ORIGIN OF TRACTION PLOW— BISHOP 547 



From China, again, the traction plow traveled to the East Indian 

 Archipelago, occupation of which it shared with the type from India. 

 Generally speaking the line of demarcation between the two fields of 

 cultural influence extends, though with many interpenetrations, from 

 east-central Tibet southward through the Indochinese peninsula, 

 thence swinging off in a southeasterly direction into Indonesia. 

 Formosa, the Philippines, and North Borneo remain on the Chinese 

 side, while Sumatra, Java, and their nearer neighbors fail within the 

 Indian sphere. It seems to have been only in this quarter of the 

 globe that the traction plow in its earlier career penetrated, albeit very 

 slightly, south of the Equator. 



Let us now summarize briefly the results of our inquiry. These 

 seem to make it fairly clear that the traction plow appears at pro- 

 gressively later dates the farther we travel, in whatever direction, 

 from the region where we find the earliest indications of its use — that 

 is to say, in the ancient Near East. Moreover its extension, so far as 

 we have been able to trace it through written records, has invariably 

 been due to diffusion — to culture borrowing, never to repeated inde- 

 pendent invention. There is every reason to believe that the same 

 holds true for prehistoric times, also. These facts go a long way 

 toward accounting for that essential unity underlying the agricultural 

 svstems upon which have been based the great civilizations of the Old 

 World.^" 



'0 On this unity, see Loser, Paul, Entstehung und Verbreitung des Pfluges, p. 545, 1931; also his paper in 

 Festschrift Schmidt cited in footnote 15. 



