The area in Europe where the Nordic race developed and in which the Aryan languages originated probably included the forest region of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, together with the grasslands which stretched from the Ukraine eastward into the steppes south of the Ural. From causes already mentioned this area was long isolated from the rest of the world and especially from Asia. When the unity of the Aryan race and of the Aryan language was broken up at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, wave after wave of the early Nordics pushed westward along the sandy plains of the north and pressed against and through the Alpine populations of central Europe. Usually these early Nordics, as indeed many of the later ones, constituted only a thin layer of ruling classes and there must have been many countries conquered by them in which we have no historic evidence of their existence, linguistic or otherwise. This must have certainly been the case in those numerous instances where only the leaders were Nordics and the great mass of their followers slaves or serfs of inferior races.
The Nordics also swept down through Thrace into Greece and Asia Minor, while other large and important groups entered Asia partly through the Caucasus Mountains, but in greater strength they migrated around the northern and eastern sides of the Caspian-Aral Sea.
That portion of the Nordic race which continued to inhabit south Russia and grazed their flocks of sheep and herds of horses on the grasslands were the Scythians of the Greeks and from these nomad shepherds came the Cimmerians, Persians, Sacæ, Massagetæ and perhaps the leaders of the Kassites, Mitanni and other early Aryan-speaking Nordic invaders of Asia. The descendants of these Nordics are scattered throughout Russia but are now submerged by the later Slavs.
Well marked characters of the Nordic race, which were established in Neolithic times if not earlier, enable us to distinguish it definitely wherever it appears in history and we know that all the blondness in the world is derived from this source. As blondness is easily observed and recorded we are apt to lay too much emphasis on this single character. The brown shades of hair are equally Nordic.
When the Nordics first enter the Mediterranean world their arrival is everywhere marked by a new and higher civilization. In most cases the contact of the vigorous barbarians with the ancient civilizations created a sudden impulse of life and an outburst of culture as soon as the first destruction wrought by the conquest was repaired.
In addition to the long continued selection exercised by severe climatic conditions and the consequent elimination of ineffectives, both of which affects a race, there is another force at work which concerns the individual as well. The energy developed in the north is not lost immediately when transferred to the softer conditions of existence in the Mediterranean and Indian countries. This energy endures for several generations and only dies away slowly as the northern blood becomes diluted and the impulse to strive fades.
The contact of Hellene and Pelasgian caused the blossoming of the ancient civilization of Hellas, just as two thousand years later when the Nordic invaders of Italy had absorbed the science, art and literature of Rome, they produced that splendid century we call the Renaissance.
The chief men of the Cinque Cento and the preceding century were of Nordic blood, largely Gothic and Lombard, which is recognized easily by a close inspection of busts or portraits in northern Italy. Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci were all of Nordic type, just as in classic times many of the chief men and of the upper classes were Nordic.
Similar expansions of civilization and organization of empire followed the incursion of the Nordic Persians into the land of the round skulled Medes and the introduction of Sanskrit into India by the Nordic Sacæ who conquered that peninsula. These outbursts of progress due to the first contact and mixture of two contrasted races are, however, only transitory and pass with the last lingering trace of Nordic blood.
In India the blood of these Aryan-speaking invaders has been absorbed by the dark Hindu and in the final event only their synthetic speech survives.
The marvellous organization of the Roman state made use of the services of Nordic mercenaries and kept the Western Empire alive for three centuries after the ancient Roman stock had virtually ceased to exist.
The date when the population of the Empire had become predominantly of Mediterranean and Oriental blood, due to the introduction of slaves from the east and the wastage of Italian blood in war, coincides with the establishment of the Empire under Augustus and the last Republican patriots represent the final protest of the old patrician Nordic strain. For the most part they refused to abdicate their right to rule in favor of manumitted slaves and imperial favorites and they fell in battle and sword in hand. The Romans died out but the slaves survived and their descendants form the great majority of the south Italians of to-day.
In the last days of the Republic, Cæsar was the leader of the mob, the Plebs, which by that time had ceased to be of Roman blood. Pompey’s party represented the remnants of the old native Roman aristocracy and was defeated at Pharsalia not by Cæsar’s plebeian clients but by his Nordic legionaries from Gaul. Cassius and Brutus were the last successors of Pompey and their overthrow at Philippi was the final death blow to the Republican party; with them the native Roman families disappear almost entirely.
The decline of the Romans and for that matter of the native Italians began with the Punic Wars when in addition to the Romans who fell in battle a large portion of the country population of Italy was destroyed by Hannibal. Native Romans suffered greatly in the Social and Servile Wars as well as in the civil conflicts between the factions of Sylla, who led the Patricians, and Marius who represented the Plebs. Bloody proscriptions of the rival parties followed alternately the victory of one side and then of the other and under the tyranny of the Emperors of the first century also the old Roman stock was the greatest sufferer until it practically vanished from the scene.
Voluntary childlessness was the most potent cause of the decline under the Empire and when we read of the abject servility of bearers of proud names in the days of Nero and Caligula, we must remember that they could not rally to their standard followers among the Plebs. They had only the choice of submission or suicide and many chose the latter alternative. The abjectness of the Roman spirit under the Empire is thus to be explained by a change in race.
With the expanding dominion of Rome the native elements of vigor were drawn year after year into the legions and spent their active years in wars or in garrisons, while the slaves and those unfit for military duty stayed home and bred. In the present great war while the native Americans are at the front fighting the aliens and immigrants are allowed to increase without check and the parallel is a close one.
Slaves began to be imported into Italy in numbers in the second century B. C. to work the large plantations—latifundia—of the wealthy Romans. This importation of slaves and the ultimate extension of the Roman citizenship to their manumitted descendants and to inferior races throughout the growing Empire and the losses in internal and foreign wars, ruined the state. In America we find another close parallel in the Civil War and the subsequent granting of citizenship to Negroes and to ever increasing numbers of immigrants of plebeian, servile or Oriental races, who throughout history have shown little capacity to create, organize or even to comprehend Republican institutions.
In Rome, when this change in blood was substantially complete, the state could no longer be operated under Republican forms of government and the Empire arose to take its place. At the beginning the Empire was clothed in the garb of republicanism in deference to such Roman elements as still persisted in the Senate and among the Patricians but ultimately these external forms were discarded and the state became virtually a pure despotism.
The new population understood little and cared less for the institutions of the ancient Republic but they were jealous of their own rights of “Bread and the Circus”—“panem et circenses”—and there began to appear in place of the old Roman religion the mystic rites of Eastern countries so welcome to the plebeian and uneducated soul. The Emperors to please the vulgar erected from time to time new shrines to strange gods utterly unknown to the Romans of the early Republic. In America, also, strange temples, which would have been abhorrent to our Colonial ancestors, are multiplying and our streets and parks are turned over to monuments to foreign “patriots,” designed not to please the artistic sense of the passer-by but to gratify the national preference of some alien element in the electorate.
These comments on the change of race in Rome at the beginning of our era are not mere speculation. An examination of many thousands of Roman columbaria or funeral urns and the names inscribed thereon show quite clearly that as early as the first century of our era eighty to ninety per cent of the urban population of the Roman Empire was of servile extraction and that about seven-eighths of this slave population was drawn from districts within the boundaries of the Empire and very largely from the countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean. Few names are found which indicate that their bearers came from Gaul or the countries beyond the Alps. These Nordic barbarians were of more use in the legions than as household servants.
At the beginning of the Christian era the entire Levant and countries adjoining it in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt had been so thoroughly hellenized that many of their inhabitants bore Greek names. It was from these countries and from northern Africa that the slave population of Rome was drawn. Their descendants were the most important element in the Roman melting pot and even to-day form the predominant element in the population of Italy south of the Apennines. When the Nordic barbarians a few centuries later poured in, these Romanized Orientals disappeared temporarily from view under the rule of the vigorous northerners but they have steadily absorbed the latter until the Nordic elements in Italy now are to be found chiefly in the Lombard plains and the region of the Alps.
The Byzantine Empire from much the same causes as the Roman became in its turn gradually less and less European and more and more Oriental until it, too, withered and expired.
Regarded in the light of the facts the fall of Rome ceases to be a mystery. The wonder is that the State lived on after the Romans were extinct and that the Eastern Empire survived so long with an ever fading Greek population. In Rome and in Greece only the language of the dominant race survived.
So entirely had the blood of the Romans vanished in the last days of the Empire that sorry bands of barbarians wandered at will through the desolated provinces. Cæsar and his legions would have made short work of these unorganized banditti but Cæsar’s legions were a memory, though one great enough to inspire in the intruders somewhat of awe and desire to imitate. Against invaders, however, brains and brawn are more effective than tradition and culture, however noble these last may be.
Early ascetic Christianity played a large part in this decline of the Roman Empire as it was at the outset the religion of the slave, the meek and the lowly while Stoicism was the religion of the strong men of the time. This bias in favor of the weaker elements greatly interfered with their elimination by natural processes and the fighting force of the Empire was gradually undermined. Christianity was in sharp contrast to the worship of tribal deities which preceded it and it tended then as now to break down class and race distinctions.
The maintenance of such distinctions is absolutely essential to race purity in any community when two or more races live side by side.
Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort or they ultimately amalgamate and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.
We find few traces of Nordic characters outside of Europe. When Egypt was invaded by the Libyans from the west in 1230 B. C. they were accompanied by “sea peoples,” probably the Achæan Greeks. There is some evidence of blondness among the people of the south shore of the Mediterranean down to Greek times and the Tamahu or fair Libyans are constantly mentioned in Egyptian records. The reddish blond or partly blond Berbers found to-day on the northern slopes of the Atlas Mountains may well be their descendants. That this blondness of the Berbers, though small in amount, is of Nordic origin we may with safety assume, but through what channels it came we have no means of knowing. There is no historic invasion of north Africa by Nordics except the Vandal conquests but there seems to be little probability that this small Teutonic tribe left behind any physical trace in the native population.
There seem to have been traces of Nordic blood among the Philistines and still more among the Amorites. Certain references to the size of the sons of Anak and to the fairness of David, whose mother was an Amoritish woman, point vaguely in this direction.
References in Chinese annals to the green eyes of the Wu-suns or to the Hiung-Nu in central Asia are almost the only evidence we have of the Nordic race in contact with the peoples of eastern Asia, though there are statements in ancient Chinese or Mongolian records as to the existence of blond and tall tribes and nations in those parts of northern Asia where Mongols are now found exclusively. We may expect to acquire much new light on this subject during the next few decades.
The so-called blondness of the hairy Ainus of the northern islands of Japan seems to be due to a trace of what might be called Proto-Nordic blood. In hairiness these people are in sharp contrast with their Mongoloid neighbors but this is a generalized character common to the highest and the lowest races of man. The primitive Australoids and the highly specialized Scandinavians are among the most hairy populations in the world. So in the Ainus this somatological peculiarity is merely the retention of a primitive trait. The occasional brown or greenish eye and the sometimes fair complexion of the Ainus are, however, suggestive of Nordic affinities and of an extreme easterly extension of Proto-Nordics at a very early period.
The skull shape of the Ainus is dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic, while the broad cheek bones indicate a Mongolian cross as among the Esquimaux. The Ainus, like many other small, mysterious peoples, are probably merely the remnants of one of the early races that are fast fading into extinction. The division of man into species and subspecies is very ancient and the chief races of the earth are the successful survivors of a long and fierce competition. Many species, subspecies and races have vanished utterly, except for reversional characters occasionally found in the larger races.
The only Nordics in Asia Minor, so far as we know, were the Phrygians who crossed the Hellespont about 1400 B. C. as part of the same migration which brought the Achæans into Greece, the Cimmerians who entered by the same route and also through the Caucasus about 650 B. C. and still later, in 270 B. C., the Gauls who, coming from northern Italy through Thrace, founded Galatia. So far as our present information goes little or no trace of these invasions remains in the existing populations of Anatolia. The expansions of the Persians and the Aryanization of their empire and the conquests of the Nordics east and south of the Caspian-Aral Sea, will be discussed in connection with the spread of Aryan languages.
Such are the three races, the Alpine, the Mediterranean and the Nordic, which enter into the composition of European populations of to-day and in various combinations comprise the great bulk of white men all over the world. These races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically. Moral, intellectual and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters and are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation. These moral and physical characters are not limited to one race but given traits do occur with more frequency in one race than in another. Each race differs in the relative proportion of what we may term good and bad strains, just as nations do, or, for that matter, sections and classes of the same nation.
In considering skull characters we must remember that, while indicative of independent descent, the size and shape of the head are not closely related to brain power. Aristotle was a Mediterranean if we may trust the authenticity of his busts and had a small, long skull, while Humboldt’s large and characteristically Nordic skull was equally dolichocephalic. Socrates and Diogenes were apparently quite un-Greek and represent remnants of some early race, perhaps of Paleolithic man. The history of their lives indicates that each was recognized by his fellow countrymen as in some degree alien, just as the Jews apparently regarded Christ as, in some indefinite way, non-Jewish.
Mental, spiritual and moral traits are closely associated with the physical distinctions among the different European races, although like somatological characters, these spiritual attributes have in many cases gone astray. Enough remain, however, to show that certain races have special aptitudes for certain pursuits.
The Alpine race is always and everywhere a race of peasants, an agricultural and never a maritime race. In fact they only extend to salt water at the head of the Adriatic and, like all purely agricultural communities throughout Europe, tend toward democracy, although they are submissive to authority both political and religious being usually Roman Catholics in western Europe. This race is essentially of the soil and in towns the type is mediocre and bourgeois.
The coastal and seafaring populations of northern Europe are everywhere Nordic as far as the shores of Spain and among Europeans this race is pre-eminently fitted for maritime pursuits. Enterprise at sea during the Middle Ages was in the hands of Mediterraneans just as it was originally developed by Cretans, Phœnicians and Carthaginians but after the Reformation the Nordics seized and occupied this field almost exclusively.
The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant and democratic character of the Alpines. The Nordic race is domineering, individualistic, self-reliant and jealous of their personal freedom both in political and religious systems and as a result they are usually Protestants. Chivalry and knighthood and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north.
The social status of woman varies largely with race but here religion plays a part. In the Roman Republic and in ancient Germany women were held in high esteem. In the Nordic countries of to-day women’s rights have received much more recognition than among the southern nations with their traditions of Latin culture. To this general statement modern Germany is a marked exception. The contrast is great between the mental attitude toward woman of the ancient Teutons and that of the modern Germans.
The pure Nordic peoples are characterized by a greater stability and steadiness than are mixed peoples such as the Irish, the ancient Gauls and the Athenians among all of whom the lack of these qualities was balanced by a correspondingly greater versatility.
The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments. In the field of art its superiority to both the other European races is unquestioned, although in literature and in scientific research and discovery the Nordics far excel it.
Before leaving this interesting subject of the correlation of spiritual and moral traits with physical characters we may note that these influences are so deeply rooted in everyday consciousness that the modern novelist or playwright does not fail to make his hero a tall, blond, honest and somewhat stupid youth and his villain a small, dark and exceptionally intelligent individual of warped moral character. So in Celtic legend as in the Græco-Roman and mediæval romances, prince and princess are always fair, a fact rather indicating that the mass of the people were brunet at the time when the legends were taking shape. In fact, “fair” is a synonym for beauty. Most ancient tapestries show a blond earl on horseback and a dark-haired churl holding the bridle.
The gods of Olympus were almost all described as blond, and it would be difficult to imagine a Greek artist painting a brunet Venus. In church pictures all angels are blond, while the denizens of the lower regions revel in deep brunetness. “Non Angli sed angeli,” remarked Pope Gregory when he first saw Saxon children exposed for sale in the Roman slave-mart.
In depicting the crucifixion no artist hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Saviour. This is something more than a convention, as such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord strongly suggest his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes.
These and similar traditions clearly point to the relations of the one race to the other in classic, mediæval and modern times. How far they may be modified by democratic institutions and the rule of the majority remains to be seen.
The wars of the past two thousand years in Europe have been almost exclusively wars between the various nations of this race or between rulers of Nordic blood.
From a race point of view the present European conflict is essentially a civil war and nearly all the officers and a large proportion of the men on both sides are members of this race. It is the same old tragedy of mutual butchery and mutual destruction between Nordics, just as the Nordic nobility of Renaissance Italy seems to have been possessed with a blood mania to murder one another. It is the modern edition of the old Berserker blood rage and is class suicide on a gigantic scale.
At the beginning of the war it was difficult to say on which side there was the preponderance of Nordic blood. Flanders and northern France are more Nordic than south Germany, while the backbone of the armies that England put into the field as well as of those of her colonies was almost purely Nordic and a large proportion of the Russian army was of the same race. As heretofore stated, with America in the war, the greater part of the Nordics of the world are fighting against Germany.
Although the writer has limited carefully the use of the word “Teutonic” to that section of the Nordic race which originated in Scandinavia and which later spread over northern Europe, nevertheless this term is unfortunate because it is currently given a national and not a racial meaning and is used to denote the populations of the central empires. This popular use includes millions who are un-Teutonic and excludes millions of pure Teutonic blood who are outside of the political borders of Austria and Germany and who are bitterly hostile to the very name itself.
The present inhabitants of the German Empire, to say nothing of Austria, are only to a limited extent descendants of the ancient Teutonic tribes, being very largely Alpines, especially in the east and south. To abandon to the Germans and Austrians the exclusive right to the name Teuton or Teutonic would be to acquiesce in one of their most grandiose pretensions.
Having shown the existence in Europe of three distinct subspecies of man and a single predominant group of languages called the Aryan or synthetic group, it remains to inquire to which of the three races can be assigned the honor of inventing, elaborating and introducing this most highly developed form of human speech. Our investigations will show that the facts point indubitably to an original unity between the Nordic or rather the Proto-Nordic race and the Proto-Aryan language or the generalized, ancestral, Aryan mother tongue.
Of the three claimants to the honor of being the original creator of the Aryan group of languages, we can at once dismiss the Mediterranean race. The members of this subspecies on the south shores of the Mediterranean, the Berbers and the Egyptians, and many peoples in western Asia speak now and have always spoken Anaryan tongues. We also know that the speech of the original Pelasgians was not Aryan, that in Crete remnants of Pre-Aryan speech persisted until about 500 B. C. and that the Hellenic language was introduced into Ægean countries from the north. In Italy the Etruscan in the north and the Messapian in the south were Anaryan languages and the ancestral form of Latin speech in the guise of Umbrian and Oscan came through the Alps from the countries beyond.
In Spain a Celtic language was introduced from the north about 500 B. C. but with so little force behind it that it was unable to replace entirely the Anaryan Basque language of at least a portion of the aborigines.
In Britain, Aryan speech was introduced about 800 B. C. and in France somewhat earlier. In central and northern Europe no certain trace of the Anaryan languages at one time spoken there persists, except among the Lapps and in the neighborhood of the Gulf of Finland, where Non-Aryan Finnic dialects are spoken to-day by the Finlanders and the Esthonians.
We thus know the approximate dates of the introduction of Aryan speech into western and southern Europe and that it came in through the medium of the Nordic race.
In Spain and in the adjoining parts of France nearly half a million people continue to speak an agglutinative language, called Basque or Euskarian. In skull shape these Basques correspond closely with the Aryan-speaking populations around them, being dolichocephalic in Spain and brachycephalic or pseudo-brachycephalic in France. In the case of both the long skulled and the round skulled Basques the lower part of the face is long and thin, with a peculiar and pointed chin and among the French Basques the skull is broadened in the temporal region. In other words, their faces show certain secondary racial characters which have been imposed by selection upon a people composed originally of two races of independent origin, but long isolated by the limitations of language.
The Euskarian language is believed to have been related to the ancient Iberian but has affinities which point to Asia as its place of origin and make possible the hypothesis that it may have been derived from the ancient language of the Proto-Alpines in the west.
The problem of the extinct Ligurian language must be considered in this connection. It seems to have been Anaryan, but we do not know whether it was the speech originally of Alpines or of Mediterraneans either of whom could be reasonably considered as a claimant.
Other than the Basque language there are in western Europe but few remains of Pre-Aryan speech, and these are found chiefly in place names and in a few obscure words.
Remnants of Anaryan speech exist here and there throughout European Russia, but many of them can be traced to historic invasions. Until we reach the main body of Ural-Altaic speech in the east of Russia, the Esthonians, with kindred tribes of Livonians and Tchouds, and the Finns are the only peoples who speak Non-Aryan tongues, but the physical type with the exception of the skull shape of all these tribes is distinctly Nordic. In this connection the Lapps and related groups in the far north can be disregarded.
The problem of the Finns is a difficult one. The coast of Finland, of course, is purely Swedish, but the great bulk of the population in the interior is brachycephalic, though otherwise thoroughly Nordic in type.
The Anaryan Finnish, Esthonian and Livonian languages were probably introduced at the same time as were round skulls into Finland. The shores of the Gulf of Finland were originally inhabited by Nordics and the intrusion of round skulled Finns probably came soon after the Christian era. This immigration and that of the Livonians and Esthonians may possibly have been part of the same movement which brought the Alpine Wends into eastern Germany. The earliest references to the Finns that we have locate them in central Russia.
The most important Anaryan language in Europe is the Magyar of Hungary, but this we know was introduced from the eastward at the end of the ninth century, as was the earlier but now extinct Avar.
In the Balkans the language of the Turks has never been a vernacular as it is in Asia Minor. In Europe it was spoken only by the soldiers and the civil administrators and by very sparse colonies of Turkish settlers. The mania of the Turks for white women, which is said to have been one of the motives that led to the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, has unconsciously resulted in the obliteration of the Mongoloid type of the original Asiatic invaders. Persistent crossing with Circassian and Georgian women, as well as with slaves of every race in Asia Minor and in Europe with whom they came in contact, has made the European Turk of to-day indistinguishable in physical characters from his Christian neighbors. At the same time, polygamy has greatly strengthened the hold of the dominant Turk. In fact, among the upper classes of the higher races monogamy and the resultant limitation in number of offspring has been a source of weakness from the viewpoint of race expansion. The Turks of Seljukian and Osmanli origin were never numerous and the Sultan’s armies were largely composed of Islamized Anatolians and Europeans.
In Persia and India, also, the Aryan languages were introduced from the north at known periods, so in view of all these facts the Mediterranean race cannot claim the honor of either the invention or dissemination of the synthetic languages.
The chief claim of the Alpine race of central Europe and western Asia to the invention and introduction into Europe of the Proto-Aryan form of speech rests on the fact that nearly all the members of this race in Europe speak well developed Aryan languages, chiefly in some form of Slavic. This fact taken by itself may have no more significance than the fact that the Mediterranean race in Spain, Italy and France speaks Romance languages, but it is, nevertheless, an argument of some weight.
Outside of Europe the Armenians and other Armenoid brachycephalic peoples of Asia Minor and the Iranian Highlands, all of Alpine race, together with a few isolated tribes of the Caucasus, speak Aryan languages and these peoples lie on the highroad along which knowledge of the metals and other cultural developments entered Europe.
If the Aryan language were invented and developed by these Armenoid Alpines we should be obliged to assume that they introduced it along with bronze culture into Europe about 3000 B. C. and taught the Nordics both their language and their metal culture. There are, however, in western Asia many Alpine peoples who do not speak Aryan languages and yet are Alpine in type, such as the Turcomans and in Asia Minor the so-called Turks are also largely Islamized Alpines of the Armenoid subspecies who speak Turki. There is no trace of Aryan speech south of the Caucasus until after 1700 B. C. and the Hittite language spoken before that date in central and eastern Asia Minor, although not yet clearly deciphered, was Anaryan to the best of our present knowledge. The Hittites themselves were probably ancestral to the living Armenians.
We are sufficiently acquainted with the languages of the ancient Mesopotamian countries to know that the speech of Accad and Sumer, of Susa and Media was agglutinative and that the languages of Assyria and of Palestine were Semitic. The speech of the Kassites was Anaryan, but they seem to have been in contact with the horse-using Nordics and some of their leaders bore Aryan names. The language of the shortlived empire of the Mitanni in the foothills south of Armenia is the only one about the character of which there can be serious doubt. There is, therefore, much negative evidence against the existence of Aryan speech in that part of the world earlier than its known introduction by Nordics.
If, then, the last great expansion into Europe of the Alpine race brought from Asia the Aryan mother tongue, as well as the knowledge of metals, we must assume that all the members of the Nordic race thereupon adopted synthetic speech from the Alpines.
We know that these Alpines reached Britain about 1800 B. C. and probably they had previously occupied much of Gaul, so that if they are to be credited with the introduction of the synthetic languages into western Europe, it is difficult to understand why we have no known trace of any form of Aryan speech in central Europe or west of the Rhine prior to 1000 B. C. while we have some, though scanty, evidence of Non-Aryan languages.
It may be said in favor of this claim of the Alpine race to be the original inventor of synthetic speech, that language is ever a measure of culture and the higher forms of civilization are greatly hampered by the limitations of speech imposed by the less highly evolved languages, namely, the monosyllabic and the agglutinative, which include nearly all the Non-Aryan languages of the world. It does not seem probable that barbarians, however fine in physical type and however well endowed with the potentiality of intellectual and moral development, dwelling as hunters in the bleak and barren north along the edge of the retreating glaciers and as nomad shepherds in the Russian grasslands, could have evolved a more complicated and higher form of articulate speech than the inhabitants of southwestern Asia, who many thousand years earlier were highly civilized and are known to have invented the arts of agriculture, metal working and domestication of animals, as well as of writing and pottery. Nevertheless, such seems to be the fact.
To summarize, it appears that a study of the Mediterranean race shows that so far from being purely European, it is equally African and Asiatic and that in the narrow coastal fringe of southern Persia, in India and even farther east the last strains of this race gradually fade into the Negroids through prolonged cross breeding. A similar inquiry into the origin and distribution of the Alpine subspecies shows clearly the fundamentally Asiatic origin of the type and that on its easternmost borders in central Asia it marches with the round skulled Mongols, and that neither the one nor the other was the inventor of Aryan speech.
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 extinct. 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.
Aryan 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 existence 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, untouched 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 Pre-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, Gaul 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 Mediterranean 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 same 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 Britons 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 of 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.