The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

74
THE BRONZE AGE AND THE CELTIC WORLD
de Lacouperie.'' This ingenious author, who had been dead many years before the
discoveries at Anau were made, suggested that certain tribes, settled near the Caspian
Sea, whom he called the Bak tribes and who had been under the influence of the
kings of Elam, left their settlements about 2200 B.C., and set out on a long trek towards
China, into which land they introduced the beginnings of culture and the germs of
the Chinese script.
This hypothesis was badly received when it appeared. Few of its critics had
taken the trouble to master Lacouperie's argument, which was advanced in a most
confused style. Sir Robert Douglas,'" however, a sinologist of no mean reputation,
believed that there was a considerable amount of truth at the bottom of it, though
the theory was overlaid by many fanciful conjectures. Recently M. Cordier*' has
dismissed the whole idea as imaginary and based on inaccurate hnguistic data. The
question, I venture to think, needs re-examination, for at Anau we find a settlement
of peasants, in touch with the Elamites, abandoning their village just at the date
suggested by Lacouperie.
All this evidence seems to point to the fact that owing to drought, either of a
prolonged order or lasting for two or three consecutive summers, our steppe-folk, who
buried their dead in a contracted position covered with red ochre, suddenly left the
steppe lands between the Dnieper and the Asiatic frontier, and dispersed in search of
wetter regions and richer pastures. Two settled agricultural civilisations on their
borders, the Tripolje settlements in the Ukraine and those at Anau, disappeared at the
same time, driven out either by the drought or by the advancing hordes.
That some went to the east as well as to the west seems probable, for we find not long
afterwards, in the reign of Hammurabi, 2123-2061 B.C., bands of steppe-folk on the
Iranian plateau, who had akeady tamed the horse." These entered Mesopotamia
and established the Kassite dynasty about 1760 b.c.,'^ and were the first to introduce the
horse into the valley of the Tigris."* Whether or no other bands passed further to the
eastward we have no positive evidence, but, as we have seen, there seem to be reasons
'9 Lacouperie (1887) 113-119; {1894) ch. iv., v. " King (1915) 215.
»» Douglas (1899) 3. J3 King (1915) 320.
" Cordier (1920) i. 27, 28. 14 King (1915) 215.