dialects, which were P languages, were spoken throughout Italy from
Umbria southwards, and doubtless, if we may judge from the statement of
Herodotus already quoted, as far north as the foot-hills of the Alps,
before the Gauls had invaded the valley of the Po. The only exceptions
to this spread of these dialects were Etruria, or the greater portion
of it, and a part of Latium, in which Latin dialects of the Q type
were spoken. These Latin dialects, Conway tells us, were spoken by the
Latini, the Marsi, the Æqui, the Hernici, the Falisci, who dwelt within
the borders of Etruria, and to some extent by the Sabini.[471]
The linguistic position of the Sabines seems uncertain. In the passage
quoted Conway enumerates them among the tribes who spoke Q dialects,
but later on, when mentioning some of those who had P speech, he adds
in a footnote that perhaps Sabine should be included among these. The
position of the Sabine tongue is then uncertain. If this were so, the
same uncertainty may apply to the Faliscans, for little if anything is
known directly of their dialect, but Conway states that it is “certain
that they were akin to the Sabines across the Tiber, and that their
city was subdued and governed by the Etruscans.”[472]
This leaves us with four tribes, who undoubtedly spoke Q languages,
the Latini, Marsi, Æqui, and Hernici. The area occupied by them is
only roughly indicated by Conway, but I gather that he agrees with the
boundaries delineated by Kiepert.[473] The map given in Fig. 26 gives
these bounds, and it will be seen that in many respects the region they
occupy agrees with the area in which all the Italian leaf-shaped swords
have been found. There are, however, certain marked differences.
Out of nine swords of Type D, four are found within the area of Q
speech, and one at Sulmona, only just outside and within the area
of Sabine speech. One is a stray, found somewhere in Apulia, and
three, together with one of Type C, have been found not far from Lake
Trasimene. The solitary sword of Type B, found at Ascoli, seems only to
indicate that the line of approach was from the east.
Thus it seems that there is a fair equation between the swords and Q
speech, but the latter must have been driven from the Trasimene region,
and pushed westward in the Sabine area. Of the former presence and
subsequent disappearances of the Q speech from the Trasimene region we
have no evidence, but we have seen that the Etruscans arrived later
than the leaf-shaped sword people and with a superior culture. We
have also found reason for suspecting that the Villa-nova folk, who
arrived still later, had made themselves a military aristocracy over
the Etruscans, and the conquest or expulsion may have been due to them.
We have seen that the Falisci, a tribe with Sabine affinities, were
absorbed by the Etruscans. There is nothing inherently impossible in
the same fate having overtaken the leaf-shaped sword people who had
settled in the region around Lake Trasimene.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.--MAP SHOWING DISTRIBUTION OF SWORDS AND
DIALECTS IN ITALY.]
But with regard to the westward move of the Q peoples, and to
the suggestion that they were driven from what was later Sabine
territory, we are not dependent wholly upon conjecture, for Dionysius
of Halicarnassus tells us that the tribes who occupied the region
around Rome, after the barbarian Siculi, were the Aborigines.[474]
Whether this term conveyed to Dionysius the same meaning as it does
to us, or whether it was a corruption of a tribal name as some have
thought,[475] does not concern us here. It is sufficient for our
purpose that he mentions that their original home lay to the east, in
the valley of the Velino and its tributary the Salto, which drains
Lake Fucino. He mentions by name many of their cities, and describes
the position of most of them. The sites of the majority have been
identified, though some yet remain unknown. Judging by what can be
ascertained of their position, we gather that the Aborigines occupied
the Salto valley from Marruvium, on the shores of Lake Fucino, as far
as Reatæ, where it joins the Velino, and thence to the junction of the
latter with the Nera. One of their cities, Batia, lay considerably to
the north, across the Apennines, in the direction of Ascoli, where
the Type B sword was found. How far the territory of the Aborigines
stretched towards Lake Trasimene is uncertain, as the sites of some
of their towns remain unidentified, but several of them lay in that
direction, outside the later area of Q speech, but in Sabine territory.
Dionysius tells us that one night the Sabines issued from Amiternum
and seized Liste, the capital of the Aborigines, who retired to Reatæ,
whence they endeavoured to recapture it.[476] They appear to have been
successful eventually in recovering the land around Lake Fucino, but
would seem to have lost the territory to the north-west around Reatæ.
About the same time many of them migrated south-westwards to the lands
around Rome.[477] As one of their original cities had been called
Palatium it seems likely that it was they who gave its name to the
Palatine Hill.
The general agreement between the area in which we find the leaf-shaped
swords, the area occupied by the Aborigines before the Sabine
expedition, and the area of Q speech, suggests that these three are one
especially as there is a progressive abandonment of the north-western
portion and a movement towards the south-west near the mouth of the
Tiber. My suggestion is that the Aborigines were the descendants of
the leaf-shaped sword people and the ancestors of the Q speaking Latin
peoples of later days.
Umbrian speech, though it extended towards the south-east and
surrounded the Latin tongues, is found mainly on the north-east of
the Apennines, and seems to have come from that direction; before the
advent of the Gauls it reached, as we have seen, to the foot of the
Alps. This is the region in which we find the chief remains of the
Villa-nova culture, which is not unlike that of the Dorians, so that
it seems reasonable to equate this culture with the Osco-Umbrian or P
dialects.
The Sabines, as we have seen, are said to have come from Amiternum,
which is on the north-eastern slope of the Apennines, or rather in a
valley which opens out on that side. We should, therefore, expect them
to have been a P people. But, according to Dionysius, they over-ran a
region peopled by the Aborigines, who we have found reason for thinking
were a Q people, and, though doubtless they expelled the fighting men,
a good number are likely to have remained behind. It is not surprising,
therefore, that there should be some uncertainty as to whether the
original Sabines spoke a P or a Q dialect.
All the Italian evidence is consistent with the view that the men of
the leaf-shaped sword were Q speaking, while the men with the iron
sword spoke P tongues, but before we come finally to a decision, it
might be well to make a further test elsewhere. We have seen that the
refugees from the mountain zone, armed with Type G swords, fled down
the Rhone, the Loire, and the Seine, and that, while the men with the
iron swords pursued them down the two former valleys, they left the
Seine valley alone. Sir John Rhys and his supporters have suggested
that Q speech was at one time spoken in Gaul, and have cited certain
place-names in support of their case.[478] The value of this evidence
has been disputed, but there is one name, in two forms, which so
obviously belongs to Q speech, that its value cannot well be denied,
and this is _Sequana_, the ancient name for the Seine, and _Sequani_,
the tribe who lived by its banks. It cannot be merely a coincidence
that the best attested Q names have been noted just where Type G swords
are found not followed by iron swords, and this case, bearing out as
it does the general tenour of the Italian evidence, seems to me to be
conclusive.
I would submit, therefore, that the archæological evidence, which I
have given in this and in previous chapters, proves, as conclusively
as the circumstances of the case are likely to admit, that the thesis
of Sir John Rhys that two waves of people left Central Europe for
Italy and the west, the first speaking a Q and the second a P tongue,
is absolutely correct, though modifications need to be made in the
application of this theory to Greek lands. His view that the P Folk
were the people of the Swiss lake-dwellings we have seen good reason to
reject.
/Chapter XIV/
THE WANDERINGS OF THE WIROS
I have now cited almost all the evidence which I have collected to
solve the question of the Aryan cradle and the dispersal of the Wiros
from Central Europe, especially of their raids into the Celtic lands
of the west. Except for a few details I have found myself in agreement
with other writers, sometimes with this, at others with that authority.
This is not surprising, for so many shots have been made, often at
random, and without sufficient evidence, that it would be strange if
some of them had not hit the mark.
Thus with Penka I have argued for an Aryan race, which was Nordic in
type, with Cuno that the primitive Wiro language developed on an open
plain, which, with Latham and Schrader, I have placed on the Russian
steppe. I have found myself in agreement with Sir John Rhys on the main
features of his thesis that the Q and P Wiros left Central Europe in
two successive waves, and I have argued that the Q Wiros were armed
with bronze leaf-shaped swords. This last suggestion has already been
hazarded in this country by Crawford,[479] though backed up with
inadequate evidence, and in France by M. Hubert,[480] with whose
evidence I am unacquainted, as his work dealing with the subject has
not appeared as I write.
But in all these cases I have endeavoured to support my argument, not
merely with philological data, as has been the case with most of my
predecessors, but with evidence drawn from anthropology and archæology.
The evidence from the Italian swords, backed up as it is by the absence
of Hallstatt iron swords from the Seine valley, seems so decisive that
I feel that the equation of the Q peoples with the spread of the bronze
swords is beyond dispute.
But if this general reconstruction of the early history of the Wiro
movements is to be considered correct, in outline at least, it must be
shown that it will fit in with all the linguistic evidence available;
at any rate that it is not incompatible with it. For that reason I
propose in this chapter to summarise briefly, as I conceive them,
the wanderings of the Wiros over Europe and Asia, from their first
departure from south-east Europe.
We have found reason for believing that before 3000 /B.C./, and
probably for long before that date, the Wiros had been occupying the
Russian steppes east of the Dnieper, and had perhaps wandered across
the Volga into Turkestan. They were a nomad people, living, perhaps,
partly by hunting, but mainly by herding cattle on the grassy steppes,
and the parklands which fringed them on the north. They had tamed the
horse, and held this animal in great veneration. Its name constantly
occurs as part of their own names,[481] they rode it like cow-boys
“punching” their cattle, and if we may judge from the habits of their
descendants, it was what may be described as a cult animal.
We have seen that they seem to have been of the Nordic type, but this
statement needs qualification. We are accustomed to speak of Nordics,
Alpines and Mediterraneans, and to describe their physical characters
in considerable detail. We are well aware that the population of every
country in Europe is mixed, and contains many examples of at least two
of these types and a larger number of individuals who resemble one type
in this feature and another in that; there are also many who display
intermediate characters. But from this mass of heterogeneous material
we believe that we have isolated these types, which we consider pure,
and we treat the bulk of the population as a mixture of these, varying
in its components and their proportions in each region. This postulates
that there was a time, the race-making period of some writers,[482]
when each of these races was living, pure and unmixed, in some area of
isolation.
That this position has led to clear thinking and has advanced the
science of physical anthropology is undoubted, but we have to consider
whether it represents a condition which has actually occurred. That
such a pure and homogeneous type would evolve if a community were
isolated from all others for a sufficient length of time is probable,
but we have no clear evidence that such a state of isolation has been
preserved for a sufficient period in any part of Europe, or for that
matter in the world. The Andamanese have for long kept themselves
in fairly complete isolation in a small group of islands, yet their
type seems to show evidence of admixture. The same is more true of
the Australian aborigines, although the island continent has almost
succeeded in keeping out other placental animals. It is true that
as we go back into the past, especially into early neolithic times,
the skulls in any given region appear more homogeneous than is the
case at later periods. After the forests had appeared in Magdalenian
times, and until the metal trade arose, communities seem to have been
more isolated than either before or after. This was, apparently, the
race-making period postulated by McDougall. But the communities who
settled at that time in these regions of isolation were to some extent
of mixed ancestry, and their isolation was not of sufficient length to
insure absolute homogeneity, though we find a closer approximation to
it then than has occurred since.
We have seen at the close of Chapter II. that what we have been
accustomed to consider the Mediterranean race is in reality a mixture
of several late palæolithic types, all somewhat resembling one another
in their most conspicuous features, and the same seems to have been
true of the Nordic Wiros, during their race-making period on the
Russian steppe. Unfortunately we have no very long series of skulls
to study, and in the case of some we are uncertain whether they
belong to this or to a slightly later date. But Sergi has described
a series of ninety-one,[483] which will give us some idea of their
range of variation. Thirty-six of these skulls have indices varying
from seventy-three to seventy-six, thirty-one more between seventy-one
and seventy-eight, while the remaining twenty-four range outside
these from sixty-five to eighty-one. Many of these skulls are very
high, and so conform to the type of Brünn-Brux-Combe Capelle, and
this has led Fleure to suspect that this late palæolithic type, the
essentially intrusive element into the west of Solutrean times, is
present in considerable numbers among these steppe-folk.[484] According
to Sergi fifty-one out of the ninety-one show this feature and these
are distributed pretty generally among all indices from sixty-five to
seventy-nine.
Again, Bogdanov has given us reason for believing that two races
were inhabiting the government of Moscow during the kurgan period.
“One of these races was robust, with a large and long head, an
elongated face, and, according to some examples, with hair more or
less fair. The other, smaller and more poverty stricken, belongs to
a brachycephalic people, having a shorter face, a wider and shorter
head, and chestnut hair.”[485] He shows, too, that in the centre of
the area the long-headed type was purest, and cites twenty-three
skulls from the kurgans of Souja, in the government of Kursk, of which
nineteen were true dolichocephals, while three women and one child were
subdolichocephalic.
We may, I think, consider the two skulls described by Sergi with an
index of eighty, and the one with an index of eighty-one, as belonging
to a foreign element living on the border of the steppes, perhaps as
belonging to the Tripolje folk. If so we may consider our primitive
Nordics as having fairly long and narrow heads, though in this respect
not so uniformly narrow as was the case with the Mediterraneans of
the west. The cephalic index seems to have ranged from sixty-five to
seventy-nine, though more usually from seventy-one to seventy-eight,
while the more typical members of the group varied from seventy-three
to seventy-six. These figures will be found to agree fairly well with
observations made on the tall fair people of the present population of
North Europe.
We can then imagine our Wiros as a somewhat variable race, with heads
which conform to the narrow rather than to the broad type, tall and
robust, though probably neither so tall nor so robust as many of the
modern Nordics. There is reason for believing them to have been fair,
with transparent skins, light hair and grey eyes, though it is likely
enough that in colouration, too, there was considerable variation. We
may well believe that the extremely fair colouring of the modern Swedes
is a later specialisation, due to a few thousand years of life in a
northern home, but we shall do well, I would suggest, to think of the
original Wiros as blonds rather than brunets, though not necessarily
or in all cases possessing an extreme degree of blondness. Such then
I would have you picture the Wiros on the steppe, and I would also
remind you that many of them seem to have been descendants of the
late Aurignacian and Solutrean horse-hunters, and that they may have
developed the rudiments of their language in some post-Solutrean time
within the Carpathian ring.
We have seen reason for believing that a period of drought, occurring
some centuries before 3000 /B.C./, drove some of them towards the
Baltic. It is possible, though I think improbable, that these may have
been the ancestors of the group who use Teutonic speech. I am more
inclined, however, to see in them the original speakers of Lithuanian
and the Baltic tongues. Whether there was also at this time a move to
the east is uncertain. Kurgans are said to stretch to the north-east
well into Siberia, but we have insufficient data at present to
determine their age or indeed whether they belong to Wiro culture. It
is possible, however, that the north-westerly movement was paralleled
by one to the north-east, into the Obi basin, and the Wiros may have
wandered as far north as Tobolsk, or even to the Arctic Circle.
But the great dispersal was about 2200 /B.C./ On this occasion the
drought seems to have been more excessive or more prolonged, for it
is believed that the steppe was left for awhile uninhabited. That the
movements passed east and west is certain, for we find evidence of the
abandonment of settled villages both in the Tripolje area and at Anau.
With the westerly movement we have dealt at some length; that to the
east must now demand our attention.
We have seen that shortly after 2200 /B.C./ nomad horsemen arrived on
the Iranian plateau and that their appearance attracted the attention
of Hammurabi and his counsellors. That these nomads, who were known
as Kassites, were Wiros is certain, for philologists seem agreed
that their language was of this type.[486] They were the first to
introduce the horse into this area, and that this animal was held in
reverence among them seems clear from the adoption of this beast as a
divine symbol.[487] It seems unlikely that the Kassites were the sole
representatives of this eastward move. It may be that it is to this
date that we are to attribute the kurgans found in the Obi basin, or
perhaps they found adequate pasture for their herds on the lower slopes
of the Hindu Kush and the region around Balkh. We are as yet uncertain
whether the group of Wiros, who may more properly claim the name of
Aryas, and who spoke Indo-Iranian dialects, left the steppe at this
time or on the earlier occasion but deductions drawn from linguistic
evidence, from Vedic and Avestan sources, and from later Persian
legend would lead us to expect that about 2000 /B.C./ the undivided
Aryas were occupying the eastern parts of Russian Turkestan. A little
later, perhaps, a group of these, speaking a language which had Iranian
affinities, made themselves lords of eastern Armenia.
These are generally known as the Mitanni or Mitani barons; Professor
Sayce has suggested to me that the name Mitan is the same as Midas,
which would hint at a Phrygian origin, but the Iranian affinities of
their language and the early date at which they appear in the Armenian
mountains suggest that they arrived before the Phrygian invasion of
Asia Minor, while the fact that they were located on the eastern rather
than the western side of the Armenian _massif_ leads one to believe
that their line of approach was from Turkestan or the Iranian plateau
on the east, rather than from Thracian territory on the west.
With the westward move of the Wiros I have already dealt in a former
chapter. Having destroyed the Tripolje culture some passed along the
sandy heaths of Galicia, entering Bohemia and Hungary through the
Moravian gap, and displacing the Beaker-folk who passed northwards
to Jutland, Holland and the British Isles. Others passed round the
south-west shores of the Euxine to the Gallipoli peninsula where they
divided, one party skirting the north Ægean coast to the grassy plain
of Thessaly, where they introduced Dhimini ware, and where their sudden
appearance on horseback gave rise to the legends of the Centaurs. The
other party crossed the Hellespont, sacked Hissarlik II. and passed on
to the grass lands in the centre of Anatolia. Here they organised the
eastern Alpine tribes into a great empire, and though, apparently, they
adopted the language of their subjects, they introduced some of their
own words and idioms, including the numerals, into that tongue, and
most important of all established in the Hittite empire the worship of
the Wiro deities.
Such seems to have been the distribution of the Wiros about 2000
/B.C./, or a little later, and for the next 500 years we find little
evidence of movement, except that the Kassites, about 1760 /B.C./
established themselves as rulers in Mesopotamia. The great split
between the Indian and Iranian Aryas must have taken place about this
time, causing the former to cross Afghanistan and enter the Punjab,
while the latter continued to roam the steppes of Turkestan, and
eventually to cross the Volga into South Russia, where they occupied
the plain as far west as the foot of the Carpathians.[488]
We may now for a time leave the Asiatic sections and concentrate our
attention upon those Wiros who entered what we have termed the Celtic
cradle. Some passed into the mountain zone, where others had arrived
before them, and made themselves lords of the settled agricultural
Alpine lake-villages; these were the proto-Celts. Others seem to have
remained in the plain of Hungary, continuing perhaps their former
nomadic life. These, who had spread into the basin of the Morava,
became the Thraco-Phrygian group. Between these two, in the lower
valleys of the Drave and the Save, in Croatia and perhaps in Bosnia,
were a third group, who may be termed proto-Italic. It must not be
taken for granted that from the time of their arrival these three
groups were quite sharply separated. We have seen, however, that the
division of the people of the plain and the mountain zones arose quite
early, largely from the difference between their modes of life. It is
probable that many dialects arose, and that by degrees some of the
mountain Wiros extended to the south-east, even as far as Herzegovina,
and these gradually became separated from the main body of their
fellows. The main group developed Celtic dialects, and south-eastern
group Italic, though both, it must be remembered, spoke Q tongues.
Soon after 1500 /B.C./, when the first leaf-shaped sword, Type A, had
been evolved, some Wiros seem to have passed over the mountains into
the Friuli. It may have been merely a raid or a trading venture, but
the Treviso specimen suggests that these swords had remained in use and
had developed into a local type, so that it is possible that we may see
in this, evidence of a small migration of Wiros through the Friuli to
settle in the Veneto. The evidence is admittedly slight, but it seems
to point to the introduction at this time into the regions lying at the
head of the Adriatic of the Venetian dialects, which appear to be more
archaic in form than the other Italic tongues.