developed on the banks of the Ganges (W. Crooke, Northern- India, 1907, p. 18: " an age of copper is well marked by finds of implements of remarkable shapes in the Ganges Valley").
The search for copper or gold attracted these earliest ex- ploiters to Elam, to Asia Minor, the Caucasus and Black Sea littoral, the southern shores of the Caspian and Transcaspia, and to Baluchistan; but it also led them much farther afield. So that, long before the invention of bronze the germs of ancient civilization were planted in Turkestan and along a series of gold- workings from the Oxus to Bukhara, to Issyk-kul and Kulja, to Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk and Minusinsk, which became the centre where for many centuries the civilization of central Siberia flourished in spite of the fact that it was the lure for the greed of a vast continent and the home of strife (W. J. Perry, " War and Civilization," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 1918).
But it was not merely the chain of golden sands along the line from Bukhara to the. Yenisei that attracted the miners from the S., but also the gold and jade in the Tarim valley in pursuit of which the prospectors were led on from Kashgar to Kucha past Lop-nor to Suchan, Liangshan and Lanshan until eventually they discovered the gold and jade in the mountains S. of Si-ngan in Shensi. Settling down to extract this wealth they incidentally planted the germs of the civilization of China. Laufer's memoir on The Beginnings of Porcelain in China (1917) (see also his " Some Fundamental Ideas of Chinese Culture," Journal of Race Development, vol. v., 1914, pp. 160-174) affords irrefutable corroboration of the fact that " the entire economic foundation of ancient Chinese civilization has a common foundation with that of the West " (p. 175). " It is inconceivable that the (potter's) wheels of India and China should be independent of those of the West " (p. 175). All the facts brought together by Laufer point clearly to the conclusion that the world at large learnt the use of the potter's wheel from Egypt (pp. 174-176). Many centuries later " the incentive for the process of glazing pottery was received by the Chinese directly from the West, owing to their contact with the Hellenistic world in com- paratively late historical times. The knowledge of glazing ren- dered the manufacture of porcelanous ware possible; yet in this achievement the creative genius of the Chinese was not guided by outside influence, but relied on its own powerful resources " (p. 176).
Elamite civilization was diffused to Turkestan long before wheel-made pottery was made, because Pumpelly's excavations revealed the fact that in the first and second of his culture-stages at Anau only hand-made pottery was found.
The routes followed by these early culture-bearers from Persia to central Siberia and to China respectively are mapped out by the remains of ancient irrigation systems. Wherever gold was to be obtained from any of the streams or lakes these wandering prospectors settled to wash the sands for the precious metal: they also irrigated the land in their characteristic way to grow crops to maintain themselves; and they left stone monu- ments as memorials for their dead. The association of these three classes of evidence, the presence of gold, ancient irriga- tion and stone monuments, still blazes the paths taken by these ancient prospectors forty or more centuries ago. Detailed statements of two of these classes of evidence will be found in J. Mouchkeboff's Les Richesses Minerales du Turkestan (Paris, 1878) and H. Moser's L'Irrigation en Asie Centrale (Paris, 1894).
There is evidence of another kind in substantiation of the intimate cultural link between early Egypt, Elam and Sumer, and between them and the Iranian and Turanian domains. The religious ideas and mythology reveal the closeness of the bonds between these ancient centres, and especially the fact that much of so-called early Aryan beliefs and myths are really Egypto- Sumerian in origin.
But reference has been made to the intimacy of the early cultural bonds between Mesopotamia and Turkestan because it has a bearing upon one of the most important episodes in the history of civilization the invention of the alloy bronze and the inauguration of the Bronze Age. We know that before the
invention of bronze prospectors for gold and copper exploited the line of deposits of these metals which forms a chain linking the valley of the Oxus to the upper Yenisei. The rich archaeo- logical harvest collected around the sites of these ancient work- ings establishes this fact. Now if it be true and the evidence at present available renders it probable then the making of bronze was invented with the help of the tin obtained from Meshed. Ancient tin mines were discovered in this region by P. Ogorodnikov (compare Baer, Arch. f. Anthr. [ix., p. 265], quoted by Terrien de Lacouperie, Western Origin of Chinese Civilization, p. 322). " Strabo declares that it (tin) was pro- duced in Drangiana, west of the modern Afghanistan, a district partly coinciding with Khurasan, where its presence has been confirmed. It is also found in other parts of Persia, near Astera- bad and Tabriz" (C. H. Read, A Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age, British Museum, 1904, p. 9.) The exact spot where tin has been found at the south-eastern corner of the Caspian is indicated by J. de Morgan, Mission Scientifique au Caucase (1889).
In her important monograph on Gournia Mrs. Harriet Boyd Hawes brings forward the following weighty arguments in favour of the invention of bronze in the southern Caspian area. " When the Pumpelly expedition returned from Turkestan in 1904, one of the members brought potsherds indistinguishable at first sight from the brilliantly mottled ware found at Vasiliki (Crete) during the same season. . . . The strong likeness between the two fabrics ... is more reasonably explained by intercourse than by accident. Moreover, Dr. Hubert Schmidt . . . reports that a neighbouring tumulus (near the large one in which the pottery was found) gave him a three-sided seal- stone of Middle Minoan type, engraved with Minoan designs man, lion, steer, and griffin. How shall we explain those evi- dences of Aegean influence in southern Turkestan? They must be brought in line with other proofs of contact. . . . We see that at c. 2500 B.C. Asia Minor shared with the Aegean the knowledge of bronze ... we may suggest the probability that, long before tin was discovered in Europe, it was being brought overland through Asia Minor, and also by way ef Transcaucasia and the Black Sea from distant Khorassan, Strabo's Drangiana. . . . Excavations at Elizabethpol in Transcaucasia have re- vealed a culture in early contact with the Aegean."
One of the results of this intercourse between Turkestan and Asia Minor was the introduction into Europe of the appre- ciation of jade, which no doubt was responsible for stimulating the people of Europe to hunt out and work the supplies of nephrite which occur locally.
Terrien de Lacouperie makes the following statement :
" The precious nephrite (polished celts) is found along the route from Khotan in Turkestan, its starting point, to the Jaxartes, to the Oxus, then S. of the Caspian Sea, in Babylonia and Assyria, along the Northern Asia Minor shores, bordering upon ancient Troy, then passes to the Peloponnesus, where it directs its course to Crete, and, not touching Egypt, passes from Greece to Italy, where it is dis- tributed among the Helvetian Lakes, the Megalithic monuments of Armorica, etc." (Western Origin of Chinese Civilization, p. 34.)
Chinese Civilization. There is no doubt that the cradle of Chinese civilization was in the Shensi province early in the third millennium, and that the inspiration of this culture was pro- vided by miners from the W. who were exploiting the gold, copper and jade of the mountains S. of Si-ngan-fu, and incidentally planting in China the much modified elements of Elamite civilization which had been handed on from one mining camp to another on the long route to China.
The occasional use of jade for seal-cylinders in Babylonia and the value attached to turquoise there suggests that the people who were washing the sands of the Oxus, the Syr Daria, Issyk-kul and the Ili for gold and the presence of distinctive types of ancient irrigation works on the banks of these waters proves the reality of such exploitation were also working the Tian Shan range and the neighbourhood of Khotan and Kashgar for jade and turquoise. What strengthens the belief in the reality of this suggestion is the fact that the peculiarly arbitrary and distinctive magical significance which was attached to pearls
