16 president's address. 



It is clear that it is on this Neolithic foundation that our later 

 civilisation immediately stands. But in the constant chain of actions 

 and reactions by which the history of mankind is bound together — 

 short of the extinction of all concerned, a hypothesis in this case 

 excluded— it is equally certain that no great human achievement is 

 without its continuous effect. The more we realise the substantial 

 amount of progress of the men of the Late Quaternary Age in arts and 

 crafts and ideas, the more difficult it is to avoid the conclusion that 

 somewhere ' at the back of behind ' — it may be by more than one route 

 and on more than one continent, in Asia as well as Africa — actual links 

 of connexion may eventually come to light. 



Of the origins of our complex European culture this much at 

 least can be confidently stated : the earliest extraneous sources on 

 which it drew lay respectively in two directions — in the Valley of the 

 Nile on one side and in that of the Euphrates on the other. 



Of the high early culture in the lower Euphrates Valley our first 

 real knowledge has been due to the excavations of De Sarzec in the 

 Mounds of Tello, the ancient Lagash. It is now seen that the civili- 

 sation that we call Babylonian, and which was hitherto known under 

 its Semitic guise, was really in its main features an inheritance from 

 the earlier Sumerian race — culture in this case once more dominating 

 nationality. Even the laws which Hammurabi traditionally received 

 from the Babylonian Sun God were largely modelled on the reforms 

 enacted a thousand years earlier by his predecessor, Urukagina, and 

 ascribed by him to the inspiration of the City God of Lagash.' It 

 is hardly necessary to insist on the later indebtedness of our civilisation 

 to this culture in its Semitised shape, as passed on, together with other 

 more purely Semitic elements, to the Mediterranean "World through 

 Syria, Canaan, and Phoenicia, or by way of Assyria, and by means of 

 the increasing hold gained on the old Hittite region of Anatolia. 



Even beyond the ancient Mesopotamian region which was the focus 

 of these influences, the researches of De Morgan, Gautier, and Lampre, 

 of the French ' Delegation en Perse,' have opened up another inde- 

 pendent field, revealing a nascent civilisation equally ancient, of which 

 Elam — the later Susiana — was the centre. Still further afield, more- 

 over — some three hundred miles east of the Caspian— the interesting 

 investigations of the Pumpelly Expedition in the mounds of Anau, 

 near Ashkabad in Southern Turkestan, have brought to light a parallel 

 and related culture. The painted Neolithic sherds of Anau, with their 

 geometrical decoration, similar to contemporary ware of Elam, have 

 suggested wide comparisons with the painted pottery of somewhat later 

 date found in Cappadocia and other parts of Anatolia, as well as in 

 the North Syrian regions. It has, moreover, been reasonably asked 

 ' See L. W. King, History of Sumer and Akkad, p. 184. 



