Page 331 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

the fused quartz glass known as faience found at Nakuru ’
Kenya, sixteen hundred miles south of the southern border
Egypt. Faience is a durable and easily recognizable substance
which had been known in the Middle East for about two thou­

sand years. But in the middle centuries of the Second Millennium
two very distinctive shapes of faience beads, a star form and a
segmented cylinder, are suddenly found in very large numbers

not merely in their homelands of Egypt and the Levant, but over a
very large part of the Old World. The bead from Kenya is the
southernmost yet reported, and in the other direction they have
been found twenty-five hundred miles from Egypt, on the Tobol

river in Siberia, which flows northward to the Arctic Ocean.
The beads are found in large numbers in Europe, particularly
on the upper Danube and in England. In themselves they were

of little value, but they show that trade goods from Egypt, per­
haps at second or third hand, did in fact reach into the heart of
the Asian steppes and into darkest Africa.
But, as has been suggested in a previous chapter, it is by no

means certain that Africa was uniformly “dark” at this time. If
further investigation confirms the deductions made by botanists
from later plant distribution, that at this period the peoples of

west Africa were in fact cultivating gardens of gourds and sor­
ghum and ground nuts, it would be reasonable to assume that
they had received the idea of cultivation by word of mouth from
the Nile valley.

The contemporary history of the Americas is a much more
delicate question. Outside the tropics roamed to the north the
hunters of the plains and the mesas, to the south the hunters of

the jungles and the pampas. In between, not only now in Peru but
also in Central America and Mexico, there were settled agricul­
tural communities. They seem to have been at this period isolated

from each other. In Mexico agriculture was some two or three
centuries old; the staple crop was maize, and good pottery was
manufactured. In Peru both maize and pottery were unknown,

but cotton, gourds, beans, and peppers were cultivated. How is
one to explain this? If garden cultivation of locally found plants
in west Africa is to be regarded as a sign of the spread of the idea
of cultivation, without the plants, from the Mediterranean, are