ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization,
wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north
again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and
perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary
centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons
for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial
pasture for large cattle. At best, Assyria and Syria adopted the horsed
chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hittite chariot-users of
Asia Minor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gauls
in West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of the
Mountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have noted
already, than borderers of the Grassland itself. In particular, they are
all sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratory
Scythian cart-folk in the northern Grassland. The only nomad cart-folk
within the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies,[11] and they seem mainly to
have formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all,
the vast table-land of Persia.

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at present
is that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle to
break up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above all
more rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a man
can barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, except
in irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more,
and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But
it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it
was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of
the large grasslands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone,
or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The
presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and even