Chapter XII The Aryan Cradle
During the middle half of the nineteenth century the minds of many European savants were focussed upon what was termed the Aryan hypothesis, which was investigated with more enthusiasm than discretion by comparative philologists in England and France, and with still greater vigour in Germany. Since then the general conclusions of these mid-nineteenth century speculations have been current among politicians and journalists, who talk glibly about Teutons and Celts and Slavs, and that medley of races and peoples, who still continue to use in a modified form the speech imposed upon them by their Roman conquerors, and are therefore called the Latin race. Such terms, meaningless though they are as applied to nations, have become popular during the last half century, with disastrous results, since they have been used to emphasise certain divisions which were growing up among European peoples, and which in their turn did much to give rise to the European war, and are still retarding the Peace for which everyone is longing.
The idea was first put forward in 1786, when Sir William Jones,424 in a communication to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, pointed out the similarities between the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German and Celtic languages, but little progress was made until in 1833–5 Bopp425 published his comparative grammar. For the next fifty years the hypothesis grew at a great pace. The world was anxious for a scientific classification of its peoples, especially of the peoples of Europe. Men were also enquiring what had happened in this continent before early Greek legend and literature began to lift the veil. The sciences of anthropology and prehistoric archæology were in their infancy, and unable to provide answers to these questions, and the comparative philologists, from the evidence of language alone, were prepared to give full and most detailed explanations.
Thus arose the Aryan hypothesis, forced upon an eagerly inquiring public with great enthusiasm and complete, or almost complete, agreement. But during the eighties rifts appeared to disturb this harmony, anthropology and archæology began to claim a hearing, and to disagree with the conclusions of philology. By 1890 the philological enthusiasm died out, at least in this country and in France, though for a time it lingered on in Germany. All those acquainted with the subject felt that the question needed reconsideration, partly in the light of more accurate philological study, and especially having regard to the newer evidence being produced in such quantities by the sciences of anthropology and prehistoric archæology. The general public, however, continued to talk and to write, with more confidence than before, of Teutons, Celts, Slavs and the Latin races.
A word as to the term Aryan. When it was found that Sanskrit was allied to most of the European languages, it was felt that a term was needed to describe the group. Bopp, thinking that the German or Teutonic group was the most westerly, as the Indian dialects were the most easterly, used the term Indo-Germanic, which had previously been suggested by Klaproth in 1823.426 But when it was fully realised that the Celtic tongues were also included in the group, French and Italian scholars, who felt that the term German was receiving too much prominence, suggested the name Indo-European. Neither of these terms is quite accurate and both are clumsy, so to avoid the latter defect Professor Max-Müller suggested the term Aryan. This, too, is misleading, for the Aryas were the noble caste among the Vedic Indians and the early Persians. The name, however, is convenient, and is still used by many people, especially in this country. Recently Dr. Giles427 has suggested for the original people who spoke these tongues the name of Wiros, as words similar to this, meaning men, occur in most of these languages. The term has much to recommend it, and it will be used in the following pages for the first users of this speech.
When the connection between these languages was first realised, it was felt that all the tongues had been derived from a primitive mother speech, and that this primitive speech must have been spoken originally by a small group of people, the primitive Aryans, or, as we shall call them, the Wiros. But owing to loose thinking all the people who speak these languages to-day, as well as those who have spoken them in the past, were considered Aryans, and it was assumed that because their languages were related they were racially identical. As long as this applied only to European peoples no one raised any protest, but when Max-Müller asserted that the same blood runs in the veins of English soldiers as in the veins of the darkest Bengalese,428 the Nordic spirit in this country, which, as we have seen, is prone to race exclusiveness, rose in its wrath, and the whole generalisation was questioned.
It was then shown that languages could be imposed by conquerors upon their subjects, and that there were instances on record of the reverse process taking place, as in the case of the Frankish invaders of Gaul and the Viking settlers in Normandy. People then, with equal lack of lucid thinking, ran to the opposite extreme and said, “there is now no Aryan race, and there never has been one.” To Penka429 is due the credit of making the matter clear. He pointed out that Aryan blood is not co-extensive with Aryan speech. He showed that those who use the latter are of several distinct anthropological types, but he argued that the primitive Aryans or Wiros must have been of one type.
Penka’s contention seems eminently reasonable and, one would think, incontrovertible, for a group of languages, so closely resembling one another, must have grown up in a somewhat restricted area, among a people who had, during the formative period of the language, little intercourse with the outside world. The very conditions which would produce a specialised type of language, would, we may feel sure, have produced an equally specialised type of men, that is to say, a race in the anthropological meaning of the term.
The failure of Penka’s views to carry widespread conviction was, I am inclined to think, due to the fact that his theory involved the identification of the primitive Wiros with the Nordic race. There is really no valid objection to this view, and, as will be seen later, the evidence which I am adducing points to a similar conclusion. But, unfortunately, this theory became associated with certain political opinions, and so became distasteful to those with a different outlook.
The original supporters of the Aryan hypothesis fell so in love with the languages and with the people who originally developed them, that they grew to believe that these Wiros were superior creatures, with a superior tongue, which they had imposed upon an inferior world. All good things found in the civilisation of Europe were attributed to them, and they became the super-men. As far as we can ascertain from the linguistic evidence available they had, it is true, evolved a language which, owing to its flexibility, was capable of great things, but it is by no means clear that the higher developments, which some of the tongues have reached, would have been attained had not the Wiros mixed with people possessing other ideas and other idioms. The evidence of linguistic palæontology shows that in material culture they were very backward, and, as we shall see later on, all the archæological evidence tends to show that in these respects they were far behind the peoples whom they conquered, and on whom they imposed their tongue. Their one important characteristic seems to have been their incapacity for learning other languages, and so insisting that other folk should adopt theirs. This may have been due to lack of linguistic ability, or to an overbearing conceit. Probably it was due to both. The original Wiros, then, as judged by linguistic evidence, were far from being super-men.
Another fallacy has been the belief that the Nordic is the superior person, the “white man” par excellence. The Nordic is strong, robust and courageous, and possesses certain manly qualities which are much admired; also he has taken care for some thousands of years to impress upon his neighbours that these are admirable qualities. The Nordic has also other good points, such as honesty and a genius for administration, but he is far from possessing a monopoly of the virtues, and in many respects falls behind members of the other European races. The works of Gobineau430 and later of Madison Grant431 have enumerated his virtues without defining his limitations, and no one, so far as I know, has yet written to extol the excellencies of the Alpine or Mediterranean races, who have contributed and still contribute much of what is good in the make-up of modern Europe.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century the Germans were engaged in making and consolidating their empire, and to do this they wished to encourage their nationals to believe that Germans, qua Germans, were the inheritors of many, in fact of most admirable qualities. As a matter of fact such “patriotic” ideas were current in most countries, as can be seen by an examination of the school text-books, especially history books, in use at that time, and sometimes, too, at the present day. Only in this, as is their wont, the Germans were very thorough, and they pressed every science and every hypothesis into their service.
What was read into the hypothesis of Penka, though it does not follow that he wished it, was that these Wiros or Aryan super-men were the same as the Nordic super-men, and that their home was in Germany, as could easily be proved from the pages of Tacitus. It was implied that from Germany had come all that was Aryan or Nordic or really valuable in the population of other countries, and that, therefore, the Aryan Nordic Germans were the salt of the earth. This view, which grew up insensibly from the hypothesis of Penka and others, was caught hold of by those who were wishing to transform the peaceful Alpine German into an aggressive militarist, and in its full absurdity was given to the world by a renegade Englishman, Herr Houston Chamberlain.432
Now, as we have seen, the original Wiros, though they had their good points, had by no means a monopoly of the virtues, and were enabled to spread their tongues largely by their incapacity and unwillingness to learn the speech of others. The Nordic is a picturesque and romantic figure, with many admirable qualities, but is seldom clever, skilful with his hands or patient in research. Lastly, an examination of the physical types, as they exist to-day in Germany, shows us that outside the former kingdom of Hanover, the Nordic type is rare.433 There are probably as many pure Nordics in France, distributed over the northern departments from Dunkirk almost to the west of Brittany, as will be found in the German empire. There is this difference only between the populations of the two countries. In Germany the fair colouring of the Nordic element seems to be a dominant character over the relatively dark pigmentation of the Alpine; so we meet with a majority of people having broad Alpine heads but fair Nordic colouration. In France, on the other hand, there is a large Mediterranean element, surviving from neolithic days, and the brunette colouring of this race is more dominant than the blondness of the Nordic. As all three types have mingled in France, fair hair is less frequently found among those with broad heads.
The use made of the Aryan Nordic equation by German political propagandists has inclined, French and, to some extent, English writers, to reject this view. This objection has been in a large measure due to misunderstandings, and in any case it is unscientific to allow national and political prejudices to influence our opinions on such questions.
If, then, we agree with Penka that there must have been an original Aryan race, or, as we shall call them, Wiros, it is important to ascertain what part of the world it was, from which these languages spread to Ireland and Bengal. This is the problem of the Aryan cradle.
In the early days of the hypothesis students noted that Sanskrit was the most archaic of the languages, and forgetting that the Vedic hymns were composed 1000 or 1500 B.C., while the earliest Greek literature dated from 800 or 900 B.C., there was a tendency to derive the whole group from North India.434 Subsequently, when the close connection between Sanskrit and Zend, the ancient Persian tongue, was recognised, and it was realised that the Vedic folk were recent arrivals in the Punjab when the Vedic hymns were being composed, the Aryan cradle was removed to the region watered by the Oxus and the Jaxartes, and the slopes of the Hindu Kush.435
Here the cradle remained for a long time. Pott, hypnotised by his aphorism ex oriente lux, drew a wonderful picture of the westward advance of the Wiros from their eastern home. Others filled in, largely from their own imaginations, the remaining details. And so we get the mid-nineteenth century view of these Aryan super-men, with a language containing potentialities of all that is fine in literature, with a social organisation and morality which was to reform benighted Europe, worshipping deities which were the products either of solar or chthonic myths or of diseases of language, setting forth from the western slopes of the Himalayan massif, urged on “by an irresistible impulse” towards the setting sun, migrating westward and ever westward, carrying their wives and families in the famous Aryan cart provided for them by a distinguished anthropologist.436 Such was the view unanimously held by all Europe, and which figures still in too many text-books. One man only was left crying in the wilderness, or at least in the steppe, and he was an Englishman. As Hehn437 wrote in 1874, “so it came to pass that in England, the native land of fads, there chanced to enter into the head of an eccentric individual the notion of placing the cradle of the Aryan race in Europe.”
Those of us who live “in that land of fads” may well be proud of Dr. Latham, who advanced these views in 1851, and subsequently enlarged upon them.438 In due course nearly all other philologists followed suit, and Max-Müller alone was unrepentent, and as late as 1887 wrote “I should still say, as I said forty years ago, ‘Somewhere in Asia,’ and no more.”439 But by then the Asiatic cradle had gone to the limbo of exploded hypotheses.
In 1868 Benfey, in a preface to Fick’s work,440 acknowledged the value of Latham’s protests, and, arguing for the first time from the type of evidence known as linguistic palæontology, advocated a European as distinguished from an Asiatic cradle, and suggested, as Latham had done earlier, the region north of the Black Sea. He was followed in 1871 by Geiger,441 who with national pride wished to prove that the super-man had always lived in the plain of North Germany, to which, some years later, Piètrement442 retorted by suggesting that Geiger’s arguments would apply equally well to the neighbourhood of Lake Balkash and the Ala-tau mountains.
In the same year in which Geiger’s work appeared Cuno made a notable contribution to the hypothesis.443 He contended that the original undivided Wiros were not a small clan, but must have been a numerous, nomad pastoral people, inhabiting an extensive steppe region. For the evolution of the parent tongue with its elaborate grammar a long period, several thousands of years, must have been needed, and during this time the Wiros must have moved freely over the area of the cradle, having frequent intercourse with one another, but little or none with outsiders. These conditions, he thought, could only be obtained on a vast plain, undivided by lofty mountain barriers or impassable forests; this cradle must have been in a temperate climate, tolerably uniform in character, where there would have been ample room for the growth of a numerous people. Such an area can only be found in the great plain of Northern Europe, stretching from the north of France to the Ural mountains.
Further investigation has shown that much of this plain was filled with dense forests and impassable morasses, but that the open steppe begins in Russia, and extends uninterruptedly to the slopes of the Hindu Kush, with certain westward prolongations, especially the sandy heaths to the north of the Carpathians, stretching from the Russian steppe, across Galicia, to the neighbourhood of Breslau. North of this, too, is a belt of parkland, opening on to the steppe, where nomad herdsmen could drive their cattle when the grass of the steppe became burnt up. Here, it would seem, was an area which would meet the needs of the linguistic palæontologist, and it was in this region that the Aryan cradle was placed by Dr. Schrader in 1883,444 and here it has remained without opposition until quite recently.
During the last few months there has appeared the first volume of the Cambridge History of India, to which Dr. Peter Giles had contributed a chapter on the Aryans.445 In this, in which he has repeated his suggestion that these people should in future be called Wiros, he has put forward views which differ in material respects from those hitherto held. His suggestion is, in fact, that the Aryan cradle is to be sought for in the plain of Hungary.
In contradistinction to views previously advanced, he believes that the original Wiros were settled agriculturists and not nomad herdsmen.446 He bases this conclusion, apparently, on the fact that they knew of corn. A careful study of all the evidence on this subject collected by Schrader447 convinces me, however, that it is far from certain that the undivided Wiros were acquainted with cultivated grain, for the terms used, few if any of which run through all the languages, may well apply to wild grain, and oats grow wild on the Russian steppe,448 and may well have been used as food for man and beast. Moreover it is not an unknown thing for nomad people to grow scratch crops of grain. Such crops of barley I have myself seen grown by nomad Bedawin in the clay deserts behind Alexandria. The steppe-folk, too, like most nomads, were probably in the habit of making occasional raids on the settled lands on their margin, and we have actual evidence that this occurred. We know also that settled cultivators were living both at Tripolje and at Anau on the edge of the steppe. The original Wiro word for grain might well be the name they used for this kind of booty, nor need we exclude the possibility that when times were hard they acquired grain by trade from their settled neighbours, as Abraham, a nomad steppe-man, purchased corn from Egypt. The argument from the words for grain seems indecisive, and the balance of the evidence cited by Schrader seems in favour of a nomad existence.
Dr. Giles feels that “the close similarity between the various languages spoken by them would lead us to infer that they must have lived for long in a severely circumscribed area, so that their peculiarities developed for many generations in common.”449 This, as we have seen, was Cuno’s idea, and is an eminently sound conclusion. But Dr. Giles would see in this circumscribed area one surrounded with a ring of mountains, while Cuno thought that it demanded an extensive steppe. The difference between the two views seems to depend upon whether the Wiros were nomad or settled, and I have already given reasons for believing them to have been nomads.
Dr. Giles objects to the steppe-cradle. He gives as his reason that this region has not on the whole the characteristics required by the conclusions drawn from linguistic palæontology;450 on the other hand Schrader, who has studied this side of philology more exhaustively than most inquirers, believes that the conditions are fulfilled.451 Neither argument is perhaps conclusive, and both deserve serious attention; the decision must rest upon evidence drawn from those other sciences which deal with the far past.
We have found reason for believing that in neolithic days the Russian steppe east of the Dnieper was inhabited by a nomad steppe-folk, who had domesticated horses and cattle, and perhaps sheep. As they lived on a plain they had probably not met with the goat, which is a mountain beast, and it is to be noted that the name for goat varies in nearly all the Wiro languages.452 These nomad steppe-folk, who buried their dead in a contracted position covered with red ochre under kurgans or barrows, were, we believe, Nordic or proto-Nordic in type, and some, at least, of their skeletons remind us of the Brünn-Brux-Combe Capelle type,453 who hunted horses in late Aurignacian and Solutrean times.
The state of civilisation and the area of distribution of those nomad steppe-folk exactly corresponds with the requirements of the early Wiros as postulated by Schrader, though it differs in some respects from those demanded by Giles. On the other hand, in Magdalenian and Azilian times, and perhaps during the earlier phases of the neolithic age, the ancestors of these people may well have lived in the Hungarian plain, and we have seen how some of them survived in Switzerland, at Chamblandes, well into neolithic times.454
It is possible, then, that the circumscribed area, though not the settled agricultural condition, demanded by Dr. Giles, may have been true in the later phases of the upper palæolithic age. This, however, he will not agree to, for he is persuaded that the hiatus, assumed by the earlier archæologists, still exists, and that the upper palæolithic age, as well as the lower, preceded the last ice age and belongs to a very remote past.
Some archæologists, it is true, still hold to these views, and this inflated chronology has not yet been abandoned by all. During the last few years, however, the shorter dating455 has become more generally accepted, and this brings the whole of the neanthropic period into relatively recent times, and gives us a continuous history from the Aurignacian period to the present day. If Dr. Giles could be persuaded to accept these more modern views on palæolithic chronology, many of his difficulties would be removed, and he might agree to place the Hungarian cradle of the Wiros in the latter part of the upper palæolithic age.
Dr. Giles raises objections also to the continuity of the Russio-Turkestan steppe, and maintains that a connection between South Russia and the east, north of the Black Sea, would have been impossible.456 He is, therefore, disposed to take the Wiros to Persia and India by way of Asia Minor.
The great objection which he cites to the northern passage is the existence of the barren Ust Urt desert. Also the fact that the Caspian has steadily been becoming more shallow and contracting in area. These two points, if true, to some extent contradict one another. It is true, doubtless, that at one time the Caspian had covered a greatly extended area, but it is not so clear that its contraction has been a steady progress. We have already seen, from the evidence cited by Ellsworth Huntington,457 that this contraction and expansion has probably been intermittent. In any case, the contraction has been due to light rainfall, and it is this light rainfall which has produced the desert condition of the Ust Urt. When the Caspian expanded, it was because of increased precipitation, when such parts of the Ust Urt as were not inundated would have been a grassy steppe.
Dr. Giles suggests that at one time the Caspian and Aral seas were one great inland sea, and that such was at one time the case is implied by extracts from the writings of Herodotus.458 But though this was almost certainly the case during periods of relatively heavy rainfall, the level would have to have risen well above the 200 metre contour to have obstructed the passage between the Russian and Turkestan steppes. Such a rise is quite unthinkable during the last 6000 years, for had the surface been raised 220 feet above the present sea level the Caspio-Aral Sea would have been connected with the Euxine.459 Even had the impossible occurred and the 200 metre contour been reached it would have been quite easy to pass from one steppe area to another, by crossing the southern slopes of the Urals, which are raised very little above the plain and would form no obstacle to nomad tribes.
The Anatolian passage was by no means an easy route to the east, for had the Wiros kept to the north they would have found difficulty in crossing the Armenian mountains; further south they would have come into contact with the peoples of Mesopotamia, and we should have found evidence of their presence. That some of them passed this way about 2200 B.C. we have already seen, but others had passed eastwards earlier, apparently by a different route, for otherwise it is difficult to account for the presence of the Kassites on the Iranian plateau in the time of Hammurabi. The complete absence of any evidence of a movement eastward from the Hungarian plain in neolithic days, and the fact that any such movement would have been compelled to cross the area occupied by the settled Tripolje-folk, seem to be fatal to the literal acceptance of this hypothesis.
Taking all factors, anthropological and archæological, geographical and linguistic, into consideration, and in spite of the difference in opinion expressed by Dr. Giles, whose authority to pronounce on the linguistic data all must acknowledge, I am venturing to identify the nomad steppe-folk with the primitive Wiros, while admitting the possibility that the beginnings of their language may date back to Magdalenian and Azilian times, when they may have been living surrounded by the Carpathian ring.