PART II EUROPEAN RACES IN HISTORY (continued 3)

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XIII ORIGIN OF THE ARYAN LANGUAGES

By the process of elimination set forth in the preceding chapter we are competed to acknowledge that the strongest claimant for the honor of being the race of the original Aryans, is the tall, blond Nordic. An analysis of the various languages of the Aryan group reveals an extreme diversity which can be best explained by the hypothesis that the existing languages are now spoken by people upon whom Aryan speech has been forced from without. This theory corresponds exactly with the known historic fact that the Aryan languages, during the last three or four thousand years at least have, again and again, been imposed by Nordics upon populations of Alpine and Mediterranean blood.

Within the present distributional area of the Nordic race on the Gulf of Riga and in the very middle of a typical area of isolation, are the most generalized members of the Aryan group, namely Lettish and Lithuanian, both almost Proto-Aryan in character. Close at hand existed the closely related Old Prussian or Borussian, very recently 243extinct. These archaic languages are relatively close to Sanskrit and exist in actual contact with the Anaryan speech of the Esthonians and Finns.

The Anaryan languages in eastern Russia are Ugrian, a form of speech which extends far into Asia and which appears to contain elements which unite it with synthetic speech and may be dimly transitory in character. In the opinion of many philologists, a primitive form of Ugrian might have given birth to the Proto-Aryan ancestor of existing synthetic languages.

This hypothesis, if sustained by further study, will provide additional evidence that the site of the development of the Aryan languages and of the Nordic subspecies was in eastern Europe, in a region which is close to the meeting place between the most archaic synthetic languages and the most nearly related Anaryan tongue, the agglutinative Ugrian.

The Aryan tongue was introduced into Greece by the Achæans about 1400 B. C. and later, about 1100 B. C. by the true Hellenes, who brought in the classic dialects of Dorian, Ionian and Æolian.

These Aryan languages superseded their Anaryan predecessor, the Pelasgian. From the language of these early invaders came the Illyrian, Thracian, Albanian, classic Greek and the debased modern Romaic, a descendant of the Ionian dialect.

244Aryan speech was introduced among the Anaryan-speaking Etruscans of the Italian Peninsula by the Umbrians and Oscans about 1100 B. C. and from the language of these conquerors was derived Latin which later spread to the uttermost confines of the Roman Empire. Its descendants to-day are the Romance tongues spoken within the ancient imperial boundaries, Portuguese on the west, Castilian, Catalan, Provençal, French, the Langue d’oïl of the Walloons, Romansch, Ladin, Friulian, Tuscan, Calabrian and Rumanian.

The problem of the existence of a language clearly descended from Latin, the Rumanian, in the eastern Carpathians cut off by Slavic and Magyar tongues from the nearest Romance tongues presents difficulties. The Rumanians themselves make two claims; the first, which can be safely disregarded, is an unbroken linguistic descent from a group of Aryan languages which occupied this whole section of Europe, from which Latin was derived and of which Albanian is also a remnant.

The more serious claim, however, made by the Rumanians is to linguistic and racial descent from the military colonists planted by the Emperor Trajan in the great Dacian plain north of the Danube. This may be possible, so far as the language is concerned, but there are some weighty objections to it.

We have little evidence for, and much against, the 245existence of Rumanian speech north of the Danube for nearly a thousand years after Rome abandoned this outlying region. Dacia was one of the last provinces to be occupied by Rome and was the first from which the legions were withdrawn upon the decline of the Empire. The northern Carpathians, furthermore, where the Rumanians claim to have taken refuge during the barbarian invasions formed part of the Slavic homeland and it was in these same mountains and in the Ruthenian districts of eastern Galicia that the Slavic languages were developed, probably by the Sarmatians and Venethi, from whence they spread in all directions in the centuries that immediately followed the fall of Rome. So it is almost impossible to credit the survival of a frontier community of Romanized natives situated not only in the path of the great invasions of Europe from the east, but also in the very spot where Slavic tongues were at the time evolving.

Rumanian speech occupies large areas outside of the present kingdom of Rumania, in Russian Bessarabia, Austrian Bukowina and above all in Hungarian Transylvania.

The linguistic problem is further complicated by the existence in the Pindus Mountains of Thessaly of another large community of Vlachs of Rumanian speech. How this later community could have survived from Roman times until to-day, 246untouched either by the Greek language of the Byzantine Empire or by the Turkish conquest is another difficult problem.

The evidence, on the whole, points to the descent of the Vlachs from the early inhabitants of Thrace, who adopted Latin speech in the first centuries of the Christian era and clung to it during the domination of the Bulgarians from the seventh century onward in the lands south of the Danube. In the thirteenth century the mass of these Vlachs, leaving scattered remnants behind them, crossed the Danube and founded Little and Great Wallachia. From there they spread into Transylvania and a century later into Moldavia.

The solution of this problem receives no assistance from anthropology, as these Rumanian-speaking populations both on the Danube and in the Pindus Mountains in no way differ physically from their neighbors on all sides. But through whatever channel they acquired their Latin speech the Rumanians of to-day can lay no valid claim to blood descent even in a remote degree from the true Romans.

The first Aryan languages known in western Europe were the Celtic group which first appears west of the Rhine about 1000 B. C.

Only a few dim traces of Pre-Aryan speech have been found in the British Isles, and these largely in place names. The Pre-Aryan language of the 247Pre-Nordic population of Britain may have survived down to historic times as Pictish.

In Britain, Celtic speech was introduced in two successive waves, first by the Goidels or “Q” Celts, who apparently appeared about 800 B. C. and this form exists to this day as Erse in western Ireland, as Manx of the Isle of Man and as Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands.

The Goidels were still in a state of bronze culture. When they reached Britain they must have found there a population preponderantly of Mediterranean type with numerous remains of still earlier races of Paleolithic times and also some round skulled Alpines of the Round Barrows, who have since largely faded from the living population. When the next invasion, the Cymric or Brythonic, occurred the Goidels had been absorbed very largely by the underlying Mediterranean aborigines who had meanwhile accepted the Goidelic form of Celtic speech, just as on the continent the Gauls had mixed with Alpine and Mediterranean natives and had imposed upon the conquered their own tongue. In fact, in Britain, Gaul and Spain the Goidels and Gauls were chiefly a ruling, military class, while the great bulk of the population remained unchanged although Aryanized in speech.

These Brythonic or Cymric tribes or “P” Celts followed the “Q” Celts four or five hundred years later, and drove the Goidels westward through Germany, 248Gaul and Britain and this movement of population was still going on when Cæsar crossed the Channel. The Brythonic group gave rise to the modern Cornish, extinct within a century, the Cymric of Wales and the Armorican of Brittany.

In central Europe we find traces of these same two forms of Celtic speech with the Goidelic everywhere the older and the Cymric the more recent arrival. The cleavage between the dialects of the “Q” Celts and the “P” Celts was probably less marked two thousand years ago than at present, since in their modern form they are both Neo-Celtic languages. What vestiges of Celtic languages remain in France belong to Brythonic. Celtic was not generally spoken in Aquitaine in Cæsar’s time.

When the two Celtic-speaking races came into conflict in Britain their original relationship had been greatly obscured by the crossing of the Goidels with the underlying dark Mediterranean race of Neolithic culture and by the mixture of the Belgæ with Teutonic tribes. The result was that the Brythons did not distinguish between the blond Goidels and the brunet but Celticized Mediterraneans as they all spoke Goidelic dialects.

In the same way when the Saxons and the Angles entered Britain they found there a population speaking Celtic of some form, either Goidelic or Cymric and promptly called them all Welsh (foreigners). These Welsh were preponderantly of 249Mediterranean type with some mixture of a blond Goidel strain and a much stronger blond strain of Cymric origin and these same elements exist to-day in England. The Mediterranean race is easily distinguished, but the physical types derived from Goidel and Brython alike are merged and lost in the later floods of pure Nordic blood, Angle, Saxon, Dane, Norse and Norman. In this primitive, dark population with successive layers of blond Nordics imposed upon it, each one more purely Nordic and in the relative absence of round heads lie the secret and the solution of the anthropology of the British Isles. This Iberian substratum was able to absorb to a large extent the earlier Celtic-speaking invaders, both Goidels and Brythons, but it is only just beginning to seriously threaten the later Nordics and to reassert its ancient brunet characters after three thousand years of submergence.

In northwest Scotland there is a Gaelic-speaking area where the place names are all Scandinavian and the physical types purely Nordic. This is the only spot in the British Isles where Celtic speech has reconquered a district from the Teutonic languages and it was the site of one of the conquests of the Norse Vikings, probably in the early centuries of the Christian era. In Caithness in north Scotland, as well as in some isolated spots on the Irish coasts, the language of these 250same Norse pirates persisted within a century. In the fifth century of our era and after the break-up of Roman domination in Britain there was much racial unrest and a back wave of Goidels crossed from Ireland and either reintroduced or reinforced the Gaelic speech in the highlands. Later, Goidelic speech was gradually driven northward and westward by the intrusive English of the lowlands and was ultimately forced over this originally Norse-speaking area. We have elsewhere in Europe evidence of similar shiftings of speech without any corresponding change in the blood of the population.

Except in the British Isles and in Brittany Celtic languages have left no modern descendants, but have everywhere been replaced by languages of Neo-Latin or of Teutonic origin. Outside of Brittany one of the last, if not quite the last, reference to Celtic speech in Gaul is the historic statement that “Celtic” tribes, as well as “Armoricans,” took part at Châlons in the great victory in 451 A. D. over Attila the Hun and his confederacy of subject nations.

On the continent the only existing populations of Celtic speech are the primitive inhabitants of central Brittany, a population noted for their religious fanaticism and for other characteristics of a backward people. This Celtic speech is claimed to have been introduced about 450–500 A. D. by 251Britons fleeing from the Saxons. These refugees, if there were any substantial number of them, must have been dolichocephs of either Mediterranean or Nordic race or both. We are asked by this tradition to believe that their long skull was lost, but that their language was adopted by the round skulled Alpine population of Armorica. It is much more probable that the Cymric-speaking Alpines of Brittany have merely retained in this isolated corner of France a form of Celtic speech which was prevalent throughout northern Gaul and Britain before these provinces were conquered by Rome and Latinized and which, perhaps, was reinforced later by British Cymry. Cæsar remarked that there was little difference between the speech of the Belgæ in northern Gaul and in Britain. In both cases the speech was Cymric.

Long after the conquest of Gaul by the Goths and Franks Teutonic speech remained predominant among the ruling classes and, by the time it succumbed to the Latin tongue of the Romanized natives, the old Celtic languages had been entirely forgotten outside of Brittany.

An example of similar changes of language is to be found in Normandy where the country was inhabited by the Nordic Belgæ speaking a Cymric language before that tongue was replaced by Latin. This coast was ravaged about 300 or 400 A. D. by Saxons who formed settlements along both sides 252of the Channel and the coasts of Brittany which were later known as the Litus Saxonicum. Their progress can best be traced by place names as our historic record of these raids is scanty.

The Normans landed in Normandy in the year 911 A. D. They were heathen, Danish barbarians, speaking a Teutonic tongue. The religion, culture and language of the old Romanized populations worked a miracle in the transformation of everything except blood in one short century. So quick was the change that 155 years later the descendants of the same Normans landed in England as Christian Frenchmen armed with all the culture of their period. The change was startling, but the Norman blood remained unchanged and entered England as a substantially Nordic type.

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XIV THE ARYAN LANGUAGE IN ASIA

In the Ægean region and south of the Caucasus Nordics appear after 1700 B. C. but there were unquestionably invasions and raids from the north for many centuries previous to our first records. These early migrations were probably not in sufficient force to modify the blood of the autochthonous races or to substitute Aryan languages for the ancient Mediterranean and Asiatic tongues.

These men of the North came from the grasslands of Russia in successive waves and among the first of whom we have fairly clear knowledge were the Achæans and Phrygians. Aryan names are mentioned in the dim chronicles of the Mesopotamian empires about 1700 B. C. among the Kassites and later, Mitanni. Aryan names of prisoners captured beyond the mountains in the north and of Aryan deities before whom oaths were taken are recorded about 1400 B. C. but one of the first definite accounts of Nordics south of the Caucasus describes the presence of Nordic Persians at Lake Urmia about 900 B. C. There were many incursions from that time on, the Cimmerians raiding 254across the Caucasus as early as 650 B. C. and shortly afterward overrunning all Asia Minor.

The easterly extension of the Russian steppes or Kiptchak north of the Caspian-Aral Sea in Turkestan as far as the foothills of the Pamirs was occupied by the Sacæ or Massagetæ, who were also Nordics and akin to the Cimmerians and Persians, as were, perhaps, the Ephtalites or White Huns in Sogdiana north of Persia, destroyed by the Turks in the sixth century.

For several centuries groups of Nordics drifted as nomad shepherds across the Caucasus into the empire of the Medes, introducing little by little the Aryan tongue which later developed into Old Persian. By 550 B. C. these Persians had become sufficiently numerous to overthrow their rulers and under the leadership of the great Cyrus they organized the Persian Empire, one of the most enduring of Oriental states. The base of the population of the Persian Empire rested on the round skulled Medes who belonged to the Armenoid subdivision of the Alpines. Under the leadership of their priestly caste of Magi these Medes rebelled again and again against their Nordic masters before the two peoples became fused.

From 525 to 485 B. C. during the reign of Darius, whose sculptured portraits show a man of pure Nordic type, the tall, blond Persians had become almost exclusively a class of great ruling 255nobles and had forgotten the simplicity of their shepherd ancestors. Their language belonged to the Eastern or Iranian division of Aryan speech and was known as Old Persian, which continued to be spoken until the fourth century before the Christian era. From it were derived Pehlevi, or Parthian as well as modern Persian. The great book of the old Persians, the Avesta, which was written in Zendic, also an Iranian language, does not go back to the reign of Darius and was remodelled after the Christian era, but the Old Persian of Darius was closely related to the Zendic of Bactria and to the Sanskrit of Hindustan. From Zendic, also called Medic, are derived Ghalcha, Balochi, Kurdish and other dialects.

The rise to imperial power of the dolichocephalic Aryan-speaking Persians was largely due to the genius of their leaders but the Aryanization of western Asia by them is one of the most amazing events in history. The whole region became completely transformed so far as the acceptance by the conquered of the language and religion of the Persians was concerned, but the blood of the Nordic race quickly became diluted and a few centuries later disappears from history.

During the great wars with Greece the pure Persian blood was still unimpaired and in control. In the literature of the time there is little evidence of race antagonism between the Greek 256and the Persian leaders although their rival cultures were sharply contrasted. In the time of Alexander the Great the pure Persian blood was obviously confined to the nobles and it was the policy of Alexander to Hellenize the Persians and to amalgamate his Greeks with them. The amount of pure Macedonian blood was not sufficient to reinforce the Nordic strain of the Persians and the net result was the entire loss of the Greek stock.

It is a question whether the Armenians of Asia Minor derived their Aryan speech from this invasion of the Nordic Persians, or whether they received it at an earlier date from the Phrygians and from the west. These Phrygians entered Asia Minor by way of the Dardanelles and broke up the Hittite Empire. Their language was Aryan and probably was related to Thracian. In favor of the theory of the introduction of the Armenian language by the Phrygians from the west, rather than by the Persians from the east, is the highly significant fact that the basic structure of that tongue shows its relationship to be with the western or Centum rather than with the eastern or Satem group of Aryan languages and this, too, in spite of a very large Persian vocabulary.

The Armenians themselves, like all the other natives of the plateaux and highlands as far east as the Hindu Kush Mountains, while of Aryan 257speech, are of the Armenoid subdivision, in sharp contrast to the predominant types south of the mountains in Persia, Afghanistan and Hindustan, all of which are dolichocephalic and of Mediterranean affinity but generally betraying traces of admixture with still more ancient races of Negroid origin, especially in India.

We now come to the last and easternmost extension of Aryan languages in Asia. As mentioned above, the grasslands and steppes of Russia extend north of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea to ancient Bactria, now Turkestan. This whole country was occupied by the Nordic Sacæ and the closely related Massagetæ. These Sacæ may be identical with the later Scythians.

Soon after the opening of the second millennium B. C. and perhaps even earlier, the first Nordics crossed over the Afghan passes, entered the plains of India and organized a state in the Punjab, “the land of the five rivers,” bringing with them Aryan speech to a population probably of Mediterranean type and represented to-day by the Dravidians. The Nordic Sacæ arrived later in India and introduced the Vedas, religious poems, which were at first transmitted orally but which were reduced to written form in Old Sanskrit by the Brahmans at the comparatively late date of 300 A. D. From this classic Sanskrit are derived all the modern Aryan languages of Hindustan, as well as the 258Singalese of Ceylon and the chief dialects of Assam.

There is great diversity among scholars as to the date of the first entry of these Aryan-speaking tribes into the Punjab but the consensus of opinion seems to indicate a period between 1600 and 1700 B. C. or even somewhat earlier. However, the very close affinity of Sanskrit to the Old Persian of Darius and to the Zendavesta would strongly indicate that the final introduction of Aryan languages in the form of Sanskrit occurred at a much later time. The most recent tendency is to bring these dates somewhat forward.

If close relationship between languages indicates correlation in time then the entry of the Sacæ into India would appear to have been nearly simultaneous with the crossing of the Caucasus by the Nordic Cimmerians and their Persian successors.

The relationship between the Zendavesta and the Sanskrit Vedas is as near as that between High and Low German and consequently such close affinity prevents our thrusting back the date of the separation of the Persians and the Sacæ more than a few centuries.

A simultaneous migration of nomad shepherds on both sides of the Caspian-Aral Sea would naturally occur in a general movement southward and such migrations may have taken place several times. In all probability these Nordic invasions 259occurred one after another for a thousand years or more, the later ones obscuring and blurring the memory of their predecessors.

When shepherd tribes leave their grasslands and attack their agricultural neighbors, the reason is nearly always a famine due to prolonged drought and causes such as these have again and again in history put the nomad tribes in motion over large areas. During many centuries fresh tribes composed of Nordics or under the leadership of Nordics but all Aryan-speaking, poured over the Afghan passes from the northwest and pushed before them the earlier arrivals. Clear traces of these successive floods of conquerors are to be found in the Vedas themselves.

The Zendic form of the Iranian group of Aryan languages was spoken by those Sacæ who remained in old Bactria and from it is derived a whole group of closely related dialects still used in the Pamirs of which Ghalcha is the best known.

The Sacæ and Massagetæ were, like the Persians, tall, blond dolichocephs and they have left behind them dim traces of their blood among the living Mongolized nomads of Turkestan, the Kirghizes. Ancient Bactria maintained its Nordic and Aryan aspect long after Alexander’s time and did not become Mongolized and receive the sinister name of Turkestan until the seventh century, when it was the first victim of the series of ferocious invasions 260from the north and east, which under various Mongol leaders destroyed civilization in Asia and threatened its existence in Europe. These conquests culminated in 1241 A. D. at Wahlstatt in Silesia where the Germans, though themselves badly defeated, put a final limit to this westward rush of Asiatics.

The Sacæ were the most easterly members of the Nordic race of whom we have definite record. The Chinese knew well these “green eyed devils,” whom they called by their Tatar name, the “Wu-suns,”—the tall ones—and with whom they came into contact about 200 B. C. in what is now Chinese Turkestan. Other Nordic tribes are recorded in this region. Evidence is accumulating that central Asia had a large Nordic population in the centuries preceding the Christian era. The discovery of the Aryan Tokharian language in Chinese Turkestan considered in connection with other facts indicates intensive occupation by Nordics of territories in central Asia now wholly Mongol, just as in Europe dark-haired Alpines occupy large territories where in Roman times fair-haired Nordics were preponderant. In short we find both in Europe and in western and central Asia the same record of Nordic decline during the last two thousand years and their replacement by races of inferior value and civilization.

This Tokharian is undoubtedly a pure Aryan 261language related, curiously enough, to the western group rather than to the Indo-Iranian. It has been deciphered from inscriptions recently found in northeast Turkestan and was a living language prior to the ninth century A. D.

Of all the wonderful conquests of the Sacæ there remain as evidence of their invasions only these Indian and Afghan languages. Dim traces of their blood have been found in the Pamirs and in Afghanistan, but in the south their blond traits have vanished, even from the Punjab. It may be that the stature of some of the Afghan hill tribes and of the Sikhs and some of the facial characters of the latter are derived from this source, but all blondness of skin, hair or eye of the original Sacæ has utterly vanished.

The long skulls all through India are to be attributed to the Mediterranean race rather than to this Nordic invasion, while the Pre-Dravidians and Negroids of south India, with which the former are largely mixed, are also dolichocephs.

In short, the introduction in Iran and India of Aryan languages, Iranian, Ghalchic and Sanskrit, represents a linguistic and not an ethnic conquest.

In concluding this revision of the racial foundations upon which the history of Europe has been based it is scarcely necessary to point out that the actual results of the spectacular conquests and invasions 262of history have been far less permanent than those of the more insidious victories arising from the crossing of two diverse races and that in such mixtures the relative prepotency of the various human subspecies in Europe appears to be in inverse ratio to their social value.

The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur and our present reliance on the influence of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values.

Bearing in mind the extreme antiquity of physical and spiritual characters and the persistency with which they outlive those elements of environment termed language, nationality and forms of government, we must consider the relation of these facts to the development of the race in America. We may be certain that the progress of evolution is in full operation to-day under those laws of nature which control it and that the only sure guide to the future lies in the study of the operation of these laws in the past.

263We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of race, creed or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.

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