Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

32 THE PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS
them is still unexplained ;
but we must notice the very striking resem-
blance between our statuettes and, on the one hand, those of the
Aegean Islands, on the other, the clay statuettes of the Laibach moors.
The Aegean statuettes are certainly pre- Mycenaean, and the Laibach
figures still belong to the copper age.
To conclude this rather dry and tiresome analysis I will endeavour
to estimate the significance of my deductions for the earHest periods
of the evolution of human civilization. The more we learn of the
copper age, the more important it is seen to be. This epoch created
brilliant centres of cultured life all over the world, especially in the
Orient. To the centres already known, Elam, Mesopotamia, and
Egypt, we can now add Turkestan and Northern Caucasus— perhaps
the Caucasus as a whole. The bloom of civiHzation in the Caucasus
was by no means a brief one. I have already tried to show that the
rich development of the bronze age in the Caucasus owed nothing to
foreign centres. I see no trace of the Mycenaean influence suggested
by Hoernes ; nor do I see any relation to the bronze age of Western
Siberia, the Altai, and the Ural Mountains. The Caucasian bronze age
is very peculiar and very original. The only possible connexion is
with Mesopotamia and the Asia Minor of the Hittite period. But I
do not believe that this connexion came about in the usual way, by
influence due to conquest, migration, or commercial intercourse ;
I think that in all these countries the roots of development lay in a
great copper age civilization which in each centre arose quite independently
and proceeded on different lines, although it presented
analogous features in all. How to explain the common traits I cannot
tell. Are we to suppose a common origin somewhere in Asia, or a
common state of mind which, just as in the palaeolithic and neolithic
periods, gave rise to the same productions everywhere, quite independent
of one another and only slightly influenced by very insignificant
intercourse ? In any case, the peculiar evolution of Hittite civilization
cannot be explained without assuming a great centre of copper age
civilization in Asia Minor as well. As yet we have no monuments
testifying to the existence of such a centre, but I feel convinced that
further investigation in Asia Minor will add one or more items to the
long list of centres of civilization in the copper age.
A most important centre of such civiHzation existed, as we have
seen, on the Kuban, contemporaneous with, and akin to, the other
centres of the same epoch in Nearer Asia and in Egypt. Do we know
anything of the people which produced this culture .? The
inhabitants,
autochthonous as we have every reason to believe, of the region
adjacent to the Sea of Azov are described by the Greeks as forming a