connection, but they are important in so far as they afford evidence
of early trade relations in a hitherto unsuspected direction, and the
long distances over which cultural influence extended before the dawn
of history. Further we cannot go. No inscriptions have yet been
discovered to render articulate this mysterious Central Asian
civilization, or to suggest the original source of early Sumerian
picture writing. Nor is it possible to confirm Mr. Pumpelly's view
that from the Anau district the Sumerians and Egyptians first obtained
barley and wheat, and some of their domesticated animals. If, as
Professor Elliot Smith believes, copper was first used by the Ancient
Egyptians, it may be, on the other hand, that a knowledge of this
metal reached Anau through Sumeria, and that the elements of the
earlier culture were derived from the same quarter by an indirect
route. The evidence obtainable in Egypt is of interest in this
connection. Large quantities of food have been taken from the stomachs
and intestines of sun-dried bodies which have lain in their
pre-Dynastic graves for over sixty centuries. This material has been
carefully examined, and has yielded, among other things, husks of
barley and millet, and fragments of mammalian bones, including those,
no doubt, of the domesticated sheep and goats and cattle painted on
the pottery.[13] It is therefore apparent that at an extremely remote
period a knowledge of agriculture extended throughout Egypt, and we
have no reason for supposing that it was not shared by the
contemporary inhabitants of Sumer.

The various theories which have been propounded regarding the outside
source of Sumerian culture are based on the assumption that it
commenced abruptly and full grown. Its rude beginnings cannot be
traced on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, but although no
specimens of the earliest form of picture writing have been recovered