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.