bs reproduce the beauty of the rugs once screening the
doors of their felt tents. The gift of color they passed on to the West,
first through the Moors of Sicily and Spain, later through Venetian
commerce. Their influence can be seen in the exquisite mosaic decoration
in the cloister of Mont Reale of once Saracenic Palermo, and in the
Ducal Palace and St. Mark's Cathedral of beauty-loving Venice.[1164] This
has been almost their sole contribution to the art of the world.

Pastoral nomads can give political union to civilized peoples; they can
assimilate and spread ready-made elements of civilization, but to
originate or develop them they are powerless. Between the art,
philosophy and literature of China on the one side, and of the settled
districts of Persia on the other, lies the cultural sterility of the
Central Asia plateau. Its outpouring hordes have only in part acquired
the civilization of the superior agricultural peoples whom they have
conquered; from Kazan and Constantinople to Delhi, from Delhi to Peking
they have added almost nothing to the local culture.

[Sidenote: Arid lands as areas of arrested development.]

Deserts and steppes lay an arresting hand on progress. Their tribes do
not develop; neither do they grow old. They are the eternal children of
the world. Genuine nomadic peoples show no alteration in their manners,
customs or mode of life from millennium to millennium. The interior of
the Arabian desert reveals the same social and economic status,[1165]
whether we take the descriptions of Moses or Mohammed or Burckhardt or
more recent travelers. The Bedouins of the Nubian steppes adhere
strictly to all their ancient customs, and reproduce to-day the pastoral
nomadism of Abraham and Jacob.[1166] Genealogies were not more important
to the biblical house of David and stem of Jesse than they are for the
modern Kirghis tribesman, who as a little child learns to recite the
list of his ancestors back to the seventh generation. The account which
Herodotus gives of the nomads of the Russian steppes agrees in minute
details with that of Strabo written five centuries later,[1167] with that
of William de Rubruquis in 1253, and with modern descriptions of Kalmuck
and Kirghis life. The Gauchos or Indian pastoral halfbreeds of the
Argentine plains were found by Wappaeus in 1870 to accord accurately with
Avara's description of them at the end of the eighteenth century.[1168]
The restless tenants of the grasslands c