276 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION 



centimeters higher than in 1874. He calculates the total rise be- 

 tween 1882 and 1 901 to be at least 3 meters, or 178 millimeters, 

 yearly. 



Judging from my observations and from those of others, espe- 

 cially of the Arabian writers and of the later Russian explorers, it 

 would seem that the country has long been an interior region, de- 

 pendent mainly on the snows and glaciers of the mountains for its 

 life ; that there have been within the present geological period great 

 fluctuations in the amount of water derived from the mountains as 

 recorded in high and low shore lines of the seas, and in the strata 

 left by different expansions of the united waters of the Aral and 

 Caspian and containing living forms ; that man already existed within 

 the region during at least the last great maximum of moisture. 



Evidences of Former Occupation. 



In our earliest historical records we find the country occupied as 

 now by dwellers in numerous cities, surrounded by deserts in which 

 lived nomad peoples. The town dwellers seem to have been at least 

 largely of Aryan stock and the nomads of Turanian. 



Who were the contemporaneous and the successive dwellers in 

 the many towns ? To what different races may they have belonged ? 

 Whence did they come into the land ? What were their civiliza- 

 tions and what their relations to other civilizations and to those of 

 the modern world ? These are our questions, and they can be an- 

 swered only to a greater or less extent by a study of the results of 

 excavation and in the concentrated light of comparative science in 

 archeology, ethnology, and language and of survivals in arts and 

 customs, for the answers to some of these questions will be found 

 rooted deep in the human strata of the ancient world. Asia abounds 

 in the fragmentary survivals of stocks, arts, customs, and languages. 



The vestiges of former occupation by man are varied in character — 

 in the eastern mountains pictographic inscriptions recalling those of 

 American aborigines, some rock sculpturing, and rough stone idols. 

 At Lake Issikul Professor Davis describes stone circles, recalling 

 some of the dolmen-like forms, and submerged masonry in the lake. 



Along the river courses are abandoned canals which can no longer 

 be supplied with water, and the Russian maps abound in indications 

 of ruined towns, " forts," etc. The most important remains are the 

 tumuli and the town sites. 



