RELATION OF ANAU CULTURES I AND II TO EARLY CHALDEA. Wes 
of which follows upon that of the other and lasts till September.* Further, at 
the time of the earliest culture at Anau, the Babylonian plain was still under the 
waters of the Persian Gulf. 
There can be no doubt that the people who first subjected these rivers to 
their use had lived for generations on oases where the conditions, while less difficult, 
were still such as forced the development of the considerable engineering skill 
required in attacking this greater problem. ‘This presupposes a long perspective 
of time, with perhaps several stages of migration in which Susiana may have been 
the last station on the way to the Euphrates, where the beginning of Babylonian 
culture may have been contemporaneous with the early life of the South Kurgan 
copper culture of Anau III. The relation of these cultures to the period and 
region of isolation from the outside world determines for them an origin eastward 
from Mesopotamia. The vast central region of the Iranian plateau is eliminated. 
There remain the long longitudinal depressions on the west, Sistan in the eastern 
half and northern Khorasan and the Transcaspian oases extending along the 
Kopet Dagh and into the embayments of the Oxus, Zerafshan, and Fergana on 
the north. It would seem that the region from which the culture possessing the 
characteristics common to early Anau and early Susiana radiated must have been 
in one of these directions. 
We know that in the second culture of the North Kurgan the camel and lapis 
lazuli appeared, together with the dog and goat, and with new varieties of painted 
pottery. The lack of mention of one-humped camels in Babylonia or Assyria 
before Salmanesar II, in the ninth century B. c., strengthens the probability that 
our Anau camel came from the East; and since the great source of lapis lazuli is 
in the Hindu-Kush mountains, its presence in Anau would seem to point to a 
westward drift of migration of a people whose culture was related to that of their 
predecessors of Anau, and to eastern Irania or Bactriana as the point we are seek- 
ing. So also should the fact that the Sumerians knew the lion only after their 
arrival on the Chaldean plains.t But even if this drift were from the east its 
starting-points may have been, like Anau and Susiana, points to which an earlier 
radiation had taken place after the beginning of agriculture and of settled life. 
For, there can be no doubt that the conditions which we find already existing at 
the very beginning of the first culture at Anau—settled town life, cultivation of 
the soil, and a developed potters’ art and painted designs—required for their 
evolution a time-perspective which vanishes in as yet unpenetrated darkness. 
As at a later period the natural economic possibilities of the Chaldean plains 
invited irresistibly the fusion of the surrounding peoples of different ethnic and 
linguistic stocks into the mold of Sumerian culture, so also it may not be improbable 
that at an earlier period and in eastern Irania, similar conditions had produced 
similar fusions from which the Sumerians branched off to the westward. 

* Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens u. Assyriens, p. 186. 
{This is shown by the absence of a Sumerian word for lion (Hommel). Now, while the lion exists in 
Mesopotamia and in southern Susiana on the one hand, and in India on the other, contrary to current 
statements it does not exist on the Persian plateau, nor in either Afghanistan, Baluchistan, or Turkestan 
(Blanford and O. St. John). Oppert (quoted by Elisée Reclus, in L’Homme et la Terre, p. 492) states that 
“the primitive pictographic signs recall objects belonging in a ‘climate different from that of Chaldea—no 
lions or leopards; no one-humped camel, but the two-humped Bactrian; no vines or palms, but conifers.” 
The fact that the one-humped camel first appears in the 9th century B. c., on the black obelisk of Salmanesar 
II, would seem to indicate a late domestication of the Arabian camel. 
