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 86 A Short History of The World haps tinkering,as gipsies do to this day. (But hens theywould not steal, because the domestic fowl^ — an Indian jungle fowl originally — ^was not domesticated by man until about 1000 B.C.) They would bring precious stones and things of metal and leather. If they were hunters they would bring skins. They would get in exchange pottery and beads and glass, garments and suchlike manufactured things. Three main regions and three main kinds of wandering and im- perfectly settled people there were in those remote days of the first civilizations in Sumeria and early Egypt. Away in the forests of Europe were the blonde Nordic peoples, hunters and herdsmen, a lowly race. The primitive civilizations saw very little of this race before 1500 b.c. Away on the steppes of eastern Asia various Mongolian tribes, the Hunnish peo- ples, were domestic- ating the horse and developing a very wide sweeping habit of seasonal move- ment between their summer and winter camping places. Possibly the Nordic and Hunnish peo- ples were still separated fit)m one another by the swamps of Russia and the greater Caspian sea of that time. For very much of Russia then was swamp and lake. In the deserts, which were growing more arid now, of Syria and Arabia, tribes of a dark white or brownish people, the Semitic tribes, were driving flocks of sheep and goats and asses from pasture to pasture. It was these Semitic shepherds and certain more negroid people from southern Persia, the Elamites, who were the first nomads to come into close contact with the early civilizations. They came as traders and as raiders. Finally there arose leaders among them with bolder imaginations, and they became conquerors. About 2750 B.C. a great Semitic leader, Sargon, had conquered the whole Sumerian land and was master of all the world from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean sea. He was an illiterate bar- EGYPTIAN PEASANTS GOING TO WORK From an ancient and curiously painted model in the British Museum