Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/220

210 main part of the Stone Age to which they properly belong. Even the Egyptians, in the height of their civilization, used stone arrow-heads in hunting, notwithstanding their vast wealth of bronze and iron. The peculiar arrows which are being shot at wild oxen in the bas-reliefs of Beni Hassan are still to be seen in collections; they are special as to their wedge-shaped flint heads, fixed with the broad edge foremost, a shape like that of the wooden-headed bird-bolts of the Middle Ages. The stone arrow-heads found on the battle-field of Marathon are often described, but arrow-heads and other instruments of the Stone Age are common in Greek soil, and may be præ-Aryan. It is clear, however, that metal must be very common and cheap to be used in so wasteful a way as in heading an arrow, perhaps only for a single shot.

If we go back eighteen hundred years, an account may be found of a people living under Stone Age conditions in a part of Asia much less remote than Tartary and China. Strabo gives the following description of the fish-eaters inhabiting the coast of the present Beloochistan, on the Arabian Sea, and, like the Aleutian Islanders of modern times, building their huts of the bones of whales, with their jaws for doorways:—"The country of the Ichthyophagi is a low coast, for the most part without trees, except palms, a sort of acanthus, and tamarisks; of water and cultivated food there is a dearth. Both the people and their cattle eat fish, and drink rain- and well-water, and the flesh of the cattle tastes of fish. In making their dwellings, they mostly use the bones of whales, and oyster-shells, the ribs serving for beams and props, and the jaw-bones for doorways; the vertebræ they use for mortars, in which they pound their sun-dried fish, and of this, with the mixture of a little corn, they make bread, for, though they have no iron, they have mills. And this is the less wonderful, seeing that they can get the mills from elsewhere, but how can they dress the millstones when worn down? with the stones, they say, with which they sharpen their arrows and darts [of wood, with points] hardened in the fire. Of the fish, part they cook in ovens, but most they eat raw, and they catch them in nets of palm-bark."