ORIGIN OF TRACTION PLOW— BISHOP 



539 



single handle, with a transverse hand-grip, and a well developed slade 

 in one piece with the beam. Both these characters the ancient Cretan 

 plow shares with examples found in peat bogs in northern Europe; 

 and it seems also to have been nearly related to the preclassical 

 Greek plow as well as to types found in the eastern Mediterranean 

 area today, ^^ It displays a distinctly more developed shape than do 

 the plows shown in the Ligurian and Swedish petroglyphs which we 

 shall discuss later. 



There appears to be no conclusive evidence for the use of the ox- 

 drawn plow in Europe during the Neolithic pcriod,^^ although some 

 form of foot plow was pretty surely known and perhaps human trac- 

 tion was also employed. However, Mesopotamia was in contact from 

 very early times with the steppe lands north of the mountain zone,^^ 



Figure 6.— Egyptian eighteenth dynasty example of human traction in plowing. 



Griffith, Paheri, vol. 1, pi. 3.) 



(From Tylor and 



and it was perhaps in this way that the idea of employing animal 

 traction in agriculture reached that black earth region destined one 

 day to become the granary of Athens. From southern Russia — or 

 perhaps from Asia Minor, though the latter seems on the whole the 

 less likely source — the use of the plow spread to the Danube Valley. 

 It may possibly have appeared there during the latter half of the 

 third millennium before our era; for among remains of the culture 

 known as Danubian II, which seems to have arisen about that time, 

 there have been found large stone implements interpreted as plow- 

 s' For hieroglyphic representations of the ancient Cretan plow, of. Evans, Sir Arthur J., Scripta Minoa, 

 pp. 190 fE., and fig. 102 (table 13), No. 27, 1909. 



" Childe, V. Gordon, The Bronze Age, p. 49, 1930; also, Leser, Paul, Entstehung und Verbreitung des 

 Pfluges, p. 550. 

 3» Childe, The Aryans, pp. 185 fl., 1926. 



