Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/524

508 jerkins studded with iron; and among the Tunguses and Lamuts, who had learned from the Jakuts.

But there is an older chapter of Siberian history which was closed in the seventeenth century, as that of the people of the pile-dwellings of Switzerland had ended when the Romans entered Helvetia. Multitudes of sepulchral tumuli, termed, like those of European Russia, "kurgans," are scattered over the north Asiatic plains, and are especially agglomerated about the upper waters of the Jenisei. Some are modern, while others, extremely ancient, are attributed to a quasi-mythical people, the Tschudes. These Tschudish kurgans abound in copper and gold articles of use and luxury, but contain neither bronze nor iron. The Tschudes procured their copper and their gold from the metalliferous rocks of the Ural and the Altai; and their old shafts, adits, and rubbish-heaps led the Russians to the rediscovery of the forgotten stores of wealth. The race to which the Tschudes belonged and the age of the works which testify to their former existence, are alike unknown. But seeing that a rumor of them appears to have reached Herodotus, while, on the other hand, the pile-dwelling civilization of Switzerland may perhaps come down as late as the fifth century the possibility that a knowledge of the technical value of copper may have traveled from Siberia westward must not be overlooked. If the idea of turning metals to account must needs be Asiatic, it may be north Asiatic just as well as south Asiatic. In the total absence of trustworthy chronological and anthropological data, speculation may run wild.

The oldest civilizations for which we have an, even approximately, accurate chronology are those of the valleys of the Nile and of the Euphrates. Here, culture seems to have attained a degree of perfection at least as high as that of the bronze stage, six thousand years ago. But before the intermediation of Etruscan, Phœnician, and Greek traders, there is no evidence that they exerted any serious influence upon Europe or northern Asia. As to the old civilization of Mesopotamia, what is to be said until something definite is known about the racial characters of its originators, the Accadians? As matters stand, they are just as likely to have been a group of the same race as the Egyptians or the Dravidians as anything else. And, considering that their culture developed in the extreme south of the Euphrates Valley, it is difficult to imagine that its influence could have spread to northern Eurasia except by the Phœnician (and Carian?) intermediation which was undoubtedly operative in comparatively late times.

Are we then to bring down the discovery of the use of copper in Switzerland to, at earliest, 1500 and to put it down to Phœnician hints? But why copper? At that time the Phœnicians must have been familiar with the use of bronze. And if, on