah ... ... 290
Pepi ........... 291
Uni in Palestine ......... 293
Entrance of negroes . . . . . . . .295
The Heracleopolites ........ 297
CHAPTER VIII
THE MIDDLE KINGDOM AND THE HYKSOS CONQUEST
BY H. K. HALL
DYNASTIES XI AND XII ........ 299
Amenemhet I and the god Amon . * . , . 301
The Instructions of Amenemhet . , . , . .303
The story of Sinuhe . . . . . . . 3 04
The works of Senusret (Sesostris) I . . . * , . 305
Relations with Crete . , . . « * . .307
Senusret III, the historical Sesostris . * . ,,, . - 308
Amenemhct III , * , , . , ,r . • . . 309
xxii CONTENTS
PAGE
II. THE HYKSQS , 310
North Syrian movements . . . . . - . . 3 F2
Yekeb-hal, Khian and other kings . . . . . - 3 1 3
Expulsion of the Hyksos . . . . - « « 3r4
III. THE INTERNAL CONDITIONS OF THE AGE . . . - • .315
Life of the people 3*7
Officials and soldiers . . . . . » - 3 * &
Tombs and religion . . . . . . • .321
The priesthood 323
Religious literature . . . - . . . . .324 A Messianic prophecy . . . . . . . ,325
CHAPTER IX
LIFE AND THOUGHT IN EGYPT UNDER THE OLD AND MIDDLE KINGDOMS
BY T. E. PEET
General Egyptian character - , * • . . . * ,326
I. THE ARCHAIC 3PERIOD AND THE OLD KlNGDOM , . . . .328
Local and solar cults „ . . . . . . 329
Osiris - . . . . . , . . . -S3^
The^ 334
The tomb, death, and the hereafter . . . * * -33^
II. THE EARLIER INTERMEDIATE PERIOD, VllTH TO Xril DYNASTIES . . 340
Language and writing . . . » . . . .341
Early literature . . . . . . . , » 343
Pessimism . . . . . , , . * * 345
III. THE MIDDLE KINGDOM . . . . . , . ,346
Moral standards . . . . . . . . .347
'Story of the Eloquent Peasant' 349
Coffin Texts . „ * 351
Belief in a judgment . . .*. , . » »353 Hfke, rnagic and morality. . . . . „ . 354
CHAPTER X EARLY BABYLONIA AND ITS CITIES
BY STEPHEN H. LANGDONT, M*A.7 B,D., Pn.D* Professor of and Shiliito Reader in Assyriology, Oxford
L PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS * * , , * . . 356
The Euphrates and Lower Mesopotamia , . * . 358
Sumer and the date-palm , . , » . . 3 6C
II. THE ORIGIN OF THE SvMERIANS . . . . . * ,361
The cultures of Anau and Sxisa * * , . . „ ,362
IIL EARLIEST TRADITIONAL DYNASTIES . . . . , . .364
The first city-states . * . „ . . . m .365
The third dynasty of Kish . . . , , . ,368
The fourth dynasty of Kish . . * , , . 370
Sumerian writing and religion • , . . » . 371
CONTENTS xxili
PAGE TV TgE RECORDS OF THE CITY-STATES . . . . . . * 373
Lagash . . . . . . . . . . -373
Enkhegal and Ur-Nina . . . . . . . .374
Shuruppak and its legends . . . . . . • 377
The dynasty of Ur-Nina, 3100 B.C. . . , . . 378
Eannatum and Enannatum . . . . . . .380
Entemena and his son . . . . . , . .382
Rise of priests of Lagash . . . . . „ . .385
Social reforms of Urukagina . . . . . „ ,387
Inroad of Lugal-zaggisi . . . « . , . .388 V. OTHER crriEs , . . . . . . . . .389
~ Umma . ..,.*,.... 389
Adab .*.-**..,.. 39°
Nippur 391
Isip and Larak ......... 393
Kish ........... 393
Cuthah 394
Sippar 395
Erech. ........... 396
Larsa (Ellasar) ......... 397
Ur 398
Abu Shahrein (Eridu) . . . . . . . .399
Myth of Adapa ......... 400
Ashur ........... 401
CHAPTER XI
THE DYNASTIES OF AKKAD AND LAGASH BY S. H. LANG DON
I. THE RISE OF THE DYNASTY OF SARGON ...... 4O2
Stories of his origin , . , . . . . .403
Conquests in the west ........ 404
The foundation of Agade ....... 407
Accession of Rirnush ........ 408
Manishtusu .......... 409
Contemporary monuments . . . . , „ .410
Purchase of estates . . . . . , . . .411
II. NARAM-SIN AND THE DECLINE OP THE DYNASTY OF SARGON . . .412
Deification of Naram»Sin . . . * . . * .413 His conquests ......... 414
Expedition to Magan . * . . . . . .415
The * Stele of Victory* ........ 41,7
Submission of Elam, Lagash and Nippur ..... ;^8 ]<•
Reign of Shargalisharri ........ f;T^v
The rise of Gutium , ; 1421
Period of anarchy . . - . * . » .,; ;;V; 422
III. GUTIXJM AND LAGASH ....... 423
The kings of Gutium * . . . . . ./ . 424
Ur«Bau of Lagash . . . . * , » . 425
xxiv CONTENTS
PAGE IV. THE KINGDOM OF GUDEA OF LAGASH „ . . . - ¥ 426
The statues of Gudea • 4"^s
Contemporary art and literature . . « - • 43 2
Overthrow of dynasty of Gutium . . . . . .434
CHAPTER XII
THE SUMERIAN REVIVAL: THE EMPIRE OF UR By S. IL LANG DON
I. UR-ENGUR AND DUNGI .435
Might of Ur-Engur 43 6
Conquests in the east . . . . . . „ .438
Submission of Susa ........ 440
II. LAGASH AND OTHER CITIES OF THE EMPIRE . - . . .441
Sumerian liturgies . „ . * . . , . .443
The principal cults . . . . . . , , 4 44
Conditions in Akkad ..,.*..« 44^
III. THE EASTERN PROVINCES ..<....,. 447
Early deities of the east . . . . . . . ,448
Semitic infusion ......... 450
IV. THE NORTHERN ANZ> WESTERN EXTENSION . . . . . ,451
Ashur ...**.... 451
Subartu . . . * 452
Cappadocia and its Semitic colony „ . . . . ,453
V. THE DECLINE OF SUMERIAN POWER . . . . - . .456
Bur-Sin .......... 457
Gimll-Sm ..„„....„* 458
Ibi-Sin and his overthrow » « » . * * .459 Sumerian law and calendar *»..*.* 461 The influence of the Sumerians . * . . . .462
CHAPTER XIII
ISIN, LARSA AND BABYLON
By R. CAMPBELL THOMPSON, M.A., F.S.A.
Fellow of Mcrton College, Oxfc rd
L THE POWER OP THE SEMITES .,.,.»*. 464 West Semitic elements .»«.«.*. 466 Amor (Amurru) ..,.,.... 467
Early Assyria ...*,,„»*. 468 Kara-Euynk and Kerkuk . , . . . . . .470
11^ THE DYNASTY OF ISIN ....»..,. 47o
Overthrow of Ibi-Sin ..»...«. 47 r Contemporary laments . „ . * . . . .472
^Chedorlaomer* and G-encs;s xiv . „ f » . .473 New Sumerian activity ..«*.... 474
An Amorite raid .*..,..*. 476 The wars of Gnngunurn - . , , * . , » 477 Larsa ........... 478
The First Dynasty of Babylon . » , » „ , .479
CONTENTS xxv
PAGE
Relations with Larsa and Isln . . . * , . .480 Defeat of Larsa by Elam . , - . . . . 483
Elamlte kings. ....... 484
Rim-Sin's successes against Isin . . . . , .485
Fight for Isin and Larsa . . . . . . . .486
III, HAMMURABI .......... 487
Conquest of Elam ......... 488
Temple and other works . . , . . . , .489 Campaigns in the north ........ 490
His law-code ......... 492
Extent of his empire ........ 493
CHAPTER XIV
THE GOLDEN AGE OF HAMMURABI BY R. CAMPBELL THOMPSON
I. THE COUNTRY .......... 494
Communications by water . . . . . . .495
Ships and houses ......... 497
The date-palm ......... 499
Animals and birds . . . . , . . . .500
The Tigris .......... 501
II. BABYLON . 503
Plan . 504
Nebuchadrezzar's buildings . . . * . . .505 Tower of Babel 508
III. GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY ........ 508
The patesis 509
Judicial procedure . . . . . . . . . 511
The levy 514
Capital offences, penalties . . . - . . .516
Social castes " . . . -5*8
Slavery 520
IV. PRIVATE LIFE 522
Matrimony . . . . . . . . .523
Divorce and adultery . * , * . . . .524
Children and inheritance . . . . - . « .526
Loans ........... 528
V. RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS . - . . . - * * 529
The gods 529
Religious beliefs . . . . . . . . -53*
The temple and its staff 532
Priestesses and temple- women , . ... . . .536
VI. ORDINARY LIFE, DEATH, LITERATURE ...... 546
The crops -54*
Food 543
Coinage, metals and pottery . . » . . ,.545
A love-letter ........ * 547
Burial . * . . 548
Myths and legends * . - . . , % » 55°
xxvi CONTENTS
CHAPTER XV
THE KASSITE CONQUEST
BY R. CAMPBELL THOMPSON
PAGE
I. THE END OF THE FIRST BABYLONIAH DYNASTY * . . . . 552
The Kassites and their language . . - * . 553
The kings of the Sea-country 555
Their advance . . . . - - * - 5 $7
Abeshu' and his artificial Hoods . . . . . 558
A Hittite raid • - .561
Decline of Babylonia . . . . • * * ,562
II. THE KASSITE DYNASTY . . . . . • . . -5^3
Internal conditions . . . . . « - . .564
Religion and art . . . . » * . . .567
Prelude to the 'Amania Age' 568
CHAPTER XVI
THE ART OF EARLY EGYPT AND BABYLONIA BY H. R, HALL
I. EGYPTIAN ART ..«,..»* . 570
Use of naetals . * * - , . . fc » 571
Archaic art . . . . - . . * , * 573
Portraiture * , . ,,574
Small art .....*,*. 576
II, INTERRELATIONS WITH BABYLONIA * . * . . , - 577
Prehistoric pottery . * . , . . . , .578
The Gebel el~Arak knife-handle . , . . . .580
Use of stone t . * . . . . . . 582
II L BABYLONrrAN ART . . . . . . , » * 5 84
The copper lions of el-*Obeid * * , . , « ,585
Relations with the west * . . « * » m ^
CHAPTER XVII
EARLY AEGEAN CIVILIZATION BY A. J* B. WAGE
I. CRETE . . . . . 589
Transition to Earty Minoan Age . , coo
Conditions «... „ * . . SOI
Middle Minoan Age . . * « * 593
The script . . , JQ j
Palaces of Cnossus and Phaestus „ . ^ * 595
Middle Minoan culture . . * * . 596
Transition to Late Minoan , . *
CONTENTS xxvii
PAGE
II. T,PE_CYCLADES * . . 599
Earl/ Cycladic culture Relations with Crete
III. THE HELIADIC CIVILIZATION .
Early Helladic Period Middle Helladic Period . Minyan ware Cretan influence
IV. THE THESSALIAN CIVILIZATION
First Thessalian Period .
Second Period
Third Period
First and second cities of Troy ,
Supremacy of Crete
Appearance of Mycenae .
600 602 603 604 606 607 608 609 609 610 6ix 612 614 615
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 617
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Chapters I and II ............ 619
Chapter III 625
Chapter IV 628
Chapter V 630
Chapter VI 636
Chapter VII 637
Chapter VIII 640
Chapter IX 643
Chapters X-XI1 645
Chapter XIII 649
Chapter XIV 651
Chapter XV 652
Chapter XVI 653
Chapter XVII 655
SYNCHRONISTIC TABLE 656
COMPARATIVE TABLE OF PRINCIPAL SEQUENCES AND CORRELATIONS IN SELECTED REGIONS BETWEEN
NORTH-WESTERN EUROPE AND MESOPOTAMIA FACING 660
LIST OF EGYPTIAN KINGS OF THE OLD AND MIDDLE
KINGDOMS, c. 3 500-1 580 B.C 661
LIST OF KINGS AND PATESIS OF SUMER AND AKKAD %$
KINGS OF ISIN, LARSA, BABYLON, ETC. , - . 672 GENERAL INDEX . . , . . . - .676
CONTENTS
LIST OF MAPS, ETC.
PACK
1, Stages in the growth of Land-masses , , , , FACING 16
2, The Ice Age », 48
3, Zones of Vegetation, to illustrate sequence of climatic regions „ 64
4, Olive, Vine and Orange Areas of the Mediterranean , „ 64
5, Principal Neolithic cultures „ no
6, Europe showing the principal lines of Early Bronze Aje
Intercourse „ no
7, Trade-routes of Hither Asia „ ^224
8, Egypt „ 324
9, Babylonia, stowing the sites of Ancient Cities, , , ^ 400
10, Babylonia, Assyria and Mesopotamia , , , . „ 4/14
n. Syria, Assyria and Babylonia „ 566
12, Map to illustrate Early Aegean culture , , , , ,. 614
Plan of Babylon , 504
CHAPTER I PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME
L THE SETTING OF THE STAGE
¥ TflSTORY, in its common and more popular sense, is the JLJl $tudy of Man's dealings with other men, and the adjust- ment of working relations between human groups. But there is a larger sense, in which Human History merges in Natural History, and aludieS the dealings of Man with Nature; and it may be ob- served that it has been only by slow degrees that any human group has attained to such vision of the unity of mankind, or of civiliza- tion, as might constrain it to regard other human groups as more than a peculiarly intractable element in its own natural surround- ings. An austere conception of War — that under certain circum- stances Right has no court of appeal but Might — survives to remind us that Man has not yet wholly rid himself of this con- fusion between things and alien persons; and the most modern conception of international right so far accepts this fact of an alienation between the higher functions of human groups, however reasonable, as to take differences of language — of the medium, that is, for interchange and reconciliation of ideas, — as the best guide when and where, for the present, it is safer to keep human groups apart, and let them manage their affairs as far as possible each in their own way.
History, in the narrowest sense of all, as the interpretation of written evidence for arrangements made for right living within a human group, or between such groups, accepts implicitly the same criterion, and stops short where such evidence is not available. Linguistic Pa^a525|^^y: goes a little further back, in the study of the distnf^^ groups, and of such relations
between them as loan-words, or structural likenesses in the speech, mgy suggest. But the spoken word does not fall to the ground, like the spent missile or the broken vessel, to be its own memorial of human achievement: it vanishes in air, so that the philologist deals not with originals, but at best with the reminiscence of an echo. To recover, therefore, what men were doing, or maKliig, still more what they were thinking or desiring, befofe the dawn of history, the sole available method is that of the archaeologist,
C,A,H«I I
2 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP,
merging as it does In that of the geologist : since these alone^ handle and interpret original creations of men's thought and will, and contemporary elements of the physical surroundings of those men. Where the tree falls, there shall it lie, and where the lost implement or shattered potsherd, or worn-out man fell, there have they lain, for all that any one cared then, or knows now. It is the careless- ness (in the literal sense) of the river as to the gravel which it carried, and an equal carelessness of those men as to what happened to their leavings., that justify such a hypothesis of the credibility of these data, and make prehistoric times at least a penumbra of history, ^ ^
"TSfor"are we compelled any longer by prejudice or authority to regard those times as catastrophically short, any more than we must believe that Rome was built in a day. Man's prehistory merges in the pageant of the animal world, and of the planet-wide arena on which it has been in progress. Mountain and sea-basin too have their history. Their geographical distribution has varied in immemorial years; the faith that can remove mountains is the same in kind as that in which the historian brings together armies and frontiers, 'bone to his bone/ showing *all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time/ Such 'historical* geography and 'historical' ethnology are a proper prelude to the history of the ancient world; and much, even within that history, cannot fully be understood without them. Ancient peoples come upon the stage of history, not all together, but in a certain order, and by their proper entrances; each with a character and make-up con- gruous with the part they will play* The pageant— or is it the drama ? — of history presupposes the formation of that character, and its equipment, in the green-room of the remoter past; and the sketch of the growth of initial 'cultures,* which follows now, is intended, like the hypothesis of a Greek play, to describe how men came by those qualities of build and temperament, those aims in life, atid the means wherewith they were attempting to achieve them. For, to the student of prehistory, a * culture is nothing more or less than this — the total equipment with which each gene- ration of men starts on its career, in whatever external conditions; to the archaeologist, no less, it is literally that equipment whirh the men of each generation were discarding, when they and it respectively ceased t6 be of Significant use.
To see how the stage itself was set for this pageant, we must look back beyond the moment "when the first characters enter it. For it has been Nature, rather than Man, hitherto, in almost every scene* that has determined where 'the action shall He* Only at a
I, n] 'NATURE5 AND 'MAN3 3
comparatively late phase of that action3 does Man in some measure shift t*he scenery for himself,
* And by Nature and Man are here meant neither supernatural force nor superhuman design, altering the arrangement of us and our surroundings like chessmen on a board. Nature, adopted in our speech from Latin natura^ an unlucky mistranslation of Greek $>vcn^ stands as a common and inclusive term for all 'physical' events that happen; its Greek original being a verbal substantive signifying the fact of growth, the 'way things grow/ the mere processes of a world as apprehended by a mind. It has nothing to do, SB its Latin antecedents might suggest, either with birth or any sort of coming-into-being; nor with any question 'what shall it be in the end thereof ?* These are matters outside * natural9 history and human history alike. All history is the mere study of processes, of the 'way things grow* in the old Greek sense; for to this, modern thought has laboriously but unequivocally reverted> after long preoccupation with beginnings and endings, with cos- mogony and eschatology of all kinds, in the centuries between Greek science and our own.
Within this Nature, so presented as a process or coherent sequence of occurrences, and so far as we know (by inference of me and you, each from experience of the rest of us corporeally participant in what goes on) a part of this Nature, stands Man, perceiving what goes on, learning what that is, conceiving it as alterable by inventive effort, and striving accordingly, with experience of what we call results, great or small, of that strife.
By Man, then, in what follows, is meant the collective total of such perceiving, learning, inventing, striving and experiencing * selves/ myself and yours and theirs. By races of men, are meant groups and sequences of such selves linked by corporeal similari- ties propagated by natural process within each group: by peoples or nations^ groups of selves exhibiting peculiarities of interpreta- tion, invention, and effort sufficiently similar for their results to be cumulative and coherent; and by cultures or civilizations the accu- mulated and coherent results of such similarities in the activity of selves like you and me.
IL PRE-GLACIAL GEOGRAPHY
The stage of human history is a wide one from the firs|.;;®vieii disregarding those varieties of man in inner Asiaiorrjc«jg3ferial Africa which come latest and most incidentally iB~to,^i::S|ory? the stage even of ancient history is the whole home o£ffieP ''white races/
4 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Persian plateaux, from the Sahara to the Baltic; the north-western quadrant of the? land- mass of the Old World,
To understand even the actual configuration of this area, some of which Is very complicated — still more, to understand the changes which have occurred in the form and extent of the land-masses since they have been inhabited by man — we must review the whole series of events which have resulted in the formation of the present European peninsula, of the sea-basins which lie north and south of it, and also of its eastward continuation into Hither Asia, a similarly constituted highland with comparatively low-lying* flat- lands to north and to south. For, if we trace this series of events far enough back, we reach, at all events, the more immediate reasons for those strongly marked contrasts in the composition and structure of Its rocks, which have so profoundly affected the habitability and human prosperity of each component region, through the peculiar distribution of its plants and animals, and eventually of its breeds of Man.
Herodotus, attempting to summarize the contrast between the northern flatland and the Aegean cradle of the Greeks, describes Scythia as a land where there are no earthquakes and they grow corn for sale. That immensity of arable is itself the corollary of the flatland's long immunity from geological stress, and its accu- mulation of successive sediments, as sea-floor or dusty desert. The recurring earthquakes in Greece and Italy, through ancient and modern times, are sufficient evidence that the process of mountain building is not yet complete, and the rarity and discontinuity of cultivable soils illustrate the dislocation and wear-and-tear inci- dental to such a process. The catastrophic geology of Genesis and the Psalms voices the same experience of Nature's workings among a people of the Nearer East. Let us summarize, then, the main course of that period of planetary history, within which the history of Man is one of the more recent episodes.
The chalk which composes the 'white walls' of England, the massive limestones of the 'hills which stand about Jerusalem/ and the similar grey limestone which gives its wilder grace to the land- scape of Greece, were formed by deposition on the floor of a gre»t sea which, covered all, and more than all, of the stage on which history has played its greatest drama hitherto. This sea, to which geologists give the picturesque name of *Tethjy/ belongs to the second of the three great schemes of oceans and continents, whose distribution can be distinguished in the long course of the earth's history. It had taken shape as the result of that period of violent
I, ii] SECONDARY DISTRIBUTION OF LAND AND SEA 5
planetary convulsion which closed the * primary* phase, and its q^liteSration, with the exception of the Mediterranean Pontic- Caspian, and Caribbean basins, marks the change from the 'secondary' to the 'tertiary' in which human history is the most recent episode. Unliie the modern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans of the * tertiary' phase, which (whatever their breadth) extend from the Arctic to the Antarctic circle, Tethys had its greatest diameter from east to west, and was comparatively narrow from north to south. Eastward it abutted on an ancient s Angara' continent, of whi^h the solid core lay in north-eastern Asia, with more recent extensions further south: westward it opened into a Pacific Ocean. Southward it was bounded by another ancient continent, 'Gpnd- wana-lan^L,' which had once extended in one vast oblong from weat of South America to east of Australia, but was already foun- dering in places, so that growing gulfs in its southern margin were separating South America from South Africa, and South Africa from Australia; first symptoms of the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans that were to be. Similar collapse of its northern margin allowed the waters of Tethys to form a deep bay between Brazil and Morocco ; and a long gulf between East Africa, on the one hand, and, on the other, a 'I^muxian^ peninsula connecting South Africa through Madagascar with peninsular India. Both of these eventually broke clean through to meet the southern gulfs, and insulated South America and ' Lemuria* for ever* Round the north end of 'Lemuria/ there was in due course open sea between Tethys and the new Indian Ocean; and meanwhile the rise of the first mountain structure of south-eastern Asia connected the Australian fragment of old 'Gondwana' with the southward ap- pendages of * Angara-land,* so that a single continent extended from Arctic Siberia to New Zealand.
Northward, * Tethys' had probably sea-passage, of uncertain and perhaps varying width, to an Arctic Ocean, between 'Angara- land' and Scandinavia, one of the oldest and most massive corner-stones of the whole fabric. West of this again, between Scandinavia and Britain, a narrower strait extended far north, and perhaps reached the same Arctic Ocean. Beyond this, the rugged Caledonian highlands of Britain stood outpost on the eastern margin of a 'Laurentian* continent. The south coast of ' probably crossed the north Atlantic along the modern bulging then southward round the nascent Appalachian ch retreating northward near the Pacific coast of North ^A^S^c^ till it approached (or even joined) eastern * Aftgara^fflS'l^eyond the north Pacific, All north of this coastline seems €01 have been solid
6 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
land, with Greenland and Labrador at its core; but from time to time a wide lakeland covered the * middle west' of North AiAerica.
Round these ancient shores, under the influence of solar heat, the general planetary circulation of winds and sea-currents played then as now. The resulting climates however were different, by reason of the shape of the sea-basins, and the altitude of the land- masses. In particular, the long trough of 'Tethys/ lying wholly in north temperate atid subtropical latitudes, and landlocked towards the north from Mexico to Scandinavia, served — like the Medi- terranean of to-day, but on a vaster scale — to mitigate and aspimi- late in an exceptional degree the climates of its foreshores, and still more those of its islands.
For though most of 'Tethys* was open water, a lar/*e region between north Africa and Scandinavia was broken by large is- lands, ruinous fragments of continents older still, like Scandinavia itself, and the Caledonian highlands, Snowdonia, atid the Malvern and Mendip Hills, imbedded in the margin of *Laurentia.* One such forms now the plateau core of Spain and Portugal; Sardinia, Corsica, Elba, and the rugged *toe? of Italy are peaks of another, which we may call * Tyrrhenia*; the Caucasus, the Bohemian high* land, the Ardennes, are others, round whose skirts old shingle- banks and other shore deposits replace the clean limestones characteristic of the greater depths. So early in the history of the planet was the site of our European and Mediterranean region con- spicuous for its abnormalities, and its juxtaposition of old and new.
The * tertiary* period of crust-history, which is still in progress — for the term * Quaternary,1 signifying those recent phases when Man's presence can be demonstrated, is a needless concession to self-esteem — is characterized, like its * primary * and * secondary * predecessors, by vast readjustments of the crust, breaking up the Laurentian and Indo-African continents, and crumpling the cre- taceous sea-bed of 'Tethys* into a series of elevated ridges* These folds result; from two series of lateral stresses. The one, thrusting outwards from Angara-land to east, south and west, has caused a series of southward-bulging * arcs' (like the rucks in a tablecloth when a heavy book is pushed across it) which define the present continent of Asia* Such arcs form the half-submerged island*- chains, Aleutian, Kurile, Japanese, Lu-chu; the grand sweep through Burma, and the Malay peninsula with its insular pro- longation to the Moluccas; the Himalayan range and the Hindu- Kush; the Iranian arc which traverses Baluchistan, south and west Pefsia, and Kurdistan; and further west, the Tauric and Dinaric systems which bound respectively Asia Minor on the south* and
I, n] TERTIARY MOUNTAIN-BUILDING 7
the Balkan peninsula on the west,, as far as the head of the Adri- atic. Then follows the southward and westward-bulging Atlas range, and its prolongation into south-eastern Spain. Within these outer arcs rise other folds obviously concentric with them, most easily recognizable in north-eastern Asia, and behind the Hima- laya, but perceptible also in Iran and northern Asia Minor. Be- tween the folds, lie less crumpled areas, at higher or lower levels. The plateau of Tibet stands now at over 1 5,000 ft., the Tarim basin at over 3000 ft., and the core of Asia Minor at about xooo ft. above the sea; the Behring, Japan, and China Seas, on the other hand^have bottom at 12,000—9000 ft. down; the Gulf of Oman at 6000 ft., and the southern lobe of the Caspian at about 2000 ft* Similarly, outside each greater arc, the margin of old Gondwana- land*has been forced down and under, in the Bay of Bengal, in the Persian Gulf, — where the whole of Arabia has been tilted like an ill-laid paving slab — -and in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, where the north African foreland has been fractured stepwise, so that, while the Libyan shore is beset with quicksands, the greatest depths are off the Peloponnese and Rhodes.
The folds of the other series result not from southward but from northward thrusts, and overhang similarly sunken * forelands,' this time on their northern side. Examples are the Altai range between Mongolia and western Siberia, the Caucasus, and the whole Alpine series, — Balkans, Carpathians, Alps, and Pyrenees. The course of these European folds is complicated by several factors, chief among which is the presence of those older lands already mentioned, both north of the Alpine folds, in Bohemia, the Black Forest and Vosges, and the Auvergne, and within the folded area, as in Spain, *Tyrrhenia,' and Hungary; the stubbornness of which has not merely accentuated the transverse amplitude and overfolding of the ridges themselves, but has compressed them lengthways into the 2, -shape presented now by the Carpathians and Balkans and caused the spiral distortion of the Pyrenees, Alps, Apennines, Atlas, and the Spanish-Balearic arc.
Finally, local relaxations of these strains brought about the collapse of whole regions of the crust, either parallel to the trend of the folded arcs, or transversely. Examples of longitudinal subsidence are the Black Sea and southern Caspian, carrying away both ends of the Caucasus and another great segment of mountain range between the Crimea and the Balkans : another is the Adriatic, nipped between the Dinaric arc and the Apennines* ^fraft&Verse fracture and collapse are illustrated, within the mass of 013 Angara- land, by the long * trough-fault' or 'rift yall^' df the Red Sea,
8 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
which Is prolonged between Crete and Rhodes right across the junction of the Dinaric and Tauric arcs, submerging the Aegean archipelago, and breaking down a shattered trough through Macedonia and Serbia to the Hungarian plain. A branch of this same rift forking west across the Dinaric folds depressed the Gulf of Corinth; another diverging eastward further south forms the Gulf of Akaba, the Dead Sea, and the trough of Code-Syria, and may be traced far athwart Armenia. All these are only classical examples of the main types of crust movement to which the tertiary transformations of old * Tethys' are due.
Crust-movements of such amplitude occupied a vast period of time. And all the while, rainfall and frost were^denuding and dis- secting the land surfaces; rivers were transporting the debris, and depositing it in lake basins and coastal seas; limestones and fharls were accumulated in deeper waters; and at times along the lines of severest distortion and fracture, volcanic matter was discharged molten from beneath*
Principal stages in this tertiary derangement of what had been the cretaceous sea-bottom of Tethys may be summarized as fol- lows. Their importance for us, over and above their contribution to the actual distribution of land and water, of mountains and plains, is that in conjunction with the changes of climate resulting from such rearrangement of lands and seas,, they have restricted or extended the regions which this or that type of vegetation could occupy, and the range of the animal forms which such vegetation fed, and so contributed in due course to localize and differentiate the main varieties of Man*
Foldings and upheavals of the old sea-floor began earliest, as they have since reached their greatest amplitude, eastward in the heart of Asia, where the Himalaya, Kuen-lun andTienshan ranges, with the plateaux of Tibet and Mongolia uplifted between them, intervene between Angara-land and the * Leirmrian* sub-continent, of which only fragments soon remained, represented by Madagas- car and peninsular India. Elsewhere too during this stage there was widespread exposure of the sea-floor; especially along that east-and-west axis of upheaval which eventually becomes the 'Highland^Zone* of western Asia and southern Europe. Anl without being elevated, many of the remaining sea-basins dried up altogether, leaving vast deposits of salt and gypsum, like those which are forming now in the waste heart of Persia,
Renewed submergence followed, from the westward ocean* as far south as Kordofan, and as far east as Khorasan* But the Hindu- Kush and Iranian arc barred off for ever from Tethys its old south-
J, n] FIRST PHASES OF A MEDITERRANEAN SEA 9
ward gulf; and a mere bulging of the African continent cut off the eljj uf "depression in western Sahara from what we may now begin to call the Midland Sea; for it is the first phase of the Mediterra- nean of to-day. But the fauna and flora of the lands which were appearing now along the line of the Alpine folds were still essenti- ally of such Indo-African type as had spread thither during the period of exposure. And such they long remained; for these lands were mainly Insular, and as the Laurentian continent still limited the Atlantic northwards not far from the line joining Newfoundland to Cornwall, the oceanic currents which bathed their ^shores maintained a subtropical climate, warm, moist, and equable.
Furthe^ folding and upheaval of the western arcs extended and consolidated the mountain zone of the Nearer East as a long pro- montory connecting the high plateaux of Asia with these mid- European islands, and these again with the British promontory of Laurentia, along the very ancient line of folding represented by the Ardennes and the Mendips. The result was to bisect the Mid- land Sea into a southern or 'Mediterranean' and a northern or *Sarmatian* basin, which henceforth have separate histories until almost modern times. A further result was that the sinuous Apen- nine-Atlas ridge encircled a -'West Mediterranean' basin, which though it communicated usually with both the Atlantic and the East Mediterranean, was occasionally cut off from both, and in late Miocene times was so much reduced by evaporation that none of its deposits of that age are now above water level. There was therefore ample communication between the new mid-Europe and the Moroccan lobe of the old Africa*
The East Mediterranean long retained much of the character of its predecessor the Midland Sea, The highland arcs along its north border included Crete and Cyprus; the Adriatic had not yet SLink outside these arcs, nor the Aegean within them. The moun- tains of Media and Elam were still very imperfectly developed, and the Arabian slab of Gondwana-land had not yet been frac- tured or even tilted under their stresses. The southern border of this sea lay therefore far to the southward across Africa, from a Moroccan Gulf, south of Atlas, to Abyssinia, Hadramaut, and the mountain ridge of Oman; with an easterly gulf extending far Into Iran* It was separated however from all seas to the south-east, as its marine fauna show, by the ridge already mentioned connecting the Asiatic with the African continent. Occasionally disconnected from the Atlantic by elevation of the lands round tb^ttfestern basin, it underwent repeated phases of evaporation; stud Indo-African
io PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
plants and animals still occupied its northern margins^ leaving their remains for example in Sanies and Attica, "*
The northern or Sarmatian Sea had a similar though separate history. It extended repeatedly far east> to lake Balkash and the foothills of Altai and Tienshan, and far north round the base of the Urals, an old ridge accentuated by the same tertiary stresses as the mountain-zone which bounded this basin on the south. Caucasus was sometimes insulated, but usually formed part of its southern margin, with only gulfs or lakes outflanking it south- ward. Westward communication with the Atlantic was interrupted earlier, oftener, and more completely than in the Mediterranean area, thanks to the growing intimacy between Mid-Europe and those ridges and stacks of old land which we have seen ^embedded in the Laurentian foreshore. Between the rising Alps and- the Bohemian and mid-German highlands a long gulf remained^ or in high-and-dry periods a drainage basin which we may already call 'Danubian*, but the strong northward and outward bulge of the Carpathians eventually cut off these lowlands and the sunken Hungarian basin, to form inland lakes. An outlet through the Iron Gates to the Pontic basin cannot be demonstrated till later.
As the land-masses of Mid-Europe and also of North Africa and Western Asia increased in extent, the climate of the whole region became drier: the c Sarmatian' sea shrank into a * Pontic* scries of lakes, connected only by flood channels, if at all, but including then a region so far to the south-west as the present north Aegean* Eventually one of the deep fiver valleys, which dissected the ex- posed Sarmatian sea-floor, cut back into the high ground in the re-entrant angle between the Carpathians and Balkans, opened a new outlet for the waters of the Hungarian and Bavarian basins already mentioned, and created the Danubian drainage system. In this period also a long trough, faulted across Mid-Europe^ deter- mined the upper basin of the eventual Rhine, though it was long before this lakeland was tapped, like the Danubian, by a river cutting back from the north through the old Taunus highland from Coblenz to Bingetl,
The same period of uprise and continental climate affected the Mediterranean also. The rising escarpment of Media and Elam cr.t off its Iranian gulf, which became silted, first with river deposits* then, as its waters evaporated, with a crust of salt and gypsum. And as the folded escarpment rose, very steep and lofty, the foreland in front of it to the south-west was forced down and under, till the great quadrangular slab which we call Arabia was snapped off" from Africa> and tilted bodily, downwards at the foot
I, n] TERTIARY FLORA AND FAUNA n
of the new Zagros range, but with a free broken edge upreared to wqptwatJrd, and long troughs of dislocation and subsidence between itself and the African continent. The Red Sea trough opened for long into the Mediterranean, like the Nile trough to the west of it; but was closed at its south end by the main ridge from Asia to East Africa.
Further north, the same fractures crossed the Mediterranean floor, so that the free edge of the Arabian slab, or rather the de- tached strip of it which forms the Lebanon range, was thencefor- ward the eastward limit of that sea. The movement, violent as it appears in retrospect, was however gradual, and progressed from south to north so that the drainage basin formed on the tilted slab remained Connected with the Mediterranean through North Syria, and fee Jordan valley, lying in a smaller and earlier rift than that of the Red Sea and for long a tributary of a great river system of north-eastern Africa, still contains species in common with the Nile and the Euphrates* But, in time, Mesopotamia too became a separate basin like Iran, accumulating its own river sediments, and in dry periods its beds of salt and gypsum.
The gradual coherence of new land-masses where the Tethys basin had been, and the restricted communication between the remaining seas and the Atlantic, affected the climate of the whole region profoundly and adversely, and the fauna and flora were modified accordingly. Surviving representatives of the first occu- pants of tertiary Europe are now only recognizable in the Malay zoological region, and to some extent in tropical west Africa. For our present purpose we need only note that it Is in these two regions alone that the great anthropoids, gorilla and orang-utan, survive; that it is certain that various monkeys, and probable that creatures ancestral to Man, were among these * Malayan * occupants of mid-Europe; that the most * simian* varieties of Man himself, the dwarfish, heavy-jawed, and long-armed Negritos, have a similarly discontinuous distribution surviving only in central Africa, in Malaya and beyond, and to sorae extent ijp^sputhern India; and further, that the only creatures really intermediate be- tween these and the anthropoids, are Pithecanthropus from a deposit considerably later in Java and the Broken Hill skull from Rhodesia, It is not without reason, therefore, that search has been made for human handiwork, even in eocepe and miocgae beds. But^tjbfii; * eoliths* collected in Belgium from miocene deposits h^^etiibt yet been generally accepted as such: those from graves ililing the sides of the present Nile valley are rather betft^jrtS^te'd, but must still be viewed with reserve.
ia PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
As the climate became less favourable, the Malayan fauna gave place in the north-west to characteristically * African' types, which persisted in the new European (or rather *Eurafrican') region until the close of the Pontic stage. Then, rather abruptly,, and very widely, this * African' fauna was itself replaced by new forms, dis- tinctly 'Arctic/ advancing apparently from that Laurentian con- tinent which had existed all the while west of Britain, and prob- ably had extended also far eastward beyond Scandinavia as the Sarmatian sea evaporated; since similar 'Arctic' forms can be traced penetrating Asia too, as far as its Himalayan crest* The * African' withdrawal was of course gradual and unequal ; typical forms sur- vived in Bessarabia, for instance, later than elsewhere, and Spits- bergen and Greenland still had magnolias and plane-tpees during the Pontic phase. Within the folded zone, especially, there were secluded regions favourable to the survival of the old warmth- loving forms. The progressive folding of maturer mountain-ranges, and the development of more recent folds, such as the Apennines and the Jura, accentuated this subdivision of the north-western or * Eurafrican ' land-mass.
A fresh period of submergence follows, probably due to relaxa- tion of the folding stresses, and collapse of ill-supported blocks, The British promontory of Laurentia, and probably the whole southern seaboard of that continent, began to give way, so that the Atlantic ocean, which had long ago been extended southwards from Tethys to the Antarctic, spread northwards now into cooler latitudes. Since some of these sinking areas — for example, the Aquitanian region of France — adjoined the west Mediterranean, Atlantic marine fauna had access once more to the Mediterranean basins. As the water surface of these seas increased, the climate became moister, and the weathering of the highlands and main river valleys more destructive. It is in this period that the drainage systems of the lower Rhine, the Seine and other rivers of the English Channel, the Loire, Garonne and Guadalquivir, and the Wady Draa, south of the Moroccan Atlas, were established, in deep-lying gulfs; the Rhpne is another example of drainage con- sequent on such subsidence.
Further east, the Aegean depression, already noted, began Qo admit Mediterranean waters to basins hitherto belonging to the Pontic lake-system. The Pontic region, too, receiving ample rain- fall once more, regained its old continuity from the Carpathians as far as lake Baikal. The trough-valley of the Nile was being opened, as we have already seen, as far south as Assuan, and re- ceived copious drainage from the high west edge of the Arabian
I,n] SEVERANCE OF AFRICA FROM ASIA 13
slab; the first fractures had begun along the line of the Red Sea, and the remains of considerable lakes in the Dead Sea and Orontes region suggest similar subsidences further north. The Mesopo- tamian basin was by this time quite cut off from the Mediterranean by the tilting of Arabia, though the barrier from Lebanon north- ward was of no great width or height. When the tilting movement came to a crisis, and Arabia broke away from the African con- tinent, the Red Sea trough opened first as a gulf of the Mediter- ranean. But the foundering of the next block south of Arabia admitted the waters of the 'Indian1 Ocean into this gulf from the south; 'and a similar inbreak through the Hormuz strait converted the Mesopotamian lake, which had formed along the sunk eastern edge of Arabia, into a ' Persian gulf of the same southern ocean, extenfiing all along the foothills of Zagros, and also towards Anti- Taurus, and Anti-Lebanon. In this fashion, while the Mediter- ranean remained limited eastward almost at its present shoreline, the whole region between it and the Iranian plateau became almost wholly separated from what remained of old Gondwana-land, both in peninsular India and in east Africa, with a new and narrow isthmus, twice constricted, at Suez and north of the Lebanon, instead of the old broad land-avenue from Iran to Abyssinia.
The consequence of this separation will be seen to be of the utmost importance, when we consider the distribution of Man, and of the modern fauna and flora generally; for it is with the severance of Africa from southern Asia, on the one hand, and the replacement on the other of ' African * plants and animals north of the Mediterranean by northern forms from Scandinavia and the Laurentian foreshores about Britain, that the modern period of tertiary time may fairly be said to begin.
It will be evident from what precedes, that by this time not only Europe but the whole north-west quadrant of the Old World land-mass had been shaped approximately to its modern propor- tions : only the precise distribution of sea and lake over the shal- lower hollows in its surface being liable to shift, according as either the land rose or sank locally, or the supply of moisture varied over its landlocked basins. The broad features of this large group of regions, the eventual home of the 'white races* of man, may there- fore be summarized in modern geographical terms. It consists, essentially, of the Alpine 'folded highland/ whose structure ai^ conformation we have been tracing, bounded both northward^Scl southward by abrupt outward slopes overlooking depr^€^i btit undisturbed and level * forelands/ Included wi^^f'^iife ' folded region are numerous plateaux more or less ^le(vat©dy and more or
14 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
less buried under later sediments- And westward;* where the Alpine folds fade away towards the foreshores of the new Atlantic Ocean, and around the British remnants of Laurentia, now de- tached,, there is a * continental shelf of varying width, and liable to moderate oscillations of level.
Three main regions are therefore to be distinguished here: (i) the Highland Zone itself; (2) its Northern Foreland, from the North Sea to the foothills of Tienshan and Altai, with its south- eastern half liable to be submerged in *Sarmatian* or *Ponto~ Caspian * lakes; (3) its Southern Foreland, from Morocco to Mesopotamia, continuous and undisturbed at a fairly high average level in latitudes remote from the Highland Zone; more broken and depressed further north, till its fractured slabs sink beneath the waters of the Persian Gulf, the east Mediterranean, and the lake region of southern Tunis. As already described, it is by no geo- logical accident that the west Mediterranean basin lies north, not south, of the Atlas folds; within the Highland Zone, that is, not adjacent to it like the eastern basin,
The later history of these three principal regions must be traced separately, if only because the altitude of the Highland Zone has long been sufficient to give it a markedly cooler and moister climate than either of the Flatlands; so that its greater rainfall has sculp- tured it very deeply, and wrought upon its surface abrupt and complicated scenery of mountain and valley; the varied rocks thus exposed contributing directly, and still more (by their detritus) indirectly, to accentuate local differences in the soils and eventual flora of each drainage area. As its limits lie obliquely from north- west to south-east between latitude 50° in central Europe and 2 5° in south Persia, the larger changes of climate have affected its main regions serially from one extremity to the other. Its uplands have been sufficiently continuous at most periods to permit the spread and withdrawal of consecutive types of vegetation; yet the deep engraving of its passes has permitted the transmission of comparatively lowland flora from one basin to another* And what is evident for vegetation applies equally to all animals which are susceptible to changes of climate and food supply*
This Highland Zone3 then, may conveniently be regarded, Aa its main characters, as a single geographical region. Frequently and for long periods, it has been a promontory based on central Asia, or a long isthmus, connecting a south-eastern continent with a wide and old land in the north-west. At all times its upland conformation, moister climate, and denser forest vegetation have secluded it from the Flatlands on either flank. In so far as there
I, n] EURASIAN AND EURAFRICAN FLATLANDS 15
has been interaction. It has been the Highland which has had the initiative; because in periods of excessive moisture it has been from the" foothills of the Highland that forest has spread over adjacent plains; whereas in periods of drought, the extension of steppe con- ditions into the foothills has been retarded by the residual rainfall around the heights. Only by glaciation, It would seem., could the Highland vegetation be devastated from within, and even so under the most favourable conditions for reoccupatlon from the less frost- bitten highlands continuous with it to the south-east. And as we shall see in due course, such glacial devastation did actually occur, between the close of the pleistocene period and the beginning of our own.
North of the Highland Zone lies the Northern Flatland. It is alm*t featureless from Altai and Tienshan to the Baltic and North Sea; except for the narrow transverse fold of the Ural range, which however fades away southward before reaching latitude 5*0°. But beyond those almost accidental depressions of its western margin, which form our 'narrow seas,' this Flatland Is limited by two considerable mountain-masses, Scandinavian and British, of great age and stability; and beyond these to the north-west ex- tended formerly a long arm of that old Lauren tlan continent which still encircled the north Atlantic, long after it had ceased to occupy it; and it was probably the subsidence of this Laurentian land (represented now by the * Wyville-Thomson Ridge, * on the ocean floor from Britain to Iceland and Greenland) and the circumstance that the breach of continuity lay west and not east of the Scandi- navian and British mountain ranges and involved general redistri- bution of currents between the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, that determined the profound changes of climate to which allusion has already been made (p. 12).
Of secondary importance are the minor oscillations which deter- mined whether the northern parts of the Flatland, east and west of the Ural divide, should be above or below water; and thereby assigned to the remainder, and to the whole north face of the Highland Zone, a climate either moist enough to fill the Sarmatian depression with lakes or a sea, or dry enough to exhaust this re- servoir and reduce the whole northern Flatland to a cold desert as Inhospitable as the hot desert on the south side, to which we tutu now.
The southern or Eurafrlcan Flatland Is almost as simple ,ift its main features as the northern, and far more uniform in defSalL As this region lies within the planetary trade-wind b$l&$!i£tiS devoid of abruptly folded ridges which might precipitate ra,lia^— except the
16 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
Atlas to the north, which belongs to the folded Mountain Zone, and the highlands of Nigeria and Abyssinia, — it has always been less well watered than the regions north and south of it, which are moistened respectively by the westerlies and the equatorial rain- belt. As no cause seems to be known which could displace the equatorial belt of perennial rainfall and dense forest., to any con- siderable degree, the normal result of a pluvial or glacial crisis in the northern hemisphere has been to contract this trade-wind belt and its desert regime; and conversely. The only other important variable affecting the Southern Flatland has been the greater or less extent of submergence, in the Mediterranean and Mesopo- tamia, mitigating or accentuating the dryness of northerly winds, The mitigating influence of the Atlantic has of course been per- sistent, but has been neither great nor far-reaching, after the dis- appearance of that old gulf or lake-basin south of the Ahaggar plateau after the miocene period. It should be noted however that in periods of greater rainfall both this plateau and the Tassili and TIbesti uplands further north and east,, have attracted sufficient moisture to feed large rivers, running some southwards to the Niger, others northwards into the Mediterranean, by the Wadi Irharhar and the Tunisian Schotts*
Direct land-contact between the southern Flatland and the Highland Zone is interrupted for the middle third of its length by the persistent water-surface of the cast Mediterranean basin, last remnant of old *Tethys'; and again far eastward, by the Gulf of Oman and the Mesopotamian Gulf, formerly much larger and wider than now. Between these two sea-barriers, outer ridges of the Tauric arc radiate south-westward and southward into north Syria and Cyprus, and this highland prominence is continuous southward with the upstanding edge of the great Arabian slab and detached fragments of it, as far as the peninsula of Sinai, forming a causeway along which migrations of momentous im- portance have occurred repeatedly. In the west Mediterranean the Atlas range, which must always be regarded as being geo-
fraphically continuous, as well as structurally, with the ranges of icily and Italy, and also of south-eastern Spains has the west Saharan Flatland along its steep southern face; but the continuity of the Eurafrican land-mass here Is qualified by the depth, and usual submergence, of the west Mediterranean depressions. Only at either end of this western basin have there been intermittent land-bridges from Atlas; north-eastward through Sicily to the . Apennine arc, concentric with the Alps and repeating on a small .scale some features of the Syrian causeway; and through Spain, an
I, n] AFRICAN9 AND 'ARCTIC' FAUNA 17
old highland comparable in size and structure with that of Asia Minor? to the broad coast-plains of the Atlantic seaboard north of the Pyrenees,
It results from these northward avenues of the southern Flat- land, that there has been long intercourse between its inhabitants and those of the Highland Zone, at both ends of their long frontier; simple, marginal, and almost uniformly from north to south over the Syrian causeway; intermittent, complicated, oscillatory, and far-reaching, in the 'Eurafrican* west.
Such oscillations and, no less, the general replacement of 'Afri- can' by * Arctic* forms of life throughout the whole north-west of the Old World, were caused, or at all events greatly accelerated, in the pleistocene period by the onset of a profound change of climate, very severely felt all over the new European sub-continent of Eurafrica, but by no means confined to this region; for the *Ice Age' or * Glacial Period7 of the Old World has its counterpart in the New, and even very similar sub-periods. There have also been 'Ice Ages* in the southern hemisphere, but there is no proof that they either coincided or alternated with those in the northern, and they had no known influence on mankind. With the northern, and especially with the European Ice Age it was otherwise. That the replacement of African occupants, on the other hand, was as gradual as it was, was due to the fact that the Ice Age was not continuous, but had its * interglacial* phases, which permitted African forms to return northward, and also allowed Asiatic species to move westward into Europe along the Highland Zone; and we shall see that this oscillation had profound significance for Man.
For if we compare the earliest known distributions of the other primates with the actual distribution either of their modern repre- sentatives, or of the principal races of man, it becomes clear that whereas the four-handed, and also many of the four-footed mem- bers of this 'order* of animals, retained mainly arboreal habits, and consequently were withdrawn southward and eastward into Africa and Malaya, as the subtropical forests were restricted by the general change of climate, one intermediate variety, two-handed an4 two-footed, and thereby more able to accommodate itself to the accidents of life in the open, became so far master of its fate as to outlast the forest, and enter on a career of pedestrian adventure and manual exploitation. We do not yet know at what stages in this acclimatization to the parkland and grassland sequel of the retreating forest this biped primate achieved its three primary controls over its surroundings — control over dead matter, in the
C. A,BM
i8 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
shape of boughs and stones, prolonging the reach, and enhancing the force, of its natural hand-stroke; control over the wayward energy of fire, the scourge and the terror of all other animals; and therefore not only comparative security against carnivorous animals, but control over the fund of sustenance and energy supplied by animal flesh. But we do know already, from an implement-strewn surface of old land underlying some of the earliest glacial debris of East Anglia, that some sort of tool-using, and animal hunting * precursor' of ourselves ranged so far as this to the north-west before the climate was as yet quite glacial; and from similar indi- cations in the Nile gravels, and on the surrounding desert, that subtropical drought restricted him as little as subarctic cold. How far these early traces, or remoter relics such as the Trinil brain-case from Java, or the Broken Hall skull and other bones from Rhcdesia, may be connected with ancestors of any actual variety of Man we must consider in fuller view of the effects of the glacial crisis*
III. THE GLACIAL CRISIS
The causes of this Ice Age have been much discussed, and are still obscure: recent investigations lay greater stress on geo- graphical factors, such as the distribution of land and water, the elevation or depression of the region, and other circumstances favourable to intense snow-fall at certain places and seasons, than to those astronomical explanations by nutation of the earth's axis, or precession of the seasons, which were formerly popular. It is at all events certain that the severest glaciations occurred in periods of submergence, and that the repeated relaxations of glacial auster- ity coincide with greater exposure of land-surfaces, and with a continental climate drier rather than warmer, since dry air, how- ever cold, precipitates little snow; without copious snow there is nothing to feed a glacier, much less a continental ice-sheet; and under dry cold winds on the lowland the snout of the best-fed glacier shrinks rapidly by sheer evaporation* The same circum- stance goes far to explain why the main ice cap of the Old World lay so far towards its western edge, exposed to wet westerly winds off the north Atlantic which as we ixave seen had only recently attained its modern extent. In the same ways the evidence for ex- tensive glaciation on the mountain ranges of Caucasus, Armenia, and especially of Central Asia coheres with that for a wide water surface in the Ponto-Caspian lakeland, and for submergence of western Siberia,
Of such glacial maxima there have been recognized three in
I, m] THE FOURFOLD CRISES OF THE ICE AGE 19
most parts of France, and four on the north side of the Alps and Py^ene&s, and in north-western Germany, followed by two oscilla- tions during the final retreat over those districts which lay nearer to the principal snow-caps. The second, or * Mindel, * spell in the Alpine series (corresponding with the later part of the first, further north) was the severest; submergence was deepest, temperature lowest, and the Scandinavian ice sheet widest, covering all but the south coast of Britain, and meeting the glaciers of the Alps (while the Rhone glacier, for instance, extended to Lyon) and those of the Carpathians and Urals so that their margins, like the glaciers of the Caucasus, bordered and replenished the Sarmatian sea. Outlying ice-caps, mainly of this phase, have been traced on the Pyrenees, Apennines, and Dinaric and Tauric chains; in Armenia, Zagr8s, and the north Persian ranges; and over the whole moun- tain knot of the Pamirs and Hindu- Kush, from its Sarmatian shore to an ocean-gulf which flooded the Punjab. Over these vast areas, therefore, all life was obliterated temporarily, and round their margins and interspaces was reduced to sub-arctic desolation.
There is strong reason for believing that the climatic oscilla- tions of the whole north-west Quadrant synchronized and formed part of a single great planetary episode. Not only is the fourfold glaciation of north-western Europe repeated around the Alps and represented in a fourfold * pluvial' sequence in the Nile Valley; but the glacial maxima represented by deposits in Nebraska, Kan- sas, Illinois and Wisconsin respectively, though not necessarily contemporary, seem to repeat the relative intensity of the Gunz, Mindel, Riss, and Wtirm maxima of the European Ice Age. It is therefore permissible to treat as standard the southern Flatland, where there would seem to have been least bi*each of continuity in plant and animal life, and interpret the more broken and complicated sequence in the western and the northern Flatlands, and also in the Highland Zone, by reference of their main episodes to the principal stages in the south.
Before dealing with the human occupants of these regions, and their redistribution during and after the Ice Age, it is convenient to note briefly the effects of any such crisis on the distribution of anTmals and plants, partly because these effects can be more fully illustrated, partly because it was in response to changes in his animal and vegetable surroundings that man's first human efforts seem to have been made.
It follows directly that in any displacement of climatic zones the corresponding flora and fauna were displaced accordingly, with due allowance for peculiarities of soil or configuration which either
20 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
permitted the maintenance of any elements of such plant and animal associations, or accelerated their retreat. In this connexion, it is important to observe the normal sequence of the types of vegetation; round the margin of perennial snowfield or ice sheet* frozen treeless 'tundra* with transitory herbage after the spring thaw; then dwarf birch and stunted pine, passing to coniferous forest, and through this into mixed deciduous forest; oak, beech, and nut-bearing trees such as chestnut and walnut predominating in succession. Forest however may be interrupted, on soils un- favourable to trees, by other types of vegetation; on loess, repre- senting ancient deposits of wind-blown dust from adjacent desert, by precarious steppe or grass-land; on limestone, by the treeless turf of chalk-downs or wolds, owing to the withdrawal of surface water by underground channels; on ancient and imperviouslrocks, especially where these adjoin a wind-swept seaboard, by the dry bitter heather and gorse of moorland. Marshland too, and the
travels of river valleys, have their special * plant associations/ >rming open glades between the forests which clothe the higher ground. This normal sequence is of course retarded also locally by altitude, which increases -rainfall, and reduces mean temperature. Parnassus for example has pines above its olives and buy-trees, and alpine flowers above its pines.
Further south, in the 'Mediterranean' type of climate, with wet winter and rainless summer, deciduous trees give place to evergreens, and tall forest to thickets or shrubs; and as drought and warmth increase, even shrubs stand further apart,, in an under- growth of tough resinous bushes, and spring-flowering bulbs, annuals, and grasses* Eventually grasses, halfa-rush, and spiny leathery camel-fodder predominate, until they too fade out before drifting sand and sun-tanned rock.
As climate becomes milder, the zones of vegetation move north- wards, and uphill; but as trees take centuries to mature, the shift of vegetation may lag behind that of climate* On the other hand, adverse shift of climate rapidly destroys the less hardy plants, for they cannot retreat and only acclimatize slowly; more .mobile forms of life, such as the larger animals and man, will cither follow their habitual food-plants or maintain themselves in aust<frer climate by change of diet, by growing winter-fur, by taking shelter in caves, or, in man's case, by appropriating the hides and fur of other animals,
In an oscillating climate, therefore, such as that of this Ice Age* recurrent necessity offered exceptional stimulus to invention. It is man's inertia, rather than any initiative, his obstinate reluctance
I, iv] THE PRINCIPAL HUMAN RACES 21
to abandon a mode of life once adopted, his recourse to any compromise — * rather to endure the ills we have., than fly to others tha? we know not of* — and, in the result, his unique ability to conquer Nature by reasoned conformity with Nature's ways, that differentiates him from all animals but those, such as horse and dog, in which he has apprehended and elicited faculties remotely analogous to his own,
IV. THE PRINCIPAL HUMAN RACES
We are next concerned with the human stock, or stocks, which occupied these regions before and during the Ice Age. It has been noted already that the geological evidence points to prolonged geogttiphical severance between the plateaux of Central Asia, with their vast folded mountains and their eastward and northward forelands (including the whole of ancient Angara-land), and all that westward prolongation of the folded zone, with its forelands, which we have been discussing. This geographical severance at the narrow and almost impassable neck of high land where the Hindu Kush intervenes between Afghanistan and the Pamirs has its human counterpart in the segregation of the ancestors of the yellow-skinned, straight-haired Mong-oloid stock from all westerly varieties; for although anatomical evidence of its ancestry is not yet collected, enough is known, as we shall see (pp. 48, 59), about the slowness of the development of human types (for example, in pen- insular Europe) to justify the belief that this ancient seclusion of central and eastern Asia, lasted none too long for the differentia- tion of a kind of man so well-marked physically and even men- tally,
In the same way, the correlation of the black-skinned, woolly- haired stocks with the Malayan fauna, which is suggested by their actual distribution, would seem to postulate a period of time comparable with that suggested above for the Mongoloids, within which the no less highly-specialized negroid physique could be developed from a precursor more widely distributed, especially north-westward, and presenting those features in which both the negroid and the white stocks differ from the yellow.
On the northern slopes of the Asiatic core the supply of moisture during the Ice Age brought the Altai glaciers down to 6000 ft* from sea-level, far lower, that is, than sufficed to close all avenues from central Asia to the lowlands of Siberia and Tur- kestan. On the Himalayan side, monsoon winds from an Indian Ocean which covered the Punjab and Bengal, furnished snow
22 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
more copious still, and moraines are found as low as 3000 ft. But though the comparatively narrow neck of high land between rthe valleys of Indus and Oxus was wholly beset by its ice-cap, it is not necessary to suppose that within the great plateaux of central Asia there was perennial snow, or a wholly uninhabitable region. Rather the vast accumulations of loess, the deposit of countless dust storms, suggest a 'continental' climate with wide variations, and the possibility of at least seasonal occupation by fleet grazing- animals, such as the horse. It is indeed to an intimate parasitic connexion with such an animal "host/ in some siich circumstances, that we have probably to ascribe the highly specialized type of man characteristic of this region now. The yellow skin-colour of Mongoloid man gives him protective camouflage in sandy desert and dry-grass steppe; the structure of his straight wiry half, and its rarity except on the scalp, suggest adaptation to a continental climate; while its extreme length in both sexes serves to disguise the characteristic profile of the human head and neck, and approxi- mate it to that of a quadruped seen from behind. From the rather prominent jaw combined with globular brain-case may be inferred long habituation to some food which minimized the pull of the jaw muscles on the side-walls of the skull; and the only rood which fulfils this condition is milk and its products, on which nomad Tartars still live almost exclusively: the absence of face-hair, the short concave nose with spread nostrils, the peculiar infantile lips, the wide flat face and obliquely set eyes, are adaptations we should expect if for ages this milk was absorbed direct from the udder; and the short legs of some Mongoloids, and poor development of the calf-muscles in all> suggest that, like Tartar infants nowadays, the parasitic proto-IVtongol sat tight upon his host between meals, and shared its wanderings.
On the steppes of glacial Europe, man hunted and ate the horse; if we suppose that in central Asia, during the same and perhaps in long earlier periods, he made friends with him and lived upon his friendship, we seem to have a clue to the paradox of the emergence of a highly specialized breed of man from a region which had been for a very long time so little suited, except on these terms, to sustain him at all. The absence of rfhy widespread relics of such occupancy explains itself on the same hypothesis* Men who did not hunt or fight, had no more need of coups-de-poing than of supra-orbital ridges or a fighting-jaw^ such as characterize the negroids or the 'Neanderthal' type in Glacial Europe, As they must travel with their animal hosts or perish, they had no choice but to desert their ailing relatives when they
I, xv] SPREAD OF MONGOL MAN 23
fell behind; Interments therefore are not to be expected, nor a group-psychology which sets much value on human life, or gives out-let to futile emotion. Almost inhuman in his normal apathy, the Mongol can display almost equine savagery when provoked by panic or ill-usage.
The development of so peculiar a type presupposes not only a large continuous region? of appropriate physique, but also com- plete seclusion. The high plateaux had supplied the former for a very long time, since loess-land is so inhospitable to trees or shrubs that wide oscillations of climate only affect the density of its vege- tation without changing the quality. Seclusion has been assured by the great altitude of these plateaux, the ruggedness of the sur- rounding ranges, and the dense rain-forest of their monsoon-swept outvtfftjrd slopes. While therefore it has been exceptionally difficult for alien folk to intrude, it has been relatively easy for Mongol man to emerge, on one of two conditions — either that he parts company with his milk-giving host, and takes to hunting, as has happened in the north-east, or to agriculture, as in the south-east of Asia; or else, if he is to retain his nomad pastoral habit, he must wait till the climate has become so dry that Jhere are clearings of grassland through the forest belt. Even then he can only proceed so far as he finds grassland still in front of him; and this has only happened at two points: to the west, through the great avenue between Altai and Tienshan, and to the north-east, down the valley of the Hoang-ho; and even here it only happened far on in post-glacial time.
It would be beyond the plan of this chapter, to discuss in detail the subsequent spread of Mongoloid Man through the Asiatic foreshores of his plateaii-home; but his western and north-western expansion has so profoundly influenced the course of history in the modern world, that it is necessary to trace at least the outlines of them, so far as they can be recognized; and also to make quite clear their upward limits in time, which appear to be very narrow.
The older drainage of the southern and more elevated plateau, south of the Kuen-lun ranges, issued to the south-east, towards what is now the Malay Archipelago, but the Brahmaputra, cutting b^lck through the eastern Himalayas, where they have been inter- sected by the great Malayan folds, has captured the southernmost of these drainage areas; the Hoang-ho similarly has captured the northernmost, and the Yangtze the majority of those which lay between, leaving only a small remainder to feed the Sal wen and the Mekong. Consequently the main avenues of human movement have long been towards the eastern lowlands,, and the vast alluvial
24 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
area deposited by Chinese rivers, thus reinforced., has received and acclimatized most of the human overflow from the interior* m
From the northern and less elevated plateaux of Mongolia, however, the older drainage was mainly north-eastward; and here owing to the conformation of the eastern arcs, the eventual recipi- ents have been on the one hand the Amur, on the other the north- ward-flowing Lena and Yenisei. Here the continental core of old 'Angara-land/ which is embraced between these two rivers and has been an immemorial reservoir of ancient forms of life, has also formed the * asylum" into which have descended successive types of flora and fauna discarded from the plateau-margins in successive periods of austerity. The human population here, so far back as it can be traced, belongs to such discarded fauna, and is consequently Mongoloid, but of far less specialized types than those whichchavc never left the plateaux. It is from this Angara reservoir, and the mountain arcs which prolong the north margin of the plateaux and encircle them eastwards, that the whole north-eastern promontory of Asia has received its human population; and similar types, essentially yellow-skinned and straight-haired,, have passed on through it to Alaska and the New World,
Westward, the long-continued submergence of the Siberian lowland from the Yenisei to the Urals prevented all expansion until very recent times: and the present belts of tundra and forest vegetation are post-glacial. As far west as the longitude of Moscow they are of east Siberian origin, and it is only here that this Siberian forest meets mid-European forests advancing in the opposite direction; so that there is overlap of competing species, with a slight balance of advantage on the side of the eastern types. The importance of this is that with the forest, and its animals,, man has spread also, from east, as from west; coalescing in the same longitude as the species of trees. And over and above the disputable evidence of hybrid physique around the line of coalescence, the Mongolian antecedents of all groups cast of that line are betrayed by the fact that they have the reindeer domesticated, and do not hunt it, as Redskins do? and as did the men of the glacial west so long as wild reindeer survived there*
Quite distinct from all this, and representing a very much lat<£r phase of redistribution, is the exodus from the western gate of Mongolia. Here, about latitude 45°, the roughly parallel ranges of Altai and Tienshan stand (on an average) two hundred miles apart; the descent by this avenue onto the Kirghiz steppe is easy and manifold; the head waters of the Irtish have already cut back into the plateau, and an earlier affluent of the Sarmatian sea once
I^iy] AFRICAN FAUNA AND AFRICAN MAN 25
did the same, through the gap east of Lake Balkash, But this avenue only becomes passable under a special conjunction of cir- cumstances; the Kirghiz steppe, which all lies below 1500 ft., and much of it below 600 ft., must be neither submerged nor sand- swept; yet the avenue itself must be free of snow-cap and conver- gent glaciers; the forests on the outer slope and in the passes amist be discontinuous enough to permit pastoral nomads to pass with their flocks; and thirdly, there must be sufficient inducement to leave the plateaux at all. Obviously there is not here any large margin between one set of obstacles and the other. Moreover, ex- cept when the Sarmatian sea-floor is exposed, the Kirghiz steppe itself leads only to the Urals, where progress is barred again by forest. It is intelligible therefore that over long periods this western avenfae was not open for man; or if traversed at all, it served rather to admit western hunters from the steppes, or foresters along the foothills, than to let out the pastorals of the high plateaux; and the actual mixture of races all along this edge of the plateaux sug- gests that for a long while, and very widely, it was the west that was the aggressor, as indeed its cultures would lead us to suspect.
This summary outline is enough to show what seems to have been going on in the Asiatic continent which bounds the North- west Quadrant on the east. Its significance is that so far as can be seen, High Asia and its characteristic type of man remained utterly secluded from the North-west Quadrant until post-glacial time, and may be quite left out of its history.
We have next to deal with the African region which adjoins it on the south.
This African region, like the core of highland Asia, consists of ancient and stable land, on the northern half of which cretaceous and subsequent limestones have been laid down without serious disturbance over an area which has gradually diminished during tertiary times. In the north-west the multiple Atlas ranges belong to the Alpine folds, not to flatland Africa. Eastwards the con- tinuity of this vast flatland has been broken, as we have seen, by the sunken troughs of the Nile and Red Sea, as the Arabian slab was tilted and detached. Similar depression and tilting in front of th.e Tauric and Dinaric arcs submerged successive long strips of the north margin to the Mediterranean sea-floor, but the greater part of the Libyan flatland stood fast, and the Cyrenaic plateau was even forced slightly upwards, Here there has been oscillation, even within historic times, for the harbour of ancient Leptis is high and dry now, whereas at Cyrene the sea has invaded the Greek theatre,
With no barriers due to configuration, the distribution of plants
26 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
and animals over this large area closely follows the climate. Equa- torial rainfall, resulting as it does from the general atmospheric circulation,, may confidently be assumed as a permanent factor' of strictly limited range, and has probably never extended much farther north than latitude 20°. As the only really high ground is in Abyssinia., far to the south-east, the effects even of the present monsoon winds are minimized, and moreover, before the nearer sections of the Indian Ocean subsided, there was no reason for these winds to blow so far west at all. There has therefore been nothing since cretaceous times to interfere with the normal se- quence of trade-winds and westerlies over all northern Africa; and the only calculable effect even of the Scandinavian and Alpine glaciation would be to shift each of these zones southward towards the equatorial rainbelt, and narrow them both. The distribution of plant and animal life lay regularly therefore, as now, in zones of latitude: tropical forest in the south, passing through parkland into steppe and desert, and thence through steppe into evergreens followed by deciduous and coniferous forest, and sub-arctic moor- land and tundra. In the days of the early tertiary archipelago, the trade-wind zone was submerged, and there was therefore no desert; tropical plants and animals of old * Malayan' type flour- ished northwards almost to the Arctic circle, and those of the modern * temperate* zone were represented only in the interior of Laurentia, With the emergence of the western Sahara, and of the mid-European peninsula, 'Malayan' types were restricted to the Tropics, and replaced by * African * like those of the modern savannah region. On the establishment of a Mediterranean sea and European sub-continent north of it, * African* types were restricted in their turn, and replaced by * Arctic* forms from Laurentia; which have their counterpart in the modern flora of temperate North America, and are still fringed on the Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards by the cLusitanian* remnants of genera widespread in America*
Of the human associates of this pre-glacial vegetation we have no direct evidence from Europe; but the modern human type which characterizes the zone now occupied by the restricted
* African* fauna, is the negroid, both in Africa itself, and (as tfate aboriginal type) in the present Malayan region, and among the
* African * fauna (with its lion, tiger, and elephant) which has fol- lowed the 'Malayan' into southern Asia. The Broken Hill skull, from a deep bone-deposit in a Rhodesian cave, was found associ- ated with a distinctive * African* fauna, and is reported to display no general character subversive of this statement*
I, iv] SEQUENCE OF HUMAN TYPES IN AFRICA 27
But here a distinction must be made. Among the vast majority of * African * (that is to say * negro ') men, the prominent carnivor- ous-looking jaw is accompanied by a markedly long-shaped skull, giving purchase to the powerful jaw-muscles and itself compressed by them. This, like the deeper blackness of the skin, has been commonly regarded as a special adaptation to 'African* zoological conditions; for other types survive isolated, not only in the heart of equatorial Africa and of the Malayan region, but far to the south where the edges of negro-land reach the Limpopo swamps and the Kalahari desert; types which though generally negroid, are of abnormally small stature, inclined to steatopygy (an abnormal development of superficial fat, especially among the women) and general hairiness, and with a yellowish or leathery tinge in their blackness, and a far less long-shaped head than either the standard negroes of Africa, or their * Malayan' counterpart in Melanesia. The trans-Malayan counterpart of the Bushmen, Vaalpens, and Strandloupers of South Africa is now easily recognizable in the Tasmanians1.
That these types are ancient, and that they were already associated with the * African" fauna before it disappeared from Europe, is rendered probable, first, by the occurrence of negroid individuals along with north-western or Eurafrican races in palaeolithic deposits at Mentone, and in carvings palaeolithic and later; by the survival of a pygmy type into early neolithic times at S chaff hausen; by the frequent steatopygy of late palaeolithic and also of neolithic statuettes; by the representations of similar types in neolithic Egypt; and by other traces of a far wider distri- bution than now, in Africa itself. Besides the very long head of the standard negro type other characteristics, such as high stature and great physical strength, the more purely black pigment, the woolly scalp, the lack of body-hair, the prominent heel and slender calf, and the everted lips, may be regarded (like the more striking pecu- liarities of the Mongol type) as secondary adaptations to a highly special regime — in this case the tropical rain-forest, during the restriction of the * African* fauna to its eventual range south of the desert belt. Analogous local adaptations of a genetically * African' Type, associated in its geographical range with survivals of an * African' fauna, may be regarded as sufficiently accounting for the 'oceanic' negroes; for the negroid 'Dravidian* survivals in
1 There are no doubt other factors to be taken into account in tljese cor- relations, such as the build of the skull-base and the spinal calumny iail that is attempted here is to illustrate analogies, which might be multiplied, between the remoter races of the two regions in question.
28 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
southern India and beyond; for the ancient descriptions of * Asi- atic Ethiopians' in Mekran and in the extreme south of Arabia, around the margin (that is) of the sunken regions of Indo-Africa; and for the curious survival in the Mediterranean, and even in France and Britain, of types which combine certain characteristics of negro and of white man without any of the common marks of the half-breed,
If an anthropologist were required to indicate an extant type of man to illustrate such common characters, he would choose the widespread and loosely interconnected group which includes the aboriginal elements of the population of Ceylon and peninsular India, and a long series of remnants further west; through southern Persia, and parts of southern Arabia, merging in thje darker- coloured and slighter built elements of the mixed 'Hamitic' p<3f>u- lation of north-eastern Africa, and in a superficially similar strain which is perceptible among outcasts and derelicts of the Mediter- ranean region and recurs as far afield as the British Isles, though here there are few precise observations yet.
Summing up the relations which have existed between the negro and the white races on the African continent we reach the following result. The climatic zone represented by the Saharan desert, though it has varied in width, has been maintained long" enough to serve as an impermeable screen between the negro and the white stocks, except along a narrow coast belt fringing the Atlantic, and perhaps in the Nile Valley. Only the rare 'negroid* individuals in the palaeolithic caves of the Riviera suggest that during exceptional northward shift of the climatic belts, African man may have reached south-western Europe, temporarily and in small numbers: though others would explain these facts not by northward incursion of ready-made African * negroids/ but by the former presence, along the whole length of the region immediately south of the Highland Zone, of 'dark white* types such as those already mentioned,
We have thus reconstituted, so far as it is known, the earlier distribution of the yellow-$kinned, straight-haired, round-headed Mongoloids, in the secluded upland heart of Asia; of the black- skinned, woolly-haired, and long-headed negroes of Indo-Africatf antecedents; and of the very indeterminate group of varieties which range from the Dravidian and other "dark-white* stocks to the 'poor-whites' of^the Near East and the Mediterranean, Having associated the peculiarities of their physical build, with the preva- lence of geographical conditions likely to give rise to them, we turn to the more complicated problems presented by the so-called
I, IY] THE WHITE RACES OF MAN 29
* white race" of the north-west Quadrant, Here the criteria of statute, hair-texture, skin colour, and headform seem at first sight to fail us, in the medley of tall and short peoples; slim or thickset; blondes, auburn s, and brunettes; with all varieties of wavy or curly hair, and of florid or pasty complexions; with eyes brown, hazel, grey or various shades of blue; and with heads rivalling the average proportions alike of Mongol and Negro, and presenting besides very marked variation, in the height and contour of the brain-case, and in the modelling of face and jaw,
In the long controversy which has been provoked by these anomalies, the following have been the principal turning points. Blumenbach selected a Georgian type from the Caucasus to illus- trate whaj he regarded as the embodiment of the qualities of the whftc race as a whole, and gave to the group a name the full appropriateness of which is appreciated only when it was realized what a medley of men is harboured in the Caucasus itself, Huxley insisted on the importance of the varieties of skin and hair, and distinguished within the whole group a blonde and a brunette section. Sergi recognized a closer structural relationship between the long-headed brunettes of the Mediterranean, and the long- headed blondes of the Baltic shores than between either of these and the broad-headed men of the Alpine zone; Bogdanof proved that the long-headed people of neolithic Russia and western Siberia belonged to the Baltic or * Nordic" type, not to the Medi- terranean type as Sergi had supposed, and were to be classed as blondes; Lapouge realized that the broad-headed strains, distri- buted through the mountain zone of central Europe, over an area tapering somewhat from east to west, and extending beyond this zone far into western Russia, into the Netherlands and Denmark, and into the south and east of Britain, originated not by local adaptation of various longer headed peoples to highland altitudes or other geographical conditions, but by the intrusion of a fresh 4 Alpine* race, anatomically distinct in its general build as well as in its characteristic head form. Ripley associated this European c Alpine' type with the great mass of even broader-headed varieties which occupy Asia Minor and the mountain zone eastward as far tLs the Pamirs. Deniker discriminated within this broad-headed complex, at least three brunette sub-types, the short thickset 'Cevenole' of central France and Savoy, the tall, well-propor- tioned 'Dinaric' variety of Dalmatia and Albania, and the very peculiar 'Armenoids* of Asia Minor, with their heads abruptly flattened behind; to which it was an easy corollary, that the blonde Alpines of north-eastern Europe had arisen by interbreeding with
30 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME" [CHAP.
'Nordic' blondes,, and his 'Littoral7 and "Atlantic ' types by similar interbreeding with * Mediterranean * brunettes. Keith distinguished between those broad-headed folk who entered Britain across 6ie North Sea, coining from north-eastern Germany, and those who entered across the Channel and originated west of the Rhine. More recently Peake has restated the evidence for separating alto- gether from any * Alpine/ that is to say south-easterly immigration, those broad-headed peoples, of northern Mongoloid descent who came westwards with the spread of the Siberian forest, round the northern edge of the old Sarmatian lake-land. It only remains before summarizing present knowledge, as heretofore, in brief narrative form, to note tentative identification by de Ouatrefagcs of the * Cro-Magnon type' of late-palaeolithic man with recent Berber and Guanche strains; the separation established by Scfiliz of* the old long-headed population of the Danube Valley both from the Nordiclong-heads of the Baltic area, and from the Mediterranean folk of the south-west, and his affiliation of it to the late palaeo- lithic hunting-folk; and Fleure's recent confirmation of the long- suspected survival, in the moorlands of central Wales, of a breed anatomically indistinguishable from the widespread * Aurignacian* type, of the same remote period. For the steps by which these main positions have been won, and consolidated into a realm of knowledge, reference must be made to current hand-books and the literature on which they are based,
The problem of the * white races* is simplified in some degree by the severe glaciation of northern and central Kurope, which is the central event of 'Pleistocene * and * Quaternary * times; since the origin of the modern population of the glaciated regions is to be sought not in any general survival of earlier kinds of man within them, but in their reo ecu pation by plants, animals and men alike, from unglaciated areas. It is therefore only in these adjacent areas that questions of continuous descent can arise; and the actual distribution of the Mongoloid and Negroid varieties, and still more the reported occurrence of non-Mongoloid and pro-Mon- goloid remains on a number of sites around the fringe of South America, offer a strong presumption that the human species had already spread very widely before the glacial crisis deranged itft distribution. The close association of Negroid survivals with the discontinuous African fauna makes it certain, as we have seen,, that man accompanied this fauna before its disruption^ and probable that he was associated with it when it was still in full occupation of the North- Western Quadrant. Human remains do in fact occur with those of * African * animals, in numerous European deposits
I, v] PALAEOLITHIC MAN IN THE NILE VALLEY 31
belonging to fairly early phases of the Ice Age; and the later and better 'attested varieties of * eoliths/ belonging to phases not long an*tecedent5 would be accepted by many people as evidence of a tool-using mode of life, if there were found contemporary traces of men who might have used them. In any case, the * Chellean' types of implements (p. 46), which are contemporary with the earliest human remains, are clearly not by any means primitive, but pre- suppose much experience in the improvement of handy stones,
V. PALAEOLITHIC MAN IN THE SOUTH AND EAST
The sequence of early forms of man and of his handiwork was first established laboriously and by comparison of many sites in western Isurope; and it is only recently that it has been realized that in the Nile valley we have a single continuous series of de- posits, outside the glaciated area, and free from its destructive austerity, but near enough to it to be affected by marked alterna- tions of moist and dry climate which can now be securely linked to the main periods of the Ice Age in Europe. With this clue to guide us, we can more easily seize the outstanding features of the European series, among their bewildering complexity of detail.
The deep narrow Nile-gulf which was formed, as we have seen, in the pliocene period, across an otherwise featureless plateau, became at the close of that period a series of long lakes fed partly from the upper Nile, but partly also by considerable lateral streams whose gravel-screes, washed from the plateau surface during a period of considerably greater rainfall than now, contain chipped flints of * eolith* types; and such * eoliths7 are found on the plateau also. In a period of increasing subsidence and more abundant rain these lakes were gradually silted up by the deeply stratified Melan- <?/w>-beds, which overlie the lateral screes as high as 1 80 ft* above the present flood level.
A rain maximum, which may be taken to represent the first glacial crisis in Europe, accelerated this silting, and made good hunting on the plateau for some kind of man, whose implements, of the Chellean* type familiar from interglacial gravels in west- ern Europe, are found both there and in the Melanop$is~bzd$. Breasted ascribes to this phase, on account of their deeply weather- stained appearance, certain earlier rock-engravings of animals and even of boats, on the precipitous edges of the plateau, A first inter- pluvial drought (representing an interglacial mitigation of the cli- mate of the north-west) terminated this silting; but the Nile stream, fed as now by tropical rainfall further south, continued to flow
32 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
over the dry lake-beds, and cut into them a deep canon. It should be observed here that any northward shift of the desert regime should be accompanied by some extension of the tropical rain belt, and probably also of the area affected by the monsoon rains, since the Indian Ocean was by this time as extensive as now; and that these rains, then as now, would continue to feed the Nile stream, however arid the climate of its lower valley. In this period of drought and erosion, man seems to have maintained himself on the dry lake-bed, for Chellean implements are found among those remnants of its surface which forms the 'upper-terraces' on either side of the gorge.
Next, a second rain-age, corresponding with the second or 4 Minder glaciation of Europe, flooded the gorge and set the lateral torrents to work again; and as a rise in the sea-levelf like that which submerged much of the Atlantic seaboard, checked the main stream, a fresh series of gravels, analogous to those of the Somme and Thames, were deposited to a height of 90-100 ft. above present flood level. In the new screes, as well as on the old plateau surface outside the valley, implements are found, of the more advanced *Acheulian* fabric, showing that man became again ubiquitous as the region became refertilized; and in the early part of the second interpluvial pause, he spread once more, as in France and Britain, on to the gravel beds, and scattered imple- ments there to the margins of the new gorge which was being cut through them by the main river*
Once again in a third rain-maximum, corresponding with the third or *Riss* glaciation, fresh gravels were laid down in this inner gorge, not so copious as the earlier series, but partly covering the recent lateral screes, and standing in some places as much as 30 ft* above modern flood level; since the actual valley has been eroded In them during a third interpluvial drought* And once again, man ranged over the surface of these gravels, and left his implements there, as well as on the plateau, where they He on the desert surface mixed with all their predecessors*
Then follows the fourth rain-maximum, a comparatively mild one, corresponding with the fourth or 'Wtlrm* glaciation. The gorge, of which the bed lies not less than 60 ft. below modern flood level, began to accumulate the first deposits of the present alluvium; which are shown by borings to contain human imple- ments at nearly all depths. A first pause in the deposition of this alluvium, corresponding probably with the * lower forest' period around the North Sea and the Channel, allowed man to descend through the fens to the river margin, and accounts for the presence,
I,v] CONTINUOUS HUMAN OCCUPATION 33
at a depth of 50—60 ft. not merely of implements but of rough fragmehts of pottery, and animal bones of domesticable if not domesticated species.
As the rate of deposition since the thirteenth century B.C. aver- ages 4-08 inches in a century, this depth would represent a period of 15,000—18,000 years, assuming that the rate remained uni- form. But as there were certainly oscillations, and probably more rapid deposition at first, this estimate can only be approximate, and should perhaps be reduced. A second and a third access of alluvium, corresponding with the lower and upper peat-moss periods in Europe, and separated by ill-defined pauses, has raised the flood plain to its present level, at which it covers not only the edges of th§ last-eroded gorge, but part of the valley floor of the fourtS rain-maximum between the 'lower terraces* already men- tioned, which in some places now rise only about 20 ft. above the flood plain.
It will be seen from this sequence of events that there is every reason to believe that the Nile valley, and the margins of the desert plateau on either side of it, have been occupied by man continu- ously, though with varying density of population, at least from the beginning of the pleistocene period. Wherever any of its succes- sive land surfaces remain in the valley itself, his implements have been found representing successive stages of skill analogous to those of western Europe; and on the surface of the plateau* which has been exposed continuously, implements of all periods are found indiscriminately, and constitute a more nearly uninterrupted and graduated series than anywhere else. The only serious gap, inevitably, is in the period immediately preceding the settlements on the present alluvial surface, because this alluvium is in process of deposition, and its encroachment, since the last interpluvial pause, on the surface of the lower terrace, has been burying the sites and tombs of immediately preceding phases,
As human occupation has been thus continuous and (in the more fertile intervals) widespread, and as there is nothing in the physique of the earliest known inhabitants of the alluvial surface to suggest that they have been of anything but the local variety of EiJrafrican man, it seems probable that the arts of life represented in all these deposits are of indigenous, or at least quite local de- velopment. The last period of alluvial aggression has however been a very long one, and while the pauses in it may be presumed to represent phases of greater drought than now, the periods of more rapid deposition should be interpreted conversely as periods of moister climate, and consequently of less complete isolation from
C. A.H.I 3
34 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
the comparatively well-watered and fertile region of Palestine and Syria, where a similar though not yet so perfect sequence* of im- plements is being found. At these phases therefore allowance mxist be made for the possibility of intrusions of Palestinian and Syrian man, anticipating that which is known to have occurred when the so-called 'Gizeh' type entered and dominated Egypt in early dynastic time, And the gradual dilution of this alien type on that occasion imposes caution in assuming,, from the approximate purity of the predynastic inhabitants of the valley, that no such intrusion had ever occurred earlier.
The importance of such caution will be understood when we take stock of the predynastic culture, more fully to be described in Chap, vi, and compare it with the distribution of |ome of its chief elements elsewhere. First, the types of implements preserve almost without qualification the ancient technique of mere chip- ping and flaking. The grinding and polishing, characteristic of neolithic implements in Europe and along the Highland Zone, are employed only late and in a supplementary way. The flaking on the other hand exhibits a climax of unparalleled delicacy just before the first apparition of copper implements, in immediately predynastic time. This obstinate adherence to the flake-technique cannot be merely due to the abundant supply of suitable flint, in the rocks of the valley sides; for the upper valley exhibits a large variety of crystalline and volcanic rocks, and pebbles from these rocks are included in old gravels downstream. Considering the proximity of the large West Asiatic region of ancient and highly developed skill in grinding and polishing such pebbles, the persistence of the flake-technique in Egypt is therefore a strong presumption of technical isolation; and the rare occurrence of polished celts, of the fully formed neolithic types common In Western Asia, points rather to occasional trade than to local manufacture*
This isolation is confirmed by the original and unparalleled sequence of the pottery-forms, at all events down to the point at which appears the * red-polished* ware which is common to Egypt, Syria, and Cyprus in immediately predynastic time. And the fact that so many of the Egyptian pot-forms seem to depend on those of vessels cut out, or rather ground out^ from hard stone, makes all the more remarkable that abstention from the grinding-tcchniqiie for implements, which has been noticed above* With the ovoid forms of many of these stone vases should be compared those of the perforated stone mace-heads, which likewise betray great technical skill in shaping and perforating refractory rocks,
I, v] DOMESTICATED PLANTS AND ANIMALS 35
It must however be remembered that it is just at this period that thfi Nile-valley series is least continuous and complete. Be- tween the two main groups of the oldest remains (the refuse heaps and the burials beyond the advancing edge of the alluvium) there is a notable discrepancy. For from the moment when the population left their earlier settlements, descended into the fens, and began to domesticate cattle and practise agriculture, until the time when the fens were completely reclaimed, the dead were probably buried in the alluvium, or on its margin, and the earlier tombs are there- fore covered more or less deeply by the later alluvium. That this was so, is shown by one or two of the oldest known burial-grounds, which not only lie on the very edge of the present alluvium but have been proved to extend beneath it. Yet even these show phases of culture which are highly developed and in some respects already decadent; and throughout the long 'predynastic' period for which burials are available, there is further decadence, especially in the finer stonework. Moreover, even in the earliest known graves, objects of lapis lazuli, which must be of foreign origin, are found occasionally, and also objects of copper. Probably therefore the greater part of the purely neolithic stage of Egyptian civilization still remains to be disinterred from tombs on the valley floor beneath the recent alluvium, and from sites on old flood plains within the alluvium itself.
Other arts of life, represented in the earliest burials, are the use of wattled huts, basketry, matting and vegetable thread; of leather and wood-work, and of bone, ivory, and shell for ornaments. Rouge and green malachite were used for paint. Agriculture is represented by flax, millet, barley, and wheat; of the latter grain, both the variety called emmer (Triticum dicoccum^ which is found wild in limestone uplands in Syria, and Moab, and in western Persia) was grown, and also the cultivated wheat (TrMcum vu/gare). Goats, sheep, and short-horn cattle were kept, all apparently of African varieties, and attempts were still being made even in early dynastic times to domesticate ibex, gazelle, antelope, deer, and other desert ruminants. There were domestic geese and ducks from the fens, and from early paintings it would seem that the os?xich was familiar, if not kept in captivity like the gazelle. The dog was known, and in early dynastic times there were special breeds for sport and other purposes. The only beast of burden was an African variety of ass. There was organized irrigation, and probably an ox-drawn hoe, the prototype of the plough, as it is depicted in early-dynastic hieroglyphs. The river was navigated in large house-boats; there was fishing with hooks of delicate
3 — *
36 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
flint work, and immemorial hunting on the desert and in the fens, for the prowess of chiefs was symbolized by a fobe^ of leopard-skin.
That in fertile periods a similar neolithic culture spread widely westward over north Africa is clear from early Egyptian records, depicting the Libyans as pastoral folk, with herds of cattle, and asses; and from the survival, even now, of pot fabrics and basketry of predynastic technique and decoration.
Connecting links between the palaeolithic series of the Nile valley and of western Europe are not yet numerous; but enough has been found, especially in Algeria, and around Gafsa in south Tunis, to support the conclusions drawn from the climatic regime, and geological confirmations of its effects, and from^he general character of the modern population, which includes Aurigifkcijin remnants like those of Plynlimmon and Dordogne, and is other- wise strikingly uniform with the older elements in western Europe. Eoliths have been recorded around Gafsa and in Algerian quaternary beds; pre-Chellcan and Chellean types from Gafsa ; and the later deposits around Gafsa reveal a typical North African culture equivalent to the later palaeolithic of Europe. Rock-draw- ings from Algeria resemble those in the later French and Spanish caves. The area of this 'Capsian' culture (so called from the ancient name of Gafsa itself) seems to cover all northern Africa as far south as the oasis of Ghadames; it passes over westward into the later palaeolithic of Spain and southern France, and extends east- ward into Syria, And the continuity, now abundantly evident for this later * Capsian ' culture, is indicated for earlier periods also by more scattered finds of implements of all fabrics common to the Nile and to west Europe, in the wide ill-explored area between Gibraltar and North Syria. We may safely assume, therefore, es- sential continuity of human occupancy of this region from before the first pluvial period, qualified only in its extent by the climatic oscillations, which cohere, as in Egypt, with those of the European Ice Age. We may conclude also that all interglacial ebb and flow of human types from the south towards the Atlantic seaboard was essentially the marginal expansion or contraction of this large Eurafrican region. Of the physical characters of Burafrican nfcn we learn more at present from the remains on European sites, than from the ill-explored areas further south; in Egypt, unfortunately, no such remains have been found before the time of the predynastic graves, which belong, as we have seen, to the latest alluvial phases* Before turning however to the palaeolithic series in Europe, the question confronts us ; what was happening east of the Nile valley,
I, v] EARLY MAN IN SYRIA AND ARABIA 37
and south of that section of the Folded Highland which affronts so abnfptly the Levant and the Persian Gulf; namely on that large Arabian flatland which lies dislocated and tilted askew between great Africa and greater Asia, and along the Palestinian isthmus which connects its north angle with the Highland Zone? In its earlier stages, as we have seen, this flatland was itself a part of Africa: and the great fractures which determined the geography of the Red Sea and the Nile valley did not wholly break this con- nexion. Both at the northern and the southern end of the Red Sea, there had been frequently continuous land, and in dry periods this sea shrank through evaporation, as the Dead Sea has shrunk now. But the great slab of Arabia itself, tilting steadily under Iranian fold-stresse^s, became structurally secluded behind its abrupt western escarpment, and offered to its occupants an independent, if rather restricted career. Until the comparatively late disruption of the Hormuz Strait, the waters of the long Mesopotamian lake — an Adriatic of the Nearer East — restricted the land area of this peninsula, and mitigated its climate. The dimensions of its east- ward-flowing drainage systems testify to former fertility; and we must probably conceive it as having long enjoyed a regime not unlike that of peninsular India, with Lebanon and Bashan playing the part of the Ghats.
That it was inhabited by man, with a palaeolithic culture re- sembling that of north Africa, is proved by implements from Sinai, Palestine and Phoenicia, the only districts which have been sufficiently explored; they range from CM ouster ian* types onwards; that is to say, from at least the third pluvial maximum. Of the sequence of physical types, we know nothing: provisionally it may be assumed, from the sequence of artefacts, that if * Neanderthal' Man ranged over this region, as is suggested by the * Mousterian ' implements, he was extirpated, as in the west, by men of generic- ally Eurafrican stock; for the actual inhabitants, though far from uniform, are in essentials akin to their western neighbours. It would be natural to expect some traces of the 'Grimaldi7 negroids of the Riviera caves, and of the *poor white' strains (already men- tioned) which are common to the Atlantic seaboard, the Mediter- nfihean, and peninsular India; and superficial observation supports this; but there has been no accurate survey as yet. All that can be stated at present is that a modern population, of generically Eurafrican stock, shows larger local modifications than the present uniform regime would lead us to expect; and it may be inferred from this, that with more copious vegetation the main drainage areas were formerly better secluded, and permitted such differ-
38 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
entiation. The most Important of these local varieties is a com- paratively broad-headed type in the extreme south of Arabia; but there is no evidence as to its antiquity here, and it may only result from intercourse in historic times with trading centres in north Syria, which as we have seen is an ancient dependency of the Highland Zone.
Such are the physical circumstances in which was fashioned one of the most notable of human stocks, the Semites of Arabia. Physically they are akin to their 'Hamitic* neighbours beyond the Red Sea and throughout Eurafrica, and strongly contrast with the men of the Highland Zone who have spread southward along its Syrian projection, or overflowed from time to time along the margins of the tilted slab. Culturally they have been habituated for long ages, like the Nile-plateau folk, to alternations'of moisture and drought, which however never seem to have permitted any extensive growth of forest, except on the monsoon frontage to the south-east, nor, on the other hand, ever to have extinguished the grassland vegetation entirely. They are therefore typically grass- land folk. They have domestic animals of their own, goat, camel,, and ass, all native to Arabia; the sheep, and eventually the horse, have been acquired by them from outside; in both cases from the north. They have a remarkable type of linguistic structure, re- motely shared only by the Hamitic group, which lies nearest to them, otherwise; and a temperament and outlook more coherent and persistent than that of any other of the greater races. In the moister spells, such people multiply over the widening grassland more rapidly than any alien can habituate himself to pastoral life, or to precarious agriculture c between the desert and the sown/ On the other hand, in spells of drought, Arabia erupts like a volcano, pouring floods of highly organized and mobile tribes across its land frontiers north-eastward, northward, and across the Jordan rift into coastland Syria and Palestine, perchance even into Africa. There has been percolation also, more insidious, but of wide effect, across the Red Sea, and especially its southern strait, where the transit into Africa is shorter, and timber for boats is more avail- able. Such periodic exodus of Arabian tribes can be traced back inferentially to the third millennium at least; and it need not tee supposed that the earliest recorded movement was by any means the first. The predynastic regime of Upper Egypt, for instance, seems to be partly due to such a movement crossing the Red Sea to Koseir, and reaching the Nile at Coptos by a trail which can be followed now. And it has already been hinted that the old popu- lation of the Nile valley may have been so supplemented even
I, vj THE PALESTINIAN ROAD FROM THE NORTH 39
earlier. The physical resemblance between Arabian and Eurafrican man is* however close enough to make detection difficult, even if eafly evidence were found. See also pp. 182 sqq^ 193, 254.
Allusion has already been made to the prolongation southwards of spurs from the Highland Zone through North Syria, to form with the high western edge of Arabia a continuous highland causeway along the abrupt eastern margin of the Mediterranean, and then along the Gulf of Akaba to loftier and steeper escarp- ments fronting to the Red Sea. In structure most of this causeway is Arabian, but its exposure to wet winds from the west has given it a Mediterranean climate and a considerable rainfall; it is the 'good land beyond Jordan, flowing with milk and honey/ which tempts the nomads of Arabia in all ages, yet has never acclimatized them to itsfclf. For the vegetation is partly old African, with tropi- cal survivals still in the hot moist jungle of the Jordan gorge; partly Mediterfanean, spreading along the coast plains and sea- ward foothills; but always mainly Asiatic, reinforced, ever since the junction of highland causeways above mentioned, from the Highland Zone at its north end. Of its earlier human occupants we have little but a few Mousterian implements; but in the first neolithic culture in Palestine the people are of the highland breed; they burn their dead; and their implements, pottery, and other equipment are in strong contrast both with everything Egyptian, and with the grassland influences which predominate later. Arabian man has occupied the 'good land' again and again; but the moist air seems to be fatal to him, and many of the peasantry of south Palestine are hardly to be distinguished from their neolithic pre- decessors,
But the Palestinian complication is not the only one which qualifies the homogeneity of Arabia. Very ancient interaction of the streams which furrow the south face of the Highland Zone has reduced its drainage systems in this region to three. The Cilician rivers, trending south-westward, have created a secluded alluvial foreshore on the Gulf of Alexandretta, peopled, in all ages, by tribes who have come down from the mountain region inland, or, more rarely, have landed from oversea. The Tigris, flowing smith-eastward, is joined below Mosul by the two Zab rivers from the Median highlands in what was once another such foreshore, at the head of a Mesopotamian gulf; but it could only attain its eventual importance when that foreshore spread along the foothills of Zagros and merged with the similar deltas of the Diyala, and eventually of the Kerkhah and Karun further south again. The latter even now has a separate mouth west of the Shatt el-Arab. Here again, as in
40 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
Palestine and Cilicia, vegetation and other occupants spread outwards from the valleys, and coastwise, as these delta foreshores encroached on the gulf.
But between the head-waters of the Tigris and those of the Ctlician rivers., one southward stream, Euphrates, has cut back deeper and further than its neighbours and intercepted not only the original headwaters of the Tigris, between Malatiu and Diarbekr, but far larger areas of old westward drainage as far as Erzerum and the slopes of Mount Ararat. Thus reinforced, Euphrates has excavated, in successive periods of elevation and copious rainfall, a wide and deep valley, well-watered and fertile throughout, athwart the sunk north-eastern slope of the Arabian slab, reaching the gulf formerly at el-Der, later at Ana, and (at the beginning of the modern phase) at Hit, where it cicscemis a last terrace of solid coast-line almost to the present sea-level. To plants, animals, and people of the foothills and the Syrian parkland, this long fertile valley has always offered sustenance far out into the steppe and desert which it traverses,
By this emphatic frontier of the Euphrates channel, a roughly triangular area of southward sloping plateau — -a miniature Arabia. about as large as Ireland — is marked off from the Syrian and north Arabian plateau, and has never wholly been rejoined in history. This is Mesopotamia, the 'land between rivers/ for the Tigris delimits it no less clearly eastward from the foothill country below the Zagros ranges. Its structure is continuous with that of Syria; its climate is essentially the same, giving it (at present) desert and steppe regime in the south, and parkland nearer the hills. Its only river, the Khabur, rises in the highland, where it threatens to behead what is left of the Upper Tigris at Diarbckr; but till this happens its drainage-area is not sufficient to give It geographical importance; except that where it falls into the Euphrates close below el-Der, its delta forms a cultivable plain opening on the main valley. It will be seen at once that like Syria to the westward, Mesopotamia forms a region of transition, occupiable from the highland north of it, as far as its parkland extends at any given period; but offering wide steppe-pasture to any nomads of Arabia who may succeed in putting their flocfeS across the Euphrates,
These then were the geographical and economic factors down to the time when the present sea-level was established* and the Euphrates delta, propagated south-eastward from Hit, began to coalesce with those of the Tigris and the Diyila round the Meso- potamian gulf-head, which then lay between Baghdad and Samarra,
I, v] SUMER AND AKKAD 4I
We might compare an immature Lombardy with, the Ticino pre- paring to join deltas with the Po.
'What has followed, while the joint delta pushed its alluvial steppe and dense fen-margin seaward over the 550 miles which separate Hit from the modern coastline., is disputed, and must inevitably be obscure. As in Egypt, the population, human and other, of the alluvial flood-plain may be presumed to have been derived from the shores of the gulf as it silted up. But these shores, as we have seen, were themselves peopled from different sources; the deltas of the eastern torrents, from the Zagros foothills; the Tigris banks, with sparse but continuous offshoots of the occu- pants of its upper valley; the fertile bed of the Euphrates, with similar elements, longer segregated however from their highland and parkland ancestry. Arabia, on the other hand, established a longer and longer land frontier with the growing flood-plain, as happened to Libya while the Nile trough was being silted up; it overflowed this frontier with its own aborigines, wherever steppe conditions were established; and this Arabian element became more important as two conditions were fulfilled; first, as the north- ern part of the delta between the main rivers, and behind its ad- vancing fen-frontage on the gulf-head, was assimilated in climate and vegetation to the steppe of southern Mesopotamia; second, as the main Euphrates stream took a more easterly course (as it eventually did), leaving a larger expanse of alluvium from Kerbela southward undefended by any considerable water-channel against Arabian immigrants; and this, too, nearly opposite the point where intercourse is easiest with the comparatively hospitable Nejd oases in the heart of the peninsula. On the other hand the establishment of an important bifurcation of the Euphrates threw a new channel across to the Tigris near Baghdad, and interposed a fresh obstacle to nomad intruders from Mesopotamia into what we may hence- forward call by its historic name of Babylonia, or by the older names of Sumer and Akkad, its principal sub-regions, which differ slightly in accordance with their respective situations. That under these circumstances the southern or Sumerian half of the growing delta should be more exclusively populated from the foothills of Za|>Tos, and that the northern or Akkadian half should show greater affinities with Arabian and Mesopotamia!! people, would seem to be inevitable, and is generally admitted. It is however unnecessary, in view of the geographical antecedents, to attribute all such northerly or westerly affinities to the earliest Semitic migration of which there is historic record. The same factors had been co-operating already for a long time.
42 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
VI. THE ICE AGE IN THE NEAR EAST
We have next to see how this region of the 'Two Rivers/ and the sections of the Highland Zone adjacent to it, northwards and eastwards, were affected by the glacial crisis. As evidence is at present scanty, conclusions must be more general,, and a wider survey will best bring out the most essential points. As far as the head of the Adriatic,, a single series of events has been reconstructed in greater detail for all western Europe, and to this we shall re- turn later. East of the Adriatic, information is less copious, but the main course of events is fairly clear. The Carpathians, Dinaric ranges, and the Thracian mass of Rhodope were heavily snow- capped, and glaciated locally, and similar conditions prevailed on the coast-ranges of Asia Minor, both north and soutfi. Caucasus and Armenia, rising to greater altitudes, were glaciated more severely; and Lebanon, flanked by the Mediterranean on the one side, and with the shores of the Mesopotamian Gulf not so far off as now, on the other, had an ice-cap exceptionally heavy for its latitude. But a large part of Asia Minor probably remained fertile and habitable throughout. What is far more characteristic of this region, as of the Aegean depression and the Hellenic promontory, is the severely pluvial denudation, accentuating the rugged high- lands, and smothering the foothills in vast sheets of gravel and sand. In these the rivers cut fresh gorges during the drier intervals, which were also periods of emergence and consequently of longer and steeper gradients. The older drainage of Asia Minor had been longitudinal, towards the Aegean subsidence; sections of It are recognizable In the headwaters of the Euphrates, Halys and Iris; and the great westward avenue past Afium-karahissar probably represents its main outlet seaward* But later upthrusts of the west end of the Tauric arc closed this outlet, and converted the central plain into a lake-land, where some salt and gypsum were deposited as in Iran, But this had all happened in prcglacial timesj and the subsequent development of Asia Minor was differ- ent. For it was an immediate result of the subsidences already mentioned in the Black Sea region^ to accelerate erosion in the torrents on the new north coast, and two of these, Sangarius afiid Halys, cutting back clean through the Paphlagonian range*, drained the greater part of the central lake-land, and kept all Its floor fresh and habitable except the small central basin or Lake Tatta, The present drought is recent, and in part remediable; even in the fifth century B.C. the district west of the Halys was 'richest in sheep and corn of all known 1ri tads' for Herodotus.
I, vi] GLACIAL CONDITIONS IN ARMENIA AND IRAN 43
Further east, the Armenian ice-cap extended at times almost to the plateaux, east and west; but in milder intervals there was con- tinuous highland country, full of small plateaux, glacier-fed gorges and lake-basins, from eastern Asia Minor to western Iran; prob- ably even at the worst some sort of corridor by way of Sivas, Kharput, Diarbekr, and the "Upper Tigris; while the triangular uplands of North Syria, between Adana, Damascus and Mosul, do not seem to have been glaciated at all.
Even now, though the water-surface of the Persian Gulf has been greatly restricted, the deflection of the jo-inch rain-line north-eastward beyond the Lebanon reveals an exceptionally moist and equable climate, and associates this margin of the Arabian slab with the highlands to the north, and with the Mediterranean sea- boatfl, rather than with the rest of Arabia. It is no wonder that we have record of elephants in one of these Syrian valleys as late as the twelfth century B.C., or that the Macedonian veterans of Alexander the Great made here their most enduring settlements. But the well-marked ridge which is followed by the caravan route from Damascus to Palmyra makes the transition from parkland to steppe rather abrupt; and as long as the Lebanon retained any con- siderable ice-cap- — and it was certainly glaciated severely — there was little or no communication between north Syria and the south. The spread of Highland Man into Palestine (p. 39) was probably quite post-glacial,
The course of events further east has been less easy to discover. Through the extension of an * Indian Ocean * along its southern margin, and through the re-establishment of the Sarmatian sea on the north, the climate of Iran necessarily became moister and more equable than it had been while its salt and gypsum beds were accumulating. Allowing always for its more southerly latitude, and ampler size, we may compare its geographical position with that of Asia Minor now, between the Levant and the Black Sea; and as it retains many elements of its old Indo-African fauna, there cannot have been any such climatic break as occurred further west. At most the salt and gypsum-covered waste in its centre has been larger or smaller, and more or less occupied by lakes; and i£S present drought is consequent on the quite recent shrinkage of the Sarmatian sea. During the glacial crisis, its high marginal ranges were snow-laden, but not severely glaciated except in the north-west and north-east; the diluvial thaw was consequently not very destructive; and as the main basin was never tapped by in- ward-cutting torrents, like Asia Minor (though some intermont basins in Zagros have begun to be drained by streams flowing
44 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
south into the Persian Gulf) its local reserve of moisture was only slowly dissipated, at the cost however of greater ultimate Salinity. East and west of it, however, the ice-caps of the Hindu Kush and Armenia, where the marginal ranges converge, isolated this region no less completely than did the seas to north and to south; for until the diluvial debris became continuous along the western frontage, the Persian Gulf extended, as we have seen, at least to the point where the Tigris emerges from the foothills of Kurdistan; while raised beaches of it have been traced far west of the Euphrates,
All these regions therefore were habitable during the greater part of the Ice Age, and there are Chellean implements on the sur- face in Iran and Arabia, and in gravels containing mampoth bones on the Caspian shore, to show that they were inhabited widely by Man.
The diluvial thaw, however, brought disaster here* As was natural so far south, it was very rapid, once the cold crisis was over; violent torrents seamed deeply the superficial sediments of the Arabian slab, and spread masses of debris, among which the older rivers followed uncertain courses, like the Oxus later on the Sarmatian sea-floor. Then, to diluvial rains succeeded drought and drifting sand, before any grassland, still less any forest regime could be established, sufficient to disintegrate this debris and ac- cumulate soil. In the foothills of Zagros similar torrents, descend- ing more abruptly, spent their diluvial energies within a narrower radius; so that the eventual course of the Tigris skirts and even erodes their fan-shaped screes of gravel Rapidly at first, and after- wards more gradually, the northern part of the old Persian Gulf was filled up by these converging deltas; while further south finer sediment accumulated with proportionate speed. There was up- ward earth movement, too, after long subsidence, for at Hit the Euphrates has cut down to an older shore line, and its rapids are now wearing through the sill of this* The disastrous effect of this diluvial phase was to eliminate Mesopotamia as a focus of post- glacial culture, and to postpone effective occupation till an alluvial area had been created beyond it. The contrast, in every respect, with Egypt on the one hand, and with the Po valley on the othfir, is complete,, and of historical Importance,
I, vnj EARLY MAN IN EUROPE 45
VII. THE ICE AGE IN EUROPE
We return now to peninsular Europe, west of the Adriatic and the Black Sea. Here the fourfold Alpine maxima of the glacial period corresponds as we have seen, with the pluvial maxima of the Nile, and with repeated glaciation, fringed by diluvial rainfall, of the Balkan lands and western Asia. Earlier study of the river gravels and caves of the Atlantic seaboard, from Britain to Spain, and most of all in northern and central France, has recently been supplemented by research along the north side of the Pyrenees, and in many parts of Spain; among the caves of the central German and Bohemian highlands; in the widespread deposits of interglacial loess along the Rhine, in the Danube valley, along the Margins of the north German lowland, and beyond the Car- pathians, in Poland, and Ukraine, There is controversy still as to the perspective of the earlier human finds; the principal question being whether these are later than the third or * Riss ' glaciation, or go back Into the milder interval between this and the second or * Minder crisis, which was the severest and most extensive of all. In what follows, the longer intervals are adopted, in the belief that these accord more closely with the pluvial series on the Nile, In Europe, as in Egypt, 'eolithic' objects from preglacial deposits, have been claimed by some observers as human handiwork. In the light of the Egyptian material, which offers very similar forms, the probability that they are so is somewhat increased; but it is too early yet for an accepted verdict on most of them. In East Angiia however the presence of preglacial Man seems already secure (p. 18),
On the longer reckoning above adopted, it is in the * first iiiter- glacial * deposits which preceded the boulder clays and moraines of the *Mindel* glaciation, that the earliest human fragment has been found, a lower jaw chinless but recognizably human, from a gravel-bed near Heidelberg. No implements have been discovered in this deposit. A more perfect skull of a quite different and more modern-looking type comes, together with 'eoliths' and rolled bones of subtropical animals, from a very early river-side deposit arPiltdown, near Lewes, above, though not actually with, which lay gravel with implements ruder than those next to be mentioned, but generally similar in type. The date of the Piltdown deposit is still disputed, but it cannot be later than the earlier glacial gravels of the Thames, and may be considerably earlier.
Next in the * second interglacial' debris of the thaw-swollen Somme, and other west European rivers, occur numerous imple-
46., PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
ments, of the ruder fashion typical of the gravels of Chelles, and then in more skilful workmanship, at St Acheul. Both styles are chipped from natural nodules of flint3 so as to leave one end pointed, and the butt naturally or designedly rounded for grasping in the hand. These are but flood-spoil from camping grounds on the river banks, and tell little about their makers and users except that they haunted the drinking-places of the large African fauna whose bones are in the same gravels. Here, though we have their implements, we have at present no trace of the men themselves,
It is only when the third glaciation draws on, and the African fauna were being replaced, except the woolly mammoth, by rein- deer, musk ox, arctic fox, marmot, and other Arctic animals, that man and his prey alike took shelter from the weathcj: in natural caves, and 'Mousterian* scrapers and borers, rudely fashioned by retouching the fresh edges of the flakes formed in shaping the 'Acheulian* coup-de-faing^ give a glimpse of the scraping and piercing of bones and hides during such sojourn, and the first hint of woman's knack of finding secondary uses for the waste from man's chase and chipping. The colder climate was enforcing the invention of clothes. In a Jersey cave of this period the hunting weapons predominated near the opening; domestic scrapers and hacked bones of animals further in; the remains of a child lay a little outside the entrance. In one French cave, an old man had been buried intentionally in the floor, crouched as so many savages sleep.
This phase also has a wide distribution, from the south of England to Spain and Portugal, Algeria and Tunis, the plateau edge of the Nile valley and the Syrian margin of Arabia; eastward too through mid- Europe as far as Hungary, south Russia* and the Caucasus; and the style of the new implements Is still very uni- form. But outside these limits, lMousterian* settlements have not been found as yet, whereas Acheulian and Chellcan implements are common in South Africa^ and even further afield; and it is possible that it is to this period that we should assign a great divergence between human experiences within and beyond this ' Mousterian ' area, for reasons to be stated later (pp. 47—50).
Like their implements, the men of this Older Palaeolithic Age are of very uniform type; and as this 'Neanderthal' type differs markedly from all subsequent varieties of men and also from the older but more modern-looking type represented by the Piltdown skull and some other finds of various early periods, it must be noted briefly at this point. Into the difficult question of its place in the human genealogy, this is not the place to go. Its distribution
48 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
definitely human chin. Well represented by examples from Britain, France, and as far east as Predmost in Moravia,, this is a^type in which not only "there are no salient features which cannot be matched among the living races of the present day/ but it remains the predominant element among the modern inhabitants of se- cluded districts such as the Plynlimrnon moorland in central Wales; it is common still in the west of Ireland, in the Dordognc, in Sardinia, about Guipuzcoa in Spain, and in parts of Tra-os- Monte5? and has been noted in the oases south of Algeria and Tunis, and among Egyptians, Somalis, and elsewhere in north-eastern Africa, The numerous earlier allusions to 'Neanderthaloid' indi- viduals in modern European populations probably refer to these Aurignacians, who look 'primitive* enough when contrasted with the majority of modern men, but are separated by almost, as -great an interval from the real Neanderthal type. From characteristics of these survivors it is possible to supplement the evidence of the early skeletons. The forehead is narrow, with marked hollows in the temples, above the heavy eyebrows; the orbits are long and narrow, the cheeks are high and broad. The nose is broad, the jaw prominent, and the chin rather weak; the stature is low, the carriage loose and ungainly, and the arms very long: the hair, eyes, and complexion are dark, and the whole body is very hairy. In some individuals, the resemblance to a common type of aboriginal Australian is well-marked; and the similarity between Aurignacian skulls in Europe and the prehistoric skulls from Lagoa Santa, in Brazil and other remote localities round the margins of South America, suggests that this type had once almost as wide a dis- tribution as that of the older types of implements. It does not however seem to have been recorded, as those have been, from tropical or southern Africa; and its extreme hairiness and the wavy texture of individual hairs distinguishes it altogether both from the Negroid and from the Mongoloid breed-
With the occupation of western Europe, therefore, by Auri- gnacian Man begins a continuous series of events and material remains running on to modern times* There are moments in this series where continuity of civilization cannot be directly traced, but continuous descent is sure, and therewith continuity of tradi- tion, which above all other human characters engages the atten- tion of historians. Other breeds of man have intruded later, as we shall see, from the south-east along the Mountain Zone, and from the north-east as the Siberian forest extended towards the Volga basin; but in western Europe, Aurignacian man has never been wholly superseded, and still forms coherent groups such as the
I, viz] CRO-MAGNON AND GRIMALDI TYPES 49
Plynlimmon moorlanders, and the secluded settlements already mentioned in Spain, Portugal, and Algeria.
We are confronted however at this stage with a new turning point of advancement, the participation of more than one distinct breed of man in a single tradition of culture, and in exploitation of the same region. For, side by side with this Aurignacian type, at least two other varieties of man made their appearance in west- ern Europe during the warmer and drier period now in question. One of these, represented by the * Cro-Magnon ' skeletons, is both less widely distributed, and of larger and more modern-looking build; and has left, like the Aurignacian, its descendants among the modern population of France, Spain and North Africa, and also (according to some observers) round the western Baltic, Its genefal similarity with the Aurignacian has led to the presumption that it spread likewise from the south-west.
The other type, distinctly negroid, is best represented by skele- tons from the Grimaldi cave near Mentone. There can be little doubt of its African affinities, and there are two other indications of such African types in Europe : a pygmy breed of somewhat negroid appearance, from an ill-dated deposit at Schaffhausen, near Constance; and the well-marked steatopygy which character- izes negroid Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa,, and of some other negro breeds further north, and is represented in European drawings and sculptures of the female figure from Auri- gnacian times to the neolithic art of Malta. Steatopygy however is not an exclusively negroid character, and as it has been observed among the living in the same secluded districts along the western Pyrenees as the Aurignacian individuals already mentioned, all that results from the Grimaldi and Schaffhausen finds is that African varieties either had not yet entirely disappeared from southern Europe, or occasionally returned thither during periods of exceptional warmth* In general, however, it may be assumed that the present climatic zones were henceforward fairly well established; and that negro man, in the mass, did not range north of the Sahara desert, nor, except sporadically as now, along the Atlantic seaboard of North Africa.
*The mode of life of * Aurignacian * man differed, no less than his build, from that of the Mousterians whom he superseded; and there is no reason for an archaeologist to dispute the consensus of anthropologists that there is no trace of intercourse between the two types* If they met, it was as independent competitors for the means of subsistence; and the almost total disappearance of Mous- teriati man after the arrival of Aurignacian, suggests that it was
c.A.H-r
50 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
'war to the knife' between them. The Tasmanians had no better fortune, after the arrival of Europeans in their country; and while the Tasmanians were rather less brutish than Mousterians, Euro- pean culture claims some advance over Aurignacian.
Aurignacian industry shows great superiority over Mousterian. Flint implements are fashioned no longer from cores, but from selected Hakes, and are trimmed by careful flaking on both sur- faces., not on one only as heretofore. There are special types for boring and graving, knives adapted for a drawing-cut, and chisels for push-scraping. And the uses of all these are illustrated by an increasing quantity of bone tools, some of them shaped to be hafted with wood. There are bone dress-pins, beads and pendants; and bone whistles suggest concerted signals for action at a dis- tance. We may infer that men hunted now in a horde, and obeyed a leader; and that women took some pains with their attire.
More noteworthy still is the beginning of pictorial art; en- gravings on bone and eventually carvings in relief and in the round; larger drawings and paintings on the walls of caves* The subjects are the animals most hunted by man, as their remains in his settlements show, reproduced with a sympathy and accuracy of observation, and a vigour of draughtsmanship and modelling, which have rarely been equalled. Human figures are rarer; usxntlly representing women, with rather prominent jaw, long-braided hair, and frequent steatopygy. Both men and women arc usually shown very hairy, and are seldom clothed, except when they mas- querade in complete hides of animals* A late and perplexing class of linear designs may represent huts or other constructions of timber.
This civilization extends in time from the beginning of the interglacial period already mentioned, until far on into the last recurrence of glacial or rather pluvial conditions, for the fourth or 'Warm' glaciation was a comparatively small affair. It passes through several phases, Aurignacian in the special sense; Mag- dalenian, a well-marked regional culture of the Atlantic coast plain, best illustrated in the Dordogne cave of La Madeleine, which belongs to the beginning of a late spell of austerity; and Azilian, first identified in a remarkable cave in the foothills of the Pyrenees, which shows Magdalenian art and industry much de- generated, and only retrieved in interest by its use of painted symbols to distinguish hoarded pebbles of uncertain use. It is the first advance from delineation of objects to the visual representa- tion of ideas.
On some sites in France, between Aurignacian and Magdalenian
I, vn] THE LATER PALAEOLITHIC CULTURES 51
deposits, which in general form a continuous series of develop- ment, otcur fresh and very characteristic types of implements best represented at Solutre, near Macon, where hearths and burials of their makers lie immediately over a vast deposit of horse-bones marking the climax of the dry steppe regime, and probably some kind of late-Aurignacian slaughter-ground. Their graceful 'laurel- leaf and Svillow-leaf ' blades, single edged knives, and one-shoul- dered points suitable for missiles,, economize labour by skill in the choice and manipulation of material, and might be mistaken for a high quality of neolithic work. This use of missile weapons is itself a new invention, appropriate to the hunters of so swift an animal as the horse. Ivory beads, in country now devoid of ele- phants, suggest either wide range of movement, or some form of exch^fhge* Sketches of animals, on pebble and bone, and hoards of yellow, red, and brown colouring matter, indicate artistic tastes; insignia and whistles imply organized action against swift and in- telligent game. It has even been suggested that Solutrean horses were tame; but no horse-bits have been found, nor proof of any special breeding.
This Solutrean episode is noteworthy because here for the first time we have intrusion of one culture, abruptly and temporarily, into the region where another was in process of development. And as this intrusion occurs at the climax of a cycle of dry continental climate when conditions were most uniform and the obstacles of forest, river, and morass were minimized, it has been commonly interpreted as due to the intrusion of fresh people of the tall heavy- built long-headed stock represented by individuals from Brunn and Predmost in Moravia. Whence these people and their culture originated is not yet clear, as no human remains can be identified as theirs. Their flint technique, as has been already noted, suggests that they inherited Acheulian tradition, and it is possible that this tradition survived somewhere further east, while central Europe and parts of the west were passing through the Mousterian de- cadence and receiving Aurignacian culture from the south-west. So severely continental a climate in western Europe suggests austere drought further inland, and accords with the deep accu- mulations of loess over the greater part of the northern flatland, during late palaeolithic times. It was certainly a good country to leave. The lack of Solutrean remains south of the Pyrenees (except one isolated find at Altamira), and their comparatively frequent occurrence in lower Austria, Bohemia, Hungary a&d eastern Poland, almost preclude the alternative of a southern origin, which was formerly thought possible; and the striking resemblance of
4—2
52 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
certain Nile valley implements, which has been adduced in favour of this, must be taken in connexion with the similar workihanship of the earliest implements of neolithic Susa (which will be "dis- cussed on p. 85); and would be explicable by just such an exodus southward from the north-eastern steppe, as has brought nomad raiders more than once from Turkestan to Mesopotamia and the borders of Egypt within historic times* We shall see reason to suppose, later on, that the earliest neolithic people of the south Russian steppe, and probably also of the Danubian region, may be descendants of these Solutrcan hunters, withdrawn as rapidly as they had come, when the Magdalen ian climate reafforested the western plains, and restricted their hunting grounds. Another small group of Solutrean remains is notable as the first indication of man's presence in Scandinavia, the soxfchern promontory of which must therefore have been released at least temporarily from the ice-grip; and there seems reason to believe that there may be Solutrean blood in the earliest men of that region whose remains have been preserved; though their date is very much later. Indeed, at any period when the forest zone was restricted to the foothills of the Carpathians and the central German highlands, there was no physical obstacle to the move- ments of hunting hordes between the shores of the Black Sea and Caspian, and those of the Baltic, or the margin of the Scandinavian ice-sheet,
VIII. THE CLOSE OF THE OLD STONE AGE
On the other hand, the steadily increasing moisture of the Mag~ dalenian climate restricted the habitable areas; for the forest en- croached on the hunting ground, and horde-hunting tribes do not easily adapt themselves to forest life. Arts and industries degener- ated, especially when the antlers of the reindeer gave place to the less workable tines of the forest-ranging deer, as the material for harpoons and spearheads* The barbed harpoons themselves betray the growing importance of fishing, as the rivers increased in size, The abundance of miniature flints, at Tardenoise and many similar sites, suggests that wooden clubs or spears were armed with them, as was customary later in the Alpine lake-dwellings; and indicates that timber was more plentiful*
Then, for causes which are still obscure, the distinctive * Cap- stan' type of culture, which we have already seen to have been best and earliest represented near Gafsa in Tunis and widely distri- buted from Tripoli to Morocco, spread northwards through Spain
I, vm] CLOSE OF THE OLD STONE AGE 53
and France (where its local varieties have been commonly known as 'Caiftpignian') into Belgium: it shows a revived interest in flint work, and some of its forms recall a far older technique, which had certainly lasted long in north-west Sahara, and apparently also all across north Africa. This early African style has some resemblance to the Mousterian; and we may compare the relation already suggested between the Acheulian and Solutrean tech- niques. In any case the Campignian style was of southerly origin, and marks a last palaeolithic attempt to reoccupy the west of Europe, perhaps during some spell of drier weather. But this adventure failed, like the Solutrean irruption, and Campignian survivors merged in the disorganized remnants who harboured in cave shelters in Spain and the south of France, in open settle- ment on the downs along the Marne and Somrae and in Belgium (where there is some reason to believe that at Flenu and Spicnncs there was also immigration of rude tribes from the north-east), and in fishing and hunting stations along the Atlantic coast from Portugal to Scotland and Denmark.
Here immense refuse-heaps of shells, bones, and implements mark a last stage of collapse of the old hunting folk, like the modern Yahgans of Terra-del-fuego and the * Strandloopers ' of Cape Colony. These 'kitchen-middens' represent a long period, during which the interior of the continent was for the most part forest or swamp, and men hunted or gathered shellfish along the strand without wandering far, except occasionally seaward for fishing. Only three almost accidental acquisitions betray some overlap between the desperate state of these survivors of the Old Stone Age and the new world which was coming into being within the dreaded oak-forest. The dog, in this extremity, became man's messmate and fellow-hunter; occasional implements of neolithic fabric were acquired somehow, and refurbished by flaking as if in mere ignorance of their proper handling; and the clay linings of old leathern cups and bowls, accidentally burned at first and there- by hardened in the fire, gave a first notion of pot-making, to be imitated by degrees, but without improvement of form. All three discoveries suggest contact, at least occasional, with some other kind of man, to whom forest and swamp were familiar, and habit- able. And both forest and swamp contained such men, as we have now to see*
Further north, the swamp, engulfing by degrees much that had been tundra and cold steppe, north of the central German high- lands, had long since been assisted in its dreary advarice by con- siderable subsidence of the whole of north-west Europe, so that
54 PRIMITIVE MAN, IN GEOLOGICAL TIME [CHAP.
the period during which the Scandinavian ice-sheet shrank finally back, and exposed the south promontory of Sweden, waS one in which the Baltic was an open gulf of an enlarged North Sea "that washed the 'hundred-foot terrace* of its Scottish coast. The silt set free by the annual thaws varied slightly in quality, as the season changed^ and the banded clays which it formed in this Baltic gulf form an uniquely continuous record, so minutely graduated that it has been possible to reckon within a few centuries the interval between then and now. From this vast natural chronometer it would appear that the coast of Scania was released about 12,000 years ago, and northern Sweden about 5000 years later. The re- lease of the north German lowland was of course rather earlier, perhaps about 15,000 B.C. Those inshore * Yoldia* clays, so called from the chief marine shell which they contain, were later raised above water so far that the Danish archipelago became dry land, and the Baltic a lake wherein Ancyfas and other freshwater shells superseded the marine Yoldia.
This rise greatly increased the swamp-covered area, and seems to have permitted the westward spread of a peculiar culture, best illustrated by the Maglemose settlement in eastern Denmark* Afloat or stranded^ according to the season, a raft was constructed of pine trunks from the coniferous forest fringe which encroached on the swamp margin as it rose and dried; and from this precarious home men fished and hunted, of a distinct breed which seems to have moved westward from the cold steppe of northern Eurasia, and may have been of ultimately Mongoloid origin. At its greatest extension, this type may have made touch with the Magdalenian hunters of France, if it be admitted that one of its men has been found with them in the Chancelade cave* But it borrowed little from them, and only in its retreat, when the forest restricted Its swampy hunting grounds, did it absorb something of the Mag- dalenian artistic spirit, perhaps from hunting parties out of the west who had wandered onto the north flank or the forest and re- mained there. "With the Maglemose culture may be connected other swamp-land settlements round Lake Ladoga and in the coastlands east of the Baltic; and it seems likely that a Mongoloid clement among the modern Finns> and probably the main strain of the Lapps, are descendants of these people*
What forced the retirement of the Maglemose culture was no less the aggression of the sea than that of the continental forest. The Baltic became open gulf again, rather more so than at present^ for it is to this phase that the ^o-foot terrace * of Scotland belongs* Marine shellfish entered, such as the periwinkle^ which gives its
I, vm] SWAMP AND FOREST IN N.W. EUROPE 55
name to this L//#mr^-stage; and following them the shellfish-eat- ing folk of the kitchen-middens wandered along the north German coa^t as far as Lettland, where the pine forest closes upon the shore. Here they persisted long; and the miserable Fenni described by Tacitus in the first century A.D. may well be a last remnant of them.
The swamp-culture of the north-east, as will be seen from this sequence of events, coexisted with a considerable part of the palaeolithic decadence. At least two minor advances of the snow-cap of the Alps can be traced during the long withdrawal of the Scandinavian ice-sheet, and the general mitigation of the climate of western Europe was to this extent delayed and interrupted. It would probably be safe to place the Maglemose culture at about the same period as the spread of Campignian influences northwards over France, and it is certainly older than the kitchen-middens, since these crowd closely on the modern coastline, which was submerged in the Maglemose period.
The part played in north-western Europe by the swamp-culture, and by those alien men from the north-east who are its repre- sentatives, was but slight and of short duration. The continental forest on the other hand, which had been spreading intermittently across Europe, northward and westward in the wake of the re- treating ice-sheet, fringed by birch, hazel and pine, but itself com- posed mainly of oak and other deciduous trees, with the zone of beech, walnut, and chestnut following on an average some five hundred miles behind the pines, had reached and smothered all country where trees could grow, as far as the Atlantic seaboard, and southern Britain at least, by a date which may roughly be estimated not far short of 7000 B.C. The palaeolithic remnant had retreated before it till only the kitchen-midden folk survived on the very strand-line, and discontinuously even there. In the in- terior, a few exceptional moorlands, bleak downs, and the larger expanses of thirsty loess in the Rhine and Danube basins and in the north German plain, remained comparatively treeless oases where hunting folk might live. And if this had been all, the Old Stone Age might have passed out of human experience, a withered b?anch of the 'Tree of Life.1
That this was not so is due essentially to two factors. One is the sequence of climatic belts already noted, which provides that a northward shift of the westerly winds is accompanied by commen- surate though not necessarily equal shift of the * Mediterranean ' and * desert-zone* climates, and consequently by ampler* accom- modation for human activities of the Eurafrican type. The other
DI
n
III
nil
V
CHAPTER II NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE CULTURES
I. THE HIGHLAND ZONE AND ALPINE MAN
WHAT then was going 021, meanwhile, within the Highland Zone? For several reasons, evidence from this region is very scanty. Much of it is ill-explored from every point of view; still more — and especially in its best explored west-end where lateifrperiofls are exceptionally well exhibited and have been care- fully studied — is out of reach for the same reason as is so much the evidence for Interglacial man elsewhere; namely that the nearer we approach the centres of glaciation, the more completely do later glacial deposits cover the surfaces of the earlier; so that in Switzer- land and south Germany, for example, human record hardly begins before the neolithic age. Further south-east the scale of acci- dent is loaded the other way: for, in proportion as glacial action passes Into pluvial, it is not excess of deposits but the wholesale removal of them by rain-fed torrents that limits observation. A very large proportion of the land surface of Asia Minor, for in- stance, has no 'surface deposits/ in the ordinary sense, at all; even in the greater valleys, which are themselves rare, the upper terrace gravels have been severely dissected; and the lower have been covered by alluvium, deposited often within historic times.
Consequently, it is almost exclusively by inference from other data, such as the distribution of racial types to-day, and certain indications of the course of events in immediately prehistoric times, that the prehistory of this great region must be reconstructed pro- visionally. Limiting conditions are supplied by the climate, vege- tation, and consequent mode of existence imposed here upon man in general.
Like all other highlands this literally * Alpine* Zone has always Imd a cooler and moister climate than the lowlands north and south of it; and in periods when the submerged areas on its Mediterra- nean and Sarmatian flanks were extensive, this humidity was greatly accentuated, It must be inferred from this that the whole region has been predominantly and persistently a forest area. General changes of temperature would replace subtropical by temperate or subarctic species, but would not necessarily alter the forest area.
58 NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE CULTURES [CHAP.
A period of general drought would draw the forest margin inwards and upwards among the foothills; a pluvial period would expand it into the plains; and a heavy snow-cap would devastate it amdng the peaks and ridges5 and down the glaciated valleys. But none of these agencies would avail to destroy the forest regime altogether; that catastrophe was reserved for the hand of man; and even man has not devastated it wholly as yet.
It follows that the grassland and parkland, fauna, whether African or Arctic, which is so widely associated elsewhere with the first signs of man's presence,, did not pervade the Highland Zone at all generally. In alluvial valleys, and in the large interment plains and forelands, such as the Danube valley, which are characteristic of the region and were reserved to grassland by their mantle of interglacial loess, it was possible for small herds of elephants to wander, as they did still in north Syria in the twelfth century B.C.; and for the lion to maintain himself as he did in Palestine until, at least, the tenth century,, in Macedon until the fifth, and in the Mesopotamian foothills until the present time. But these animals were never characteristic of the great mass of the highland: their place was taken by bear, wolf, and ruminants large and small.
Man, hunting in the open, as he hunted in the lowlands of western Europe, or on the great steppes and parklands, had there- fore no inducement to occupy the forest area: at most his mode of subsistence brought him along the larger rivers such as the Danube, and its tributaries. It is significant that all the earlier individuals whose remains have been found hitherto within the Highland Zone are of the Neanderthal type; that the only large
froup of Neanderthal men hitherto recorded is that from tlie rapina cavern in the headwaters of the Save; and that almost all the Neanderthal men have been found, along the western outliers of the highland core of Europe, To draw conclusions from the distribution of so few examples is risky, and the fragments from Kent's Cavern and one of the Gibraltar caves impose caution already; but there is another reason for expecting that the Nean- derthal type may be found to represent an early forest man, differ- entiated by his surroundings-, as well as by long descent,, from his Aurignacian contemporaries on the grasslands and parklands ouf- side. Whatever the relations of Neanderthal man to 'the Highland Zone, the Aurignacian stock at all events seems to have originated elsewhere, and to have only penetrated it locally and 'marginally* Here again, however, it is possible that Aurignacian relics scattered nearer its core may have been obliterated by the last outspread of glacial debris. And these last glacial deposits are
sufficiently widely distributed to show that in the period which in westerti Europe is that of transition from palaeolithic to neolithic culture, practically the whole of the main highland was divested, not only of any human population it may have harboured inter- glacially, but of all save the most alpine vegetation. In any case we know enough about the changes of climate within the glacial period, to presume wide oscillation of contrasted types of man, as the forest spread or shrank again.
As the highland was surrounded from north-east to south-west by tundra and cold steppe, while southward and eastward its slopes were washed by Mediterranean and Pontic Seas, there was only one avenue by which, when the climate was mitigated finally, it could be rgoccupied by that sequence of plants and animals which it exhibits now. This avenue is from the south-east, and consists of the long Asiatic continuation of the Highland Zone itself; for the Hellespont * river, * as Greek geography rightly named it, offered no real obstacle, and the occurrence of alpine flora in Crete and even in the larger Cyclades illustrates the regional continuity between the highland shores of the Archipelago itself.
We have therefore to conceive the Highland Zone as a single great region, peninsular and self-contained; thrust westward into the heart of Europe from its Armenian summit, where it joins, base to base, its twin eastward promontories, the north Persian ridges and the Zagros escarpment south-eastward, and the diminu- tive but vitally important southward causeway through Syria into south Palestine. North of the Armenian mountain knot, and inti- mately associated with it, in climate, flora and fauna, lay the trans- verse ridge of Caucasus, steep-fronted towards Sarmatian seas or their flatland bed.
Though we have no direct evidence yet as to the older human population, the modern inhabitants of this Highland Zone give an important clue, and the known course of events in the long neo- lithic and chalcolithic periods confirms that clue impressively. From end to end, the dominant type in historic times is distinct and characteristic; interrelated by well-marked broad-headedness and high-headedness; by wide and high orbits, set level or droop- ihg outwards, with almost no trace of brow-ridges; by broad cheek- bones and palate; by a characteristic wide square jaw with its * hinge-ends long, massive, and rising nearly at right angles with the plane of the teeth. It has broad shoulders and hips, broad hands and feet, with thick wrists and ankles, and a generally thickset build; dense parchment-like skin, sallow in the shade, and leathery under the weather; eyes hazel or brown, dark brown wavy hair,
60 NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE CULTURES [CHAP.
long In both sexes and very copious on the body, with profuse beard in the men. Its nearest affinities are with the other white-skinned and wavy-haired types, and with these it has formed numero'us intermediate varieties3 within which its own bodily features appear to be in the Mendelian sense * dominant,1 so that, once introduced into a region, it tends to persist and become accentuated with time, Its purer varieties are all found within the Highland Zone: its occurrences in north-west Africa, Spain, and the Canaries are not sufficient to establish the south-western origin formerly proposed; and the broad-headed strains which connect it north-eastward with the Mongoloid population of the Eurasiatic woodland, — whose other physical features are very different, — may be attributed rather to admixture between independent types spreading in op- posite directions, than to any propagation of such strains inter the Highland. The * Alpine' type in fact may be regarded as essentially of Alpine origin.
On account of its great width, this type of skull was long classed with the Mongolian; but the general build and lofty proportions of the brain-case, and still more the peculiarities of the face and jaw? should have precluded this; and the absence of skin pigment, the wavy hair, and the copious beard and body-hair, force the con- clusion that we are dealing with a stock of quite other origin, more likely to be akin to the other * white* races, b>ut nevertheless strongly contrasted with these, in its head-form and bodily build.
Moreover, between the highland home of * Alpine* man, and the still loftier plateaux, which we have seen reason to regard as the Mongoloid * cradle/ the narrow but gigantic ridges of the Hindu Kush and Pamirs have been long and almost continuously glaciated, as we have already noticed; their flanks are dissected by ancient transverse gorges; and below ice-level there Is vast extent of dense Inhospitable forest, fed, like the snows above them, by wet monsoon winds. Such human elements as have worked their way round this vast ice-cap since its last contraction have moved wholly from west to east, not from the Mongolian habitat into the Alpine; and Mongol admixture in highlands west of the Hindu Kush can always be traced to another and quite recent origin^ namely to nomad pastorals Intruded transversely from the low* lying grasslands of Turkestan, which m all but the latest phases of the Sarmatian sea lay submerged and therefore as Impassable as the snow-cap.
Enough seems to be known of the correlation between diet and the form of the jaw, and of the pull of the jaw-muscles on the tem- poral and parietal region of the skull, to warrant the suggestion
II, i] PRINCIPAL VARIETIES OF ALPINE MAN 61
that the peculiar combination of a short and massive jaw, suited rather Tor crushing than for cutting or tearing, with a musculature soTeeble as to be accompanied by almost no lateral compression of the brain-case, points to a long-continued mode of subsistence quite different from that of the carnivorous hunters of the steppes and parklands of Eurafrica. And we have already seen that the Highland Zone has necessarily been at all periods more or less completely a forest area, ill-adapted to maintain the large land- animals of the parkland except quite locally and sporadically, but abounding in many kinds of trees and shrubs bearing fruits or nuts, from conifers to chestnut and walnut, and from cranberry, crab-apple and sloe, to the characteristic fleshy-fruited apricot and peach of Persia and Armenia, and the vine, mulberry, fig and olive whi&h are common to the foothills of the forest zone and the ever- green flora of the Mediterranean region south of it. We shall see reason also to suspect that the first domesticated grasses, wheat, barley, and millet belong to genera which inhabit this same mar- ginal belt between the forest and the southern grasslands; and that they were cultivated by men of Alpine stock as far west as the Swiss lake-basins, and as early as we have any evidence of modern man in that section of the highland (p. 72).
In this connexion it is perhaps worth noting, that Greek eth- nology, which so often formulates conclusions which it has been reserved to modern observers to substantiate, clearly distinguished between an earlier phase of subsistence, that of the * nut-eating' men (ySaXaz/^c^ctyot az/8/>es), and a later 'meal-eating* culture (az/Spes aX^Tya-rat); and that, in a very ancient stratum of Greek myth and ritual, the Power to whom the gift of grain-food was ascribed was worshipped with sacrifice of the pig, a typical forest-ranger.
But within the Highland itself, the Alpine type varies, and the actual distribution of its principal varieties gives a clue to its prob- able cradle-land. Most accentuated is the 'Armenoid' variety, of the Ararat mountain region, with a head characterized by very lofty vault and outward-drooping orbits, and so abruptly flattened behind, that it has been ascribed by some observers, both ancient and modern, to artificial deformation. This variety predominates throughout the central section of the Highland, and is also not un- common throughout south-eastern and east-central Kurope. Least peculiar in the two respects already noted and distinguished rather by its smoothly globular cranium, and by a jaw broad but not so angular, are the West European varieties, especially in AuVergne and Savoy, and the most easterly groups from nolth Persia to the Pamirs and beyond; and the general likeness between these
62 NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE CULTURES [CHAP.
remotest groups is in fact such as to suggest that they represent a quite early phase both of differentiation and of outward srpread. Intermediate types, characteristic of east-central and south-eastern Europe, and commonly described as Dinaric5 show this globular head becoming more angular and cubical; and have their counter- part in Caucasus, western Persia, and along the southern margin of the highland thence towards the 'Dinaric' area westward, with notable offshoots southwards through Syria, Their distribution suggests a later stage both of specialization and of dissemination, around the central area already described, where alone the develop- ment has attained to that extreme 'Artnenoid* phase whose dis- tribution is least wide and also apparently least early.
The relative antiquity of these successive phases of growth and spread can be stated approximately; for the outermost western or 'Cevenole7 type made its appearance in the Alps and in France during the transition from late palaeolithic to neolithic culture, At Ofnet, in Bavaria, it made its appearance in the Azilian phase, mixed with Aurignacian people, and already interbreeding with them; eastward, on the other hand, the human remains from Anau show that no such * Alpine' type had reached the north margin of Persia until after the second desertion of this early settlement (p. 85). Similarly the broad-headed intruders into Egypt at the beginning of the dynastic series, and into Crete and the Cy chides at the beginning of the Minoan Bronze Age, belong to the second phase, which may therefore be dated about 4000—3500 B.C.: and the first known occupants of Cyprus, and of Troy, in the earliest Bronze Age are of the same type, Fully developed 'Armenoid* remains, on the other hand, do not seem to be found anywhere until the second millennium at earliest*
At present, therefore, it seems safe to regard this * Alpine* group of broad-headed types as representing phases of a special development within the Armenian mountain mass, or rather (since this region was certainly subjected to severe glaciation during the Ice Age) within the mountain-girt plateau of Asia Minor imme- diately west of it; large enough, isolated enough, and at all relevant periods habitable enough to become the cradle of such a sequence of varieties; sufficiently well connected with large similarly quatf fied regions eastward and westward and sufficiently liable from its geographical position to periodic changes of climate, to serve as a reservoir of population, like the highlands of Atlas and the Iberian peninsula in earlier times, and like the Arabian and Eur- asian reservoirs later on.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed, that even considering
II, i] FOREST CULTURE AND POLISHED IMPLEMENTS 63
how little scientific research there has been in this region, traces of palaeolithic culture are still so rare here, especially in view of the quite common occurrence of neolithic implements of polished stone in all parts of it. There is however good reason why flaked implements should be in any case rare in such a region. Though fairly well adapted for attacking wild animals, cutting up game, and dressing hides, and even for shaping and decorating imple- ments of bone and antler, the flaked implement is comparatively ineffective for felling trees, splitting logs, dressing planks, or pounding roots, bark or nuts* Moreover, though a large part of the great flatlands consist of, or rest on, flint-bearing strata — cre- taceous or derivative — and are as open country as they actually are, mainly because these limestone surfaces are inhospitable to tree^ in the highland zone, on the other hand, these beds are either absent — which accentuates its forest aspect, seeing how precarious is tree growth over limestone — or so distorted, or even deficient in flint and chert, that the supply of this material was scanty, and (what was worse) discontinuous. Collateral evidence is that in Egypt, where timber was rare and exotic, the flake- technique persisted and underwent cumulative refinement from Solutrean to chalcolithic times; and that in the kitchen-middens of north-west Europe acquaintance with polished implements in- creases pan passu with the northward advance of oak-forest, dis- placing conifers, just as these and the dwarf-birch had previously invaded the cold steppe. A further point is, that even before ac- quaintance with the polished technique began, there is a complete revolution in the mode of employment of stone implements gener- ally. The tapering pyramidal point for stabbing, and the longi- tudinal edge for cutting or ripping, are supplemented, and even- tually replaced in the more massive implements, by the transverse edge for hacking and clearing, under shock (rather than pressure) applied to the butt-end. This is conspicuous in the Campignian technique, which will be remembered as marking a last palaeo- lithic aggression in the moist forest-ridden west. The form of the butt-end, too, frequently suggests the use of some form of haft; ajid hafting itself presumes familiarity with wooden staves and clubs, and therefore with parkland at all events. Again, in any region where roots and tubers formed any considerable part of the food supply, the mere act of breaking the ground with pick or hoe, whether