364 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
This Sian Valley was the first place at which this route across moun- 
tain and desert delivered culture elements from the west to men 
living in good farmland. 
This first center of the present Chinese culture had a rare combina- 
tion of qualities. There was enough rain to support agriculture, 
and there was loess soil. This wind-blown gift of deserts that lay 
to the west is the closest approach on earth to the perennial fertility 
of the annually flooding river valley. Let a farmer plow the top foot 
of loess and let the soil wash away or blow away, it matters not— 
the second foot is as good as the first; the twentieth foot is as good as 
KNOWN DISTRIBUTION 
—OF THE— 
WAR-CHARIOT 
-IN- 
ANTIQUITY 
«tS “ime 
FicukE 5.—Known distribution of the war chariot in antiquity. (After Carl 
Bishop.) The war chariot came later than the plow. It depended upon the 
horse. The open grassland of central Eurasia and the Zungarian Gate (see figs. 
6 and 18), an opening in the mountains west of China, furnish an easy passage- 
way for men and ideas. 
the second. Here then was another basis for an agriculture that 
could endure for centuries. 
Generation after generation of men in the Wei Valley loess had the 
advantages of permanent fertility of the soil. Meanwhile the mind 
of man was fertilized by the arrival of cultural elements from Meso- 
potamia and the steppes. Still another stream of culture elements 
came to the Sian Valley from India, by way of the Burma Road. 
Sinologists say that fowls and rice were early arrivals over this route. 
Besides the fertility base of loess vouchsafed by nature, the farmer 
adopted two fertility measures whose effectiveness is unrivaled by 
