254. Korea
Korea has repeatedly been under the political authority of China, more often autonomous, but for three thousand years has been dependent on China culturally. Non-Chinese influences have also reached it: such as an alphabet of Indian origin (§ 149); and probably the earliest iron industry came in from Altaic sources. In its turn, the peninsula transmitted to Japan: until about a thousand years ago, Chinese writing and culture reached Japan mainly via Korea. The spread of Chinese civilization was perhaps largely of the usual, slow, diffusing kind, but was several times accelerated by the settlement in Korea of groups of Chinese refugees, colonists, or adventurers; for instance in Chou and Han times. The center of power and civilization within Korea has gradually moved southwards, which suggests the waning of original central Asiatic affiliations as Chinese ones became stronger. The first realm to be defined was Fuyu on the Sungari river. Then followed Kokorai or Korai, whence our name Korea. In the centuries immediately before and after Christ, Shinra and then Hiaksai, farther south on the peninsula, came into the lead. By the beginning of this period not only the writing but the classic books of China had been introduced. Since the fourteenth century Confucianism has been the state religion—though the people had long before become Buddhists—and literary examinations for office of the Chinese type have been in vogue.
255. Japan
Japan is the one country of eastern Asia from which considerable prehistoric data are available. There are indeed no indubitable evidences of any Palæolithic culture or race, but shellheaps and burial mounds abound and have been explored. The shell deposits, of which 4,000 have been found, are probably the accumulation of refuse of occupation by the Ainu, the first known inhabitants of Japan, now surviving only in the extreme north of the island chain and in Sakhalien, and still a primitive people. This race is different from the Japanese, and has often been classified as Caucasian (§ 27). The shell deposits show the aborigines to have been fishers and hunters, without agriculture or edible domestic animals. They had the bow, dog, incised hand-made pottery, and ground stone axes, and were thus approximately in an early Neolithic stage.
A somewhat dubious bronze age is sparsely represented in southern Japan. It has been ascribed to an invasion about the seventh century B.C., but is perhaps only an early phase of the iron age. Iron was brought in at a time not precisely determined, but likely to have been about the fourth century B.C., by the so-called Yamato people—evidently the ancestors of the Japanese of to-day—who seem to have come from Korea and at any rate occupied the southern islands first. Thence they fought their way northward, gaining territory at the expense of the natives but slowly. Fifteen centuries ago the northern third of the main island was still in Ainu possession. These early Japanese erected megalithic chambers or corridors as tombs for their princes, covering them with mounds of earth. More than 3,000 of these structures are known. The early emperors were buried in double mounds, some of them of great area. From the fifth to the seventh century Korean influence was strong; the Chinese writing and classics were imported from that country. Later relations between the two nations were more intermittent, perhaps because of the growing consolidation and strength of Japan from the eighth century on.
The cultural debt of Japan to China is great, but less than that of Korea. The Japanese added 47 purely phonetic syllabic characters to the Chinese writing, in order to represent their own proper names, grammatical forms, and the like. These characters would have sufficed for a simple, efficient, and purely native script, but have remained a mere supplement to the ideographic Chinese system (§ 105). The mandarin and examination system of China were never taken over by the Japanese, who clung to their feudal customs more than two thousand years later than China. The ancestor worship of the Chinese and the official Confucian religion also did not become established in Japan, the state cult being Shinto, the crystallization of a primitive set of rites and of a mythology which has parallels in the Occident, in the East Indies and Oceania, and even in North America, rather than in China.
An early Malaysian strain in both Japanese race and culture has been alleged, but this is a subject on which more evidence is needed. Japanese speech does not elucidate the origins of the nation, the language—like that of Korea—not being determined as related to any other. The physical type, on the other hand, and this applies also to Korea, is allied to that of China.
256. Central and Northern Asia
It has become a habit to regard central and northern Asia as a hive for humanity, as the area from which nations and races have chronically swarmed. Whenever the origin of a people remains obscure, be they Neandertals, Alpines, Sumerians, Chinese, Japanese, Aryans, or what not, some one propounds the convenient hypothesis of deriving them from this vast interior land, which in many cases amounts to an explanation of the half-known by the unknown. Of late there has been added the fashion of attributing the expansions to climatic drying-up of central Asia, which forced the population out. There appears to be considerable evidence of such progressive desiccation; but its degree, and still more the extent of its influence upon culture and emigration, remain to be ascertained.
A more balanced view would concede the recurrence and occasional destructiveness of the invasions out of central Asia, but would view them rather as transient and relatively superficial phenomena from the point of view of civilization; and on the other hand would recognize that under all the boiling of tribes and peoples, the growth and spread of culture went steadily on, even in the tracts which one is wont to associate only with the perpetual breeding of elusive and devastating nomads. In short, it is wise to guard against a natural overestimation of the sensational, cataclysmic aspects of the history of the interior Asiatic peoples. It is their spasmodic irruptions which the self-centered nations of the West, of India, and of China, have been chiefly concerned with. Their attempts at achieving stability, their increments to the world’s culture, their rôle as peaceful transmitters, have lain at home, largely out of vision of the peoples clustered about the foci of civilization.
It may be added that the temptation to the outsider to burst by force into the seats of wealth and splendor as soon as firmness of guard slackens, is not confined to Ural-Altaians, but is ever present in history. Amorites, Hebrews, Arabs, Æthiopians, Lybians, Greeks, Kelts, Germans, Hindus, and Malays have all played this part at one time or another. Semite, Hamite, and Aryan are no different in such regard from Ural-Altaian, except that in the short span conventionally known as history the former have happened more often to be the ins and haves, the central Asiatics the outs and have-nots. Further, the destructive effect of nomad migrations, even where accompanied by mass settlement of population, is everywhere transient so far as civilization is concerned. Hebrew and Hellenic, Arab and Germanic tribes did crash cities and empires before them, but they tore down only what was already moribund, and brought in new systems of thought, new methods of feeling and organization, which, however crude at first, soon added new qualities to culture. The chief distinction of the north Asiatics is that, excepting some terror-striking massacres, they were both less subversive and less constructive culturally than Semites and Indo-Europeans. They barely dented the civilization of the West as they barely dented that of India and China. If Russia is backward as compared with western Europe, it is not from having been Tatar-ruled a few centuries, but because Russia has long been peripheral to the Mediterranean focus of civilization and therefore chronically belated. It was the very thinness of her culture that made mediæval Russia succumb to the Mongol wave which pounded vainly against the more consolidated civilization of central Europe and quickly drew off.
To define the exact contribution of the North Asiatics to civilization is difficult: partly because of the comparative paucity of available archæological and historical records; partly because their habitat did not contain one of the greater hearths of civilization at which its most distinctive forms were sweated out. The area has always been relatively though not extremely peripheral. The horse, indeed, can be set down as one important gift of the Ural-Altaic peoples or their predecessors to general civilization. It is only in central Asia that a wild horse—not a tame breed that has run wild—is to be found; and it seems to have been from the north that soon after 2000 B.C. the animal was introduced into Mesopotamia and India. Biological considerations also point to interior Asia as the most likely area of first domestication of several of the earlier fundamental animals of culture, especially the sheep and goat. The comparatively advanced culture of Anau in Turkistan in the Neolithic and early Bronze periods is also significant, even though this site lies only just within the great steppe and plateau country. Some of the jade and jade-like stone used for tools and ornaments in the Swiss lake-dwellings appears to have come from inner Turkistan. The probability of the central Asiatic peoples having been the transmitters of metals, cattle, grains and other important groups of culture elements from the Near to the Far East has already been mentioned, as has the established trade between China and the Mediterranean world in Roman times (§ 251). Indeed the very character of the country and cultural conditions which favored a considerable degree, though not an absolute prevalence, of nomadism in interior Asia, seem also to have fostered, in many periods, a longer range of trade than flourished elsewhere. Finally, it appears that the Turks and Mongols had at least a hand in the early use of gunpowder for firearms; and, as already mentioned, the first state paper money, that of China, was issued by a Mongol dynasty. It is scarcely rash to predict that the intensive study of the interior Asiatic peoples from both prehistoric and historic sources, without speculative bias or plunging of opinion, will prove one of the most illuminating contributions to the history of general civilization.
The original unity of the Ural-Altaians—with the Turks, Mongols, and Tungus-Manchu as the Altaic or definitely Asiatic group, Finno-Ugrians as Uralic or Eurasian, and Samoyeds as specifically Arctic representatives—is accepted on linguistic grounds by almost all authorities in the field. Yet the career of the several divisions has been diverse. The Finno-Ugrians have mainly been peaceful: the Finns definitely so for two thousand years: the Hungarian Magyars were exceptional when they terrorized central Europe a thousand years ago. Both these nations have long since become integrally absorbed into European culture. They are the only Ural-Altaic peoples with this experience. The remainder of the Finno-Ugrians have for some centuries become increasingly submerged under Russian civilization; much as in the Far East the Manchu-Tungus have gradually fallen more and more under either Chinese or, of late, Russian cultural influence. As between the Turks and Mongols, the greatest single conquest, that of Djengis Khan and his successors, falls to the record of the latter; but the Turks have been the more numerous, stable, and advanced people. They have frequently settled as well as invaded; and are the only known stock, as previously mentioned (§ 245), that has ever seriously and permanently encroached on territory once held by Indo-Europeans—in Asia Minor and the Caspian region. The later so-called Mongol conquests, those of Tamerlane and the Indian Moguls, were made by armies mainly of Turks under dynasties tracing back to former Mongol leaders. The Turks in general have inclined to Mohammedanism on coming into contact with the world religions, the Mongols to Buddhism, although Christianity in its Nestorian form once made considerable numbers of converts among both.
Several important historic peoples cannot yet be assigned with certainty to one or the other of the Ural-Altaic divisions, or are variously classified: thus the Huns, most likely to have been Turks; the White Huns or Ephthalites; the Avars; and the ancient Bulgars.
In northern and eastern Siberia there live, besides the Samoyed, a series of non-Ural-Altaic peoples, truly peripheral and retarded in culture, who seem once to have occupied larger areas but to have shrunk or been partially absorbed before Ural-Altaic expansion. These include the tribes sometimes grouped as Yeniseian; the Yukaghir; the Kamchadal-Koryak-Chukchi group; a few Eskimo who have either failed to cross Behring strait or have come across it from America; and perhaps the Ainu of Japan and Sakhalien. These have been called the Palæo-Asiatic peoples, though their diverse languages render their community of origin dubious. How far they may be considered as following a positively similar culture, except in direct response to an extreme climate, is also doubtful. Their rigorously marginal position and depriving environment stamp their culture with a preponderance of negative traits. The possession of domesticated reindeer is common to several of these peoples as well as to the Tungus and the Finno-Ugric Lapps of northern Russia and Scandinavia. Reindeer-breeding among these groups appears to be due to a transmission, in the sense of being a reflex of contact, an imitation of the cattle or horse breeding of the more favorably situated nations to the south. It is also interesting and probably significant that the American Eskimos never domesticated the reindeer, although they depended largely upon its hunt.
Racially the array of north and central Asiatic peoples shades from pronounced Caucasian to extreme Mongoloid type. The Mongols have given name to their whole larger racial stock, and the Tungus-Manchu and northeast Siberian savages clearly form part thereof. The Turks in the main are rather Caucasian, although all intergradations occur according to region; as also among the Finno-Ugrians. The Hungarians to-day are not only Caucasians but Alpines; the Finns definite Nordics; the Lapps a strange partial graft of Nordic traits on broad faced and broad headed Mongolian physique.
257. India
India is not a country, but a connected block of lands shut off from the remainder of the world by lofty mountains and harboring a population approximating those of Europe and of China. Its 300,000,000 inhabitants constitute nearly a fifth of humanity. Historically, India forms a continent as fully as does Africa. Culturally, it must be equated with the Occidental or Mediterranean area and with China as one of the three great and substantially coördinate focal points which civilization developed in the eastern hemisphere.
Racially the peoples of India are prevailingly Caucasian, but both the two other great stocks are represented. Nearly everywhere, but especially in the south, there is an evident admixture of a dark skinned, broad nosed, long headed type. This is more likely to have had Australoid than Negro affinities before its absorption; remnants of it, like the Veddas of Ceylon and Irulas and some other tribes of the Deccan, are often grouped with more easterly peoples as representatives of an original Indo-Australoid race (§ 24, 27, 260). So far as this race can be reconstructed, it seems to have been less Negroid than the Australian of to-day; that is, it possessed more Caucasian resemblances. In fact, it might almost be described as proto-Caucasian. In this light the modern Hindu[37] would be a varying mixture of two related strains—the undifferentiated proto-Caucasian, approximating the Australian and perhaps having ultimate Negroid relations without being Negroid; and the specialized Caucasian typical of the Occident; the former strongest in the south, the latter almost pure in the northwest of India. This hypothesis has this to commend it: it squares with the facts that the Hindu in spite of his dark complexion makes almost universally the impression of being essentially “white” in race; and that he differs outstandingly from what a mulatto-like blend of Negro and Caucasian would be.
In the north and east of India, Mongolian resemblances begin to appear, as the natural result of thousands of years of contact of two stocks.
It would seem that the proportions of racial blood in India, and in the rough their geographical distribution, parallel the proportions of the numbers of speakers of tongues belonging to the several families. More than three-fourths of the Hindus speak Indo-European dialects. Most of the remainder are Dravidas in the south and Kolarians in the east central parts—the same regions in which the Indo-Australoid or proto-Caucasian element is most conspicuous. Along the northeastern edge, Tibeto-Burman speech has spilled in with the Mongolian type. However, while the races have blended, the languages have remained distinct. As almost everywhere, the linguistic classification is therefore clearer cut in India than the racial one. Consequently it is misleading to infer from a Hindu’s speaking a Sanskrit-derived language that his Caucasian blood is pure, or conversely to conclude that all Dravidians have broad noses and black skins.
The Kolarians have been thought by some to possess ancient linguistic relatives to the east (§ 50), and certainly possess cultural ones in this direction (§ 262). Dravidian speech has not been thus connected, even tentatively, and one indication points to its former westward extension: the Brahui language in Beluchistan, which appears to be the remnant of an old Dravidian offshoot.
The ancient culture of India is inadequately known. Archæological exploration and analysis have been insufficient; yet they have gone far enough to suggest that the prehistoric development followed different lines from those in the West, so that the findings of European prehistory cannot be applied to interpret such knowledge as there is on India. Thus the Lower Palæolithic stage is well represented in India, but there is nothing to show whether or not it was contemporaneous with that of Europe. There is some possibility that it passed into the Neolithic without the intervening Upper Palæolithic which is so important in western Europe (§ 213). It seems dubious whether there was a true Bronze Age in India. More pre-iron implements of pure copper seem to have been found than of tin bronze.
The early Kolarian culture seems preserved in considerable degree among the modern Kolarians, who are backward hill or forest tribes, that is, internally peripheral to the prevalent higher civilization. At any rate, their culture resembles that of many less advanced populations to the east, well out into Oceania. This presumably ancient and partly surviving “Indo-Oceanic” culture is discussed below (§ 262). As regards its history within India, this is almost certain: the old culture is nowhere any longer pure, but has regularly absorbed elements of the advanced civilization that surrounds it; and conversely has contributed to the latter. For instance, one of the great recognized cults of India is Sivaism, which tends frequently to bloodiness and obscenity and is a strange mixture of philosophical rationalization and crass superstition. One of the most frequent attributes of Siva is a necklace of skulls; a feature that looks as if it might go back to the skull cult which is a typical ingredient of Indo-Oceanic culture.
The old Dravidian culture was probably more advanced than the Kolarian but is more difficult to reconstruct because of its extensive blending with the culture brought in or developed by Indo-Europeans. The Dravidians, perhaps because they were the more advanced and populous, were able to accept the intrusive culture and yet maintain themselves, whereas the Kolarians either preserved themselves by resisting civilization or had their speech and identity absorbed by it. When the Dravidians first begin to creep into history, shortly before the Christian era, they already possess cities, kingdoms, commerce, writing, and philosophy. They have on the whole contributed less to Indian civilization than the Indo-Europeans: its center always lay in the north; but they have long formed an integral part of it.
The Indo-Europeans are first known to us from their religious hymns, the Vedas, which have been preserved as sacrosanct by succeeding ages, and constitute the oldest continuously transmitted documents in history. They date from 2000 or 1500 to not after 1000 B.C., and are in Sanskrit, which is fairly close to Avestan or Old Persian, the two languages and their descendants constituting the Indo-Iranian or proper Aryan branch of Indo-European. When Indo-European as a whole is designated as Aryan, it is by an extension of the term. The region of India to which the Vedas almost wholly refer is the Indus drainage, that is the northwest, the parts adjoining the Iranian highland, whence the invaders came or through which they passed.
Vedic Aryan culture was of late Bronze Age type. Whether the bronze was really such, or copper, it is mentioned more frequently than iron, as in Homer and the older books of the Bible. Grains, cattle, horses, chariots and wagons, the plow, wool and weaving, gold, patriarchal chieftains and a tribal society, a nature mythology, non-communal rituals with constant but prevailingly bloodless sacrifices, are the characteristics of this culture. It smacks more of the Europe of its time than of the contemporary Orient. It is unbound, ready to pack up and move without being essentially nomadic; half peasant-like and half aristocratic; an uncitified semi-civilization, pioneer rather than backwoods. The temples and writing, walled towns and kingdoms, district gods and royal tombs of Egypt, Babylon, Canaan, Minoan Greece are wanting. The picture is that of the first historic Indo-Europeans elsewhere, in eastern and central Europe; with whom the Aryans undoubtedly were or had been in connection through the countries north of the Black and Caspian seas.
A few centuries after the Vedas, the culture depicted by the literary remains is profoundly altered. The scene has shifted to the Ganges valley. There are cities and palaces, wealth and pomp. There are kings, priests, townsmen, peasants, hermits and ascetics. Caste is in vogue. Cotton and rice are in use. There is a deal of philosophizing; life appears complex and difficult; pessimism is abroad, soul rebirth taken for granted, spirituality emphasized. Concepts to which western science later returned, the atom and ether, are familiar. In all essentials, post-Christian Hinduism had been blocked out in this pre-Christian period. Only a few elements like money and writing are lacking.
This change from the Vedic age is not fully accounted for, and the time usually allowed for its occurrence is insufficient. Buddha was born B.C. 563 or 557. His religion assumes ideas which are part of the Sankhya philosophy—in many ways the subtlest philosophy of all India and one of the great thought systematizations of the world. Its founder Kapila is placed about 600 B.C., and must have had predecessors. Caste seems a thing of development. It is absent in the Vedas, but Buddhism is already in a measure a protest against it. It seems difficult to squeeze such growths into a few hundred years. It is true that the florescence of Greece came with a rush; but Greek civilization rose from the debris of the older Minoan one and was in contact with the cultures of Asia. In India there is no sign of an antecedent high civilization, and a greater dearth of known foreign influences between 1000 and 600 B.C. than at any other period. The transposition of the cultural center eastward must enter into the problem. Perhaps a larger and wealthier pre-Aryan population was encountered by the Aryans along the Ganges, contact and mixture with whom proved provocative of innovation. Or possibly the movement and development in the east began while the Vedas were still being composed along the Indus, and were ignored by them. Or, conceivably, the Aryans on the Ganges may have been the first comers, who quickly altered in the direction of their future civilization but remained obscure to our vision during the period in which the Vedas were being made or retained by the later comers of the Punjab, in whose memories and sub-arid environment their former steppe culture remained more unmodified. These are only speculations: they emphasize the gap in our understanding of this important chapter of world culture history.
258. Indian Caste and Religion
Caste is peculiarly Indian. Nowhere else is it so complex, so systematically worked out and endlessly reinforced by ritual and taboo, so pervasive of conduct and thought. It has been ascribed to the conflict of races, to the drawing of a color line by conquerors in order to keep their lineage and culture pure. If so, it has failed egregiously, as the physical anthropology of modern India shows. The explanation is obviously inadequate. Castes do represent race to a certain extent, but they also represent nationalities, tribes, common residence, religious distinctness, occupations, cultural status. Whatever sets off a group in any way may be sufficient to make it a caste in India. If groups diverge within an established caste, they become recognized as sub-castes, perhaps finally to develop into wholly separate castes. Priests, nobles, clerks, fishermen, street-sweepers are castes; so are the Parsis; so are hill tribes that maintain their primitive customs—the Dravidian Todas for instance are reckoned a high caste. Clearly we have here a generic system, a pattern of organizing society, into which every sort of group as it actually forms is fitted. Caste is a way of thought which the Hindu has tried to universalize.
All Indian castes are in theory strictly endogamous: intermarriage is intolerable. All possess an intrinsic, unchangeable worth. Thus they automatically rank themselves. Each possesses an occupation, a mode of life and customs, a set of prescribed rituals, inherently peculiar to it. The greater the restrictions and prohibitions incumbent upon it, the less it relaxes to comfort and indifference, and the more spiritual it is, the higher its grade. In consequence it is also the more pollutable, and so its restrictions are drawn the closer. The wider the gap of non-intercourse, of non-contact with lower castes, the greater becomes its purity. Caste observance is thus a virtue, an aid to religion and morality; breaking caste an ultimate indecency; the offspring of inter-caste unions necessarily lower than either parent, and their descendants, unless from matings with their own miserable kind, lower still, in an infinitely descending series. There is no elevating a caste. The very attempt to rise is a vice that brings degradation as a result, since castes are eternal, founded in nature, absolute, so that alteration is of necessity a sullying.
Such is the Hindu scheme—which in actuality is lived up to in no single point. Perverse as the system seems to men reared in other cultures, it must be admitted to possess completeness, self-consistency, and the desire to preserve inward worth. It differs from the basic assumptions of our civilization in that it sees value as something already existing and therefore to be maintained, not to be created; it tries to fit life into a theoretical pattern; it is futureless. Yet all the facts show that as historical realities castes have changed enormously and are changing now. Obviously therefore each generation ignores the changes last made and repeats its insistence on caste perpetuity and unalterability. Such is the hold of patterns on men’s minds.
The theorizing which the Hindu does about caste is characteristic of him in all cultural manifestations. The relation which can be thought out between one fact or act and others, the compartment to which it can be assigned in a system, are of more interest to him, as compared with the fact itself, than to peoples of other civilizations. Hence philosophy has flourished in India, but native history has been inadequate and disorderly. Hence too the abstract sciences of logic, mathematics, grammar enjoyed an early original development, equal for a long time and in part antecedent to that which they attained in the West. On the other hand the astronomical and still more the physical and biological sciences remained backward: they were concerned with concrete objects. The Hindus seem never to have made a move of their own toward devising a system of writing; but once the Semitic alphabet had been introduced, they modified, expanded, and rearranged it into a more logical scheme, a more consistent one phonetically, than any other people has given it (§ 146). It is probably no accident that chess and our “Arabic” position numerals with a symbol for zero (§ 109) are Hindu inventions, and that it is only in India that priests have for age after age been ranked higher than rulers.
It is natural that a culture of such inclinations should exalt the mind and soul above the body. Hence the extraordinary development of asceticism in Indian religion; its deep pessimism as regards life on this earth; its insistence on the superior reality of soul, with which is connected the universal assumption of rebirths; the working out of a system of unescapable moral causality called karma in place of a scheme of mechanical causation; the tendencies toward pantheistic identification of soul and God, or atheistic denial of divinity as distinct from soul; and the thoroughly anti-materialistic bent of almost all Hindu philosophy. It is also intelligible that these qualities should have imparted to Indian religion a superior degree of spiritual intensity which was appreciated by the nations to the north and east when Buddhism was presented to them, and caused them to embrace it.
Like Christianity, however, Buddhism found no permanent favor among the people and in the land of its origin. It flourished in India for a time, but was rarely looked upon as more than a sect; after something over a thousand years it died out completely, except in Ceylon, at the very period that its hold on non-Indian nations to the north and east was strengthening. Its place was taken in India by the miscellaneous assemblage of cults, all theoretically recognizing Brahman ascendancy, that in the aggregate constitute what is known as Hinduism. Hinduism is not a religion in the sense that Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism are “religions.” It recognizes no personal founder, no head or establishment; it tends to exclude foreigners rather than to convert them; it is national instead of universal. It accepts and reinforces the existing institutions of its particular culture: caste, for instance, which Buddhism tried to transcend. Hinduism is therefore comparable to the ancient Greek and early west Asiatic religions in consisting of a series of locally or tribally different cults never integrated or fully harmonized, conscious and tolerant of one another, resting on common assumptions and similar in content, everywhere in accord with tradition and usage, resistive to organization into a larger whole but tied into a certain unity through reflecting a more or less common civilization.
Hinduism is also comparable to Confucianism and Shintoism with this difference. These grew up analogously, but early became associated with the central government or imperial authority, to which India never attained. They gradually became official religions, as which they survive; such religious piety as the population of China and Japan experiences finding its outlet chiefly through Buddhism. Buddhism may be said to have failed in India because it aimed at being a world religion; because it tried to be international instead of national, to overlie all cultures instead of identifying itself with one. The Hindu like the Jew preferred remaining within the limits of his nationality and particular civilization.
259. Relations Between India and the Outer World
The first culture influence whose entry into India can be traced in any detail was that carried by the Vedic Aryans from the northwest. In fact, as already mentioned, more is known about this importation than of what it encountered in India. In the post-Vedic period, the introduction of the Semitic alphabet suggests that other cultural ingredients also flowed into India from the west without direct record being preserved of their transmission. The Persian and Macedonian conquests extended only over the westernmost margin of India and were of little direct influence. But the latter was followed by a semi-Hellenization of southwestern Asia, including for instance the establishment of a Græco-Bactrian kingdom in southern Turkistan and Afghanistan, adjacent to India; and for several centuries a stream of Greek culture elements trickled into the heart of India. Sculpture, architecture, astronomy, drama, coinage, derived new impetus, in some cases even their origin, from this source. In some instances the Hindus were no more than copiers of Hellenistic models: Greek hangs and folds were given to sculptured garments, Greek astronomical measurements taken over without change. Yet as the centuries wore on and new imports along these lines lessened and then died out, the introduced elements became more deeply incorporated into Indian civilization, modified and encrusted more and more heavily by distinctive Hindu styles, until now their superficial appearance makes an impression of independent native growth. The working over of the Semitic alphabet into its Hindu forms may be taken as typical of the nature and degree of this remodeling of the Hellenistic culture imports.
Soon after 700 A.D. commenced a series of Mohammedan invasions and conquests—Arab, Afghan, and Mongol-Turkish—also from the northwest, and of course accompanied by a new series of culture influences—firearms, for instance, and the true arch—which in their turn underwent absorption and partial transformation.
The flow of culture between India and the Mediterranean world has not been wholly eastward. Cotton; the common domestic fowl; probably the buffalo and rice; perhaps asceticism, monastic life, and certain mystic points of view; position numerals with zero; chess; and some of the concepts of modern philology, were transmitted westward. Eastern Africa was influenced, largely through the medium of Arab sea trade. Towards the north and northeast as far as Mongolia and Japan, India has been a dispenser of culture content and has taken little in return. Toward the southeast, Indian influence has been the largest component in the civilization of Indo-China and the East Indian archipelago, which as regards their higher attainments may be regarded as cultural dependencies or extensions of India.
260. Indo-China
Farther India or Indo-China, the great southeastern peninsula of Asia, falls somewhat short of India and China in area, is less densely inhabited, and contains a population which is of definitely Mongolian type except for some scattered fragments of hill tribes. On the basis of speech, four groups are to be distinguished. In the southwestern and southeastern corners of the peninsula, in the former kingdoms of Pegu and Cambodia, are the Mon and the Khmer, certainly related to each other and perhaps distantly connected with the Malayo-Polynesian family. On the east are the Anamese, with a monosyllabic, tonal language whose affiliations are doubtful. It contains a Chinese element, but perhaps by absorption rather than by original connection. The center and west of Indo-China are occupied respectively by the peoples of the T’ai or Siamese-Shan and Tibeto-Burman groups, both probably collateral offshoots with Chinese from what may be called the original Sinitic stock (§ 50). The movement of population has clearly been out of inner Asia into the peninsula. The Mon-Khmer are situated like half submerged remnants. Burma on the map hangs from Tibet like the outgrowth that it probably is. Seven centuries ago, the T’ai empire was centered in Yünnan, in southwestern China. Siam represents a southward shift of the seat of T’ai power after Mongol conquest (Fig. 12).
The Malay peninsula is Siamese in its narrow or neck portion. The head is inhabited by three racial groups. The Semang in the interior are pure Negritos. The Sakai or Senoi, also in the interior, are short in stature, dark, and broad nosed, but wavy-haired. They resemble a series of hill tribes scattered from India to the East Indies: the Vedda of Ceylon, the Irula and other tribes of southern India, the Toala of Celebes (§ 27, 257). Perhaps the Kolarians or Munda-Kol of central India, the Moi and other groups of Indo-China, the Nicobar islanders, and certain nationalities of Sumatra are also to be reckoned as partial representatives of the same type. This race, if it is such, is generalized, with certain Caucasian and other Negroid but few Mongoloid resemblances. It is perhaps to be classed as Australoid, and has been named Indo-Australoid. The third racial group of the peninsula are the Malays, who, at least in large part, are emigrants in comparatively recent centuries from Sumatra. Culturally the Malay peninsula belongs with the East Indies rather than with Indo-China.
Three main layers of civilization are evident in Indo-China. The old native culture was allied to that of the East Indies and the islands beyond—whatever the speech may have been. Even to-day backward tribes of both regions, especially inland, often show strikingly similar customs: the use of bark cloth, for instance, separate houses for unmarried men and girls. This culture remains fairly well defined in spots as far west as Assam and the Kolarian region of India.
The two other civilizations have flowed in from India and China. Practically everything of higher culture in Indo-China traces back directly to these two countries. The Indian influence has been both wider and deeper than the Chinese. It brought in Buddhism and writing, and colored art and architecture. This Indian influence began more than two thousand years ago, and while it may have weakened somewhat after India’s return from Buddhism to Brahmanism, it has never ceased. As there were no notable Indian conquests, this influence is an excellent example of the normal, gradual type of cultural pervading. Chinese contacts are equally old as the Indian, but have mostly remained confined to the area adjacent to the Middle Kingdom. The Anamese have adopted the Chinese system of family names, Confucianism, literary examinations, and the like, sometimes more largely as a conscious endeavor than in fact.
261. Oceania
From the Malay peninsula the vast island region of Oceania stretches eastward to within two thousand miles of America. Australia deserves to be set apart on account of its continental size, isolation, and ancient biological independence. Oceania proper falls into five natural divisions. These are Indonesia or Malaysia[38] or the East Indies, where large islands are scattered among many small ones; Papua or New Guinea; and three tracts of relatively small, widely separated islands rising out of the depths of the Pacific: Melanesia, a broken chain southeastward from New Guinea; Micronesia, to the northeast; and Polynesia, far eastward. Two primary facts stand out in regard to the inhabitants. Papua and Melanesia are peopled with blacks, the Oceanic Negroids; the other regions have brown inhabitants of prevailingly Mongoloid affiliations. Linguistically a single fundamental speech, the Malayo-Polynesian, prevails over all of Oceania except Papua, whose tongues so far as known fail to connect with any others or with one another. Large unanswered problems inhere in these distributions: how the Oceanic Negroids are related to those of Africa, from whom they are so remote geographically but whom they resemble so strikingly in type; how the black Melanesians came to talk dialects of Malayo-Polynesian,[39] which otherwise is a speech of brown peoples. More in detail, there are questions such as where and how the Polynesians developed their somewhat aberrant racial characteristics; what may be the relations of a more and a less specifically Mongoloid, a broader and a longer headed strain, among the East Indians; and whether the latter of these connects racially with the “Indo-Australians.”
262. The East Indies
Culturally, the East Indies are the most diverse of the Oceanic regions, in that the various islands, and within the larger islands adjacent districts, sometimes contain populations heavily tinctured with Asiatic civilization, sometimes tribes whose customs are far more aboriginal. However, there is no people in the East Indies that has wholly escaped the influence of Asiatic culture: the difference is always one of degree, although ranging from what is currently called semi-civilization to savagery. The profoundest influence has been exerted by India. This began nearly two thousand years ago and remained active for over a thousand; it introduced architecture, sculpture, writing, monarchy, religion, iron, cotton, and a host of other elements of higher culture. The earlier Indian influence was Buddhist and its seat of power centered in southern Sumatra; the later was Brahman and reached its zenith in Java. The number of immigrants was probably small, their effect enormous. A group of refugees, a younger son of a royal house with his retinue, a band of adventurers, would found a colony, sometimes conquering the natives, sometimes attaching them peacefully to their leadership, and soon a little kingdom was flourishing, which in time sent out other offshoots or absorbed its rivals until its name commanded respect and tribute for long distances across the sea. It was a procedure which the Mohammedanized Malays later repeated over the East Indies, and which on the Asiatic continent some centuries earlier had carried Chinese civilization far to the north and south of its original limits, and Aryan speech and culture throughout India. The kingdoms struggled, throve, decayed, and succeeded one another; the permanent aspect of the process was the ever deeper though irregular permeation of life with new arts and ideas.
The influence of China came later and was less than that of India. In the thirteenth century the Sumatran Malays were converted to Mohammedanism and began a career of expansion which culminated in the complete conquest of Java by 1478, carried their faith over much of the area, and was checked only by the advent of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Dutch. Mohammedanism, besides its cult and law, introduced some new elements of culture, such as firearms; but perhaps its most important effect was that it put an end to the growth of the specifically Indian type of influence in Malaysia.
Underlying these strains from the historic civilizations of Asia was a semi-primitive culture, many of whose elements were shared by the East Indians with the Indo-Chinese and Melanesians, and which in part can be traced from India to Polynesia. This Indo-Oceanic culture included agriculture—with rice and sugar cane in Malaysia and on the mainland; domestic animals of its own—the buffalo, pig, and fowl—different from those of north and west Asia; pottery, bark clothing, possibly bronze, though if so this was intrusive; men’s clubs or sleeping houses; a non-political organization of society on the basis of kinship and tribal community; and such practices as head hunting and skull cult. The employment of bamboo and rattan was a prime characteristic, and seems to have prevented a vigorous stone age from having flourished in the East Indies and adjacent regions. Bamboo is perhaps capable of serving more different cultural uses than any one other plant. It makes satisfactory houses, rafts, knives, spears, bows, arrows, blowguns, textiles, cooking vessels, receptacles, and musical instruments, with a minimum of labor. It is best worked with metal tools, and has therefore perhaps experienced its most thorough utilization at the hands of peoples too backward to secure a large supply of metals for themselves but able to obtain a limited stock of iron from their neighbors. Nevertheless even the prehistoric culture of the region is likely to have made large use of bamboo.
This primitive culture of course varied locally. It was also not of unitary origin. It certainly contained elements that were older than others, or that originated in different parts of the area. Rice and fowls for instance are likely to be more recent than skull cult and use of bamboo. The culture may even resolve, when it shall have been analyzed more intensively, into two or more fairly separable strata. But, taken in block, it must once have prevailed with fundamental similarity from eastern India well out into the Pacific, since everywhere within this tract there are to-day hill and jungle peoples whose culture conforms at least roughly to the type. It is necessary to remember, however, that nowhere does this culture survive in purity. To some degree the influence of the greater Asiatic civilizations has made itself felt among the most aloof tribes. They mix a few Hindu religious concepts with their head hunting rituals, for instance, or know how to forge imported iron, or even grow American maize. They have everywhere been exposed in some degree to contact with cultures of subsequent level. Thus it is characteristic that the Negritos, whose scattered distribution indicates that they may have been the first inhabitants of the East Indies, possess a debased or parasitic Malaysian culture instead of a specific Negrito one.
263. Melanesia and Polynesia
As one passes out from the East Indies into New Guinea and Melanesia, the mass effect of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization comes to an end, and the primitive culture that has been outlined is altered. Metals, rice, the buffalo, disappear. The growing of taro and other tropical plants, the pig and fowl, the use of bamboo where nature permits, skull cult or cannibalism, remain. Other features, such as the totemic and matrilinear moiety organization of society and adolescence rites for girls, obtrude, and are sometimes elaborately developed. How far such traits represent secondary local developments or on the other hand survivals from a Negroid culture phase anterior to that of primitive Malaysian-Southeast Asiatic culture, is not clear. Local diversity of custom is unusually great in both New Guinea and Melanesia.
Micronesia and Polynesia present a different although allied set of problems. The Polynesians in particular manifest a remarkable uniformity of speech and, on the whole, of culture, especially in view of the thousands of miles of ocean through which their island groups are dispersed. This uniformity suggests that the language and culture became characterized in a limited area from which they spread over Polynesia after or while contact with the remainder of the world was lost. But it is difficult to settle even tentatively on such an area of original characterization because certain sides of Polynesian culture are relatively high and carry suggestions of Asia, whereas other elements are lacking which would be expectable if higher Asiatic influences had ever carried to the ancestral Polynesians. Royal lineage, for example, bears to the Polynesians a powerful implication of sanctity, of descent from the gods, such as is unparalleled among any truly primitive people. Religion and mythology also contain an abstract, spiritual strain that is almost reminiscent of Buddhism. Yet there seems no single specific idea or name that can be traced to an Asiatic source; and the essentially ancient ideas of magic and taboo are strong—the word taboo itself is Polynesian. There are structures and sculpture in stone, sometimes monumental, but never more than barbaric in quality. The absence of metals may mean little, since they might have been possessed but the art have been lost in the island habitat, often coralline. Yet pottery, the bow and arrow, the men’s club house, the clan or moiety type of society, are also wanting or weakly developed. On the other hand, the dog, pig, and fowl, cultivated plants like taro, bark cloth, cannibalism, and human sacrifice are shared with the island regions to the west.
The various Polynesians possess genealogies and often migration traditions which on comparison, and after computation of the number of generations, seem to point to two waves of migration, both within the Christian era, perhaps about the fifth and tenth centuries respectively. The traditions fail, however, to throw clear light on the area of origin, since they attribute this either to Hawaiki, which may be either Java or a mythical land, or crisscross back and forth among the island groups within Polynesia. Something of the mysteriousness which the discoverers felt continues to attach to the origin and history of this people, and is deepened by the fact that the affiliations of their racial type remain ambiguous.
264. Australia
The human history of Australia is as detached from that of the remainder of the world as its biological history. The race is distinctive: sub-Negroid, it might be called. The languages relate to no other. The culture is primitive and well characterized. The isolation of Australia was aided by the fact that the one approach to it other than by a sea-voyage of some length, the approach across Torres Straits, was blocked by New Guinea, the area of most backward culture in Oceania. The Papuans did not possess enough civilization to hand on much to the Australians; but they prevented higher elements from Asia from flowing to them.
The Australians lacked not only all agriculture and domestic animals, but pottery, the bow, and apparently the harpoon. These deficiencies would at once stamp their culture as pre-Neolithic in type, were it not that they grind some stone implements.
All in all, Australian culture is unusually meager on the industrial and economic side. Houses, clothing, weapons, boats, tools, are most scantily developed: often lacking and always rude. This poverty of Australian material culture cannot be explained wholly from the prevailing desert character of a large part of the continent, since the natives of the most favored regions were not appreciably better off as regards variety of arts conducive to comfort.
Social organization is much more complicated than the arts. Most of the Australians are divided into moieties, which frequently are subdivided into four classes or eight-sub-classes, all exogamous. A frequent peculiarity is that the child belongs to a different class from both its parents. So far as the moiety is concerned, custom varies locally as to whether the child is born into the mother’s or father’s side of the community. Frequently there are also hereditary totemic groups. These may be subdivisions of the moieties or descend independently of them. A few tribes, chiefly in southeastern Australia, are without moieties or classes; some are totemless (Fig. 29). The moiety scheme of course prescribes equally that one must marry into the opposite moiety and out of one’s own. The extension of this principle to classes and sub-classes still farther limits the group among whom marriage is permissible, thereby emphasizing its prescriptive character. Where the individual belongs to a third or different class from his parents, his wife must come from the fourth or remaining one, and his children will belong again to the first or second, according as moiety descent is patrilinear or matrilinear. Consequently he has blood relatives in every class; and conversely all the members of each class stand in a certain defined kinship to every individual in the community, according to their respective sex and age. This means not only that certain relatives are within the absolutely prohibited degrees, but that others are prescriptive spouses. These are only a few of the innumerable ramifications and variations of Australian social organization.
The origin of these social schemes is in dispute. Some ethnologists interpret them as original inventions of the Australians, manifestations of their peculiar primitiveness. Others look upon then as evolved somewhere in the region between India and Melanesia where analogous institutions are frequently encountered, and as carried into Australia by diffusion or migrations. The contiguity of Australia to the Indo-Melanesian area of totems, moieties, unilateral descent, etc., is not likely to be wholly a matter of coincidence (§ 110). Moreover, the strongest development of this type of organization within Australia is on the whole in the northern part, the tribes that show least or none of it being in the south, farthest from the presumptive entrance via New Guinea. On the other hand, certain features of the systems are confined to Australia: the classes and sub-classes, the occasional coexistence but non-relation of totems and moieties, for instance. These variations must have originated among the Australians; and this raises the question whether many other traits may also be indigenous. The most probable course of events would appear to have been the importation of the basic pattern of exogamy, followed by its diffusion with numerous new growths in Australia.
Religious status fits the same interpretation. Ceremonial practices are often, both abundant and elaborate, but ring the changes on fundamentally primitive concepts like imitative magic, bewitching, taboo, adolescence and other crisis rites. These concepts, as implicit in a series of customary acts, might all have been imported at a very early time; in fact in the main very likely go back to Palæolithic culture. On this foundation the Australians developed their locally varying superstructures of religion, which often differ conspicuously in specific content, and into which they poured a notable quantity of imagination or social creativeness. They evolved nothing of a fundamentally “higher” type of cult because of their unusual degree of insulation from all the more important later streams of culture. There occurred no significant import of either new religious elements as such, nor of material factors like agriculture which might have raised the economic status, increased the population,[40] forced a political organization, and ultimately led to the growth of basically new religious patterns among the Australians themselves.
To return to material culture, it may be noted that the boomerang groups with Australian rites and social organization in being a highly specialized form of a fundamentally simple and presumably early type, namely the throwing stick or flat club. Crescentic throwing sticks are in use in Asia and America: they fly faster and straighter than rod shaped or knobbed ones. The Australians alone added the twist which gives the boomerang its peculiar flight. They may have been led to evolve this feature through not having higher types of weapons such as bows and arrows to engage their interest and energies. At any rate, the discovery of the quality imparted by the twist may have been made by accident, such as the warping of an implement, and random experimenting may have brought the improvements.
Whether the relatively unimportant implements of ground stone in Australia represent an invention made there or should be considered one of the small group of culture elements which like the moiety system may have been imported subsequently to the main stock of Australian culture, remains to be ascertained. This main stock is certainly ancient, and in its content may be regarded as approximately equivalent to the Palæolithic culture of Europe and probably connected with it by an early diffusion; although in the specific forms taken by their corresponding types the two cultures obviously differ greatly, as indeed the lapse of time and stretch of distance between them would render inevitable.
265. Tasmania
Tasmania is situated toward Australia as Australia is toward Asia-Oceania. It constitutes an ultimate periphery. Of what little culture Australia had received from the remainder of the hemisphere, Tasmania again received only a part. The prevailing opinion that the Tasmanians were the most primitive of recent peoples is therefore probably justified. They lacked everything that the Australians lacked; and in addition lacked spear-throwers, boomerangs, shields, and ground stone tools. They are the one population among whom it seems reasonably certain that a culture of Palæolithic type was preserved unmixed until modern times. They had chipped knives, axes, scrapers, and similar tools; wooden spears and clubs; bark rafts; windbreak huts; cordage and baskets; paint; ornaments of bone and other animal parts. Unfortunately the Tasmanians numbered only a few thousands, died rapidly on contact with civilization, and became extinct in the nineteenth century before scientific study of their culture or speech had been made. Their religion and society therefore perished almost unrecorded. Their racial type is preserved in skeletal material and photographs. It is clear that it differed from that of the Australians. Their hair was woolly. They have consequently sometimes been reckoned as Oceanic Negroes rather than as an Australian sub-type. It is likely that they represent the first human strain to enter Australia, which was later absorbed or exterminated on that continent by the Australians, surviving only in the protected island of Tasmania.
266. Africa
Africa is the second largest of the continents, the most compact and least indented, and, except for Australia, the most deficient in great mountain systems and the most arid. The only considerable forested area lies in its west central portion; the remainder ranges from parkland through steppe to desert. The population is the densest of any continent reckoned as prevailingly uncivilized: a hundred and twenty-five millions or more, some ten to a dozen souls to the square mile.
As regards its races, it is important to remember that the northern third or half of Africa is inhabited by native “whites.” There is much confusion on this point. We tend to say African when we mean Negro. Until recently the word Moor in north European countries often meant Negro, although it denotes Mauretanians, Moroccans, who are Caucasians. It is true that almost across the breadth of Africa there is a transition zone in which it is arbitrary to classify the population as definitely Negro or Caucasian. But over the vaster bulk of the continent, there is never doubt as to the substantial distinctness of the racial stocks.
The oldest stone age is well represented. Implements of Chellean type in particular have been discovered in a number of areas. Whether these are contemporary with the Chellean remains of Europe is not wholly certain, since they are generally surface finds. An Upper Palæolithic phase, the Capsian, with three sub-periods, is well established for North Africa (§ 215). It was approximately coeval with the Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and probably Azilian of western Europe, and influenced them. Syria and Spain were largely Capsian in culture. The Neolithic is less well marked as a distinctive phase in Africa; and evidences of a separate Bronze Age, other than in Egypt, have nowhere been discerned. There is a bronze art with casting in lost molds in Benin. This is of undetermined origin. It may be ancient; but so far as can be told to-day, iron came into use in much of Africa as early as bronze, and is worked by modern tribes who do not know bronze. Dolmens and other megalithic monuments are abundant in north Africa, absent south of the Sahara. Some of them are later than the similar European megaliths, since iron horse-bits have been found associated with them. It is evident from this summary that Europe and Africa have been closely associated in their prehistoric culture, especially in its remote stages. Two sets of fossil human remains corroborate the connection: Grimaldi man of Italy was pre-Negroid in type, Rhodesian man more or less Neandertaloid.
Iron is smelted, worked, and used throughout Africa except among the dwarf tribes. Apparatus and technique are usually simple, but efficient. Smiths often constitute a caste, sometimes a wandering one. Some tribes rank them highly, others repute them wizards, nearly all accord them a special social position. There is no other area so large and culturally so backward as Africa south of the Mohammedan belt, in which an iron industry flourishes. The existence of the art therefore raises a problem. Some have thought that its origin was indigenous, that perhaps even Egypt derived its knowledge of iron from Negro peoples. On the whole, however, it is much more probable that the reverse holds. In the more than three thousand years since iron was worked in Egypt, the process could readily have been transmitted through the continent. The long lapse of time, the distances traversed, the comparative cultural backwardness of central and south Africa, would allow for, in fact would almost dictate, both the simplicity and the specializations of the technique.
267. Egyptian Radiations
Ancient Egyptian influences have penetrated Africa more significantly than has generally been thought. It is only recently that a beginning has been made in tracing them out in detail in the Nile Sudan. For so intensive a civilization as that of Egypt to exist in juxtaposition to the southeastern Hamitic tribes and the Negroes for five or six thousand years without radiating innumerable elements of culture into their life would be unparalleled. In fact the dynastic Egyptians used materials like ostrich feathers that were imported from far south, and depicted Negroid physical types. The trade and association involved must have flowed both ways. The elements most typical of Egyptian civilization, and its fabric and organization, need by no means have been imparted along with the elements that were transmitted. The fact that they were not seems to be what has delayed wide recognition of Egyptian influence in Negro Africa. The general character of the culture of a modern central African tribe and of the ancient Egyptians being so profoundly different, diffused culture ingredients would therefore often appear among the Negroes in a different form, and always in a different setting, thus tending to disguise their historic connection. The failure of certain Egyptian traits to seep through Africa is also readily accounted for. A backward population broken up into small communities without much stability would have difficulty fitting such an art as writing into their scheme of life, in fact would find it useless. It is therefore not surprising that none of the un-Mohammedanized tribes of the continent write. Similarly, masonry would be needless, perhaps economically unfeasible, under the prevailing social conditions of central Africa. On the other hand, so obviously utilitarian an art as iron working might be quickly taken up, once it had been brought into a simple technique. In the same way, an adaptable domestic animal or plant would tend to be accepted and diffused, while a concomitant scheme of political organization or elaborated religious system might fail to make even a beginning of penetration. It is in this way that several animals of Asiatic origin came to be kept through considerable parts or almost the whole of Africa; the horse, camel, sheep, fowl, for instance, of which at least the first two entered through the gateway of Egypt.
This does not mean that all constituents of African culture have their origin in Egypt; still less that the colors or patterns of African cultures can be derived from that country. However great a bulk of culture may be absorbed by one people from another, the organization which is given this, the stamp put upon it, is necessarily more or less distinctive, because the introduced constituents meet others already established; and especially because the recipient culture, even if low, already possesses a form of its own into which it unconsciously attempts to fit the new content, and into which, unless the influx is sudden and great, it usually succeeds in fitting the imports for a time. However, any specific culture trait common to ancient Egypt and the modern Negroes is suspect of a common origin, which ordinarily—though not universally—would mean an Egyptian or more remote origin. Yet the resolution of such a suspicion is not always easy. Much depends on the extent and continuity of the geographical distribution of the trait, and on the actuality and specificity of the resemblance. On these points the necessary information is often still incomplete.
The general relation of Africa as a whole to Egypt is paralleled by the relation of western Europe of four thousand years ago to the Orient. The bronze, cereals, tamed animals, and many other culture elements of Europe, including religious traits like the ax cult, can be derived from the Near East. But the cities, monarchies, temples, inscriptions, astronomy, and art of the Orient had not penetrated to farther Europe. Moreover, European Bronze Age culture was not merely Oriental civilization with half or three-fourths its content omitted. It enjoyed an organization of its own, followed local and at least partly original trends, possessed what might metaphorically be called an organic unity as great as that of any Oriental culture.
268. The Influence of Other Cultures
Two other great cultural influences have long affected Africa. As far back as the strictly historic period extends, its Mediterranean shore has been generally under the control of peoples belonging to Western civilization—Carthaginians, Romans, or Arabs. As in the case of Egypt, it is unthinkable that the cultures thus planted in the north could have been wholly without effect on the remoter parts of the continent. In fact, for the Arabs, who both penetrated the farthest and are the most recent comers, influence far into the Sudan is manifest. The other exposure was toward the east, and here, as might be expected, Indian influences, chiefly sea-borne through Arab restlessness, have been potent. Eastern Africa has hump-backed cattle, cotton, the pit-loom, perhaps the fowl, from this source. Madagascar, though mainly Negro in race, is Malaysian in speech and prevailingly Malaysian in culture as the result of similar maritime influences from the east.
In these lights, much of African culture which cannot yet be definitely traced to an extra-African source and which until recently was generally assumed to be of purely native origin, may prove to be due to transmission from Asia or Europe. The powerful kingdoms repeatedly established by successful leaders among both Sudan and Bantu Negroes, kingdoms embracing diverse tribes and sometimes continuing under the same dynasty for several centuries, may be due to Egyptian or Mohammedan example. The same can be said for the prevalence of slavery, which is both more widespread and more important economically in Africa than in any other large region of similarly retarded cultural level. Possibly the frequency of polygyny belongs in the same category. It is true that Negro economic life is generally so organized that wives represent investment and create wealth. This fact might be the result of the influence of old economic tendencies upon introduced polygyny. Or the form of marriage might be the outcome of the economic scheme of life characteristic of Africa. Yet even in the latter case an indirect foreign causation can be suspected, since primitive peoples, at any rate those unquestionably beyond the influences of the Eur-Asian civilizations, like the Australians and Americans, generally do not place heavy social stress on wealth. The African point of view as regards economic success, with the African attitude toward marriage as a consequence, may therefore be partly due to extra-African stimulus and example.
Such stimulus seems more easily demonstrable for the proverbs and riddles which abound in Africa, since proverbs were completely and riddles almost wholly wanting in the western hemisphere, and are therefore not the native and spontaneous outflow of the human mind which our own familiarity with them might tempt us to take for granted (§ 90).
The totemic and exogamic institutions of Negro Africa (§ 110) are difficult to understand. Their distribution, both in totality and as regards their several forms, is patchy. Clans sometimes coexist with castes or occupational classes, sometimes tend to coincide with them. Matrilineal institutions crop up irregularly among prevailingly patrilineal ones. In several separate areas the totemic and exogamic groups are divorced, even following opposite lines of descent. The large blocks of peoples sharing substantially the same form of organization in Australia, the regularity of regional and typological graduation of forms of organization characteristic of North America, find no counterpart in Africa. The reason would seem to be that the Australian and American cultures developed in isolation and from within, undisturbed; whereas Africa has long been subjected to a cultural bombardment which constantly mingled new traits with old, foreign with acclimated, and acclimated with indigenous. The native cultures were therefore unable to follow the relatively smooth sequence of development by area or stage which occurred in Australia and America; the injected ferments caused a cultural bubbling in which elements dissociated, combined, intensified, or disappeared according to intricate circumstances. It is possible that other phases of African culture owe their appearance of randomness under classification to the same set of causes.[41]