GRASSLAND AND FARMLAND—SMITH 369 
long enough, according to Prof. Louis Gray of Columbia University, 
to produce the literature known as Vedas. They then divided, one 
group went southwestward into Mesopotamia and the other southeast- 
ward into India. This common origin in the steppes explains the 
remarkable similarity of the Greek and Sanskrit languages. 
Beginning about 1200 B. C. many waves of these Aryans went into 
India. They overwhelmed the Indus Valley cultures. Prof. Walter 
Von Brunn, of the University of Leipzig (Science News Letter, Feb. 
19, 1938), pointed out in 1938 that the remains of Mohenjo-daro, 
Chanhu-daro, and other Indus Valley cities of 3500 B. C. had no signs 
of having had walls or other fortifications. From this fact he inferred 
that continuous peace prevailed in the era before the eruption of the 
horsemen from the steppes. Perhaps this was the Golden Age. 
These cities on the Indus plain had houses of well-burned brick. 
The present inhabitants of this area live in mud villages. Fifty-five 
hundred years ago Mohenjo-daro, built of brick, had a sewer system 
equal to that of Pompeii and other Roman cities that were built more 
than 3,000 years later. 
All this the northern invaders destroyed—destroyed it so com- 
pletely that we only learned of its existence by accidental discoveries 
in the twentieth century. Imagine if you can the thoughts and feel- 
ings of the cultured people of Mohenjo-daro as these early Nazis 
destroyed a city that had stood for centuries in peaceful prosperity. 
India received many waves of these new raw men from the steppes. 
As a result Indo-European languages prevail today over large areas 
in northwestern India. The other results of these migrations can 
be observed today by anyone who passes northwest from southern 
India to the Khyber Pass and observes the gradual change in the 
color of the skin of the inhabitants. The color of native skin is black 
in southern India, white in the Khyber Pass, with various shades 
between. 
The culture that originated in the warm and fertile valleys spread 
eastward to China, westward to the Aegean, and also, at an early 
date it spread northward to the highlands of Iran and Armenia 
where, as in China and in Crete, a civilization arose in part on bor- 
rowed culture elements. 
In the third millennium B. C. non-Indo-European peoples in what 
we now call Armenia had a considerable culture, with cities and 
written language. Babylonian colonists settled among them, and 
the Mesopotamian cuneiform characters were added to their writing. 
Early in the third millennium there came among them a migra-. 
tion from the steppes, “an Indo-European conquering people called 
by us ‘Hittites.’” The invaders stayed, learned, increased, and made 
an empire. Recent excavations show that Hittite scholars mastered 
