Many other equally definite proofs might be cited of the transmission of customs from the Old to the New World, of which the instance reported by Tylor ([102]) is the classical example[2]; but I know of no other which has been so critically studied and so fully recorded as Mrs. Nuttall’s case.
But the difficulty may be raised—as in fact invariably happens when these subjects come up for discussion—as to the means of transmission. Rivers has explained what does actually happen in the contact of peoples ([68]) and how a small group of wanderers bringing the elements of a higher culture can exert a profound and far-reaching influence upon a large uncultured population ([64] to [70]).
Lane-Fox’s [Pitt Rivers’] memoir “on Early Modes of Navigation” ([21]) not only affords in itself an admirable summary of the definite evidence for the spread of culture; but is also doubly valuable to us, because incidentally it illustrates also the actual means by which the migrations of the culture-bearers took place. The survival into modern times, upon the Hooghly and other Indian rivers, of boats provided with the fantastic steering arrangement used by the Ancient Egyptians 2000 years B.C., is in itself a proof of ancient Egyptian influence in India; and the contemporary practice of representing eyes upon the bow of the ship enables us to demonstrate a still wider extension of that influence, for in modern times that custom has been recorded as far apart as Malta, India, China, Oceania and the North-West American coast.
But there is no difficulty about the question of the transmission of such customs. Most scholars who have mastered the early history of some particular area, in many cases those who most resolutely deny even the possibility of the wider spread of culture, frankly admit—because it would stultify their own localised researches to deny it—the intercourse of the particular people in which they are interested and its neighbours. Merely by using these links, forged by the reluctant hands of hostile witnesses, it is possible to construct the whole chain needed for such migrations as I postulate (see [Map II].)
No one who reads the evidence collected by such writers as Ellis ([15]), de Quatrefages ([60]) and Percy Smith ([98])[3] can doubt the fact of the extensive prehistoric migrations throughout the Pacific Ocean along definitely known routes. Even Joyce (whose otherwise excellent summaries of the facts relating to American archæology have been emasculated by his refusal to admit the influence of the Old World upon American culture) states that migrations from India extended to Indonesia (and Madagascar) and all the islands of the Pacific; and even that “it is likely that the coast of America was reached” ([61], p. 119).[4]
There is no doubt as to the reality of the close maritime intercourse between the Persian Gulf and India from the eighth century B.C. ([13]; [14]; [51]; and [101]); and of course it is a historical fact that the Mediterranean littoral and Egypt had been in intimate connexion with Babylonia for some centuries before, and especially after, that time.
Map 2.—An attempt to represent roughly the areas more directly affected by the “heliolithic” culture-complex, with arrows to indicate the hypothetical routes taken in the migrations of the culture-bearers who were responsible for its diffusion.