The YellowRaces.
race, and perhaps their most typical representatives are the Chinese. The type is a sufficiently familiar one. ‘The skull of the yellow race is rounded in form. The oval of the head is larger than with Europeans. The cheek-bones are very projecting; the cheeks rise towards the temples, so that the outer corners of the eyes are elevated; the eyelids seem half closed. The forehead is flat above the eyes. The bridge of the nose is flat, the chin short, the ears disproportionately large and projecting from the head. The colour of the skin is generally yellow, and in some branches turns to brown. There is little hair on the body; beard is rare. The hair of the head is coarse, and, like the eyes, almost always black.’[41]In the present day the different families of the globe have gone through the changes which time and variety of climate slowly bring about in all; and the yellow race has not escaped these influences. While some of its members have by a mixture with white races or by gradual improvement, reached a type not easily distinguishable from the European, others have, through the effect of climate, approached more nearly to the characteristics of the black family. We may, however, still class these divergent types under the head of the yellow race, which we consequently find extending over a vast portion of our globe. Round the North Pole the Eskimo, the Lapps, and the Finns form a belt of people belonging to this division of mankind. Over all Northern and Central Asia the various tribes of Mongolian or Turanian race inhabiting the plains of Siberia and of Tartary, and again the Thibetans, the Chinese, Siamese, and other kindred peoples of Eastern Asia, are members of this yellow family. From the Malay peninsula the same race has spread southward, passing from land to land over thecountless isles which cover the South Pacific, until they have reached the islands which lie around the Australian continent, the islands ofPolynesiain the South Pacific, and have mingled with the negro race that had preceded them there and that remains unmixed in theMelanesianislands. The Maoris, the inhabitants of New Zealand, belong to this yellow race; and the Australians,perhaps, represent a mixture of negro and yellow races. In all, this division of mankind covers an immense portion of the globe stretching from Greenland in a curved line, through North America and China, downwards to New Zealand, and again westward from China through Tartary or Siberia, up to Lapland in the north of Europe. And it must be added that many anthropologists consider the red races of America only a variety of this wide-spread yellow race.
The WhiteRaces.
From the results of the previous chapter we see that to the yellow race must be attributed all those peoples of Europe and Asia which speak agglutinative languages, and therefore that for the white race are left the inflected tongues. These it will be remembered, we divided into two great families, the Semitic and the Aryan or Japhetic. We thus see that from the earliest times to which we are able to point we have living in Europe and Asia these three divisions of the human family, whom some have looked upon as the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. What relationship the other excluded races of mankind, the black and red, bear to the Hamites, Shemites, and Japhetites, has not been suggested. It seems more reasonable to consider Noah as merely the ancestor of the white races, and, therefore, so far as our linguistic knowledge goes, of the Semitic and Aryan families of speech only. But outside the pureSemites there lived a race of a less pure nationality, springing, probably, from a mixture of Semites with earlier black and yellow races. These people we may distinguish as Hamites. A division of this race were the Cushites, the stock from which the Egyptian, the Chaldæan, and many of the Canaanite nations were mainly formed.
But though from the earliest times there were probably in Asia these three divisions of mankind, their relative position and importance was very different from what it is now. At the present time the Turanian races are everywhere shrinking and dwindling before the descendants of Japhet. At the moment at which I write it is the Aryan Slavs who are pushing the yellow-skinned Tartars farther and farther back in Siberia and Central Asia, and are endeavouring to push the Mongolian Turks from their last foothold in Europe.[42]The Tartar races have had their era of great conquest too, for to them belong those races—Huns, Avars, Magyars—who have spread such devastation in Europe, to them belong such conquerors as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timûr Lenk (Tamerlane). In the first few centuries after Mohammedism was introduced among them, the Turanians of Central Asia rose into power. Several different Tartar races in succession—Seljûks, Ayyûbites, Mongols (Moghuls), etc.—rose upon the ruins of the Arab Chalifate, and invaded India, Persia, Africa, and Europe. The last of these is the race of the Osmanlîs, or, as we call them simply, the Turks. Their days of conquest are past, and therefore, great as is the space which the Turanian people now occupy over the face of the globe, there is reason to believe that in early prehistoric times they were still more widely extended. In allprobability the men of the polished-stone age in Europe and Asia were of this yellow-skinned Mongolian type. We know that the human remains of this period seem to have come from a short and round-skulled people; and this roundness of the skull is one of the chief marks of the Mongolians as distinguished from the white races of mankind.
We know, too, that the earliest inhabitants of India belonged to a Turanian, and therefore to a yellow, race; and that Turanians mingled with one of the oldest historical Semitic peoples, and helped to produce the civilization of the Chaldæans. And as, moreover, we find in various parts of Asia traces of a civilization similar to that of Europe during the latter part of the polished-stone age, it seems not unreasonable, in casting our eyes back upon the remotest antiquity on which research sheds any light, to suppose an early widespread Turanian or Mongolian family extending over the greater part of Europe and Asia. These Turanians were in various stages of civilization or barbarism, from the rude condition of the hunters and fishers of the Danish shell-mounds to a higher state reigning in Central and Southern Asia, and similar to that which was afterwards attained towards the end of the polished-stone age in Europe. The earliest home of these pure Turanians was probably a region lying somewhere to the east of Lake Aral. ‘There,’ says a writer from whom we have already quoted, ‘from very remote antiquity they had possessed a peculiar civilization, characterized by gross Sabeism, peculiarly materialistic tendencies, and complete want of moral elevation; but at the same time, by an extraordinary development in some branches of knowledge, great progress in material culture in some respects, while in others they remained in an entirely rudimentary state. This strange and incomplete civilization exercised over great partof Asia an absolute preponderance, lasting, according to the historian Justin, 1500 years.’[43]
As regards its pre-historic remains, we know that this civilization, or half-civilization, was especially distinguished by the raising of enormous grave-mounds and altar-stones, and it must have been characterized by strong, if not by the most elevated, religious ideas, and by a peculiar reverence paid to the dead. Now, we have seen that it is by characteristics very similar to these that the civilization of Egypt is distinguished, and Egypt, of all nations which have possessed a history, is the oldest.
Egypt.
These are reasons, therefore, for considering the Egyptian civilization, which is in some sort the dawn of history in the world, as the continuation—the improvement, no doubt, but still the continuation—of the half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on from the Turanian to the Cushite peoples. We may look upon this very primitive form of culture as spreading first through Asia, and later on outwards to the west. Four thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the dates disputed over as those of Menes, the first recorded King of Egypt.[44]And Egypt even at this early time seems to have emerged from the age of stone, and been possessed, at least, of bronze, possibly of iron. The later date, 4000B.C., probably marks the beginning of the stone-age life corresponding to the more extensive remains in Europe. It was therefore with this early culture as it has been with subsequent fuller civilizations—
‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelisIllic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.’
‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelisIllic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.’
‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelisIllic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.’
The Egyptian civilization which (for us) begins with Menes, say 5000B.C., reaches its zenith under the third and fourth dynasty, under the builders of the pyramids some eight hundred or a thousand years afterwards. Then in its full strength the Egyptian life rises out of the past like a giant peak, or like its own pyramids out of the sandy plains. It is cold and rigid, like a mass of granite, but it is so great that it seems to defy all efforts of time. Even when the Egyptians first come before us everything seems to point them out as a people already old; whether it be their enormous tombs and temples, their elaborately ordered social life, or their complicated religious system, with its long mysterious ritual. For all this, the Egyptian life and thought present two elements of character which may well spring from the union of two distinct nationalities. Its enormous tombs and temples and its excessive care for the bodies of the dead—for what are the pyramids but exaggerations of the stone-age grave-mounds, and the temples but improvements upon the megalithic dolmens?—recall the era of stone-age culture. The evident remains of an early animal worship show a descent from a low form of religion, such a religion as we find among Turanian or African races. But with these co-existed some much grander features. The Egyptians were intellectual in the highest degree,—in the highest degree then known to the world; and, unlike the stone-age men, succeeded in other than merely mechanical arts. In astronomy they were rivalled by but one nation, the Chaldæans; in painting and sculpture they were at the head of the world, and were as nearly the inventors of history as of writing itself,—notquiteof either, as will be seen hereafter. Mixed, too, with their animal worship were some loftyreligious conceptions stretching not only beyondit—the animal worship—but beyond that ‘natural’ polytheism which was the earliest creed of our own ancestors the Aryans, and a noble hope and ambition for the future of the soul. Were these higher features due to the influx of Semitic blood? It seems likely, when we remember how from the same race came a chosen people to whom the world is indebted for all that is greatest in religious thought.
Chaldæa.
During the fourth and fifth dynasties, or some three or four thousand years before Christ, Egypt and the Egyptians do, as we have said, rise up distinctly out of the region of mere conjecture. Three or four thousand years before Christ—five or six thousand years ago: this is no small distance through which to look back to the place where the first mountain-peak of history appears in view. What was doing in the other unseen regions round this mountain? Only probably in one other part of the globe could there have been found at this date a civilization in the smallest degree comparable to that of the Egyptians. This region is the valley of the Tigrus and Euphrates.
The Tigro-Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, was in early days as regards appearance and position very similar to the land of Egypt. These two territories are in fact two oases in an immense band of desert, which stretches from the western edge of the great Sahara (which is almost the edge of Africa itself) in a curved sweep, through part of Arabia, part of Persia, up to the great plains of central Asia; in other words, it stretches across more than one-third of the circumference of the globe. The Tigro-Euphrates oasis which the Greeks called Mesopotamia is in the Bible called Chaldæa or the country of the Chaldees. In days known to history, its inhabitants were a mixed people, of whomthe oldest element was undoubtedly Turanian; and this section of the nation had probably descended from the country afterwards called Iran to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. These people are called by modern scholars the Accadians, or the Shûmîro-Accadians.[45]They are the Accad of the Bible. Mixed with them were a people of Semitic, or half-Semitic origin, whose language is closely allied to the Hebrew and the Aramæan. If we take the Biblical name for them, we should call them Hamites or Cushites. But the best ethnological name would be that of Aramæans.
These two races mingled, and formed the nation of Chaldæans as known to history; and in time the Semitic element predominated over the Turanian. Nevertheless it was the Accadians who had brought to the common stock the earliest elements of civilization. Their earliest tombs show them in possession of both the metals bronze and iron, though of the latter in such small quantities that it took with them the position of a precious metal; ornaments were made from it as much as from gold. What is far more important, the Accadians possessed a hieroglyphic writing similar in character to that of the Egyptians, and, after their junction with the Semite people, that developed into a syllabic alphabet.[46]We may date the fusion of the Accadian and Aramæan peoples at about 4000B.C.
It is in this country, be it remembered, in the Tigro-Euphrates basin, that the Bible places the earliest history of the human race. ‘And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.’[47]Here, too, is placed the building of Babel, and the subsequent dispersion of the human family.Here ruled Nimrod, ‘the son of Cush,’ the first of the kings of this region of whom any authentic mention is made; though we have dynastic lists of supernatural beings who were supposed to have reigned in Chaldæa in far distant ages of the world, as we have in the case of Egypt. Even of Nimrod’s reign no monumental records have yet come to light. The cities which Nimrod built, says the Bible, were Erech [in Accadian, Ounoug, or Ûrûk] and Ur [Accad. Urû]—these two are the present Warkah and Mugheir,—Accad [Agadê] and Calneh. But the earliest human king of whom we have anything like an authentic date is either Sargon I., who may have reigned as early as 3800B.C., or Ûrbagûs, who seems to have ruled over all Mesopotamia, contemporaneously with the fifth Egyptian dynasty (3900 or 2900B.C.).
The Chaldean buildings of this period, like the contemporary Egyptian ones, are of gigantic proportions, and like them seem to recall bygone days, the grandiose conceptions of the later stone-age, thosetumuliand cromlechs which, spread over the face of the world, most undoubtedly have suggested to subsequent nations of mankind the belief in a giant race which had preceded them on earth—
‘The far-famed hold,Piled by the hands of giantsFor god-like kings of old.’
‘The far-famed hold,Piled by the hands of giantsFor god-like kings of old.’
‘The far-famed hold,Piled by the hands of giantsFor god-like kings of old.’
And thus, as has already been often said, this earliest civilization in the world looks back to pre-historic days as much as forward to historic ones.
Close beside Chaldæa, in the more mountainous country to the east, but not far from the Persian Gulf, rose another civilization, that of the Elamites, which may possibly have been not much later than the Chaldæan. This, too, we may believe, was in its origin Turanian. The capital ofthe country of Elam was Susa. Between 2300 and 2280B.C., a king of Susa, Kurdur-Nankunty, conquered the reigning king of Chaldæa, and henceforward the two districts were incorporated into one country. The accession of strength thus gained to his crown induced one of the kings of the Elamitic line, Kudur-lagomer (Chedorlaomer) by name, to aspire towards a wider empire (c. 2200B.C.). He sent his armies against the Semitic nations on his west, who were now beginning to settle down in cities, and to enjoy their share of the civilization of Egypt and Chaldæa. These he subdued, but after sixteen years they rebelled; and it was after a second expedition to punish their recalcitrancy, wherein he had conquered the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and had among the prisoners taken Lot, the nephew of Abraham, that Chedorlaomer was pursued and defeated by the patriarch. ‘And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.’[48]
The conquest of a powerful Chaldæan king by a handful of wandering Semites seems extraordinary, and might have sounded a note of warning to the ear of the Chaldæans. Their kingdom was destined soon to be overthrown by another Semitic people. After a duration of about half a thousand years for the Elamite kingdom, and some seven hundred years since the time of Nimrod, the Chaldæan dynasty was overthrown and succeeded by an Arabian one,that is, by a race of nomadic Shemites from the Arabian plains; and after two hundred and forty-five years they in their turn succumbed to another more powerful people of the same Semitic race, the Assyrians. The empire thus founded upon the ruins of the old Chaldæan was one of the greatest of the ancient world, as we well know from the records which meet us in the Bible. Politically it may be said to have balanced the power of Egypt. But the stability of this monarchy rested upon a basis much less firm than that of Egypt; the southern portion—the old Chaldæa—of which Babylon was the capital, was always ready for revolt, and after about seven hundred years the Babylonians and Medes succeeded in overthrowing their former conquerors. All this belongs to history—or at least to chronicle—and is therefore scarcely a part of our present inquiry.
To these primitive civilizations of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Susa we might, if we could put faith in native records, be inclined to add a fourth.
China.
TheChineseprofess to extend their lists of dynasties seven, eight, or even ten thousand years backward, but there is nothing on which to rest such extravagant pretensions. Their earliest known book is believed to date from the twelfth century before Christ. It is therefore not probable that they possessed the art of writing more than fifteen hundred years before our era, and before writing is invented there can be no reliable history. The best record of early timesthenis to be found in the popular songs of a country, and of these China possessed a considerable number, which were collected into a book—theBook of Odes—by their sage Confucius.[49]The picture which these odes present is of a society so very different from that of the time from which their earliest book—theBook of Changes—dates,that we cannot refuse to credit it with a high antiquity. From the songs we learn that before China coalesced into the monarchy which has lasted so many years, its inhabitants lived in a sort of feudal state, governed by a number of petty princes and lords. The pastoral life which distinguished the surrounding Turanian nations had already been exchanged for a settled agricultural one, to which houses, and all the civilization which these imply, had long been familiar. For the rest, their life seems to have been then, as now, a simple, slow-moving life, not devoid of piety and domestic affection. But it should be mentioned here that recent researches seem to point to the conclusion, strange as it may appear, that the Chinese civilization is closely connected with that of the Accadians, and may have had an origin from some contact with the Accadian peoples in their earliest homes in Central Asia. In any case it hardly seems likely that this can be classed as the fourth civilization which may have existed in the world when the pyramids were being built. But it is without doubt after these three the next oldest of the civilizations which the world has known. It seems to be remote alike from the half-civilization of the other Mongolian people of the stone age, and from the mixed Turanian-Semitic civilizations of Egypt and Chaldæa.
To these early civilizations in the old world, may we add any from the new, and believe in a great antiquity of the highest civilization of theredrace? The trace of an early civilization in Mexico and Peru, bearing many remarkable points of resemblance to the civilization of Chaldæa, is undoubted. Thismayhave been passed on by the Chinese at a very early date. But there is nothing to show that the identity in some of the features of their culture extended to an identity in their respective epochs.
Assyrians,Phœnicians,Hebrews.
A greater destiny, though a more tardy development, awaited the pure Semitic and Japhetic races. Among the former we might notice many nations which started into life during the thousand years following that date of 3000B.C., which we have taken as our starting-point. Of the Assyrians we have already spoken. The next most conspicuous stand the Phœnicians, who, either in their early home upon the seacoast of Syria, or in their second home, the sea itself, or in one of their countless colonies, came into contact with almost every one of the great nations of antiquity, from the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Israelites, to the Greeks and Romans.
But it is upon the life and history of the nomadic Shemites, and among them of one chosen people, that our thoughts chiefly rest. Among the prouder citied nations which inhabited the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, dwelt a numerous people, more or less nomadic in their habits, under the patriarchal form of government which belonged to their mode of life. Among such a people the chief of one particular family or clan was summoned by a Divine call to escape from the influence of the idolatrous nations around, and to live that vagrant pastoral life which was in such an age most fitted for the needs of purity and religious contemplation. It is as something like a wandering Bedouin chieftain that we must picture Abraham, while we watch him, now joining with one small city king against another, now driven by famine to travel with his flocks and herds as far as Egypt. Then again he returns, and settles in the fertile valley of the Jordan, where Lot leaves him, and, seduced by the luxuries of a town life, quits his flocks and herds and settles in Sodom, till driven out again by thedestruction of that city. And we are not now reading dry dynastic lists, but the very life and thought of an early time.[50]To us—whose lives are so unsimple—the mere picture of this simple nomadic life of early days would have an interest and a charm; but it has a double charm and interest viewed by the light of the high destiny to which Abraham and his descendants were called. Plying the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade, these people lived poor and despised beside the rich monarchies of Egypt or Chaldæa; one more example, if one more were needed, how wide apart lie the empires of spiritual and of material things.
Up to very late times the Children of Israel bore many of the characteristics of a nomadic people. It was as a nation of shepherds that they were excluded from the national life of Egypt. For long years after their departure thence they led a wandering life; and though, when they entered Palestine, they found cities ready for their occupation—for the nations which they dispossessed were for the most part settled people, builders of cities—and inhabited them, and, growing corn and wine, settled partly into an agricultural life, yet the chief wealth of the nation still probably consisted in their flocks, and the greater portion of the people still dwelt in tents. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the people of the north, for even so late as the separation, when the ten tribes determined to free themselves from the tyranny of Rehoboam, we know how Jeroboam cried out, ‘To your tents, O Israel.’ ‘SoIsrael departed unto their tents,’ the narrative continues. After the separation we are told that Jeroboam built several cities in his own dominions. The history of the Israelites generally may be summed up as the constant expression and the ultimate triumph of a wish to exchange their simple life and theocratic government for one which might place them more on a level with their neighbour states. At first it is their religion which they wish to change, whether for the gorgeous ritual of Egypt or for the vicious creeds of Asiatic nations; and after a while, madly forgetful of the tyrannies of a Ramses or a Tiglath-Pileser, they desire a king to reign over them in order that they may ‘take their place’ among the other Oriental monarchies. Still their first two kings have rather the character of military leaders, the monarchy not having become hereditary; the second, the warrior-poet, the greatest of Israel’s sons, was himself in the beginning no more than a shepherd. But under his son Solomon the monarchical government becomes assured, the country attains (like Rome under Augustus) the summit of its splendour and power, and then enters upon its career of slow and inevitable decline.
The Aryans.
Now let us turn to the Japhetic people—the Aryans. It is curious that the date of three thousand years before Christ, from which we started in our glance over the world, should also be considered about that of the separation of the Aryan people. Till that time they had continued to live—since when we know not—in their early home near the Oxus and Jaxartes, and we are able by the help of comparative philology to gain some little picture of their life at the time immediately preceding the separation. We have already seen how this picture is obtained; how, taking a word out of one of the Aryan languages and making allowance for the changed formwhich it would wear in the other tongues, if we find the same word with the same meaning reappearing in all the languages of the family, we may fairly assume that thethingfor which it stands was known to the old Aryans before the separation. If, again, we find a word which runs through all the European languages, but is not found in the Sanskrit and Persian, we guess that in this case the thing was known only to the Yavanas, the first separating body of younger Aryans, from whom it will be remembered all the European branches are descended. Thus we get a very interesting list of words, and the means of drawing a picture of the life of our primæval ancestors. The earliest appearance of the Aryans is as a pastoral people, for words derived from the pastoral life have left the deepest traces on their language. Daughter, we saw, meant originally ‘the milker;’ the name of money, and of booty, in many Aryan languages is derived from that of cattle;[51]words which have since come to mean lord or prince originally meant the guardian of the cattle;[52]and others which have expanded into words for district or country, or even for the whole earth, meant at first simply the pasturage. So not without reason did we say that the king had grown out of the head of the family, and the pens of sheepfolds expanded into walled cities.
But though a pastoral, the ancient Aryans do not seem to have been a nomadic race, and in this respect they differed from the Shemites of the same period, and from the Turanians, by whom they were surrounded. For the Turaniancivilizationhad pretty well departed from Asia by that time,and having taught its lessons to Egypt and Chaldæa, lived on, if at all, in Europe only. There it faded before the advance of the Celts and other Aryan people, who came bringing with them the use of bronze weapons and the civilization which belonged to the bronze age. The stone age lingered in the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as we thought, till about two thousand years before Christ or perhaps later, and it may be that this date,B.C.2000, which is also nearly that of Abraham, represents within a few hundred years the entry of the Aryans into Europe. The Greeks are generally believed to have appeared in Greece, or at least in Asia Minor, about the nineteenth century before our era, and they were probably preceded by the Latin branch of the Aryan family, as well as by the Celts in the north of Europe. So that the period of one thousand years which intervened between our starting-point and the call of Abraham, the starting-point of the Hebrew history, and which saw the growth and change of many great Asiatic monarchies, must for the Aryans be only darkly filled up by the gradual separation of the different nations, and their unknown life between this separation and the time when they again become vaguely known to history.
Summary.
The general result, then, of our inquiries into the grouping of nations of the world in pre-historic times may be sketched in rough outline. At a very early date, say 4000 or 5000B.C., arose an extensive Turanian half-civilization, which, flourishing probably in Central and Southern Asia, spread in time and through devious routes to India and China upon one side, on the other side to Europe. This was, at first at any rate, a stone age, and was especially distinguished by the raising of great stones and grave-mounds. This civilization was communicatedto the Egyptians and Chaldæans, a mixed people—Semite, Turanian, Ethiopian—who were not strangers to the use of metals. As early as 3000 years before our era the civilization of Egypt had attained its full growth, and had probably even then a considerable past. Chaldæa, too, and the neighbouring Elam were both advanced out of their primitive state; possibly so also were China, Peru, and Mexico. But the pure Semite peoples, the ancestors of the Jews, and the Aryans, were still pastoral races, the one by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the other by the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. The first of these continued pastoral and nomadic for hundreds of years, but about this time the Western Aryans separated from those of the East, and soon after added some use of agriculture to their shepherd life. Then between 3000 and 2000B.C.came the separation of the various peoples of the Western Aryans and their migration towards Europe, where they began to appear at the latter date. After all the Western Aryans had left the East, the older Aryans seem to have lived on for some little time together, and at last to have separated into the nations of Iranians and Hindus, the first migrating southward, and the second crossing the Hindoo-Koosh and descending into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges. Thence they drove away or exterminated most of the older Turanian inhabitants, as their brethren had a short time before done to the Turanians whom they found in Europe. Such, so far as we can surmise, were in rough outline the doings of the different kindreds and nations and languages of the old world in times long before history.
Formation ofsettlements.
Wehave seen, so far, that the early traces of man’s existence point to a gradual improvement in the state of his civilization, to the acquirement of fresh knowledge, and the practice of fresh arts. The rude stone implements of the early drift-period are replaced by the more carefully manufactured ones of the polished-stone age, and these again are succeeded by implements of bronze and of iron. By degrees also the arts of domesticating animals and of tilling the land are learnt; and by steps, which we shall hereafter describe, the art of writing is developed from the early pictorial rock-sculptures. Now, in order that each step in this process of civilization should be preserved for the benefit of the next generation, and that the people of each period should start from the vantage-ground obtained by their predecessors, there must have been frequent intercommunication between the different individuals who lived at the same time; so that the discovery or improvement of each one should be made known to others, and become part of the common stock of human knowledge. In the very earliest times, then, men probably lived collected together in societies of greater or less extent. We know that this is the case now with all savage tribes;and as in many respects the early races of the drift-beds seem to have resembled some now existing savage tribes in their mode of life, employing, to a certain extent, the same implements, and living on the same sort of food, this adds to the probability of their gregariousness. The fact, too, that the stone implements of the first stone period have generally been found collected near together in particular places, indicates these places as the sites of early settlements. Beyond this, however, we can say very little of the social state of these early stone-age people. Small traces of any burial-ground or tomb of so great an antiquity have yet been found, and all that we can say of them with any certainty is, that their life must have been very rude and primitive. Although they were collected together in groups, these groups could not have been large, and each must have been generally situated at a considerable distance from the next, for the only means of support for the men of that time was derived from hunting and fishing. Now it requires a very large space of land to support a man who lives entirely by hunting; and this must have been more particularly the case in those times when the weapons used by the huntsman were so rude, that it is difficult for us now to understand how he could ever have succeeded in obtaining an adequate supply of food by such means. Supposing that the same extent of territory were required for the support of a man in those times as was required in Australia by the native population, the whole of Europe could only have supported about seventy-six thousand inhabitants, or about one person to every four thousand now in existence.
Next to the cave-dwellings the earliest traces of anything like fixed settlements which have been found are the ‘kitchen-middens.’ The extent of some of these clearlyshows that they mark the dwelling-place of considerable numbers of people collected together. But here only the rudest sort of civilization could have existed, and the bonds of society must have been as primitive and simple as they are among those savage tribes at the present time, who support existence in much the same way as the shell-mound people did. In order that social customs should attain any development, the means of existence must be sufficiently abundant and easily procurable to permit some time to be devoted to the accumulation of superfluities, or of supplies not immediately required for use. The life of the primitive hunter and fisher is so precarious and arduous, that he has rarely either the opportunity or the will for any other employment than the supply of his immediate wants. The very uncertainty of that supply seems rather to create recklessness than providence, and the successful chase is generally followed by a period of idleness and gluttony, till exhaustion of supplies once more compels men to activity. That the shell-mound people were subject to such fluctuations of supply we may gather from the fact that bones of foxes and other carnivorous animals are frequently found in those mounds; and as these animals are rarely eaten by human beings, except under the pressure of necessity, we may conclude that the shell-mound people were driven to support existence by this means, through their ill-success in fishing and hunting, and their want of any accumulation of stores to supply deficiencies.
The next token of social improvement that is observable is in the tumuli, or grave-mounds, which may be referred to a period somewhat later than that of the shell-mounds. These contain indications that the people who constructed them possessed some important elements necessary to theirsocial progress. They had a certain amount of time to spare after providing for their daily wants, and they did not spend that time exclusively in idleness. The erection of these mounds must have been a work of considerable labour, and they often contain highly finished implements and ornaments, which must have been put there for the use of the dead. They are evidences that no little honour was sometimes shown to the dead; so that some sort of religion must have existed amongst the people who constructed the ancient grave-mounds. The importance of this element in early society is evident if we inquire further for whom and by whom these mounds were erected. Now, they are not sufficiently numerous, and are far too laborious in their construction, to have been the ordinary tombs of the common people. They were probably tombs erected for chiefs or captains of tribes to whom the tribes were anxious to pay especial honour. We do not know at all how these separate tribes or clans came into existence, and what bonds united their members together; but so soon as we find a tribe erecting monuments in honour of its chiefs, we conclude that it has attained a certain amount of compactness and solidity in its internal relations. Amongst an uneducated people there is probably no stronger tie than that of a common faith, or a common subject of reverence. It is impossible not to believe, then, that the people who made these great, and in some cases elaborately constructed tombs, would continue ever after to regard them as in some sort consecrated to the great chiefs who were buried under them. Each tribe would have its own specially sacred tombs, and perhaps we may here see a germ of that ancestor-worship which may be traced in every variety of religious belief.
It has been supposed by some that a certain amount of
Barter.
commerce or barter existed in the later stone age. The reason for this opinion is that implements of stone are frequently found in localities where the stone of which they are made is not native. At Presigny le Grand, in France, there exists a great quantity of a particular kind of flint which seems to have been very convenient for the manufacture of implements; for the fields there are covered with flint-flakes and chips which have been evidently knocked off in the process of chipping out the knives, and arrow-heads, and hatchets which the stone-age men were so fond of. Now, implements made of this particular kind of flint are found in various localities, some of which are at a great distance from Presigny; and it has therefore been supposed that Presigny was a sort of manufactory for flint weapons which were bartered to neighbouring tribes, and by them again perhaps to others further off; and so these weapons gradually got dispersed. But it is also possible that the tribes of the interior, who would subsist almost exclusively by hunting, and would therefore be of a more wandering disposition than those on the sea-coast, may have paid occasional visits to this flint reservoir for the purpose of supplying themselves with weapons of a superior quality, just as the American Indians are said to go to the quarry of Coteau des Prairies on account of the particular kind of stone which is found there.
In any case, whatever system of barter was carried on at that time was of a very primitive kind, and not of frequent enough occurrence to produce any important effects on the social condition of the people. That that condition had already advanced to some extent beyond its original rudeness, shows us that there existed, at all events, some capacity for improvement among the tribes which theninhabited Europe; but, when we compare them with modern tribes of savages, whose apparent condition is much the same as theirs was, and who do not seem to have made any advance for a long period, or, so far as we can judge, to be capable of making any advance by their own unassisted efforts, we cannot but conclude that the stone-age people, if left to themselves, would only have emerged out of barbarism by very slow degrees. Now we know that, about the time when bronze implements first began to be used, some very important changes also occurred in the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Europe. A custom of burning the dead superseded then the older one of burial; domestic animals of various sorts seem to have been introduced, and the bronze implements themselves show, both in the elaborateness of their workmanship and the variety of their designs, that a great change had come over European civilization. The greatness and completeness of this change, the fact that there are no traces of those intermediate steps which we should naturally expect to find in the development of the arts, denote that this change was due to some invading population which brought with it the arts that had been perfected in its earlier home; and other circumstances point to the East as the home from which this wave of civilization proceeded. Language has taught us that at various times there have been large influxes of Aryan populations into Europe. To the first of these Aryan invaders probably was due the introduction of bronze into Europe, together with the various social changes which appear to have accompanied its earliest use. To trace then the rise and progress of the social system which the Aryans had adopted previous to their appearance in Europe, we must go to their old Asiatic home, and see if any of the steps by which this system hadsprung up, or any indications of its nature, may be extracted from the records of antiquity.
The patriarchalfamily.
Hitherto scarcely any attempt has been made to discover or investigate pre-historic monuments in the East. We can no longer therefore appeal to the records of early tombs or temples, to indications taken from early seats of population; but though as yet this key to Aryan history has not been made available, we have another guide ready to take us by the hand, and show us what sort of lives our ancestors used to lead in their far-off Eastern home. That guide is the science of Language, which can teach us a great deal about this if we will listen to its lessons: a rich mine of knowledge which has as yet been only partially explored, but one from which every day new information is being obtained about the habits and customs of the men of pre-historic times.
All that we know at present of the Aryan race indicates that its social organization originated in a group which is usually called the Patriarchal Family, the members of which were all related to each other either by blood or marriage. At the head of the family was the patriarch, the eldest male descendant of its founder; its other members consisted of all the remaining males descended on the father’s side from the original ancestor, their wives, and such of the women, also descended on the father’s side from the same ancestor, as remained still unmarried. To show more exactly what people were members of the ancient patriarchal family, we will trace such a family for a couple of generations from the original founder. Suppose, then, the original founder married, and with several children, both sons and daughters. All the sons would continue members of this family. The daughters would only continue members untilthey married, when they would cease to be members of the family of their birth, and become members of their respective husbands’ families. So when the sons of the founder married, their wives would become members of the family; and such of their children as were sons would be members, and such as were daughters would be members only until they married; and so on through succeeding generations. On the founder’s death he would be succeeded as patriarch by his eldest son. On the eldest son’s death, he would be succeeded byhiseldest son, if he had a son; and if not, then by his next brother. The patriarchal family also included in its circle, in later times at all events, slaves and other people, who, although perhaps not really relations at all, wereadoptedinto the household, assumed the family name, and were looked upon for all purposes as if its actual members. This little group of individuals seems originally to have existed entirely independent of any external authority. It supported itself by its own industry, and recognized no other law or authority than its own. The one source of authority within this little state was the patriarch, who was originally regarded, not only as the owner of all the property of which the family was possessed, but also as having unlimited power over the different individuals of which it was composed. All the members lived together under the same roof, or within the same enclosure. No member could say that any single thing was his own property. Everything belonged to the family, and every member was responsible to the patriarch for his actions.