46 THE SUCCESSIVE CULTURES AT ANAU. 
to Egypt. Flinders Petrie gives in “ Wlahun, Kahun, and Gurol”’ (plate vm, fig. 27) 
a representation of such a sickle found at Kahun in which the cutting edge is 
formed by flakes of flint set in wood. And De Morgan found such flakes in 
abundance both in Egypt and in Susiana. Similar flakes abound in the earliest 
cultures at Anau; obviously the sickle would be one of the first implements to 
be made of copper after the introduction of that metal. It would not be surpris- 
ing if future researches should show that the Anau and Trojan form with the 
bent-back tang was a survival from a much more ancient time. 
The persistence of forms in objects of daily use through thousands of years 
is one of the most remarkable evidences of that conservatism that has till recently 
hindered the development of the inventive faculty of man in all directions. For 
nineteen centuries the Italian peasant has used agricultural implements identical 
in form with those in the Pompeian collection at Naples. This identity, as shown 
in Pompeii, covers the widest range of survivals still in use throughout the modern 
world, to mention only certain surgical and drafting implements, the same forms 
in faucets and valves in plumbing,and in some kinds of bits for horses, and in the 
dice for gambling. Here, too, we find in the Pompeian astragali the same “‘knuckle- 
bones’’ which occur abundantly in the early culture-strata of Anau on the one 
hand, and were used in games by the Greeks, and are still in use by modern 
youth, marking perhaps a stage in a real sequence of tradition. The same method 
of yoking oxen has followed the ox from ancient Chaldea westward through the 
millenniums; and the American cowboy uses the lasso as it has come down to 
him with the horse from ancient Irania. The same form of spindle-whorls occurs 
in great quantities through eight thousand years of pre-Christian culture at 
Anau, and still later in the medieval city, where they differ only in being glazed. 
They had the same forms, too, though decorated, in Troy after the first city, 
It would seem that all of our stocks of forms and of ornament have their roots 
in many prehistoric centers, and that until the recent advance in mechanics and 
chemistry modification in forms was due almost wholly to the requirements in 
working newly discovered materials; and that the addition of new concepts was 
due to the comminglings of traditions from primitive centers of independent 
evolution. 
I come now to what is, for several reasons, perhaps the most remarkable 
of the finds from this culture. Between 40 and 43 feet above the base of culture, 
there came to light numerous terra-cotta figurines of both human and animal 
forms. Of these the human figures all represent women, and those of animals 
are clearly meant for bulls or cows. ‘They are shown on plates 46 and 47. As 
a rule they are roughly formed, but in one instance (plate 46, figs. 10a and 10d) 
the modeling is surprisingly artistic in so far as it was the evident intention of 
the maker. 
These female figures belong undoubtedly in the class of images of the life- 
creating and life-nourishing goddess.* As Beltis, Ishtar, Nana, Anat, Astarte, 


_ *HOrnes has discussed, in his ‘‘Urgeschichte der Bildenden Kunst in Europa,” the wide prehistoric 
distribution of this idea in various forms of representation. 
