A further corroboration comes from Turkestan, from the mounds of Anau. In the south kurgan, the lower layers belonged to the period known as Anau III., which contained a copper culture and a three-sided seal,[221] which Mrs. Hawes recognised as having Middle Minoan affinities.[222] This settlement, which seems to have been in touch with the Elamite culture of Susa,[223] came suddenly to an end at a date which Pumpelly fixes at about 2200 /B.C./[224] Whether the settlement was destroyed or merely abandoned is not quite clear, but what is important for our purpose is that two agricultural communities on the edge of the steppe, those of Tripolje and Anau, came to an end at exactly or almost exactly the same date. I have also suggested[225] that in this last case we may perhaps see some proof of an hypothesis, advanced many years ago from legendary and linguistic data by Terrien de Lacouperie.[226] This ingenious author, who had been dead many years before the discoveries at Anau were made, suggested that certain tribes, settled near the Caspian Sea, whom he called the Bak tribes and who had been under the influence of the kings of Elam, left their settlements about 2200 /B.C./, and set out on a long trek towards China, into which land they introduced the beginnings of culture and the germs of the Chinese script. This hypothesis was badly received when it appeared. Few of its critics had taken the trouble to master Lacouperie’s argument, which was advanced in a most confused style. Sir Robert Douglas,[227] however, a sinologist of no mean reputation, believed that there was a considerable amount of truth at the bottom of it, though the theory was overlaid by many fanciful conjectures. Recently M. Cordier[228] has dismissed the whole idea as imaginary and based on inaccurate linguistic data. The question, I venture to think, needs re-examination, for at Anau we find a settlement of peasants, in touch with the Elamites, abandoning their village just at the date suggested by Lacouperie. All this evidence seems to point to the fact that owing to drought, either of a prolonged order or lasting for two or three consecutive summers, our steppe-folk, who buried their dead in a contracted position covered with red ochre, suddenly left the steppe lands between the Dnieper and the Asiatic frontier, and dispersed in search of wetter regions and richer pastures. Two settled agricultural civilisations on their borders, the Tripolje settlements in the Ukraine and those at Anau, disappeared at the same time, driven out either by the drought or by the advancing hordes.