Some things he could understand: he learned to avoid or to ward off many dangers. Others seemed altogether beyond his understanding or control. Here he could only wonder; but the wise old Greeks knew that wonder was the mother of wisdom. He wondered at storm, lightning, hail, and flood; at disease and death, and a hundred other things. He sat in the mouth of his cave and watched that strange creature fire devouring the wood and sending smoke and sparks skyward. He thought a very little in a dull, stupid way, dozed and dreamed and awaked to wonder again. Or he saw fire raging through the forest and fled for his life. But it was warming and fascinating, and somehow akin to himself. Did it not devour wood and lap up water on the hearth?
He seems to have come to feel rather than recognize that he was surrounded by invisible powers, in some respects like himself but vastly more powerful, who knew what he was doing, and who would hurt him if he did certain things and might help him if he did others. Certain places were to be strictly avoided, certain objects must not be touched, certain things must never be done, or could be permitted onlyat certain times. They were taboo. He has started on a long journey of exploration, experiment, and discovery.
How had he come to believe this? Largely through hard experience of nature’s buffets, whenever he acted contrary to this hypothesis or feeling. His religion was largely one of fear fitted for a savage mind, though not without a mingling of hope.
Of course in us cultured folk perfect love, sentimentality, softness of fibre, heedlessness, forgetfulness, and general superficiality of life—to make a very inadequate list—have combined to cast out fear, “for fear hath torment”; and we thank God loudly that we are so much wiser than our benighted ancestors. Even our New England fathers feared God, though they feared nothing else, but we fear only everything else except God and law. But the unlucky scientific wight living and working in the shadow of adamantine law remains in hopeless bondage to fear.
“Nach ewigen ehernen, grossen GesetzenMussen wir alle unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden.”156
“Nach ewigen ehernen, grossen GesetzenMussen wir alle unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden.”156
“Nach ewigen ehernen, grossen GesetzenMussen wir alle unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden.”156
These great powers might not necessarily be hopelessly hostile. They might be appeased or won over, possibly controlled. What could hedo to please them? For something must be done. Here ritual arises.157Possibly he offers to one or more of them a share in the feast which he so much enjoys after a successful hunt. In time this may become a sacrifice, sent up and out on the wings of fire.158Or he practises a wind or rain dance as the outlet and expression of his intense desire; and to awaken, encourage, and help the powers of these elements. He holds a hunting-dance to rehearse and gain power for the killing of the bear. Call it objectification of his heart’s desire, or magic if you prefer. Magic and religion grow up side by side, and probably from the same root in these early stages: as alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy will spring up later.
The pictures on the cave-walls of France probably had a magical or religious purpose. Here we find very few representations of human beings. But in a rock-painting at Cogul, possibly Neolithic though probably older, we see a group of women apparently engaged in some rite of magic or religion. The occurrence of amulets also does not surprise us.
We cannot make a study of primitive ritual magic and religion, their origin, form, and content. But even our hasty glance shows us thatman had been wondering and thinking about this subject during millennia before our Neolithic time, had been forced to accept many profound convictions, containing germs of sublime truth overlaid, like our own, with many errors; he had elaborated a system of ritual, and had travelled far along the road of religious experience and discoveries long before this comparatively recent epoch.
The conspicuous features of the religion of this ancient period of primeval stupidity, orUrdummheit, to borrow the German word, were the host of invisible powers or dæmons, and the law of taboo, the forbidden thing. Breach of taboo rendered not only the individual lawbreaker but the whole tribe, however innocent, liable to punishment. The whole community was responsible for every deed of any and every one of its members, and suffered or prospered accordingly. When Agamemnon had wronged the priest of Apollo, the god shot his arrows not at Agamemnon but throughout the innocent Greek host. The children of Israel were routed at Ai, because Achan had taken the devoted or forbidden thing. This stage of tribal responsibility seems to be practically universal. It gave the law an iron grip on the people, tamed them, and made them march in lock-step, a necessarystage of terrible discipline. But only under the protection and stimulus of this tribal feeling of common responsibility and resulting tribal conscience could the individual conscience be gradually awakened and developed, and finally break through the cake or crust of custom into freedom and light.
All these forces and influences were acting throughout the Neolithic and later periods, and are still with us. Perhaps we can gain a tolerably distinct and correct view of Neolithic religion among the Mediterranean peoples by a glance at the ancient Greek mysteries. Students of Greek art and literature quite naturally have been very slow to take interest in these crude, often ugly and indecent, rituals. But for this very reason the primitive stands out all the more sharply defined against the brilliant, beautiful, artistic Olympian religion of Greek art and literature, and particularly of Homer. Students like Professor Murray could hardly be expected to explore these lower strata with great sympathy. For this very reason, as somewhat unwilling witnesses to whatever is good or great in primitive Greek ritual, their testimony is all the more valuable, though probably hardly as just as that of Miss Harrison.159We shall follow mainly Professor Murray’s vivid portrayal.160In hisSaturnia Regnahe pictures the ritual and belief of the ancient Greeks before the arrival of Achæans or Hellenes in any strict sense of the word. Strictly speaking, it is a description of the religion of the Bronze Age during the earlier part of the second millennium B. C. It has been growing, developing, and undergoing modifications since Neolithic time, but in all its essential features it is ancient.
We find here very few traces of the chief Olympian divinities, which belong to a later age than the objects of worship or cult of these ancient peoples whom we venture to call Pelasgi. They worshipped powers or dæmons in indefinite numbers, but with no individual names: represented, if at all, by emblems or symbols, very rarely in bodily human form. Of these spirits of death, disease, madness, and calamity there were “thousands upon thousands, from whom man can never escape or hide.” So much is mainly a heritage from Paleolithic times. But the conception of spirit has grown more clear, distinct, and elevated, as we saw in our study of burial rites.
But Neolithic men lived in communities and devoted themselves largely to tillage of theground and to raising sheep, goats, swine, and cattle. Their life was still precarious. “Their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground. All the while they knew almost nothing of the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defilement. It is this state of things that explains the curious cruelty of agricultural works, which like most cruelty had its roots in terror, terror of the breach of taboo—the ‘Forbidden Thing.’”
Neolithic man, with his new discoveries and industries, had given new hostages to fortune, and a new and wider scope of application to the old doctrine of taboo and of tribal responsibility. This strengthened the hold of the priest or magician on the hopes, fears, and faith of his people. The law is going deeper as well as wider. There arises an individual feeling of pollution and of the need of expiation which will blaze out in the oldest Greek tragedies as almost a veritable sense of sin. We might almost say that a sense of morality toward the spirit world is now appearing in a religion previously almost or quite unmoral. We may easily overestimate the extent and power of the change, but we can hardly be mistaken in recognizing its dawn and the vast germinal possibilities of this dim feeling or conception.
In agriculture and throughout nature seed-time was followed by harvest, fall, and winter’s gloom and death. Then in the next spring there was a return, a rebirth or a resurrection. If the seed failed to come up, if the blade withered or was blighted, it was because the vegetation spirit or dæmon had failed to reappear or had been reborn weak or sickly, and all this because some one had broken taboo, had touched the forbidden thing. This must be prevented at all cost, they must help the spirit. Hence there must be every year a time of purification, of renovation, when the old garments and utensils and everything which could carry the pollution of death were cast off or cleansed.
All these conclusions, and some others of equal importance to which we will return later, are expressed or symbolized in the great Dromena, festivals, mysteries, or whatever you may call these rites of pre-Homeric Greece. Then, for a time, they are partially, though never totally, eclipsed, by the brilliant beauty of the Olympian religion with its glorious temples, statues, and other works of art.
The Olympian gods had conquered the world. They practise neither agriculture nor industry, nor any honest work. They fight and feast and drink and play. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. The Olympian religion hadits time and place, and did its work. It swept out many indecent features of the older cults, many superstitions and abuses. It suited the Achæans and their civilization exactly, and we can never forget its “sheer beauty,” But it went bankrupt, lost its hold on men’s minds and hearts, failed and faded out. Professor Murray compares its end to that of a garden of rare exotic flowers overrun by the rank weeds which it had temporarily displaced. Miss Harrison more justly compares it to a flower withering because cut off from its roots.
There was vastly more vitality in the ancient crude symbols and chaos of conceptions than in the ordered and artistic Olympian hierarchy with its marvellous representations of the gods in human or superhuman form and beauty. Even its art and literature could not save it. It had lost its mysticism. The old Neolithic religion, handed down by peasants and artisans reoccupied the field, transformed sometimes almost beyond recognition, like the Ugly Duckling of the fairy tale. It returned triumphant through sheer power of unlimited vitality and adaptability. Plato draws his finest illustrations from its mysteries, out of which, also, the Greek drama arose. Paul quotes from them or from a similar stratum of belief.
Some of the many sources of its vitality are obvious. It was rooted in the firm conviction of the existence of a spiritual world toward and into which its every rootlet was forcing its way and from which it drew nourishment and power. We might better change the illustration and say that it was slowly developing a spiritual eye which peered into a higher world and developed in keenness and clearness of vision in response to the higher pulsations. By patient experiment and experience, which produced a hope that could not make ashamed and a faith in which hope and experiment combined, it was feeling its way into spiritual knowledge. It knew nothing of practical science or of material cause and effect. But its world pulsated with the universal life. It recognized the law of forbidden things and the sure penalty of law-breaking. It had a tribal conscience and recognized the need of purification. It had the promise, at least, of individual conscience and consciousness of sin.
Its symbol was the mystery which lifted only a corner of the veil and left an abundant opportunity for wonder, imagination, thought, and mysticism, which was entirely lacking in the perfect statue and the finished creed. It made man, through its sympathetic magic, a coworker with his divinities or dæmons in gaining the answer to an intensive desire or prayer acted by all the members of the community with all their united might, instead of expressed merely in words, the utterance of his whole being and life. Such a system or chaos overflows with sublime possibilities.
The introduction of agriculture had produced another most important change in religious views and ritual. In tillage the earth brought forth and gave birth to the crops which furnished their chief food supply, and probably, in their view, to animals and men also; just as the human mother gives birth to the child. Hence there was a wide-spread belief in, and cult of, an earth divinity, of course female, or in a goddess or dæmon of fertility. She is sometimes or usually accompanied by a male partner, companion or son, but he occupies a lower place.
FEMALE IDOLS, THRACEFEMALE IDOLS, THRACE
FEMALE IDOLS, THRACE
FEMALE IDOL, ANAU
FEMALE IDOL, ANAU
FEMALE IDOL, ANAU
Reproduced from “Explorations in Turkestan.” Carnegie Institute of Washington, Publishers.
This cult of the goddess seems to have been a marked feature of Neolithic religion.161We find it in the remains of the Minoan periods in Crete; Isis and her companion god Osiris were very prominent in Egypt. The cult was wide-spread throughout Asia Minor: Diana, or better Artemis, of the Ephesians, Ma in Anatolia, thegreat goddess of the Hittites are a few examples. Farther eastward we find Astarte. Pumpelly found a female idol (Astarte?) at Anau. The cult dots, if it does not cover, the old middle migration route. We remember the wide-spread distribution of the painted pottery from Susa to Anau and over to Boghaz-keui in the land of the Hittites. Art and religion are closely related during the early times and a wide-spread type of art suggests, though it does not prove, an accompanying form of religion similar throughout the same wide area. In Greece we find Demeter, and in “Pelasgic Athens” the goddess Athena always held the highest place. Hera may well have been another great goddess of the Pelasgi. When the conquering Achæans came in and their chieftains wedded the princesses of the land, they married their god Zeus to the goddess of the land. Hence this cult has been displaced and its records blotted out by later changes. That so many traces of it outlasted the Bronze Age is a proof of its firm hold and great vitality.
We have studied these ancient cults in Greece and the Mediterranean basin because here they are easily discovered and can be restored. They are covered by only a thin layer of later cults which could not destroy their vitality. Whenwe attempt to explore northern Europe the situation is quite different. Christianity blotted out all traces of the worship of Odin and Thor; what it could not blot out it took over into its own service in a modified form. Behind Thor and Odin we see the shadowy form of Dyaus (Ziu?), perhaps a sky-god akin to the Hellenic Zeus, whose name has come down to us in our weekday, Tuesday. Behind all these we must search for traces of the deeply buried and almost obliterated genuine Neolithic cults. These traces could persist only as superstitions of peasants.
We notice first of all that we find one race extending northward along the coast of France into England and Denmark, the zone of the megalithic monuments. In this zone we find figurines and carvings of divinities. Here Déchelette tells us that the female divinity was undoubtedly preferred as the guardian of the tombs.162This zone was so closely connected with the Mediterranean region that we should expect nothing else.
In southeastern Europe, around the valley of the Danube, at Cucuteni, Jablanica, and elsewhere, we find figurines, and here again the female divinity is at least the more prominent, ifnot decidedly dominant.163Déchelette tells us as to its source: “From the earliest times striking analogies have been proven between the old villages of the Danube and the Balkans and the Ægean settlements of the Troad and Phrygia. Primitive idols, painted pottery, frequent employment of the spiral in decorative art: all these occur scattered through the stations of southeastern Europe in Neolithic times and in the eastern Mediterranean basin in pre-Mycenæan and Mycenæan days. Between Butmir (near Sarajevo, Bosnia) and Hissarlik (Troy) these discoveries mark the routes which without doubt were already opening communication between the pre-Hellenic peoples and the pre-Celtic tribes.” Reinach adds: “Eastern Europe, part of Asia Minor and of Egypt, have been revealed as very intense centres of Neolithic civilization.”164They may be traced in rare examples still farther northward into Bohemia and even in Thuringia. But their distribution outside of southeastern Europe is very sparse. Traces of the worship of an earth mother,165though vague and few, can still be discovered in the superstitions of the peasant folk of northern Germany. A primitive belief in spirits of the earth, of vegetation, of fertility—of dæmonswho preside over the crops, who die in the autumn or winter and reappear in the spring—is common in the folk-lore and customs of the peasants in many parts of Europe. Our Maypole has an interesting history and is probably the last survival of an ancient cult. Still other more interesting illustrations might easily be cited.166
The Balder-myth is familiar to us all. He is a “rare exotic,” entirely out of place in that circle of berserker gods and brutal giants who lived in or over against the Norse Valhalla, but would have found himself at home in the land and times of Dionysus. Have we possibly here an intrusion of a far more ancient religious element which even the rude dwellers in a harsh Northland could not forget, and would not allow to die?
Usually accompanying the cult of the goddess we find frequent and wide-spread traces of a related trend of thought, mother-right (Mutterrecht), maternal kinship, matriarchy: under which were generally included the reckoning of descent in the female line, rights of inheritance by the daughter, hence female rights of property and general high social and economic position of woman. These features need not be united—theymay appear separately, one here and another there. We are probably not studying a system of thought or law, but a general tendency of life.167
Mother-right, to use the most general term, survived, partially at least, down to historic time in Egypt. It persisted in Asia Minor. Perhaps it crops out in the story of the Amazons. We find traces of it in ancient law and custom in northern Europe. Says Hoernes: “Among the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, and Slavs, remains of mother-right occur even in historic times.”168Wundt thinks that maternal kinship was once universal.169We have no time or room to discuss the origin of mother-kinship. We may yet find that it and mother-right represent distinct forms of a deep-seated universal tendency, often of independent origin, occurring usually together but sometimes separate.
Something akin to mother-right, and to a high position and dominating influence of woman in the family and in society, is only what we should expect at this time. We have seen that women were the first great discoverers and inventors; discoverers and founders of all our household arts and crafts as well as of most of our science. Women were the first spinnersand weavers, the first potters. They were the first herbalists and botanists and the first household physicians. In the care of the children they were compelled to be alert, quick-minded, ready for all sorts of emergencies. Paleolithic man was a mere hunter; the rest of the time he ate and loafed. The woman provided the vegetable food, as well as much of the animal, and became the first gardener or farmer. She introduced tillage of the ground, and thus became economically by far the more important member of the partnership, and she probably had by far the more alert, quick-witted brain.
The establishment of agriculture was followed by the cult of the earth-mother, who gave birth to all the fruits of the ground and probably to all life. The goddess, with or without a male companion, was the head of the hierarchy. This again could not have been without its influence. Says Miss Harrison: “Woman to primitive man is a thing at once weak and magical, to be oppressed, yet feared. She is charged with powers of child-bearing denied to man, powers only half understood, sources of attraction but also of danger and repulsion, forces that all over the world seem to fill him with dim terror. The attitude of man to woman and, though perhaps to a less degree, of woman to man is stillessentially magical. Man cannot escape being born of woman: but he can, and if he is wise he will, as soon as he comes to manhood, perform ceremonies of riddance and purgation.”170
One other fact deserves notice. In times of dearth the savage man always eats up all the grain reserved as seed for the next year, and there is none to sow. This is the rock on which attempts to introduce agriculture among savages or nomads have usually been shipwrecked. Here the priest, or perhaps priestess, of the goddess came to her aid, armed with the weapon of taboo. Against this alliance the poor, stupid, clumsy, and slow-witted Neolithic man struggled in vain. He could vent his fury by pulling his wife about by the hair, but this availed little or naught. He had to submit and be resigned.
Female magic increases in power as we approach the frontier and frontier life. At the fall of the Roman Empire northern tribes swept away the old civilization. Grass grew in the ruined cities, only villages remained inhabited. The priests, by a liberal preaching of hell and other dire torments, attempted to subdue these barbarians to law and to introduce order. Agriculture and industry rearose or returned slowly. Finally after the “dark ages” great cathedralssprang up, dedicated not to apostles or martyrs but to the Virgin, Queen of Heaven. Mr. Adams tells us that at this time the women of France were the real leaders. Is this apparent parallelism mere chance, or is it due to a certain amount of similarity in conditions?
Some one has said that our Neolithic ancestors, especially the megalith-builders, were priest-ridden. If he had added that they were tamed and led, and very possibly diligently hen-pecked, by a veritable matriarchate, I suspect that he would have discovered and correctly estimated the two great sources of their marvellous progress. For at this stage, as at some others, the priests and the women were the élite, and the government was, therefore, ideal for its day.
But the tendency was based upon something far broader and deeper than changing social and economic conditions and religious feeling. Even the “mere man” must admit that it was biological and natural. “Nature,” says Humboldt, “has taken woman under her special protection.” She has always been partial to the female. Throughout the long period of mammalian evolution she has showed very little regard for the males. The more they fight and kill one another off, the fewer useless individuals to feed. The same tendency reaches its logicalconclusion in the parthenogenesis of insects. Havelock Ellis says of woman: “She bears the special characteristics of humanity in a higher degree than man, and represents more nearly than man the human type which man is approximating.” He boldly asserts that man seems to be the “weaker vessel,” and brings strong arguments for his assertion.171
“Das Ewig-weiblicheZieht uns hinan.”
“Das Ewig-weiblicheZieht uns hinan.”
“Das Ewig-weiblicheZieht uns hinan.”
The buried Pelasgic religion regained its rightful place. It had more vital reality than the Olympian. Has the great Roman Catholic Church, in its worship of the Virgin, retained at least the symbol of an element of vital reality which we Protestants, in our recoil from so-called “Mariolatry,” have neglected to our cost in favor of a purely paternal conception of God? We leave this question to the theologians.
IT is a far cry and long and weary road from the ape descending from the trees and the ape-man shuffling over the ground, keeping close to his arboreal refuge, to the lake-dweller and builder of stone monuments. There was very little in the appearance or structure of the ape-man to encourage great hopes for the future. The sleek, graceful, wiry, well-armed cats were far more attractive, promising, and thrilling actors on the world’s stage. Why did not they progress, win the future, and insure that all the future meetings of art and learning should be held on the back fence? They certainly did not progress—that is a stubborn fact.
They had largely or completely exhausted the possibilities of their special line of development; as cats they were perfect and could dominate the portion of the world in which as cats they were solely interested. This was an impassable bar to progress. Why should they change? They were so thoroughly conformed to the environment of their time and conditions that any marked change would have been a disadvantage. But when conditions did change, and the fashionof the world which had produced them passed away, they became out of fashion, “back numbers,” incapable of meeting new emergencies and crises—like men, parties, and governments in all ages of human history. They suffered from over-adaptation and the resulting limitations.
Man did not make this mistake. Isolated tribes and even races might settle down in contentment, become completely adapted to easy conditions of life, and stagnate or degenerate. But a saving remnant was always marching out into new physical or social surroundings, exposed to new needs, fears, and opportunities, and readapting itself to meet and profit by them. Man was not, and could not be, precocious. He was always a bundle of possibilities and great expectations, which he has even now only begun to realize.
Overpopulation, or other pressure in his primeval home, resulted in great racial migrations, sending him all over the world to seek his fortune. He became one of the very few physically cosmopolitan animals, living everywhere from the equator to the Arctic zone. He became toughened and hardened and adaptable, able to live under the most trying circumstances. Everywhere he had to be a close observer, watchful and wary. He was weak and defenseless, and his life depended upon his quick recognition of “nature’s signs of displeasure,” upon the full exercise of his few small wits. He learned to be faithful in a few things. We need not repeat or review this weary chapter of his history.
“There were years that no one talked of. There were times of horrid doubt.There was faith and hope and whacking and despair.”
“There were years that no one talked of. There were times of horrid doubt.There was faith and hope and whacking and despair.”
“There were years that no one talked of. There were times of horrid doubt.There was faith and hope and whacking and despair.”
Man was experimenting with all kinds of climates and conditions. It was in the hard and cold northern regions that he developed farthest, though less rapidly at first. We have already glanced at the educational results of language, of family life in the rock-shelter around the fire, of the fashioning and use of tools, of his love of ornaments and display, of his dawning and clearing self-consciousness, of the beginnings of ownership. We have noticed his burial rites and their suggestions. All these may have been rude and crude, but they contained the germs of vast possibilities, though painfully slow of development. His “castles in Spain” were his richest possessions, though he probably never knew or suspected them. One hundred thousand years of human life in Europe produced nothing higher than Neanderthal man.
Suddenly, at the beginning of Upper Paleolithic time Cro-Magnon man appeared. His splendid physique and large brain, his production and appreciation of art, and many other qualities, have led some one to speak of him as the “prehistoric Greek.” In our enthusiasm we may easily overestimate his powers; but, as we study him and his work, we feel that here was a great race, and that now some great human possibilities are to be fully attained and made permanent. Apparently he had come from the plateau region of western Asia. Near his birthplace there must have been other peoples capable of great things. We remember that Susa was probably founded not much later than the beginning of the Magdalenian epoch in Europe. But the Cro-Magnon folk decreased in numbers, in stature, apparently also in ability and vitality. During the period of transition to Neolithic time Europe was occupied only by a sparse population of fishermen along the rivers, while barbarous hunting tribes were working their way northward toward the Baltic. The shell-heaps of Denmark are the monuments of the attainments of this epoch.
A higher civilization had already entered the Mediterranean basin. It was building houses, villages, possibly forerunners of the Greek city-states.Especially in Greece they were sufficiently separated to allow independence of development and great variety, and yet near enough to one another to prevent the ill effects of complete isolation. Here there was rapid interchange and improvement of physical and mental attainments, mental stimulation and rivalry, change and progress. Implements, weapons, pottery; new discoveries, inventions, ideas, arts, and habits of life and thought spread slowly and gradually from these centres of progressing culture far to the northward. This was undoubtedly one important source of stimuli. But we must not overestimate its influence.172
It spread through France into England and Denmark. As time went on this northward current increased and strengthened until, during the Bronze period, the Baltic region, especially Denmark, became almost a second Mediterranean centre of culture and art; just as at a far later time Flemish cities became the Venices of the north. But the north was never a beggarly dependent and imitator of the south. It selected and accepted only what it would, almost always modified and frequently improved what it had selected.
ANCIENT FISHERMENANCIENT FISHERMENFrom the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
ANCIENT FISHERMEN
From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
The larger part of central and northernEurope lay outside of this great current and was reached by it only slightly and very indirectly. These regions or provinces were largely working out their own civilization and culture.
What then was the real source of Neolithic progress?173It is not to be sought in great wars and revolutions. Genuine wars are carried on by nations with a national government, and as yet there were no nations, and even tribal government—outside of religion, the great bond of tribal unity at this stage—was probably weak, loose, and inefficient. There were no such strong towns or city-states as sprang up later in Greece. There were here no nomadic hordes to be driven by drought from their withering pastures to migrateen masseand force their way into less thirsty and starving regions. There was, as yet, no great overpopulation of mountainous areas compelling raids or forays into piedmont zones. The nearest approach to this condition is the slow, evidently peaceful penetration of parts of France by broad-heads from its eastern uplands filtering in and mixing with the long-headed older population, and betraying their arrival mainly by a change in form of head and rise of cephalic index.
There was little wealth to tempt invasion.There were no cities or large towns to plunder. There were wide stretches of land thinly or not at all populated and open to any newcomer. All that we know of Neolithic religion, far more dominant in tribal life and action than the very feebly developed political or social organization, the cult of the goddess, and the accompanying mother-right, suggest peace. The great invasions of the Bronze and Iron periods introduced or stimulated the cult of war gods and patriarchal family life and kinship. But these were still in the future. The picture of Europe at this time as a great arena of roving savages, thirsting for blood and always at war, seems to be a caricature.
The people of the banded pottery were evidently peaceful. They left no weapons except mattocks and hammers. No one, I believe, has ever accused the broad-heads of blood-thirst. The graves of northern hunters with corded pottery are all about Grosgartach. The little village was deserted and decayed. It showed no signs of having been burned. The lake-dwellings were open to attack at all times, especially after the ice had formed during the winter. Robenhausen during its long history burned several times; hardly as often as most of our New England villages. Here a single brandor fire-tipped arrow in a thatched roof would have destroyed the whole settlement.
Only in northern Europe, in the country of the corded pottery, do we find great attention paid to the making of fine weapons like the flint daggers and axes. Here we have chiefly herdsmen and hunters. Here there were probably village incompatibilities—Donnybrook fairs, cattle-lifting, and forays. But these should hardly be dignified with the name of wars. We find then some North German peoples at the very end of the Neolithic period pushing southward, often by peaceable infiltration, sometimes perhaps by violent incursions, when the resistance was great.174
Says Wundt:175“So long as he is not obliged to protect himself against peoples that crowd in upon him, primitive man is familiar with the weapon only as an implement of the chase. The old picture of a war of all with all, as Thomas Hobbes once sketched the natural state of man, is the very reverse of what obtained. The natural condition is one of peace, unless this is disturbed by external circumstances, one of the most important of which is contact with a higher culture.”
We remember, also, the fewness of fortifiedvillages in northern Europe until toward the end of the Neolithic period, and then mainly along great routes of migration; and around mines and workshops. They seem to fail altogether in Scandinavia at this time. Even the wars, battles, or quarrels which occurred probably hindered progress far more than they aided it. Haeckel in his younger days was fierce in his denunciations of the stupidity of war.
Political or economic revolutions could hardly occur when there was probably little organized government and even less wealth and class difference.
Conditions in France may have been somewhat different. Here the great stone monuments suggest a denser population under a more advanced organization, religious or political, or both, reminding us of conditions in the Mediterranean region, with whose culture it was closely connected. Here fortifications seem to have been quite numerous.176But our knowledge is too slight to allow even a conjecture.
EARLY AGRICULTUREEARLY AGRICULTUREFrom the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
EARLY AGRICULTURE
From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
In the southeastern part of Europe we find the people of the banded pottery who practised an advanced form of agriculture. Here apparently the men as well as the women worked in the fields. We find their stone mattocks andploughshares. Hoe-culture was giving place to ploughing. Here men were receiving a very different education and training from the hunters, fishermen, and herdsmen of the north, though there also a gradual increase of tillage was doubtless taking place. They were tilling the ground laboriously, monotonously, doing what was wearisome and disagreeable for a reward sometimes large, sometimes scanty. The peasant farmer learns forethought, thrift, economy, industry, and a host of homely virtues, far less known to hunter or herdsman. He is no more a collector taking what he finds: he has gone into partnership with nature. He is studying her ways, moods, and whims. He amasses a steadily increasing store of most valuable lore concerning climate, weather, soil, plants, animals, and things. He is rooted in a little patch of ground. His outlook is narrow and he is slow to change. But he learns his lessons thoroughly. He may enter the school unwillingly but he stays in it.
He has a permanent home even if it is hardly more than a hut, which is the centre of his life and thought. It is a hard, healthy life, and population increases rapidly under such conditions. He probably has a large family of children, and they educate and socialize him andone another. He is trained and moulded by “home surroundings.” Is not this the history of the frontiersman or homesteader everywhere at all times? The home and family attachments and instincts are deeply rooted because very ancient and entirely natural.
He lives in a village or neighborhood, which is hardly more than a great patriarchal family, closely united by intermarriage, and by the pressure of common work to satisfy common needs, common ownership of the soil, mutual aid in hard times. The religious rites and ceremonies, the feasts and mysteries, the prayers or magic, are all community affairs. Many of the divinities are local. These religious bonds are all the firmer and more compelling because, in the lack of any developed and permanent political organization, religion is the great tribal bond. We easily forget the civilizing, refining, and improving unremitting pressure and power of these simple, uninteresting peasant influences. He is learning to get on with the members of the family and neighborhood. He is experimenting upon his neighbors: his experiments and experiences may often be very trying to himself and them; the results may sometimes be discouraging. But he is not only practising the essentials and fundamentals of morality, veryincomplete and without code; but a sort of preparatory course in government. It may easily be self-government in these small villages. The town-meeting originated here or somewhat farther north.
We have already seen that his religion had grown out of the experiences of his daily life. May we not claim that science and a sort of philosophy may have sprung from the same source? He knew nothing of cause and effect in the material world. But he was seeking diligently the invisible bond of relations of things and events. The relation, according to his views, was mainly of a spiritual character through the agency of dæmons. His ritual, call it magic if you will, was the expression of his conviction that results in the material world might be modified by his lending a helping hand to all the beneficent spirits. He indulged freely in hypotheses, but these were the outgrowth of millennia of experience and life, a very healthy form of pragmatism. He who has never laughed at a modern scientific theory, useful and fruitful in its time but now outgrown and replaced by a somewhat better one, may cast the first stone at his “benighted” Neolithic ancestor.
We might even venture to suspect that in his own crude way he was a philosopher. He musthave had something like a philosophy of life, even if it was hardly more than a dumb instinct.
Says Miss Harrison: “Dike” (usually translated justice), “in common Greek parlance is the way of life, normal habit. Dike is the way of the world, the way things happen, and Themis is that specialized way for human beings which is sanctioned by the collective conscience, by herd instinct. A lonely beast in the valley, a fish in the sea, has his Dike, but it is not till man congregates together that he has his Themis. Greeks and Indians alike seem to have discovered that the divine way was also the truth and the life. This notion of the way, which was also the truth and the life, seems to have existed before the separation of Indian from Iranian. Closely allied to Dike and to Vedic Rta is the Chinese Tao, only it seems less moralized and more magical. Deep-rooted in man’s heart is the pathetic conviction that moral goodness and material prosperity go together, that if man keep the Rta, he can magically affect for good nature’s ordered going.”177
Thus primitive man, long before the dawn of anything like civilization, was seeking, finding, clearing, and treading out the “way” to an ordered, right, and healthy individual and sociallife—not through, but to, codes of morals and systems of philosophy. His thought was more or less chaotic, perhaps; it was crudely, often indecently, expressed in ugly form or action; but it was always acted upon, kept close to life. We might possibly call him an “Ur-pragmatist,” if you will pardon the barbarism. He had neither the language nor the “conveniences for thinking” and other things, to write out a cool, logical abstract system in long words. In this we have outrun him until we have left him out of sight. His philosophy was not a guidebook or map, but a rough and often miry trail.
We have tried to express briefly the results of a glance at the agriculturists of southeastern Europe. Before the close of the Neolithic period they were in fairly close communication with Ægean culture and owed considerable or much progress to stimuli from this source. In the great essentials of human training and development something quite similar might be said of the lake-dwellers and the broad-heads of eastern France. North Germany had a different culture and probably somewhat different religious cults and general views and conceptions. France and England, too, represented a quite distinct province whose peoples were always under Mediterranean influence. Denmarkwas already a meeting-place for a variety of cultures, thoughts, and influences.
Peoples were gradually closing in from all directions on the central provinces of northern Europe, and here apparently they met. We find here a mixture of head-forms, of culture; mixture or modifications of styles of ceramic ornament, of burial customs—all suggesting a mingling of peoples of a variety of cultures. Here at or toward the end of the Neolithic period was the “melting-pot” for the fusion of these peoples and their cultures. There was conflict of customs and ideas, ofwaysof life. There was probably much incompatibility, many broken heads. The pacific people of the banded pottery seem largely to have withdrawn, or been driven out, before the infiltration or invasions of northern folk. It was hardly a comfortable place for conservative pacificists. There were doubtless battles in many regions—perhaps now and here we might speak of wars. In some places there may have been extermination of the fighting men. But in most parts there was large fusion, and out of this mixture of cultures, ideas, thoughts, and habits of life came the culture of the beginning of the Bronze Age.
The great characteristic of Neolithic culture seems to be a rude, often barbarous, sometimesugly but generally healthy, always hardy and vigorous growth—it grew “like a weed”—the manifestation of an intense vitality. Because it was healthy it was essentially and generally fairly sane, matter-of-fact, whole, and balanced. The Neoliths were certainly no “reversed cripples,” in whom one or two of the less essential powers had outgrown and dwarfed the man. It was an adaptable stock giving rise to many marked and vigorous varieties, from whose intercrossing something great and good could hardly fail to arise.
Green refuses to write a “trumpet-and-drum history of England.” “Happy the people—here we cannot say nation—that has no annals.” Here is surely a certain amount of truth which we may be in danger of forgetting. In plants, and often in men, a long period of silent unnoticeable growth usually precedes the brief season of flowers and fruit. Is this the rule in racial, or internal, development?
Is it true, as some historians tell us, that a dormant period of national history best repays investigation, and that dormant peoples will bear watching? Is the dormant nation often storing up nutriment, strength, vitality, just as the plant is doing in its ugly underground roots and stem? Are fallow periods necessary to itsfertility and apparently dormant times essential to its life and growth? Must periods of energetic action and effort be followed by times of exhaustion and rest, as in the history of the strong athlete rejoicing to run a race?
Is China awakening from just such a dormant period? What of India, still the home of philosophy? Because a nation, after bearing a marvellous harvest of culture, thought, art, or religion, seems barren and exhausted, does this discourage or arouse the hope that it will some day produce an equal or greater fruitage?
How about “darkest Africa”? Here surely we have a case of degeneration beyond all hope of recovery, not to mention a great future. But is this quite as certain as some of us seem to think? Is not much of our so-called Occidental progress really an orgy of wasted energy, neurotic excitement, half-camouflaged decadence, which will end in degeneration? We do not know yet. May there some day be a family rather than league of nations to which every one will contribute according to its special ability? If this be granted, will Huxley’s statement concerning the individual be applicable to races and peoples: “Its aim will be not so much the survival of the fittest as the fitting of as many as possible to survive”? These aresphinx questions demanding an answer from statesmen. Unfortunately most of our statesmen are only waiting to be gathered to their fathers in the graveyard of dead politicians. We will turn homeward after our excursion, gladly leaving our little bundle of facts and questions at the door of the philosopher of history.
But one question confronts us directly. Is our whole estimate and valuation of Neolithic life, work, and progress extreme and practically worthless? Were they, in spite of all our arguments, a mob of crude, worthless barbarians, undeserving of any gratitude or sympathy, much less of respect? Do we really owe anything to them?
One historic event of great importance had its growth and rise during the Neolithic period out of Neolithic life, conditions, and culture. This was the Aryan culture of Persia and India, of Greece and Rome, and of our northern ancestors. No one seems to deny its importance and value. We must glance at its origin and growth, and see if it supports at all the tentative and often conjectural conclusions at which we have arrived. This will be the object of our work and study in the next and closing chapter.
SAID Max Müller in hisBiographies of Words: “I have declared again and again that, if I say Aryan, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. The same applies to Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, and Slavs. When I speak of them I commit myself to no anatomical characteristics. The blue-eyed and fair-haired Scandinavians may have been conquerors or conquered, they may have adopted the language of their darker lords or their subjects, or vice versa. I assert nothing beyond their language.... To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.”
We may well take this warning to heart, and remember that the first and most noticeable, if not the one essential, characteristic of the Aryans was their language. For the sake of convenience and clearness, and of avoiding misunderstandingor prejudice, we will use the word Indo-European for the whole group of languages to which Müller applied the word Aryan. These languages fall into two great divisions or branches: (1) the Indian and Iranian (Persian), which we will call Aryan; and (2) the European branch, including Greek, Latin, German, Slavic, and others. Our first question is: what inferences can we safely draw from a study and comparison of these different European and Asiatic languages? Evidently they have all sprung from a parent language no longer adequately represented by any one of them. They have all been considerably or greatly modified during the lapse of time. They, and others whose names we have omitted, are all sister languages descended or developed from a parent language which must once have been spoken by a people, very probably representing a mixture of races, having a definite local habitation, cradle, or home. Here the language originated as the expression of a certain culture or civilization, and from this region, large or small, it spread into Persia and India and throughout Europe. The wide spread of the language testifies to the superiority in some important respects of either language, culture, people, or all three. We may well recognize two homes, thefirst, original cradle of the language and culture, and the second homeland, far more extensive, over which the original language, probably with well-marked dialects, was used just before the final separation and dispersal.
In its distribution from India to western Europe it must often have wandered far from its original home. Its introducers must often have been few compared with the large and dense populations among which they came. The Aryans could have been hardly more than a handful among the peoples of India. Something similar may be said of its introduction into Europe about the close of the Neolithic period. Middle Europe was at this time fairly well populated, at least in its more fertile regions. The bearers of the new language must have represented a ruling, conquering, or otherwise very influential class, else it would never have been accepted by the mass of the people.
When the original or modified Indo-European language, perhaps in several distinct dialects, was introduced into Europe, it was carried to peoples of several or many stocks and languages. These had to learn and acquire it as we acquire a foreign language, but only as a spoken, unwritten language. Probably no one of them acquired it exactly in its original form. It wasalmost impossible for them to pronounce all its consonants or combinations, its “shibboleths.” They retained much of the stress and accent and more of the cadence of their own tongue. Similarly at a far later date Latin developed into the various Romance Languages of modern Europe.
Under the new conditions content and meanings changed as well as forms of language. Words little used in the new home, especially names of objects, might easily be lost, while others would be replaced by favorite apt words from the aboriginal language. A name might be applied to a new object and thus change its meaning. To cite a familiar modern instance, the robin redbreast of America is quite a different bird from that of England. For a long time it was supposed that the occurrence of the root of the word “beech” in the European languages proved beyond doubt that the language must have originated in a region where the beech-tree was common. But the Greek word derived from the same root means oak; a similar, perhaps not the same, root word in Kurdish means elm. Our knowledge of the original meaning of the word is very uncertain. Through all the languages there runs a single word for weaving or plaiting, but whether the originalword referred to the weaving of cloth or to the plaiting of mats or baskets we do not know.
The work of discovering and restoring the original language is difficult and far from finished. But the comparative philologists or “linguistic paleontologists” have established certain facts, or at least theories, on which we may rely with a fair degree of confidence. We find names for all the most important domestic animals, including the horse. There are words for the wagon, its wheels, and various other parts. Words for tillage and land cultivation agree in the Western branch, but are far less noticeable in the Aryan languages. Here the vocabulary is rather that of the herdsman. This seems to allow us to conclude that, when Eastern and Western branches separated, and probably long before that time, the Eastern people were herdsmen paying slight attention to agriculture: the Western predominantly tillers of the ground.
The linguist, as we have already seen, is frequently or usually unable to discover the exact meaning of the word in the original language, and hence is uncertain as to the degree of development of any art or technique. But the culture, as far as discovered, seems to be that of the average of Neolithic peoples, perhaps fairly well represented by that of the Swiss lake-dwellers.It may have varied in different areas or provinces. The language seems to represent most clearly features of the undivided life and settlement of the people or peoples when it had spread over a wide territory and become the property of a large population, otherwise it would be impossible to explain the successive great waves of Indo-European migration. The cradle where the language originated and took form must have been far more limited and the culture simpler.
The original language contains words for summer and winter, ice and snow; it tells of a fairly cold climate. They had a common word for metal, probably copper, hence they were living together after the introduction of this metal. They lived in villages apparently surrounded by a hedge or wall, or some sort of fortification.
The family was decidedly patriarchal. Of the older mother-right scarcely more than traces remain, survivals from an older alien culture. The goddess is no longer supreme. A new divinity, a sky-god, or sun-god, or manifestation of light or brightness had already appeared—the Greek Zeus, Latin Ju-piter, with the same root appearing in all the languages. The earth-goddess is not banished, but remains as consortof the male divinity. The supreme divinity of the religious cult is no longer local. There is in it an element or germ of universality overleaping all provincial boundaries, in many respects a vast improvement over the old Neolithic religions. It generally held its own, but only by adopting much from the older native religions on which it was superimposed, as was the case in Greece.
Indo-Europeanism must have had something to recommend it and make it highly attractive to enable it to spread so fast and far. The language itself, while apparently somewhat clumsy, was certainly rich in conceptions and shades of expression. The clearness and beauty of the religious cult may have attracted some, though this seems doubtful. All these features are inadequate to explain the rapidity and extent of its spread. We must leave this problem for the present.
Even the original language frequently describes the same object or even action by words having very different roots. It shows great variety in synonyms and inflections. Feist compares it with English and considers it a “mixed language” almost from the start, and many facts seem to favor this view. This does not surprise us when we remember that itsgrowth and development were late, during the latter half of Neolithic time, when great movements and minglings of people were taking place and long routes of trade and communication had opened.
The date of the earliest migrations of Indo-European peoples is roughly indicated by the presence of a word for metal, probably copper, in the original undivided language. Aryan names appear in western Asia about 1400 or 1500 B. C. Meyer says that the Achæans had arrived in the southern Balkans as early as 2000 B. C. and reached Greece about 1200 or 1300 B. C.; the Dorians followed about 1100 B. C. We can hardly be far from the truth if we consider that they were in their original home until about 2000 B. C., and that the separation began very soon after. Their development was a product of the Neolithic period, their spread was the striking event of earliest historic times.
Inasmuch as their migrations are so recent, especially when compared with those of the Semites, it ought to be possible for us to discover certain traits which they brought with them from the homeland. The Achæans had apparently marched southward from Hungary or thereabouts through the Balkans into Greece, arriving there not far from 1200 B. C. Theydid not come in one invading horde but in successive waves, each crowding the other before it. Behind the Achæans came the Dorians, behind them were the Thracians and other wayfarers. Their unit of organization was the band, brotherhood, or clan, each with its own leader, reminding us of the Scotch clans of a century or two ago. They came with their horses and carts, perhaps with war-chariots. They were the “horse-taming” Achæans. They were youthful, red-blooded, irresponsible and irresistible, careless, untamed barbarians, swaggering in from hard battles and long campaigns, having seen the manners and tested the might of many peoples. They came in contact with ancient, settled, staid, conservative Pelasgic wealth and culture. They were the rough riders of their day. They were hard drinkers and fighters; loud, boastful talkers, good-natured if not opposed; good “mixers.”
Their chieftains married the princesses of the old régime, who seem to have held the right of succession in the kingdom or city-state. The wooing was rough and more or less forceful; but I suspect that the princesses yielded not altogether unwillingly, even if the course of true love did not always continue to run smooth in after years. They married their gods to thegoddesses of the land, and made little further interference with the old Ægean religion or popular life.
In comparison with the native peoples who had builded Tiryns and Mycenæ the Achæans were probably few, scattered over Greece. They probably robbed the subject peoples with one hand, but with the other they defended them against the forays of sea-pirates and other enemies. They were no worse than former native rulers, far better watch-dogs of the city, attractive leaders of an admiring crowd, the best possible missionaries of a new culture and language. They turned the old Neolithic world upside down. Evolution had brought revolution: old things passed away and, for a time, all things became new. We cannot easily overestimate the extent and importance of the change.
The leaders, and naturally their followers to a less degree, show clearly the characteristics of the new era, which Wundt has called the Age of Heroes in distinction from the Age of Totemism and the iron supremacy of tribal custom. The chief feature was the rise, development, and dominance of individual personality in the leaders and the enthusiastic, individual loyalty of the members of the brotherhood or clan. Up tothis time the individual has been entirely submerged in the customs and culture of the tribe, whose control has been mostly in the hands of the old men and the priests; now the young warrior and champion has grasped the reins. In all Homer’s pictures the ranks of the common people, however firm, count for little. The battle is won in single, hand-to-hand combat by the leader—a dour giant of an Ajax, a dashing Menelaus, “good at the rescue,” a crafty Ulysses, a heroic Hector. The wisdom of old Nestor is endured with kindly tolerance, hardly with enthusiasm. It is an age of young men with all their virtues and vices. But every leader is a distinctly marked individual; no two are alike.
City-states are beginning to appear, but their success depends very largely on the wisdom and power of the ruler, who seems at first to be largely irresponsible, a despot in the ancient sense of the word. It is anything but a true democracy, but it is government by the élite of their day and world. The new era orZeitgeistis putting its stamp on all its peoples. Homer’s description of the Achæans would apply almost equally well to the Celts when they first appear in history; and kindred spirits are marching and fighting in India and Persia. All seem to representa new type which all brought from the common homeland.
The chieftains, with this clan or brotherhood of warlike followers, came into a country occupied by agriculturists or peasants unused and untrained to war, such as we have found in the Mediterranean region and in most of northern Europe. Conquest was usually easy and left little bitterness. There was no national consciousness or pride to arouse resistance. It was a totally different kind of invasion from that of nomadic Semites in Asia, or of Mongols into Europe. It came almost as a new movement, a renaissance for which the people were ready. Celt and Greek alike were usually absorbed and lost in the masses of the people to whom they came. Physically they produced little permanent change in the people with whom they mingled. They seem to have accepted fully as much as they contributed, and may often have received credit for many improvements which they really had little share in bringing about.
We have already seen that Greek philosophy and religion, while retaining much of the Olympian or Indo-European form, sprang essentially from the old Pelasgic cults with their greater vitality. How far were Achæans and Dorians responsible for the glory of Greek art, especiallyin “Pelasgic Athens”? The answer can hardly be as obvious and sure as it has appeared to some.
How far was Roman government and law due to Indo-European influence? Neither Greeks nor Celts seem to have been very successful in founding great or permanent states. Italy was far less easy of access from the north than from Greece, and Rome lay well southward beyond the Apennines. Some of its most important political features seem to have sprung from uprisings of thePlebs, the common people, probably mostly of native stock; others, perhaps, from the Etruscans. I cannot attempt to answer this question or any one of many similar ones. The Indo-Europeans brought in a new era and started a new world; but just what was their definite and permanent contribution to European culture?
Europe had been long enough in the school of Neolithic discipline. Agriculture and settled home life had trained peasants to do many things which they disliked to do, to observe taboo and to obey ancient custom, to march in rank and file, and even in lock-step. It was a hard school in which savage man had been tamed, home-broken, and socialized, and he had learned its lessons thoroughly. It was high time thatmen should be promoted to a higher grade of education the aim of whose training should be the development of free and vigorous personality. The crust or cake of custom must yield or be broken and allow the individual to enter upon the possession of his rights.
It was a critical and revolutionary change. It had been rendered easier by the accumulation of wealth, and of a certain amount of personal property in cattle and other goods. In centres of trade the individual was thrown more and more on his own resources and initiative. With exchange of goods came exchange of knowledge, ideas, and methods undermining the ancient customs and traditions. Movements or migrations of peoples or smaller bands called for leadership by the most capable. And those became more and more numerous about the close of the Neolithic period. Neolithic culture had been largely the product of peace and isolation; it was inadequate to the new conditions. Matriarchy and the cult of the goddess were unsuited to times of struggle and migration; with the rise of the chieftain comes the worship of the war-god.
Where did this change or revolution and the rise of this new language and culture and remarkable people take place? All agree that the cradle or original homeland must have beensomewhere on our third route of migration, the great zone of steppe and parkland stretching from western Turkestan westward along the Caspian and Black Seas into the valley of the Danube, and from the Hungarian extension of the Asiatic steppe northward to the great plain of North Germany and to Scandinavia. In our study of racial migrations we found that the great Mongoloid branch went eastward from the neighborhood of the Iranian plateau, while successive waves of migration turned westward into Europe, both following a zone of steppe and parkland enjoying unusually favorable climatic conditions in early Post-glacial times.
The discovery of Sanskrit and the belief that it represented the parent of the Indo-European languages led students to place the original centre of their dispersal far toward the eastern end of this zone. When it became evident that this view of Sanskrit was untenable, they began to locate the centre in Europe. Finally some or many students have sought it in the extreme west and north in Germany or also in Scandinavia. When careful and thorough scholars have arrived at so many and so different conclusions, we may well be cautious and remember that new discoveries may necessitate a change in our own views.
The chief argument in favor of the North German homeland is anthropological. The earliest Indo-Europeans both in Europe and Asia were apparently blonds, with light hair and eyes; and such people have lived along the shore of the Baltic since early Neolithic times.
The claim that the ancient Celts and Achæans were physically more like Germans and Scandinavians than any other European people is certainly not without foundation. It has been urged that the Indo-Europeans were acquainted with the sea and with the eel, which is said to be unknown in the tributaries of the Black and Caspian Seas, as also their acquaintance with the beech. Other arguments can be found in special articles. We have seen that arguments based on the meaning of words like beech, eel, and sea, rest on a very insecure foundation. The Finns are almost as blond as the Germans, and Kossina178places them with the Germans asancestors of the Indo-Europeans. There are in Europe also blond brachycephals, generally acknowledged to have been of western Asiatic origin. The arguments for a Germanic origin are attractive, but hardly convincing, and anything but conclusive.