Pottery was probably invented as an outcome of the mode of life and the needs of these early agriculturists, and the domestication of cattle and the use of their milk for food helped to neutralize the ill-effects of a too exclusively cereal diet. Other events followed in the train of this first adoption of a settled mode of life. The disposal of the dead in the sands that fringed the area of cultivation, and the natural preservation of the corpse that often resulted, shaped the beliefs of the people with reference to the fate of the dead. Incidentally it led to the invention of the arts of the carpenter, the stone-mason, and the embalmer; and as an outcome of these practices architecture, as well as the ritual of the temple, had its origin.
Long before these events primitive man had begun to ponder over the meaning of death. At first he associated it with such injuries as he had learned by experience killed animals that he hunted; and as the escape of blood caused unconsciousness and death, he framed the belief that blood was the substance of consciousness and of life. To exchange blood was to share knowledge; to give blood was to confer fresh vital substance, i.e. to minimize the risk of extinction or prolong the existence of living or dead. This is the fundamental idea underlying all religious belief and ritual—the giving of life and immortality.
But the act of birth is also a process of life-giving. The cowrie-shell (and subsequently other shells and the pearls contained in them) came to be regarded as a symbol of this life-giving power, and an amulet which could protect both the living and the dead from the risk of extinction. The demand for these precious elixirs of life became so intense that they acquired a fictitious value as currency, and models of them were made to serve as amulets in their stead. The beauty and the lightness of the models of such shells made of the soft useless plastic metal found in the Egyptian and Nubian deserts was probably the means by which gold first acquired any value, and afterwards by confusion came to be credited with the same life-giving attributes as were at first bestowed merely upon the form of the amulets made from it. Thus gold came to be regarded as an elixir of life, and men began to search for the precious substance far and wide, incidentally spreading abroad the germs of the arts and crafts, the beliefs and practices of our common civilization. The use of malachite as a cosmetic provided the circumstances that eventually led men to discover how a gold-like substance, copper, could be obtained from the green ore; and in course of time it came to be realized that the metal was useful for other purposes than the mere making of amulets and jewellery. When the full value of copper as a material for making tools and weapons was fully appreciated, the ore became of tremendous economic importance, and men sought for it far and wide, as they had previously prospected for flint and gold.
The people who introduced the Neolithic culture into Europe brought with them from Egypt a knowledge of agriculture, of pottery-making, of domestication of animals, of linen, and of the characteristic burial customs and religious beliefs. But these rudiments of civilization were also diffused to Crete and Cyprus, to Syria and Asia Minor, to Elam and Sumer by prospectors searching for the things which the growth of civilization was making valuable, the incense and the timber, the gold and precious stones, the copper and other metals. It is probable that the germs of Egyptian civilization were first planted in Elam by men prospecting for copper, and that Sumerian and Babylonian civilization received their initial inspiration in this way. Crete was inoculated with the germs of civilization by Egypt directly, as well as indirectly, from Asia Minor, which was subjected to the double influence of Egyptian and Sumerian culture. In the Age of Copper, Elamite culture was diffused abroad by miners to Turkestan and Baluchistan, thence respectively to Siberia and China (Shensi province), and to India. In the neighbourhood of the south-eastern corner of the Caspian the alloy bronze was probably invented soon after 3000 B.C. by mixing tin and copper; and the influence of this epoch-making event rapidly spread to Babylonia, to Crete, and to Europe, where it inaugurated the Age of Bronze. It also spread to China, to India, and many centuries later across the Pacific to Central America.
The needs of the early Egyptians compelled them to devise sea-going ships, which in turn became the models of the Cretans, the people of East Africa, the Babylonians, the Phœnicians, and the Greeks. These ships trafficked in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea, then farther west and east, to the Atlantic seaboard of Western Europe and the shores of the Indian Ocean. The search for gold and pearls led early mariners to Southern India and Ceylon, to Burmah and Indonesia, to the whole coast-line of Eastern Asia, New Guinea, and Melanesia, and in course of time to Polynesia and the coasts of Central America and Peru. Wherever these adventurers found gold or copper, pearls or precious stones, they settled to exploit these sources of wealth, and incidentally planted the
germs of their methods of cultivation, their stonework, their burial customs and beliefs. Such expeditions were probably responsible for introducing into Polynesia its first colonists, a mixture of people of Brown and Maritime Central races, mingled with other elements in the course of their easterly wanderings. The earliest movement into Polynesia apparently took with it a considerable element of Melanesian blood, which eventually was carried to New Zealand and the Moriori Islands in the south, and to Easter Island and the American coast in the east. The germs of the ancient civilizations of Central America and Peru were carried across the Pacific from Cambodia and Indonesia between the years 300 B.C. and A.D. 1000, the periods of greatest activity being probably the third and fourth centuries A.D.
The elements of this imported culture were planted in Honduras and Guatemala and the Isthmus region (Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia), and from there spread in the fifth century A.D. to Yucatan and then to Mexico. It also spread from the isthmus down the Pacific littoral of South America, the earliest centre of civilization being the region around Lake Titicaca. From Mexico the culture spread in a degraded form up the Mississippi to the Great Lakes, as well as north-west into Arizona.—Bibliography: A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, revised edition by A. Hingston Quiggin and A. C. Haddon, is a useful guide to the literature of anthropology and ethnology; see also Robert Munro, Prehistoric Britain; W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives; M. Boule, Les Hommes fossiles; G. Elliot Smith, The Migrations of Early Culture; such periodicals as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Man, and especially L'Anthropologie, give the current literature.
Eth´yl, the name given to the radicle C2H5, contained in ether, (C2H5)2O, alcohol, C2H5OH, &c. Ethyl has not been isolated, as it immediately combines with another ethyl group forming diethyl or butane, C2H5—C2H5. Ethyl chloride, C2H5Cl, formed by the action of hydrochloric acid on alcohol, is much used for the production of low temperature—as a local anæsthetic. Ethyl nitrite, C2H5NO2, constitutes sweet spirits of nitre when dissolved in alcohol.
Eth´ylamine, C2H5NH2, an organic base formed by the substitution of 1 atom of hydrogen in ammonia by ethyl group. Thus
