248. Other Contributing Nationalities
Almost every people in the area, in fact, made its special contribution. In Asia Minor evolved the concept of a great primal mother goddess, known to the Greeks as Cybele. Lydia, in western Asia Minor, coined the earliest money about 700 B.C. Some people near the Black Sea in eastern Asia Minor seem to have been the first to develop the working of iron and perhaps of steel. The Kassites from the north or east probably introduced the horse into Babylonia, soon after 2000 B.C. Thence it spread, as the animal of royalty, aristocracy, and the special arm of chariot warfare, until it reached Egypt some three hundred years later. The first domestication of the horse was apparently in central Asia; the transmission to Europe may have been direct rather than through Mediterranean Asia. The camel had been tamed earlier, also in central Asia. Its remains appear in Turkistan in the copper period; and in Israel the Arab Midianite raiders whom Gideon defeated rode camels, while some generations later, in David’s time, about 1000 B.C., horses were still scarce.