Page 193 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

the great centers of ancient civilization ringed around by new
nations led by Indo-European speakers, throughout Europe the
shape is appearing of things to come, with the use of copper

and bronze penetrating north from the Mediterranean coast and
being widely spread in the west and center by the traders from
Spain, at the same time as the Indo-European speakers from
the east are introducing the horse and chariot, the worship of the

sun, and the languages which are going to be general over all
Europe at the time when history opens, and which are still the
languages of Europe today.
But we must not forget that Europe and the Near East were
no larger a part of the whole world then than they are now. It

is unfortunate—it is in fact disgraceful—that we know so little
about what was going on thirty-six hundred years ago over the
rest of the world, but our ignorance must not tempt us to believe
that nothing at all was happening there. At this time there were

people living in Africa, in China, and in Greenland, in Indonesia
and in Australia and America, whose lives, did we but know the
details of them, were just as important as the lives of Human
horse grazers in the Euphrates valley or beaker-using tradesmen
on the upper Danube.

We catch a few scattered glimpses, and must guess the rest.
In Egyptian tomb paintings we meet the tall black herdsmen
of the Sudan, warrior tribes under kings of their own who raid
the Egyptian frontier regions on average two or three times a

generation. Much work needs to be done here, to determine how
far south into Africa the practice of agriculture and the in­
fluence of Egyptian culture had spread at this date.
Into Farther Asia we know that agriculture had spread very
far from its cradle in the Near Orient. Beyond the Indus valley,

whose civilization at this time was preparing to meet the threat
of the Indo-European-speaking Aryans, the settled agricultural
communities of the valley of the Ganges could almost by now

rank as a civilization in its own right, and must, could we but
know it, have had a history no less detailed than that of Europe.
By now agriculture has also reached the steppes north of
the Caucasus, the original home of the battle-ax herdsmen. The