Khotan is the ancient trading centre which connected central Asia and India, and India and China. One of the most important products of Khotan is jade—that is, important from the historical point of view. It is uncertain at what period the importation of jade into China from the Khotan area was inaugurated. But there can be no doubt about the antiquity of the jade trade between Chinese Turkestan and Babylonia. Some of the Babylonian cylinder-seals were of jade, others being of “marble, jasper, rock-crystal, emerald, amethyst, topaz, chalcedony, onyx, agate, lapis-lazuli, hæmatite, and steatite”[21]—all [[203]]relics of ancient trade and mining activity. Turquoise was imported into Babylonia from Khotan and Kashgar. The archæological finds made on the site of the ancient Sumerian city at Nippur include cobalt, “presumably from China”.[22] At Nippur was found, too, Persian marble, lapis-lazuli from Bactria, and cedar and cypress from Zagros.
When it is borne in mind that the chief incentive behind the search for precious metals and precious stones was a religious one, we should not express surprise to find that not only the products of centres of ancient civilization were carried across Asia to outlying parts, but also myths, legends, and religious beliefs of complex character. These were given a local colouring in different areas. In northern Siberia, for instance, the local fauna displaced the fauna of the southern religious cults, the reindeer or the goat taking the place of the gazelle or the antelope. Mythological monsters received new parts, just as the dolphin-god of Cretan and other seafaring peoples received an elephant’s head in northern India and became the makara; and the seafarers’ shark-god received in China the head of a lion, although the lion is not found in China. No doubt the lion was introduced into China as a religious art motif by some intruding cult. Touching on this phase of the problem of early cultural contact, Ellis H. Minns[23] suggests a number of possibilities to account for the similarities between Siberian and Chinese art. One is that “the resemblance may be due to both (Siberians and Chinese) having borrowed from Iranian or some other Central Asian art.… In each case,” he adds, “we seem to have an intrusion of monsters ultimately derived from Mesopotamia, the great breeding-ground of monsters.” The data summarized [[204]]in a previous chapter[24] dealing with the Chinese dragon affords confirmation of this view.
Dr. Joseph Edkins, writing in the seventies of last century as a Christian missionary who made an intensive study of Chinese religious beliefs at first hand, had much to say about the “grafting process” or culture-mixing. “Every impartial investigator”, he wrote, “will probably admit that the ceremonies and ideas of the Chinese sacrifices link them with Western antiquity. The inference to be drawn is this, that the Chinese primeval religion was of common origin with the religions of the West. But if the religion was one, then the political ideas, the mental habits, the sociology, the early arts and knowledge of nature, should have been of common origin also with those of the West.”[25]
No doubt the stories brought from Siberia by the early explorers tended to stimulate the imaginations of the myth-makers of Mesopotamia, India, and China. The mineral and hot springs in the cold regions may have been regarded as proof that “the wells of life” had real existence. Some of these wells are so greatly saturated with carbonic acid gas that they burst skin and stone bottles. “Here is living water indeed!” the early explorer may have exclaimed when he attempted to carry away a sample. “The feathers in the air”, as Herodotus puts it when referring to the snow, and the aurora borealis must have greatly impressed the early miners in the mysterious Altai region—a region possessing so much mineral wealth that it must have been regarded as a veritable wonderland of the gods by the early prospectors. Who knows but that the story of Gilgamesh’s pilgrimage through the dark mountain to the land in which trees bore gems instead of fruit owes something [[205]]to the narratives of the early explorers who reached mysterious regions rich in metals and gems, where the strange murmurings that fill the air on still winter nights are still referred to as “the whisperings of the stars”, and the aurora borealis, which scatters the darkness and illumines snow-clad mountain ranges and valleys, displays wonderful and vivid colours in great variety.
That the early culture which was disseminated eastward across Siberia to China and westward into Europe was of common origin, is clearly indicated by the archæological remains.
Dealing with the bronzes of Russia and Siberia, Sir Hercules Read writes: “At both extremities of the vast area stretching from Lake Baikal through the Southern Siberian Steppes across the Ural Mountains to the basin of the Volga, and even beyond to the valleys of the Don and Dnieper, there have been found, generally in tombs, but occasionally on the surface of the ground, implements and weapons marked by the same peculiarities of form, and by a single style of decoration. These objects exhibit an undoubted affinity with those discovered in China; but some of the distinctive features have been traced in the bronze industry of Hungary and the Caucasus; for example, pierced axes and sickles have a close resemblance to Hungarian and Caucasian forms. The Siberian bronzes have this relationship both in the East and West, but their kinship with Chinese antiquities being the more obvious, it is natural to assume that the culture which they represent is of East Asiatic origin.” Read notes, however, that “most of the Chinese bronze implements are of developed, and therefore not of primitive forms.… Such forms can only have been reached after a long period of evolution, but their prototypes are found neither in the Ural-Altaic region itself, where some [[206]]objects may indeed be simpler in design than others, but cannot be described as quite primitive; nor as yet within the limits of China.”[26]
The evidence afforded by ancient religious beliefs and customs tends to show that the cultural centre in Asia, which stimulated the growth of civilization, was Babylonia, while Egyptian influence flowed northward through Palestine and into Syria. In time the influence of Cretan civilization made itself felt on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. The ebb and flow of cultural influences along the trade routes at various periods renders the problem of highly complex character. But one leading fact appears to emerge. The demand for metals and precious stones in the earliest seats of civilization—that is, in Babylonia and Egypt—stimulated exploration and the spread of a culture based on the agricultural mode of life. Not only was the system of irrigation, first introduced in the Nilotic and Tigro-Euphratean valleys, adopted by colonies of miners and traders who settled in mid-Asia and founded sub-cultural centres that radiated westward and eastward; the religious ideas and customs that had grown up with the agricultural mode of life in the cradles of ancient civilization were adopted too. New experiences and new inventions imparted “local colour” to colonial culture, but the leading religious principles that veined that culture underwent little change. The immemorial quest for the elixir of life was never forgotten. It was not to purchase their daily bread alone that men lived laborious days washing gold dust from river sands, crushing quartz among the Altai Mountains, or quarrying and fishing jade in Chinese Turkestan; they were chiefly concerned about “purchasing” the “food of life” so as to secure immortality. The fear of death, which sent [[207]]Gilgamesh on his long journey, caused many a man in ancient times to wander far and wide in search of life-giving metals, precious stones, pearls, and plants. And so we find in China as in Egypt, in Babylonia as in western Europe, that the quest of immortality was the chief incentive that stimulated research, discovery, and the spread of civilization. The demand for the wood of sacred trees, incense-bearing trees and plants, precious metals and precious stones in the temples of Egypt and Babylonia, had much to do with the development of early trade. The Pharaohs of Egypt and the Patesies of Sumeria fitted out expeditions to obtain treasure for their holy places, and to keep open the trade routes along which the treasure was carried.
That the system of metal-working had anciently an area of origin is emphasized by the investigations conducted by Professor Gowland.[27] He deals first with the Japanese evidence. “The method which was practised, and the furnace employed by the early workers, still”, he writes, “survive in use at several mines in Japan at the present time.” A hole in the ground forms the furnace, and a bellows is used to introduce the blast from the top. After the copper is smelted it is allowed to cool off, and when it is nearly solidified it is taken out and broken up. “The copper thus produced in Japan is never cast direct from the smelting furnaces into useful forms, but is always resmelted in crucibles, a mode of procedure which undoubtedly prevailed in Europe during the early Metal and the Bronze Ages.” The Japanese clay crucibles “are analogous to those found in the pile-dwellings of the Swiss and Upper Austrian lakes”.
Dealing with iron-furnaces, the Professor shows that [[208]]the Ancient Egyptian furnace resembled “the Japanese furnace for copper, tin, and lead”. The Etruscan furnace also resembled the Egyptian one. “From metallurgical considerations only”, Gowland adds, “we would certainly be led to the inference that the Etruscans had obtained their knowledge of the method of extracting metal from that (the Egyptian) source.” British evidence suggests that the methods obtaining in ancient times were introduced from “the Mediterranean region of Europe.… The actual process for the extraction of iron from its ores in Europe, in fact in all countries in early times, was practically the same.”
Elsewhere, Professor Gowland has written: “It is important to note … that the type of furnace which survives in India among the hill tribes of the Ghats is closely analogous to the prehistoric furnace of the Danube, and of the Jura district in Europe”.[28]