Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c10.18

c10.18

The concept of the 'zoning' of cultures outside the areas of higher and more ancient civilization is one with which European archaeologists are familiar when working in their own continent, but it applies just as much to the countries lying eastwards of the most ancient centres of agriculture (such as the sites described in Mesopotamia and Persia, and others of about the same date in Syria and Asia Minor) as it does to the lands to the west. It seems unlikely, on the whole, that the elaborate techniques of agriculture and, slightly later, of the invention of metallurgy were evolved independently in several areas of the Old World, and in the present state of our archaeological knowledge the origins of these basic contributions to human civilization must be assumed to lie in the area between Asia Minor and Turkestan.