It is difficult to conceive that such an international commerce can have existed at such a remote period, and the difficulty is increased by the fact that in Europe, where we can pretty well trace the passage from the neolithic into the bronze period, bronze does not seem to have been known until some 2000 or 3000 years later, when the Phœnicians had migrated to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and extended their commerce and navigation far and wide over its northern coasts and islands; and at a still later period, when the Etruscans had established themselves in Italy and exported the products of the Tuscan tin mines by trade routes over the Rhætian Alps. It is even doubtful whether there was any knowledge of metals in Europe prior to the Phœnician period, as the Aryan names for gold, silver, copper, tin, and iron are borrowed from foreign sources; and have no common origin in any ancestral language of the Aryan races before they were differentiated into Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavic. Copper seems to have been the first metal known, and there are traces of a copper age prior to that of bronze in some of the older neolithic lake villages of Switzerland and Italy, and in very old tombs and dolmens in Hungary, France, and the south-west of Spain. But these copper implements are very few and far between, they are evidently modelled in the prior forms of polished stone, and must have been superseded after a very short time by the invention or importation of bronze, which, as already stated, implies a supply of tin, and a common knowledge of the art of alloying copper with it in the same uniform proportion which gives the best result.
But in the historic records and remains of Egypt and Chaldæa, which go so much further back, bronze had evidently been long known when history commences. The Accadian name for tin, Id-Kasdaru, is the oldest known, and reappears in the Sanscrit Kastira, the Assyrian Kasugeteira, and the Greek Kassiteros. The oldest known name for copper is the Accadian urud or urudu, which singularly enough is preserved in the Basque urraida, while as rauta it reappears as the name for iron in Finnish, and as ruda for metal generally in Old Slavonic. In Semitic Babylonian, copper is eru, which confirms the induction that the metal was unknown to the primitive Semites, and adopted by them from the previously existing Accadian civilization. We are thus driven back by every line of evidence to the conclusion that Egypt and Chaldæa were in the full, bronze age, and had left the stone period far behind them, long before the primitive stocks of the more modern Aryan and Semitic populations of Europe and Western Asia had emerged from the neolithic stage, and for an unknown period before the definite date when their history commences, certainly not less than 7000 years ago.
We are also driven to the conclusion that other nations, capable of conducting extensive mining operations, must have been in existence in the Caucasus, the Hindoo-Kush, the Altai, or other remote regions; and that routes of international commerce must have been established by which the scarce but indispensable tin could be transported from these regions to the dense and civilized communities which had grown up in the alluvial valleys and deltas of the Nile and the Euphrates.
It is very singular, however, that if such an intercourse existed, the knowledge of other objects of what may be called the first necessity, should have been so long limited to certain areas and races. For instance, in the case of the domestic animals, the horse was unknown in Egypt and Arabia till after the Hyksos conquest, when in a short time it became common, and these countries supplied the finest breeds and the greatest number of horses for exportation. On the other hand, the horse must have been known at a very early period in Chaldæa, for the tablet of Sargon I., b.c. 3800, talks of riding in brazen chariots over rugged mountains. This makes it the more singular that the horse should have remained so long unknown in Egypt and Arabia, for it is such an eminently useful animal, both for peace and war, that one would think it must have been introduced almost from the very first moment when trading caravans arrived. And yet tin must have arrived from regions where in all probability the horse had been long domesticated before the time of Menes. The only explanation I can see is, that the tin must have come by sea, but by what maritime route could it have come prior to the rise of Phœnician commerce, which was certainly not earlier than about 2000 b.c., or some 3000 years after the date of Menes? Could it have come down the Euphrates or Tigris and been exported from the great sea-ports of Eridhu or Ur by way of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea?
This seems the more probable, as Eridhu was certainly an important maritime port at the early period of Chaldæan civilization. The diorite statues found at Tell-loh by M. de Sarzec are stated by an inscription on them to have come from Sinai, and indeed they could have come from no other locality, as this is the only known site of the peculiar greenish-black basalt or diorite of which those statues and the similar one of the Egyptian Chephren of the second pyramid are made. And in this case the transport of such heavy blocks for such a distance could only have been effected by sea. There are traces also of the maritime commerce of Eridhu having extended as far as India. Teak wood, which could only have come from the Malabar coast, has been found in the ruins of Ur; and "Sindhu," which is Indian cloth or muslin, was known from the earliest times. It seems not improbable, therefore, that Eridhu and Ur may have played the part which was subsequently taken by Sidon and Tyre, in the prehistoric stages of the civilizations both of Egypt and of Chaldæa, and this is confirmed by the earliest traditions of the primitive Accadians, which represent these cities on the Persian Gulf as maritime ports, whose people were well acquainted with ships, as we see in their version of the Deluge, which, instead of the Hebrew ark of Noah, has a well-equipped ship with sails and a pilot, in the legend of Xisuthros.
The instance of the horse is the more remarkable, as throughout a great part of the stone period the wild horse was the commonest of animals, and afforded the staple food of the savages whose remains are found in all parts of Europe. At one station alone, at Solutre in Burgundy, it is computed that the remains of more than 40,000 horses are found in the vast heap of débris of a village of the stone period. What became of these innumerable horses, and how is it that the existence of the animal seems to have been so long unknown to the great civilized races? It is singular that a similar problem presents itself in America, where the ancestral tree of the horse is most clearly traced through the Eocene and Miocene periods, and where the animal existed in vast numbers both in the Northern and Southern Continent, under conditions eminently favourable for its existence, and yet it became so completely extinct that there was not even a tradition of it remaining at the time of the Spanish conquest. On the other hand, the ass seems to have been known from the earliest times, both to the Egyptians and the Semites of Arabia and Syria, and unknown to the Aryans, whose names for it are all borrowed from the Semitic. Large herds of asses are enumerated among the possessions of great Egyptian landowners as far back as the fifth and sixth dynasties, and no doubt it had been the beast of burden in Egypt for time immemorial.
It is in this respect only, viz. the introduction of the horse, that we can discern any foreign importation calculated to materially affect the native civilization of Egypt, during the immensely long period of its existence. It had no doubt a great deal to do with launching Egypt on a career of foreign wars and conquests under the eighteenth dynasty, and so bringing it into closer contact with other nations, and subjecting it to the vicissitudes of alternate triumphs and disasters, now carrying the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and Tigris, and now bringing Assyrian and Persian conquerors to Thebes and Memphis. But in the older ages of the First and Middle Empire, the ox, the ass, the sheep, ducks and geese, and the dog, seem to have been the principal domestic animals. Gazelles also were tamed and fed in herds during the Old Empire, and the cat was domesticated from an African species during the Middle Empire.
Agriculture was conducted both in Egypt and Chaldæa much as it is in China at the present day, by a very perfect system of irrigation depending on embankments and canals, and by a sort of garden cultivation enabling a large population to live in a limited area. The people also, both in Egypt and Chaldæa, seem to have been singularly like the modern Chinese, patient industrious, submissive to authority, unwarlike, practical, and prosaic. Everything, therefore, conspires to prove that an enormous time must have elapsed before the dawn of history 7000 years ago, to convert the aborigines who left their rude stone implements in the sands and gravels of these localities, into the civilized and populous communities which we find existing there long before the reigns of Menes and of Sargon.