The New Stone Age in Northern Europe Part 12

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 grat.i.tude 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.

CHAPTER XII

THE COMING OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS

Said Max Muller in his _Biographies 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 a.s.sert 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 misunderstanding or prejudice, we will use the word Indo-European for the whole group of languages to which Muller 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, the first, 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 cla.s.s, else it would never have been accepted by the ma.s.s 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 was almost impossible for them to p.r.o.nounce 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 original word 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 G.o.ddess is no longer supreme. A new divinity, a sky-G.o.d, or sun-G.o.d, 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-G.o.ddess is not banished, but remains as consort of 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 its growth 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 Achaeans 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 Achaeans had apparently marched southward from Hungary or thereabouts through the Balkans into Greece, arriving there not far from 1200 B. C.

They did not come in one invading horde but in successive waves, each crowding the other before it. Behind the Achaeans 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" Achaeans. 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 regime, 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 G.o.ds to the G.o.ddesses of the land, and made little further interference with the old aegean religion or popular life.

In comparison with the native peoples who had builded Tiryns and Mycenae the Achaeans 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 pa.s.sed 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 to this 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 elite of their day and world. The new era or _Zeitgeist_ is putting its stamp on all its peoples. Homer's description of the Achaeans 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 represent a 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 ma.s.ses 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 Achaeans and Dorians responsible for the glory of Greek art, especially in "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 the _Plebs_, 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 that men 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 acc.u.mulation 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 G.o.ddess were unsuited to times of struggle and migration; with the rise of the chieftain comes the worship of the war-G.o.d.

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 been somewhere 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 sh.o.r.e of the Baltic since early Neolithic times.

The claim that the ancient Celts and Achaeans 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 Kossina[178] places them with the Germans as ancestors 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.

The objections to this view are weighty. One marked feature of Indo-European culture was the use of the horse, which held the highest rank among their domestic animals. But the domestic horse seems to have been introduced into Europe from the East. The few traces of its presence in northern Europe during Neolithic times are usually explained as remains of wild animals killed in the hunt. If they played so large a part in Indo-European culture, it is strange that they have left so few remains.

Kossina, in one of his studies, places the cradle of Indo-European culture in "Scandinavia, Denmark, and northwest Germany, wherever megalithic monuments with their characteristic pottery occur." Wherever such monuments occur we find incineration coming in late in Neolithic time, or more exactly with the Bronze period, except in Brittany and England, of which later. But incineration seems to accompany the progress of the European branch, and must have come into use among these peoples well back in their history to explain its wide occurrence.

The word town, in the original language, seems to signify a settlement surrounded by a hedge or wall, or some sort of defense. But fortified towns are hardly known in North Germany at this time. All these cultural features seem to appear somewhat or considerably too late in North Germany to suit Kossina's theory.

A second feature of Indo-European culture is the rise of the chieftain.

But the Germans seem to have borrowed the name for king and other expressions for military organizations, as well as many culture-words, from the Celts. This fact has led some good authorities to declare that the Germans received their Indo-European language from the Celts.

The homeland of the Indo-Europeans must have supported a large population to send out all the tribes which went out from it. Only such a region can satisfy our requirements, and such was Germany, an _Officina gentium_, some 2,000 years later. But we notice that the migrations of peoples have always set westward into Europe, not in the reverse direction. Similarly the new discovery or idea has come westward or northward from western Asia or from the Mediterranean region. The north has almost never been a centre of origination of new ideas and movements. It has borrowed from the richer south. We would not expect that the Indo-European movement would form an exception to this rule.

Moreover, the peoples of the banded pottery who had filled southeastern Europe, coming in, as is generally acknowledged, from the East, had brought with them a good knowledge of agriculture which could support a large population.

Now Kossina finds evidence of the spread of the corded pottery southward at the close of the Neolithic period, and infers that it was carried by a migration from the north. I am inclined to think that his conclusion is correct, though it may be doubtful whether the invasion went so far into the province of the banded pottery as he thinks. He sees in this the first stage of the Indo-European movement which was to sweep eastward as far as India. The people of the banded pottery apparently retreated eastward before this movement, and thus tended still further to increase the density and power of resistance in these regions.

Furthermore, had this southeastward movement continued, it would have met the first of a series of waves of invasion which would surely have turned it backward.

We have seen that all through the Neolithic period brachycephals of the Furfooz or Grenelle race have been spreading from Belgium and the rough eastern part of France. At the end of the Neolithic period they are being crowded by the long-heads. During the Bronze Age the cephalic index rises all over middle and western Europe. At its very beginning we find a new people in England--tall, rugged, heavy-faced round-heads, who burned their dead and deposited the ashes in round barrows. They seem to have come from the Rhine valley, and may well have introduced incineration into Brittany, where it appears early. They differ markedly in stature and features from the Furfooz people. They have quite certainly come from the east, perhaps from the region of the Armenian highlands. They have crossed Europe in sufficient numbers and compactness to retain their anthropological characters until they strike England and crowd back the old Iberian or Mediterranean peoples. The movement looks like an invasion in ma.s.s, not like a quiet, slow infiltration. They were the forerunners of a general advance and spread of the broad-heads.

Were these people Celts or at least partially celticized? To express an opinion on a Celtic question is to accept an invitation to a Donnybrook fair. Anthropologically they differ markedly from the later Celtic invaders. But their custom of incineration is certainly suggestive, and it is not at all impossible that they spoke a Celtic dialect. They certainly seem to prove that the westward migration from the region of the Black Sea or from farther eastward had not ceased or been turned backward at this time. The spread of North German people southward at this time would have brought them where they would mingle with Celts coming westward and receive their first lesson in Indo-European language and culture, if it came from the east.

There is at present a strong tendency to seek the original Indo-European homeland neither in the extreme east or extreme west or north, but somewhere in the open country of southern Russia lying to the north of the Black Sea or farther eastward toward the Caspian. Here they locate them mainly in a long zone of parkland extending along the southern edge of the forest zone and in the valleys of the great rivers. Here at a much later date Scythians were settled who raised large quant.i.ties of wheat, while others were nomadic. We remember that Neolithic trade-routes followed mainly rivers and seash.o.r.e. The islands of the Mediterranean were occupied early and sea commerce found a centre in Crete. A great centre of trade arose very early at Troy (Hissarlik), on the highway between the aegean and the settlements along the sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea and in the valleys of the rivers descending from the interior.

Dech.e.l.lette has called attention to the striking a.n.a.logies in form of settlement, in primitive idols, in pottery with painting and spiral ornament between the villages of the Balkans, Troy (Hissarlik) and of the Troad and Phrygia, and of the pre-Mycenaean culture of Crete and Greece. "Between Butmir and Hissarlik these discoveries mark the routes which already undoubtedly connected pre-h.e.l.lenic peoples and pre-Celtic tribes."

Meyer tells us that the banded pottery shows the same motives in ornament in Butmir and Tordos as in Troy and the aegean, and spreads thence northward and westward; and that painted pottery in Europe starts at the end of the Neolithic (2500-2000 B. C.) in the great plain east of the Carpathians in the region of the Dniester and Dnieper, a region of high culture in other respects. "Here the connection with the aegean world is evident (_augenfallig_)." This people was agricultural. They burned their dead, and Meyer thinks that incineration spread northward and westward from this centre. They show no use of metal. Their culture breaks off suddenly at the end of the Neolithic period.