THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY
238. The early focal area.—239. Egypt and Sumer and their
background.—240. Predynastic Egypt.—241. Culture growth
in dynastic Egypt.—242. The Sumerian development.—243.
The Sumerian hinterland.—244. Entry of Semites and
Indo-Europeans.—245. Iranian peoples and cultures.—246. The
composite culture of the Near East.—247. Phœnicians, Aramæans,
Hebrews.—248. Other contributing nationalities.—249. Ægean
civilization.—250. Europe.—251. China.—252. Growth and spread
of Chinese civilization.—253. The Lolos.—254. Korea.—255.
Japan.—256. Central and northern Asia.—257. India.—258.
Indian caste and religion.—259. Relations between India and
the outer world.—260. Indo-China.—261. Oceania.—262. The East
Indies.—263. Melanesia and Polynesia.—264. Australia.—265.
Tasmania.—266. Africa.—267. Egyptian radiations.—268. The
influence of other cultures.—269. The Bushmen.—270. The West
African culture-area and its meaning.—271. Civilization, race,
and the future.
238. THE EARLY FOCAL AREA
The prehistoric archæology of Europe and the Near East, outlined in the
last chapter, besides arriving at a tolerable chronology, reveals a
set of processes of which the outstanding one is the principle of the
origin of culture at focal centers and its diffusion to marginal tracts.
Obviously this principle should apply in the field of history as well as
prehistory, and should be even more easily traceable there.
In the Western Hemisphere it is plain that the great hearth of cultural
nourishment and production has been Middle America—the tracts at the
two ends of the intercontinental bridge, the Isthmus of Panama. That a
similarly preëminent focal area existed in the Eastern Hemisphere has
been implied over and over again in the pages that immediately precede
this one, in the references to the priority of Egypt and Babylonia—the
countries of the Nile and of the Two Rivers. These two lands lie at no
great distance from each other: they are closer than Mexico and Peru.
Like these two, they are also connected by a strip of mostly favorable
territory—the “Fertile Crescent” of Palestine, Syria, and northern
Mesopotamia. Curiously, the two countries also lie in two continents
connected by a land bridge: the Isthmus of Suez is a parallel to that of
Panama.
Both in Egypt and in Babylonia we find a little before 3000 B.C. a system
of partly phonetic writing, which, though cumbersome by modern standards,
was adequate to record whatever was spoken. Copper was abundant and
bronze in use for weapons and tools. Pottery was being turned on wheels.
Economic life was at bottom agricultural. The same food plants were
grown: barley and wheat; similar beer brewed from them. The same animals
were raised: cattle, swine, sheep, goats; with the ass for transport.
Architecture was in sun-dried brick. Considerable walled cities had
arisen. Their rulers struggled or attained supremacy over one another
as avowed kings with millions of subjects. A regulated calendar existed
by which events were dated. There were taxes, governors, courts of
law, police protection, and social order. A series of great gods, with
particular names and attributes, were worshiped in temples.
239. EGYPT AND SUMER AND THEIR BACKGROUND
It is scarcely conceivable that these two parallel growths of
civilization, easily the most advanced that had until then appeared on
earth, should have sprung up independently within a thousand miles of
each other. Had Sumerian culture blossomed far away, say on the shores of
the Pacific instead of the lower Euphrates, its essential separateness,
like that of Middle American civilization, might be probable. But not
only is the stretch of land between Babylonia and Egypt relatively short:
it is, except in the Suez district, productive and pleasant, and was
settled fairly densely by relatively advanced nations soon after the
historic period opens or even before. The same is true of the adjoining
regions. Canaan, Syria, Mesopotamia, Troy, Crete, Elam, southwestern
Turkistan, had all passed beyond barbarism and into the period of city
life during the fourth and third millenia B.C. This cannot be a series of
coincidences. Evidently western Asia, together with the nearest European
islands and the adjacent fertile corner of Africa, formed a complex but
connected unit, a larger hearth in which culture was glowing at a number
of points. It merely happened that a little upstream from the mouths of
the Nile and of the Euphrates the development flamed up faster during the
fifth and fourth millenia. The causes can only be conjectured. Perhaps
when agriculture came to be systematically instead of casually conducted,
these annually overflowed bottom lands proved unusually favorable;
their population grew, necessitating fixed government and social order,
which in turn enabled a still more rapid growth of numbers, the fuller
exploitation of resources, and division of labor. This looks plausible
enough. But too much weight should not be attached to explanations of
this sort: they remain chiefly hypothetical. That culture had however
by 3000 B.C. attained a greater richness and organization in Egypt and
in the Babylonian region than elsewhere, are facts, and can hardly be
anything but causally connected facts. These two civilizations had
evidently arisen out of a common Near Eastern high level of Neolithic
culture, much as the peaks of Mexico and Peru arose above the plateau of
Middle American culture in which they were grounded.
Of course this means that Egypt and Sumer did not stand in
parental-filial relation. They were rather collateral kin—brothers, or
better, perhaps, the two most eminent of a group of cousins. Attempts
to derive Egyptian hieroglyphic from Babylonian Cuneiform writing, and
vice versa, have been rejected as unproved by the majority of unbiased
scholars. But it is likely that at least the idea of making legible
records, of using pictorial signs for sounds of speech, was carried from
one people to the other, which thereupon worked out its own symbols and
meanings. Just so, while the Phœnician alphabet has never yet been led
back to either Egyptian, Cuneiform, Cretan, or Hittite writing with
enough evidence to satisfy more than a minority fraction of the world of
scholarship, it seems incredible that this new form of writing should
have originated uninfluenced by any of the several systems which had been
in current use in the near neighborhood, in part in Phœnicia itself, for
from one to two or three thousand years. Such a view denies neither the
essentially new element in Phœnician script nor its cultural importance.
It does not consider the origin of the alphabet explained away by a
reference to another and earlier system of writing. It does bring the
alphabet into some sort of causal relation with the other systems,
without merging it in them. It is along lines like this that the relation
of early Egypt and Babylonia to each other and to the other cultures of
the ancient Near East must be conceived.
240. PREDYNASTIC EGYPT
Egyptian civilization was already in full blown flower at the time of
the consolidation of Lower and Upper Egypt under the first dynasty in
the thirty-fourth century. Its developmental stages must have reached
much farther back. Hieroglyphic writing, for instance, had taken on
substantially the forms and degree of efficiency which it maintained
for the next three thousand years. An elaborate, conventional system
of this sort must have required centuries for its formative stages.
A non-lunar 365-day calendar was in use. This was easily the most
accurate and effective calendar developed in the ancient world, and
furnished the basis of our own. It erred by the few hours’ difference
between the solar and the assumed year. This difference the Egyptians
did not correct but recorded, with the result that when the initial
day had slowly swung around the cycle of the seasons, they reckoned
a “Sothic year” of 1,461 years. One of these was completed in 2781;
which gives 4241 B.C. as the date of the fixing of the calendar. This
is considered the earliest exactly known date in human history. Of
course, a calendar of such fineness cannot be established without long
continued observations, whose duration will be the greater for lack
of astronomical instruments. Centuries must have elapsed while this
calendar was being worked out. Nor would oral tradition be a sufficient
vehicle for carrying the observations. Permanent records must have been
transmitted from generation to generation; and these presuppose stability
of society, enduring buildings, towns, and a class with leisure to devote
to astronomical computations. It is safe therefore to set 4500 B.C. as
the time when Egypt had emerged from a tribal or rural peasant condition
into one that can be called “civilized” in the original meaning of that
word: a period of city states, or at least districts organized under
recognized rulers. From 4500 on, then, is the time of the Predynastic
Local Kingdoms.
Beyond this time there must lie another: the Predynastic Tribal
period, before towns or calendars or writing or metal, when pottery
was being made, stone ground, boats built, plants and animals being
domesticated—the typical pure Neolithic Age, in short. Yet with all
its prehistoric wealth, Egypt has not yet produced any true Neolithic
remains. It is hardly likely that the country was uninhabited for
thousands of years; much more probably have Neolithic remains been
obliterated. This inference is strengthened by the paucity and
dubiousness of Upper Palæolithic artifacts in Egypt. Lower Palæolithic
flint implements are abundant, just as are remains from the whole of the
period of metals. What has happened to the missing deposits and burials
of the Upper Palæolithic and Neolithic that fell between?
Apparently they have been buried on the floor of the Nile valley under
alluvial deposits. The Eolithic and Lower Palæolithic implements are
found on the plateau through which the valley stretches; also cemented
into conglomerate formed of gravel and stone washed down from this
plateau and cut into terraces by the Nile when it still flowed from
30 to 100 feet higher than at present; and on the terraces. Just when
these terraces were formed, it is difficult to say in terms of European
Pleistocene periods; but not later than the third glacial epoch, it would
seem, and perhaps as early as the second. As the Chellean of Europe is
put after the third glaciation in the chronology followed in this book,
the antiquity of the first flints used, and perhaps deliberately shaped,
in Egypt, is carried back to an extremely high antiquity by the specimens
imbedded in the terrace cliffs.
About the time of the last glaciation—the Mousterian or end of the Lower
Palæolithic in Europe—the Nile ceased cutting down through the gravels
that bordered it and began to build up its bed and its valley with a
deposit of mud as it does to-day. From excavations to the base of dated
monuments it is known that during the last 4,000 years this alluvium has
been laid down at the rate of a foot in 300 years in northern Egypt.
As it there attains a depth of over a hundred feet, the process of
deposition is indicated as having begun 30,000 or more years ago. Of
course no computation of this sort is entirely reliable because various
factors can enter to change the rate; but the probability is that,
other things equal, the deposition would have been slower at first than
of late, and the time of the aggrading correspondingly longer. In any
event geologists agree that their Recent—the last 10,000 years or so—is
insufficient, and that the deposition of the floor of the Nile valley
must have begun during what in Europe was part of the Würm glaciation.
This is the period of transition from Lower to Upper Palæolithic (§ 69,
70, 213) in Europe. The disappearance of Upper Palæolithic remains in
Egypt is most plausibly explained by the fact that the Upper Palæolithic,
just as later the Neolithic, was indeed represented in Egypt, very likely
flourishingly, but that in the mild climate its artifacts were lost or
interred on or near the surface of the valley itself and have therefore
long since been covered over so deep that only future lucky accidents,
like well-soundings, may now and then bring a specimen to light.
For the Neolithic, there actually are such discoveries: bits of pottery
brought up from borings, 60 feet deep in the vicinity of one of the
monuments referred to, 75 and 90 feet deep at other points in lower
Egypt. The smallest of these figures computes to a lapse of 18,000
years—nearly twice as long as the estimated age of the earliest pottery
in Europe. It is always necessary not to lay too much reliance on
durations calculated solely from thickness of strata, whether these are
geological or culture-bearing. But in this case general probability
confirms, at least in the rough. In 4000 B.C., when Egypt was beginning
to use copper, western Europe was still in its first phase of stone
polishing; in 1500 B.C., when Egypt was becoming acquainted with iron,
Europe was scarcely yet at the height of its bronze industry. If the
fisher folk camped on their oyster shells on the Baltic shores were
able to make pottery by 8000 B.C., there is nothing staggering in the
suggestion that the Egyptians knew the art in 16,000 B.C. They have had
writing more than twice as long as the North Europeans.
The dates themselves, then, need not be taken too literally. They are
calculated from slender even though impressive evidence and subject to
revision by perhaps thousands of years. But they do suggest strongly the
distinct precedence of northern Africa, and by implication of western
Asia, over Europe in the Neolithic, as precedence is clear in the Bronze
and early Iron Ages and indicated for the Lower Palæolithic.
If, accordingly, the beginning of the Early Neolithic—the age of
pottery, bow, dog—be set for Egypt somewhere around 16,000 B.C., about
coeval with the beginning of the Magdalenian in middle western Europe
(§ 215), the Full Neolithic, the time of first domestication of animals
and plants and polishing of stone, could be estimated at around 10,000
B.C., when Europe was still lingering in its epi-Palæolithic phase (§
216). One can cut away several thousand years and retain the essential
situation unimpaired: 8000, or 7000 B.C., still leaves Egypt in the
van; helps to explain the appearance of eastern grains and animals in
Europe around 6000-5000 B.C.; and, what is most to the point, allows a
sufficient interval for agriculture and the allied phases of civilization
to have reached the degree of development which they display when the
Predynastic Local Kingdoms drift into our vision around 4500 B.C. A long
Full Neolithic, then, is both demanded by the situation in Egypt and
indicated by such facts as there are; a long period in which millet,
barley, split-wheat, wheat, flax, cattle, sheep, and asses were gradually
modified and made more useful by breeding under domestication. This Full
Neolithic, or its last portion, was the Predynastic Tribal Age of Egypt;
which, when it passed into the Predynastic Local Kingdoms phase about
4500 B.C., had brought these plants and animals substantially to their
modern forms, and had increased and coördinated the population of the
land to a point that the devising of calendar, metallurgy, writing, and
kingship soon followed.
241. CULTURE GROWTH IN DYNASTIC EGYPT
The story of the growth of Egyptian civilization during the Dynastic
or historic period is a fascinating one. There were three phases of
prosperity and splendor. The first was the Old Kingdom, 3000-2500,
culminating in the fourth dynasty of the Great Pyramid builders, in the
twenty-ninth century. The second was the Middle or Feudal Kingdom, with
its climax in the twelfth dynasty, 2000-1788. After the invasion of
the Asiatic Hyksos in the seventeenth century, the New Empire of the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties arose, whose greatest extension fell
in the reign of Thutmose III, 1501-1447, although the country retained
some powers of offensive for a couple of centuries longer. There followed
a slow nationalistic decline, a transient seventh century conquest
by Assyria, a brief and fictitious renascence supported by foreign
mercenaries, and the Persian conquest of 525 B.C., since which time Egypt
has never been an independent power under native rulers. A waning of
cultural energy, at least relatively to other peoples, had set in before
the military decline. By 1000 B.C. certainly, by 1500 perhaps, Egypt was
receiving more elements of civilization than she was imparting. She still
loomed wealthy and refined in contrast with younger nations; but these
were producing more that was new.
Copper smelted from the ores of the Sinai peninsula had apparently come
into use by 4000, but remained scarce for a long time. The first dynasty
had some low grade bronze; by 2500 bronze containing a tenth of tin was
in use. Iron was introduced about 1500 or soon after, but for centuries
remained a sparing Asiatic import. In fact, the conservatism that was
settling over the old age of the civilization caused it to cling with
unusual tenacity to bronze. As late as Ptolemaic and Roman times, when
the graves of foreigners abounded in iron, those of Egyptians were still
prevailingly bronze furnished.
Quite different must have been the social psychology three thousand years
earlier. The first masonry was laid in place of adobe brick to line tomb
walls in the thirty-first century; and within a century and a half the
grandest stone architecture in human history had been attained in the
Pyramid of Cheops. This was a burst of cultural energy such as has been
equalled only in the rise of Greek art or modern science.
Glass making seems to have been discovered in Egypt in the early
dynasties and to have spread from there to Syria and the Euphrates. The
earliest glass was colored faïence, at most translucent, and devoted
chiefly to jewelry, or to surfacing brick. Later it was blown into
vessels, usually small bottles, and only gradually attained to clearness.
From western Asia the art was carried to Europe, and, in Christian times,
to China, which at first paid gem prices for glass beads, but later was
perhaps stimulated by knowledge of the new art into devising porcelain—a
pottery vitrified through.
The horse first reached Egypt with the Hyksos. With it came the war
chariot. Wheeled vehicles seem to have been lacking previously. The
alphabet, the arch, the zodiac, coinage, heavy metal armor, and many
other important inventions gained no foot-hold in Egypt until after the
country had definitely passed under foreign domination. The superior
intensity of early Egyptian civilization had evidently fostered a spirit
of cultural self-sufficiency, analogous to that of China or Byzantine
Greece, which produced a resistance to innovation from without. At
the same time, inward development continued, as attested by numerous
advances in religion, literature, dress, the arts, and science when the
Old Kingdom and New Empire are compared. In the eleventh and twelfth
dynasties, for instance, the monarchy was feudal; in the eighteenth lived
the famous monotheistic iconoclastic ruler Ikhnaton.
The civilization of ancient Egypt was wholly produced and carried by a
Hamitic-speaking people. This people has sometimes been thought to have
come from Asia, but its Hamitic relatives hold Africa from Somaliland
to Morocco even to-day, and there is no cogent reason to look for its
ancestors outside that continent.
242. THE SUMERIAN DEVELOPMENT
The story of Babylonia is less completely known than that of Egypt
because as a rockless land it was forced to depend on sun-dried brick,
because the climate is less arid, and also because of its position.
Egypt was isolated by deserts, Babylonia open to many neighbors, and
so was invaded, fought over, and never unified as long as Egypt. The
civilization was therefore never so nationally specific, so concentrated;
and its records, though abundant, are patchy. Babylonia, the region of
the lower Euphrates and Tigris, was the leading culture center of Asia in
the third and second millenia before Christ; and while mostly a Semitic
land in this period, its civilization was the product of another people,
the Sumerians, established near the mouth of the two rivers in the fourth
millenium. It was the Sumerians who in this thousand years worked out
the Cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing—mixedly phonetic and
ideographic like the Egyptian, but of wholly different values, so far
as can be told to-day, and executed in straight strokes instead of the
pictorial forms of Hieroglyphic or the cursive ones of its derivative
Hieratic. It was the Semites who, coming in from the Arabian region, took
over this writing, together with the culture that accompanied it. Their
dependence is shown by the fact that they used characters with Sumerian
phonetic values as well as by their retention of Sumerian as a sacred
language, for which, as time went on, they were compelled to compile
dictionaries, to the easement of modern archæologists.
Of the local origins of this Sumerian city-state civilization with
its irrigation and intensive agriculture, nothing is known. It kept
substantially abreast of Egypt, or at most a few centuries in arrears. In
certain features, as the use of metals, it seems to have been in advance.
Egypt is a long-drawn oasis stretched through a great desert. Babylonia
lies adjacent to desert and highland, steppe and mountains. Within a
range of a few hundred miles, its environment is far more varied. Not
only copper but tin is said to have been available among neighboring
peoples. So, too, Babylonia is likely to have had the early domestic
animals—except perhaps cattle—earlier than Egypt, because it lay nearer
to what seem to have been their native habitats. The result is that
whereas Egyptian culture makes the superficial impression of having been
largely evolved on the spot by the Egyptians, Sumerian culture already
promises to resolve, when we shall know it better, into a blend to which
a series of peoples contributed measurably. The rôle of the Sumerians,
like that of their Semitic successors, was perhaps primarily that of
organizers.
243. THE SUMERIAN HINTERLAND
There are some evidences of these cultures previous to the Sumerian
one or coeval with it. In Elam, the foot-hill country east of Sumer, a
mound at Susa contains over 100 feet of culture-bearing deposits; in
southern Turkistan, at Anau, 300 miles east of the Caspian sea, one is
more than fifty feet deep. The date of the first occupancy of these
sites has been set, largely on the basis of the rate of accumulation of
the deposits—an unsafe criterion—at 18,000 and 8000 B.C. respectively.
These dates, particularly the former, are surely too high. But a remote
antiquity is indicated. Both sites show adobe brick houses and hand-made,
painted pottery at the very bottom. Susa contains copper implements in
the lowest stratum; Anau, three-fourths way to the base—in the same
level as remains of sheep and camels. Still lower levels at Anau yielded
remains of tamed cattle, pigs, and goats, while wheat and barley appear
at the very bottom, before domesticated animals were kept. Whatever the
date of the introduction of copper in these regions, it was very likely
anterior to the thirty-first century, when bronze was already used by the
Sumerians. These excavations therefore shed light on the Full Neolithic
and Eneolithic or Transition phases of west Asiatic culture which must
have preceded the Sumerian civilization known to us.
The languages of these early west Asiatic peoples have not been
classified. Sumerian was non-Indo-European, non-Semitic, non-Hamitic.
Some have thought to detect Turkish, that is Ural-Altaic, resemblances
in it. But others find similarities to modern African languages. This
divergence of opinion probably means that Sumerian cannot yet be safely
linked with any other linguistic group. The same applies to Elamite,
which is known from inscriptions of a later date than the early strata
at Susa. What the Neolithic and Bronze Age people of Anau spoke there
is no means of knowing. The region at present is Turkish, but this is
of course no evidence that it was so thousands of years ago. The speech
of the region might conceivably have been Indo-European, for it lies
at the foot of the Persian plateau, which by the Iron Age was occupied
by the Iranian branch of the Indo-Europeans, who are generally thought
to have entered it from the north or northwest. But again there is not
a shred of positive evidence for an Indo-European population at this
wholly prehistoric period. The one thing that is clear is that the
early civilization of the general west Asiatic area was not developed
by the Semites who were its chief carriers later. This is a situation
parallel to that obtaining in Europe and Asia Minor, whose civilization
in the full historic period has been almost wholly in the hands of
Indo-Europeans, whereas at the dawn of history the nations who were
culturally in the lead, the Hittites, Trojans, Cretans, Lydians,
Etruscans, and Iberians, were all non-Indo-European.
244. ENTRY OF SEMITES AND INDO-EUROPEANS
The Semitic invasions seem to have proceeded from the great motherland of
that stock, Arabia, whose deserts and half-deserts have been at all times
like a multiplying hive. Some of the movements were outright conquests,
others half-forceful penetrations, still others infiltrations. Several
great waves can be distinguished. About 3000 there was a drift which
brought the Akkadians, Sargon’s people, into Babylonia, perhaps the
Assyrians into their home up the Tigris, the Canaanites and Phœnicians
into the Syrian region. About 2200 the Amorites flowed north: into
Babylonia, where Babylon now sprang up and the famous lawgiver Hammurabi
ruled; into Mesopotamia proper; and into Syria. Around 1400, the
Aramæans gradually occupied the Syrian district, and the Hebrews began
to dispossess the Canaanites. Around 700 still another wave brought the
Chaldæans into Babylonia, to erect a great Semitic kingdom once more—that
of Nebuchadnezzar. Then, for more than a thousand years, Arabia lay
contained within herself, dammed perhaps by the Persian, Macedonian,
Parthian, and Roman empires, until in the seventh century after Christ
Mohammedanism led forth her peoples. A much earlier movement, at an
unknown time, had brought the forefathers of the Abyssinians across the
mouth of the Red Sea into Africa, and the Hyksos who overthrew the Middle
Kingdom of ancient Egypt may have been Semites.
The Indo-Europeans entered southwest Asia later and permeated it more
locally than the Semites. Soon after 2000 the Kassites or Kossæans
intruded into Babylonia; they seem to have been Indo-Europeans, perhaps
Iranians. Around 1500 the Mitanni were a power on the upper Euphrates
between the Assyrians and the Hittites of Asia Minor. Their personal and
god names as preserved in Assyrian Cuneiform inscriptions show them to
have been an Iranian people. The latter are not recognizably referred to
in their permanent home on the Iranian plateau until about 1000, but may
well have settled there a thousand years earlier. Their close relatives,
the Indic branch, are believed to have begun their entry of India about
2000-1500 B.C. or soon after.
245. IRANIAN PEOPLES AND CULTURES
By the seventh century B.C., the Iranians were civilized and strong
enough to participate in the overthrow of Semitic Assyria, whose
principal inheritors they became. From then on for over twelve hundred
years, with only a century of interruption due to Alexander and his
successors, a succession of Iranian powers dominated not only the plateau
but Babylonia and Mesopotamia: Medes, Achæmenian Persians, Parthians,
Sassanian Persians. A strong national consciousness was evolved and
reinforced by a national religion—Zoroastrianism, Magism, Fire-worship,
the Avestan faith, are some of its names. This Iranian religion endured
nearly three thousand years, and still survives among a shrunken number
of followers, notably the emigrant Parsis—that is, “Persians”—of India;
and its basic ideas of the eternal conflict of good and evil, truth and
lie, and of a single supreme deity of righteousness, have influenced
many other cults, including Christianity. The long contact between Iran
and the Tigris-Euphrates valley and their frequent political unity since
600 B.C. reacted favorably to the intensification of culture in the
highlands; with the result that when the Arabs and later the Turks broke
from their marginal homes into the old civilized parts of western Asia,
they absorbed heavily from the long established cultures of Iran. Much of
Arab and Turkish civilization is really Persian, and goes back ultimately
to Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian origins.
Soon after the Iranians pushed southward out of the steppe on to the
plateau east of the Caspian, other Indo-Europeans drove southward west
of the Caspian and Black Sea; the Armenians into the seats which they
have held ever since, the Kardouchoi into the Kurd country, tribes
allied to the Balkan Thracians and the Phrygians into Asia Minor. The
centuries before and after 1000 B.C. were the period of these movements,
all of which failed to penetrate as deeply into the heart of the
west Asiatic cultural center as had the Semitic inflows. Nor was the
Indo-Europeanization of all the newly occupied territories as permanent
as the corresponding Semitization. Asia Minor, which is now prevailingly
Turkish, is the one area of consequence that in the historic period has
been de-Indo-Europeanized in speech (§ 50).
246. THE COMPOSITE CULTURE OF THE NEAR EAST
In this western end of Asia, then, from the Hellespont to Persia and from
the Caucasus to the Arabian desert, beginning five thousand years ago
and probably more, a motley of nations was thrown together—autochthonous
peoples of several sorts, Semites, Indo-Europeans, possibly
Ural-Altaians. Their contacts enabled each to acquire many of the
new devices developed by the others, to combine these with their own
attainments, and thus to be a source of culture stimulation over again
for the others. The largest tract of rich lowland in the area was the
Fertile Crescent which bowed from Jerusalem northward and eastward into
Mesopotamia and then down the course of the Tigris and Euphrates to their
mouths, and here, for several millenia, civilization tended to advance
most intensively. Within this Crescent, again, its southeastern end, the
drainable and irrigable alluvial plain of Babylonia, averaged in the lead
from the earliest known Sumerian times until shortly before the Christian
era. Yet political dominance often shifted elsewhere: to Egypt, which
conquered to the Euphrates in the fifteenth century B.C.; to the Hittites
of Asia Minor in the fourteenth and thirteenth; to the Assyrians of the
middle Tigris in the twelfth and eleventh and again in the eighth and
seventh centuries. Culturally, too, almost every one of the many nations
or tracts comprised within the west Asiatic area developed a degree of
independence; each added features or modified those which it borrowed;
each gave to its local civilization a cast of its own, without losing
touch with the others.
247. PHŒNICIANS, ARAMÆANS, HEBREWS
Thus, the Phœnicians, or some Semitic people closely related and
geographically near them, by 1000 B.C. developed, presumably out of
one of the several part-phonetic or syllabic writings in use about or
among them, the true alphabet (§ 134). In the two or three centuries
following, they established a commercial and maritime supremacy over the
Mediterranean that led to the founding of Carthage, direct trade as far
as Spain and indirect to Britain, and transmission of the alphabet and
other knowledge to the Greeks.
Another trading people, although an inland one, were the Aramæans,
Semites of the same wave as the Hebrews but established north of
Palestine in Syria, with Damascus as their greatest center. Never more
than a secondary political power, they penetrated other countries
peacefully, brought in their system of measures and weights, their
writing, and even their language. Assyria had become half Aramaic
speaking by the time of her fall, and the every-day language of Palestine
in the days of Jesus and for some centuries before was Aramaic. Aramæan
script, a cursive form of the Phœnician alphabet, gradually replaced
Cuneiform writing, first for business and then for official purposes,
throughout western Asia and beyond. In the fourteenth century, the Syrian
and Palestinian city rulers had written their reports and dispatches
to the Egyptian overlord in Cuneiform, which a corps of clerks in the
Foreign Office or Dependencies Department at Tell-el-Amarna transcribed
into Hieroglyphic or Hieratic. In the fourth century, Persian officials
were employing Aramæan for official communications. As the Cuneiform
more and more died out, derivatives of Aramæan became the alphabets of
Persia; of at least part and possibly the whole of India; of the Jews;
of the Arabs; of the Nestorian Christians; and of the ancient Turks, the
Mongols, and the Manchus. Practically all Asia except perhaps India, so
far as it writes alphabetically, thus derives its letters from an Aramæan
source (§ 146).
Equally profound was the influence of the neighboring Hebrews in another
phase of civilization. At the time they first entered history, about
1400 B.C., the Hebrews worshiped a tribal god Jahveh. They believed
that there were many gods beside him, but that they were his people and
he their god. A growing national consciousness led them more and more to
emphasize the special relation between him and them, to the exclusion
of worship of other deities which was constantly creeping in from their
Canaanite, Phœnician, Aramæan, and Egyptian neighbors. Thus they grew
into the stage of monolatry, or worship limited to one god. As however
Assyria and Babylonia first threatened and then engulfed them, and
their national impotence became more and more evident, they confided
less in themselves, as they had done in the brief days of their little
tenth century glory, and trusted increasingly in their god as their
salvation. National hopes fell and divine ones rose; until the Hebrew
people passed from thinking of the Lord as all powerful to thinking of
him as one and sole: monotheism had evolved out of monolatry as this
had grown out of a special tribal cult. Historically the monotheistic
idea was not new. Ikhnaton of Egypt had proclaimed it more than half
a thousand years before the Hebrew prophets. The concept may actually
have been carried over; but it certainly drew sustenance of its own on
Hebrew soil and first became established there as a cardinal, enduring
element of a national civilization. The Hebrews adhered to monotheism
with an ever-increasing insistence; until the concept was taken over by
Christianity and Islam—two of the three great international religions;
Buddhism, the third, being essentially atheistic. Here then is another
tremendously spread cultural element of deep significance that originated
as a local west Asiatic variant.
248. OTHER CONTRIBUTING NATIONALITIES
Almost every people in the area, in fact, made its special contribution.
In Asia Minor evolved the concept of a great primal mother goddess,
known to the Greeks as Cybele. Lydia, in western Asia Minor, coined the
earliest money about 700 B.C. Some people near the Black Sea in eastern
Asia Minor seem to have been the first to develop the working of iron
and perhaps of steel. The Kassites from the north or east probably
introduced the horse into Babylonia, soon after 2000 B.C. Thence it
spread, as the animal of royalty, aristocracy, and the special arm of
chariot warfare, until it reached Egypt some three hundred years later.
The first domestication of the horse was apparently in central Asia;
the transmission to Europe may have been direct rather than through
Mediterranean Asia. The camel had been tamed earlier, also in central
Asia. Its remains appear in Turkistan in the copper period; and in Israel
the Arab Midianite raiders whom Gideon defeated rode camels, while some
generations later, in David’s time, about 1000 B.C., horses were still
scarce.
249. ÆGEAN CIVILIZATION
On the island of Crete, almost equidistant from Asia, Africa, and Europe,
there began to grow up with the introduction of bronze, about 3000 B.C.,
a civilization most of whose elements were imported, but which added
to them and molded the whole of its mass with unusual originality.
Three great periods, named the Early, Middle, and Late “Minoan” after
the legendary Cretan king Minos, are distinguishable in the abundant
remains which excavation has brought to light; each of these is divisible
into three sub-periods designated I, II, III. At some sites, such as
Knossos, the remains of successive sub-periods are separated by layers
of packed-down earth deposited when an old settlement was obliterated
and serving as floor for the next occupation. Underneath the Bronze Age
deposits were thick strata from the Neolithic, with unpainted pottery.
With the Early Minoan, about 3000 B.C., painted pottery as well as
bronze came in, to be followed by the potter’s wheel and a system of
hieroglyphic writing unrelated to the Egyptian. In the Middle Minoan the
pottery became polychrome, palaces were built, art took a remarkable
naturalistic turn in pottery and fresco painting and carving, and the
hieroglyphics evolved into a linear, probably syllabic, script. The
beginning of the Late Minoan, from the sixteenth to the fourteenth
century B.C., saw the culmination of Cretan civilization. Then something
violent happened, the palaces were destroyed, and after a brief decadence
Minoan culture passed out at the arrival of the first of the historic
Greeks, at the opening of the Iron Age, about 1250 B.C.
The Minoans left no chronology of their own and their writing is unread.
But datable Egyptian objects found in Cretan strata of identified period,
and Cretan objects characteristic of particular periods found at datable
Egyptian sites as the result of trade, have made possible an indirect
but positive chronology for Minoan culture. The second sub-periods of
Early, Middle, and Late Minoan respectively were contemporary with the
Sixth, Twelfth, and Eighteenth Dynasties on the Nile. From 2000 B.C. on,
Minoan dates are therefore reliable within a century and sometimes less.
Industry, commerce, games, a light, practical style of architecture,
above all a graceful realistic art, flourished particularly from Middle
Minoan III to Late Minoan II. There was evidently considerable wealth,
a leisure class, and life was prevailingly peaceful and surrounded with
charm.
The Minoans were a Caucasian people of Mediterranean race. Their language
is unknown, but seems to have been distinct from the later Greek, and
therefore probably non-Indo-European. When their home power crumbled, a
fragment appears to have taken refuge in Asia and founded the Philistine
cities which for a time pressed the tribal Hebrews and which gave their
name to Palestine.
A related culture appears in the ruins of the successive cities of
Troy; on the islands of the Ægean Sea; and in mainland Greece, where
it has been called Mycenæan, after the citadel and town attributed to
Agamemnon. Ægean perhaps is the name least likely to confuse, for this
larger culture of which the Cretan Minoan was long the most illustrious
representative. The table outlines the principal correlations.
[Illustration]
The thirteenth century brought the Greeks, then a rude, hardy, and at
first non-maritime people, fighting their way south and wrecking or
sapping the Ægean civilization. Culture lost its bloom, life became hard,
the outlook contracted. Art shriveled into crude geometric ornamentation,
the forms became childishly inept, intercourse with the Orient sank to
a minimum, and when trade and foreign stimulation revived they were at
first in Phœnician hands. It is not until the seventh century that true
history begins in Greece, and in the main only to the sixth that the
rudiments of that characteristic Hellenic philosophy, literature, and
art can be traced, which were released after the Persian wars early in
the fifth century. Yet the half thousand and more years of dark ages
between Ægean and classic Greek civilization did not entail a complete
interruption. The Greek often enough smote the Mycenæan or Minoan. More
often, perhaps, he settled alongside him, possibly oppressed him, but
learned from him. He choked out Ægean culture, but nourished his own
upon it. The Homeric poems, composed in Greek during this period of
retrogression, picture a civilization essentially Ægean; and along with
them much other cultural tradition must have been passed on.
At any rate, when Greek culture reëmerged, it was charged with Oriental
elements and influences, but perhaps even more charged with Ægean ones.
Its games, its unponderous architecture, its open city life, the free
quality of its art, its political particularity, its peculiar alert
tenseness and feeling for grace, had all flourished before on Greek
soil. Their flavor is un-Asiatic and un-Egyptian of whatever period. We
have here another instance of the tenacity of the attachment of cultural
qualities to the soil; of the faculty, at once absorptive and resistive,
that for thousands of years, however inventions might diffuse and culture
elements circulate, succeeded in keeping China something that can fairly
be called Chinese, India Indian, Egypt Egyptian, the Northwest and
Southwest of America Northwestern and Southwestern respectively; in a
degree even kept Europe, so long culturally dependent on the Orient,
always European.
250. EUROPE
With Greece we have entered the realm of what is conventionally
regarded as history. For the rest of Europe, prehistoric archæology
and its record of illiterate peoples abut so closely on history in the
ordinary sense, that a tracing of the transition takes one promptly
into documentary study. There is much in this early historical field
that is of anthropological interest, and just back of it lies more
that is specifically so: where the round headed peoples came from who
began to appear in Europe during the Neolithic; whether peoples like
Ligurians, Sicilians, Scythians, were Indo-Europeans or not, and of
what branch; where the blond Nordic type took shape and whether it
originally spoke dialects of the Germanic group; who built Stonehenge and
the other megalithic monuments of western Europe; where the first home
of the Indo-Europeans lay. But such problems are intricate, and usually
answerable, if at all, from stray indications scattered among masses
of literary and historical data controllable only by the specialist,
whose primary interests tend in other directions. Where these documented
indications fail, the problems become speculative. We have no clear
record of any indubitable Indo-European people, in or out of Europe,
before the second millenium B.C. When they appear in history, they are
already differentiated into their familiar main divisions. The Bronze
Age Scandinavians seem likely to have been Indo-Europeans and perhaps of
the Germanic branch; for the Neolithic an identification would be mere
guessing. The LaTène Iron culture is characteristically Keltic, that of
the Hallstadt period and area less certainly Illyrian and Keltic. And
after all, such considerations concern speech, or race, which can be
associated with any culture. Our present concern being primarily with
the latter, it will be more profitable to pass on from these questions
and turn to regions remote from those in which Occidental civilization
assumed its modern form.
251. CHINA
China, far from Europe and known to the outside world only recently,
possesses a civilization so different from ours in a multitude of
aspects, that thought of connection between the cultures seems at first
unreasonable. One thinks of rice, pagodas, bound feet, queues, silk, tea,
ancestor worship, a strange, chopped, singing speech, and writing in
still stranger characters. Yet the Chinese have long had a civilization
identical in many of its constituents with our own: civil government,
rimed poetry, painting, trousers, wheat and barley, our common domestic
animals, bronze and iron, for instance. Since most of these culture
elements are wanting in Africa and Oceania, as well as in native America,
there is no inherent reason why they should be expectable in China.
Their repetition in China and in the West as the result of independent
causes would be remarkable. Evidently many if not all of this group of
common traits represent absorptions into the civilization of China, or
diffusions out of it into the West, much as the larger part of early
European civilization was imported out of the nearer Orient.
In the broader perspective of culture history, then, China no longer
stands aloof. The roots of her civilization are largely the same as those
of our own. In this light, understanding of Chinese civilization involves
two steps. The first is the tracing of the elements derived from the
west or imparted to it. The second is the recognition of how these were
remodeled and combined with elements of local growth and thereby given
their peculiarly Chinese cast and setting.
Authentic historical records of China go back only three thousand years,
and her archæology is little known. Beyond the beginning of the Chou
dynasty, about 1100 B.C., or more exactly, beyond a point when this
dynasty was about three centuries old, in 827 B.C., the Chinese possess
only legendary history, in which slight strands of fact are interwoven
with fabricated or fabulous constituents. Then, too, the Chinese have
long been genuinely more advanced than their neighbors, than all of
their world, in fact; with the result that they could hardly escape
the conviction of their own superiority and self-sufficiency, and the
belief that they had devised almost everything in their own culture. This
presumption led to the conscientious manufacture by native historians of
dates for inventions which were really made outside of China.
Beginning, then, in the ninth century B.C., we find the Chinese a settled
and populous people in the lower valley of the great Yellow river, in
what is now the northeastern corner of the “Eighteen Provinces” or China
proper, from about Si-an-fu to Peking. They may have come from middle
Asia or still farther west by a national migration, as has sometimes been
conjectured: there is nothing to show that they did, and a great deal to
suggest that they had lived in or near their seats of that period long
before. It is difficult to imagine that the Chinese could have moved out
of central Asia without leaving a part of their number behind, or without
leaving conspicuous traces of their culture among their former neighbors.
Of this there is no evidence. For one of the most advanced peoples of
its time to remove itself and its civilization complete and unimpaired
would be without parallel in history, and indeed is inconceivable as soon
as one turns from the vague idea to face specific details of the process.
Nevertheless the Chinese as we first know them had the principal grains
and tamed animals, the metals and plow and wheel of contemporary Eastern
Asia and Europe. While it is scarcely thinkable that this great complex
of culture traits should not have been due to connections with the
west, there is every probability that these connections were of the
sort that have been traced so frequently in foregoing pages: diffusions
unaccompanied by populational drifts, or at least in the main independent
of them. When it is recalled that western Turkistan held cereal-growing
and animal-raising inhabitants far back in the Neolithic, and that the
Bronze period is definitely represented in Siberia,[36] such transmission
will not seem far fetched. It is also well to remember that all through
the historic period central Asia contained farming populations, cities,
traders, and skilled artisans, some measure of which evidences of
higher culture it is only necessary to project a few thousand years
backward to complete the link in the cultural chain between China and
the west. We tend to overlook this fact because it is the transient Hun
and Mongol invasions that chiefly obtrude into both western and Chinese
history. Whenever the nomads ceased boiling over, they receded from the
historians’ view. Obviously they could not have migrated and fought
and burnt and slain among each other continuously. The more settled
life at home, which they led most of the time, and into which they were
always inclined to take over the religion, writing, and arts of the
Orient, India and China, is the phase of their existence most likely
to be overlooked, but which, from the point of view of the history of
civilization, is far more important than their evanescent conquests. In
this underlying phase they were the connectors of Near and Far East.
It is interesting in this connection that so far as more recent
transmissions between China and the west are datable or positively
traceable, they took place chiefly by the long land route through central
Asia. The first trade between the Roman empire and China of the Han
dynasty was overland; so was the introduction of Buddhism and cotton from
India. In each case sea communication came later. It was scarcely before
Mohammedan times that ocean trade between China and the west became
important.
On the other hand, the Chinese and other east Asiatics always lacked,
and still lack, several aspects of the grain-cattle-horse-wheel-metals
cluster that are very ancient and practically universal in Europe, the
Near East, and even central Asia. They do not use milk or its products,
wool, nor bread-leaven. It has been suggested that the cluster was
transmitted to China before these traits had been added to it; and
that when they finally might have reached China, they found its people
satisfactorily established in a culture containing substitutes for these
traits, and therefore resistive to them.
It is significant that even to-day northern China, within which the
oldest known China lay, still cultivates wheat, barley, and millet,
and breeds cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and swine, as did the Swiss
lake-dwellers; whereas in southern China the typical grain and animal are
rice and the buffalo, as in Indo-China and Malaysia. There are evidently
two fundamentally distinct economic systems here, characteristic
respectively of Europe and west and north Asia, and of southeastern
Asia; and evolving in the main independently. The first civilized China,
that of the Chou period, that which produced Confucius as its literary
standardizer, and has chiefly shaped Chinese traditions and institutions
ever since, belonged to the great northern and western cycle; was in fact
its easternmost outpost.
This brings up the question whether Chinese writing could not also have
sprung from a western source, notably the Sumerian Cuneiform, which it
superficially resembles in its linear, non-pictorial strokes, and in
its mixed ideographic-phonetic method. The connection has indeed been
asserted, but no satisfactory evidence of specific correspondences has
been adduced. The most that it seems valid to maintain is that a remote
connection is thinkable; a connection not extending beyond a limited
number of characters or the idea or method of writing. The earliest
Chinese characters preserved on bronzes are nearly two thousand years
younger than the most ancient inscriptions of the system which developed
into the classic Cuneiform. Both systems are fairly crystallized when
they first come to our knowledge. Their formative stages, in which such
connection as they might have would be most apparent, are obscure. It is
well to remember that Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic, which were
virtually contemporaneous and much nearer to each other geographically,
have not yet been brought into specific relation as regards their origins.
252. GROWTH AND SPREAD OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION
Chou China at first embraced most of Shensi and Honan, southern Shansi
and Chihli, and western Shantung. It was feudal, and practically as
separatist as mediæval Germany. The chief functions of the over-king
were to perform sacrifices, to admonish the kings and princes, and to
govern his small dynastic domain. Unity lay not so much in an effective
organization as in an idea, the feeling of a common race and especially
of a common civilization. This idea has persisted to the present. It is
adhesion to the culture of China, to its deep roots, its permanence,
its humanities, that has always made Chinamen feel themselves Chinamen;
has in fact sooner or later turned into Chinamen all alien elements,
whether they were intrusive conquerors or primitive folk, that came to be
included within the limits of the realm. In this way common customs and
ideals already united the dozen or more larger Chou states and hundreds
of dependencies; and chronic internal warfare did not prevent this era
from being the age of Confucius, Laotse, Mencius and the other great
sages that from the sixth to the fourth centuries formulated the typical
Chinese character and attitude.
During the latter part of the Chou period began a gradual reduction
of the number of feudal states, due to the larger swallowing the
smaller. By the middle of the third century, two of these had emerged as
preponderant: Ts’in in the west, centering about the Wei valley, and Ch’u
on the south, along the middle Yangtse. Both were frontier states, less
cultivated and hardier than the others, and regarded as barbarian or only
half Chinese. Ts’in may have included some Hunnish absorptions; Ch’u very
likely represented the rule of a Chinese dynasty over a native population
whose original affiliations may have been either with the non-Sinitic
Anamese of to-day, with the Shan-Siamese division, or with some closer
branch of the Sinitic family, but who were gradually assimilating the
culture and speech of the northern old China. At last, in 223 B.C., Ch’u
fell before Ts’in, and within two years the remaining states in the
northeast collapsed. For the first time China, from nearly its present
frontier to south of the Yangtse, was effectively under one active ruler,
Shi Hwang-ti, the “first emperor.” His dynasty crumbled almost at his
death, but only to be succeeded by the famous Han line, under which,
in the two centuries before and the two after Christ, China extended,
consolidated, and prospered. The boundaries of the empire were pushed, in
name at least, to virtually their present limits; and though political
control may often have been slight, cultural influence progressed rapidly
south of the Yangtse, much as Gaul became Romanized at the same time.
Even the survival of half-independent barbarian groups here and there in
the south and west has its parallel in the persistence of Keltic speech
in French Brittany. By the seventh to ninth centuries after Christ, when
the empire flourished once more under the Tang dynasty, the mass of
southern China may be considered to have been substantially assimilated.
Even the southern coast, which was the last area to be integrated,
and which retains to-day the greatest dialectic differentiations and
autonomous tendencies, had become part of the Chinese polity and
civilization. The consequence was that when in the thirteenth century the
Mongols and in the seventeenth the Manchus conquered the empire, they
accomplished little more than the overthrow of one dynasty by another.
The course of Chinese culture went on undisturbed, as it had in several
previous historic periods when half of the realm passed temporarily
under the sway of nomads or barbarians from the north.
A considerable measure of the cultural predominance of China over her
neighbors is to be ascribed to her more numerous population, which in
turn was partly due to the cultural advance. The Chinese were the first
nation to maintain a system of fairly reliable census records. In the
first century and a half after Christ, under the Hans, ten censuses
showed from 29 to 83 million inhabitants, the average being 63 millions,
or about the same as the estimated population of the Roman empire at its
height; somewhat more than that of Europe when America was discovered. A
thousand years later, between 1021 and 1580, eight censuses yielded from
43 to 100 millions, with an average of 62 millions. Under the Manchus
the population gradually rose from 125 millions in 1736 to 380 in 1881.
To-day, the northern half of China is about twice as populous as the
southern, and the eastern half exceeds the western in the same ratio.
This superior density of population in the northeast reflects the fact
that ancient China was the northeast. The same grounding in the past is
evident in the fact that from the time of the Chous until the Mongol
conquest in 1268, the imperial capitals lay mainly in Shensi or Honan,
the core of the old kingdom.
Many ingredients of modern Chinese civilization, and most of its
distinctive color, have been present in it since the opening of the
historic period. Such are the use of hemp and silk as the typical textile
materials; of jade as the precious stone of the nation; the tremendous,
life-long moral authority accorded to parents, and the associated worship
of ancestors; the unusual respect and rewards for learning; a professed
contempt for war and emotional activity; aversion for mythological and
metaphysical, scientific, or any other sort of speculation, and coupled
therewith an unflagging interest in practical ethics, in the cultivation
of character, in the finer shaping of the relations of individuals. These
and other leanings endow Chinese civilization with something persistently
idiomatic, with a quality of coherent originality. If this civilization
were less great, China and the countries influenced by it would be spoken
of as constituting what among barbarous and savage peoples we call a
culture-area. In the widest perspective, they are such. China, India,
the West—which in this view of course includes the Near East as well as
Europe—are the three great focal centers of civilization in the eastern
hemisphere. Their cultures have risen far above those of the intervening
and peripheral nations. Until quite recent centuries, the three have run
their courses with approximately equal achievement. And while exchanging
elements since prehistoric times, they have each molded both what they
borrowed and what they devised into a unified and distinctive design,
have stamped it with original patterns. In short, culture development in
China, India, and the Occident has been coördinate.
Of course, this distinctness of the three great regions of Old World
civilization does not imply that diffusion of culture elements between
them ever ceased. It is the form more than the content of civilization
that is peculiar to the three areas. From India, for instance, China
derived Buddhism, which was accorded a reception under the Hans and
cultivated with fervor in the following centuries. Cotton came in the
wake of the religion—first as a rare and valuable textile, then to be
grown. The West, within the historic period, gave glass and perhaps the
impulse toward a Chinese “invention”—porcelain, a glazed-through pottery.
In recent centuries the West acted as transmitter for several elements
of American origin, tobacco, for example, and maize, which quickly
became an important food-plant in parts of China. There have even been
reimportations. Gunpowder is said to have been used for fireworks in
China in the fifth century, for war in the twelfth, but its employment
for the propulsion of missiles from firearms is due to introduction by
the Altaic nations in the fifteenth century. From the fourth century B.C.
on, there are repeated references in Chinese sources to the magnetic
needle and to “south-pointing chariots”—apparently a compass-like device
used on land, though probably only as a mechanical toy. Then the needle
was applied to geomantic purposes, until Arab or other foreign sailors
took it up as a true mariner’s compass, and in the eleventh or twelfth
century reintroduced it to the Chinese as an instrument of navigation.
Nor was civilization as stagnant in China as the outsider is likely
to think, who becomes aware first of all of its persistent native
flavor. The old war chariot, for instance, went out of use about
contemporaneously in China and the West. Printing from engraved blocks
was in vogue in the sixth century after Christ, from movable clay types
in the dynasties between the Tangs and the Mongols, from metal types
not much later, since the art was established among the imitating
Koreans in the fifteenth century. A system of classifying the numerous
characters was invented before the Tangs; the modern one of grouping
them according to 214 radicals, under the Mings. True encyclopædias were
first compiled in the fourteenth century—four hundred years earlier than
in the West. The system of awarding office on the basis of literary
examinations took root under the Hans and became organized under the
Tangs. The earliest poetry, three thousand years ago, was rimed, and
had four or five monosyllabic words in the line. In the Tang time, the
line became extended to seven words; and still later was the origin of
the peculiar rhythm of alternating tones—a system by which every other
word was one bearing the “even” tone and those between any of the other
tones. Paper making is said to date from the Hans, and paper money was
first issued—disastrously as in some of the first Western attempts—under
the Mongols. These and dozens of other instances that might be compiled
exemplify, as does the history of ancient Egypt, that even those
cultures constantly move to which one is tempted to apply the stigma
“conservative” or “tradition-bound.”
253. THE LOLOS
Scattered in the mountains of southern and western China are a number of
barbarous, semi-independent peoples of distinctive ways and speech who
maintain their national or tribal status. They seem on first contact to
promise a picture of the pre-Chinese culture of the area, but examination
shows their customs to be a blend of primitive and advanced, ancient and
recent elements. The Lolos of Szechuan may serve as an example. They eat
meat from their herds, use no milk, but wear woolen clothing. They grow
neither cotton nor rice. They raise oats, buckwheat, maize, and potatoes.
Two of these plants are of north or west Asiatic origin; the others are
American. Plows are used. Houses are of lashed bamboos, and rain-coats
of palm-fiber. No pottery is made, but iron is worked into weapons and
tools by native smiths. The Lolos are warlike. They fight like Malaysians
with lance and sword. They are organized “feudally,” into nobility and
commoners, with tribal heads or lords. They marry cousins. Religion
resembles that of the more backward Indo-Chinese and Malaysian peoples.
Sorcerer-priests cure disease; sacrifice animals for their blood, the
flesh being eaten; offer also fermented liquor; divine the future by
observing parts of the sacrificed animals—the cracks that develop in
heated shoulder-blades (§ 97). There is a native system of writing,
which seems to derive from Chinese stimulus, if not sources. It is
obvious that this culture has fused together very old elements that are
characteristic of southeastern Asia, with elements that have flowed in
from remote sources or during the most recent centuries. It is also clear
that certain ingredients of Chinese culture have been freely absorbed and
others rejected by this mountain people.
Such cultures as that of the Lolos may be described as internally
marginal or peripheral. They differ from externally marginal cultures,
like those of the Bushmen, Australians, Fuegians, in that the latter, on
account of their geographical remoteness, have retained their ancient
level with relative purity. Included marginal cultures, on the contrary,
being of necessity exposed to subsequent influences, are regularly a
mixture of belated and recent ingredients, no matter how well integrated
these may have become.
254. KOREA
Korea has repeatedly been under the political authority of China, more
often autonomous, but for three thousand years has been dependent on
China culturally. Non-Chinese influences have also reached it: such
as an alphabet of Indian origin (§ 149); and probably the earliest
iron industry came in from Altaic sources. In its turn, the peninsula
transmitted to Japan: until about a thousand years ago, Chinese writing
and culture reached Japan mainly via Korea. The spread of Chinese
civilization was perhaps largely of the usual, slow, diffusing kind,
but was several times accelerated by the settlement in Korea of groups
of Chinese refugees, colonists, or adventurers; for instance in Chou
and Han times. The center of power and civilization within Korea has
gradually moved southwards, which suggests the waning of original central
Asiatic affiliations as Chinese ones became stronger. The first realm
to be defined was Fuyu on the Sungari river. Then followed Kokorai or
Korai, whence our name Korea. In the centuries immediately before and
after Christ, Shinra and then Hiaksai, farther south on the peninsula,
came into the lead. By the beginning of this period not only the writing
but the classic books of China had been introduced. Since the fourteenth
century Confucianism has been the state religion—though the people had
long before become Buddhists—and literary examinations for office of the
Chinese type have been in vogue.
255. JAPAN
Japan is the one country of eastern Asia from which considerable
prehistoric data are available. There are indeed no indubitable evidences
of any Palæolithic culture or race, but shellheaps and burial mounds
abound and have been explored. The shell deposits, of which 4,000 have
been found, are probably the accumulation of refuse of occupation by the
Ainu, the first known inhabitants of Japan, now surviving only in the
extreme north of the island chain and in Sakhalien, and still a primitive
people. This race is different from the Japanese, and has often been
classified as Caucasian (§ 27). The shell deposits show the aborigines
to have been fishers and hunters, without agriculture or edible domestic
animals. They had the bow, dog, incised hand-made pottery, and ground
stone axes, and were thus approximately in an early Neolithic stage.
A somewhat dubious bronze age is sparsely represented in southern Japan.
It has been ascribed to an invasion about the seventh century B.C., but
is perhaps only an early phase of the iron age. Iron was brought in at a
time not precisely determined, but likely to have been about the fourth
century B.C., by the so-called Yamato people—evidently the ancestors
of the Japanese of to-day—who seem to have come from Korea and at any
rate occupied the southern islands first. Thence they fought their way
northward, gaining territory at the expense of the natives but slowly.
Fifteen centuries ago the northern third of the main island was still
in Ainu possession. These early Japanese erected megalithic chambers or
corridors as tombs for their princes, covering them with mounds of earth.
More than 3,000 of these structures are known. The early emperors were
buried in double mounds, some of them of great area. From the fifth to
the seventh century Korean influence was strong; the Chinese writing
and classics were imported from that country. Later relations between
the two nations were more intermittent, perhaps because of the growing
consolidation and strength of Japan from the eighth century on.
The cultural debt of Japan to China is great, but less than that of
Korea. The Japanese added 47 purely phonetic syllabic characters to
the Chinese writing, in order to represent their own proper names,
grammatical forms, and the like. These characters would have sufficed for
a simple, efficient, and purely native script, but have remained a mere
supplement to the ideographic Chinese system (§ 105). The mandarin and
examination system of China were never taken over by the Japanese, who
clung to their feudal customs more than two thousand years later than
China. The ancestor worship of the Chinese and the official Confucian
religion also did not become established in Japan, the state cult
being Shinto, the crystallization of a primitive set of rites and of a
mythology which has parallels in the Occident, in the East Indies and
Oceania, and even in North America, rather than in China.
An early Malaysian strain in both Japanese race and culture has been
alleged, but this is a subject on which more evidence is needed. Japanese
speech does not elucidate the origins of the nation, the language—like
that of Korea—not being determined as related to any other. The physical
type, on the other hand, and this applies also to Korea, is allied to
that of China.
256. CENTRAL AND NORTHERN ASIA
It has become a habit to regard central and northern Asia as a hive for
humanity, as the area from which nations and races have chronically
swarmed. Whenever the origin of a people remains obscure, be they
Neandertals, Alpines, Sumerians, Chinese, Japanese, Aryans, or what not,
some one propounds the convenient hypothesis of deriving them from this
vast interior land, which in many cases amounts to an explanation of the
half-known by the unknown. Of late there has been added the fashion of
attributing the expansions to climatic drying-up of central Asia, which
forced the population out. There appears to be considerable evidence of
such progressive desiccation; but its degree, and still more the extent
of its influence upon culture and emigration, remain to be ascertained.
A more balanced view would concede the recurrence and occasional
destructiveness of the invasions out of central Asia, but would view them
rather as transient and relatively superficial phenomena from the point
of view of civilization; and on the other hand would recognize that under
all the boiling of tribes and peoples, the growth and spread of culture
went steadily on, even in the tracts which one is wont to associate only
with the perpetual breeding of elusive and devastating nomads. In short,
it is wise to guard against a natural overestimation of the sensational,
cataclysmic aspects of the history of the interior Asiatic peoples. It is
their spasmodic irruptions which the self-centered nations of the West,
of India, and of China, have been chiefly concerned with. Their attempts
at achieving stability, their increments to the world’s culture, their
rôle as peaceful transmitters, have lain at home, largely out of vision
of the peoples clustered about the foci of civilization.
It may be added that the temptation to the outsider to burst by force
into the seats of wealth and splendor as soon as firmness of guard
slackens, is not confined to Ural-Altaians, but is ever present in
history. Amorites, Hebrews, Arabs, Æthiopians, Lybians, Greeks, Kelts,
Germans, Hindus, and Malays have all played this part at one time or
another. Semite, Hamite, and Aryan are no different in such regard from
Ural-Altaian, except that in the short span conventionally known as
history the former have happened more often to be the ins and haves,
the central Asiatics the outs and have-nots. Further, the destructive
effect of nomad migrations, even where accompanied by mass settlement of
population, is everywhere transient so far as civilization is concerned.
Hebrew and Hellenic, Arab and Germanic tribes did crash cities and
empires before them, but they tore down only what was already moribund,
and brought in new systems of thought, new methods of feeling and
organization, which, however crude at first, soon added new qualities to
culture. The chief distinction of the north Asiatics is that, excepting
some terror-striking massacres, they were both less subversive and less
constructive culturally than Semites and Indo-Europeans. They barely
dented the civilization of the West as they barely dented that of India
and China. If Russia is backward as compared with western Europe, it is
not from having been Tatar-ruled a few centuries, but because Russia
has long been peripheral to the Mediterranean focus of civilization and
therefore chronically belated. It was the very thinness of her culture
that made mediæval Russia succumb to the Mongol wave which pounded vainly
against the more consolidated civilization of central Europe and quickly
drew off.
To define the exact contribution of the North Asiatics to civilization
is difficult: partly because of the comparative paucity of available
archæological and historical records; partly because their habitat did
not contain one of the greater hearths of civilization at which its most
distinctive forms were sweated out. The area has always been relatively
though not extremely peripheral. The horse, indeed, can be set down as
one important gift of the Ural-Altaic peoples or their predecessors to
general civilization. It is only in central Asia that a wild horse—not
a tame breed that has run wild—is to be found; and it seems to have
been from the north that soon after 2000 B.C. the animal was introduced
into Mesopotamia and India. Biological considerations also point to
interior Asia as the most likely area of first domestication of several
of the earlier fundamental animals of culture, especially the sheep and
goat. The comparatively advanced culture of Anau in Turkistan in the
Neolithic and early Bronze periods is also significant, even though
this site lies only just within the great steppe and plateau country.
Some of the jade and jade-like stone used for tools and ornaments in
the Swiss lake-dwellings appears to have come from inner Turkistan. The
probability of the central Asiatic peoples having been the transmitters
of metals, cattle, grains and other important groups of culture elements
from the Near to the Far East has already been mentioned, as has the
established trade between China and the Mediterranean world in Roman
times (§ 251). Indeed the very character of the country and cultural
conditions which favored a considerable degree, though not an absolute
prevalence, of nomadism in interior Asia, seem also to have fostered, in
many periods, a longer range of trade than flourished elsewhere. Finally,
it appears that the Turks and Mongols had at least a hand in the early
use of gunpowder for firearms; and, as already mentioned, the first
state paper money, that of China, was issued by a Mongol dynasty. It is
scarcely rash to predict that the intensive study of the interior Asiatic
peoples from both prehistoric and historic sources, without speculative
bias or plunging of opinion, will prove one of the most illuminating
contributions to the history of general civilization.
The original unity of the Ural-Altaians—with the Turks, Mongols,
and Tungus-Manchu as the Altaic or definitely Asiatic group,
Finno-Ugrians as Uralic or Eurasian, and Samoyeds as specifically
Arctic representatives—is accepted on linguistic grounds by almost
all authorities in the field. Yet the career of the several divisions
has been diverse. The Finno-Ugrians have mainly been peaceful: the
Finns definitely so for two thousand years: the Hungarian Magyars were
exceptional when they terrorized central Europe a thousand years ago.
Both these nations have long since become integrally absorbed into
European culture. They are the only Ural-Altaic peoples with this
experience. The remainder of the Finno-Ugrians have for some centuries
become increasingly submerged under Russian civilization; much as in the
Far East the Manchu-Tungus have gradually fallen more and more under
either Chinese or, of late, Russian cultural influence. As between the
Turks and Mongols, the greatest single conquest, that of Djengis Khan and
his successors, falls to the record of the latter; but the Turks have
been the more numerous, stable, and advanced people. They have frequently
settled as well as invaded; and are the only known stock, as previously
mentioned (§ 245), that has ever seriously and permanently encroached
on territory once held by Indo-Europeans—in Asia Minor and the Caspian
region. The later so-called Mongol conquests, those of Tamerlane and
the Indian Moguls, were made by armies mainly of Turks under dynasties
tracing back to former Mongol leaders. The Turks in general have inclined
to Mohammedanism on coming into contact with the world religions, the
Mongols to Buddhism, although Christianity in its Nestorian form once
made considerable numbers of converts among both.
Several important historic peoples cannot yet be assigned with certainty
to one or the other of the Ural-Altaic divisions, or are variously
classified: thus the Huns, most likely to have been Turks; the White Huns
or Ephthalites; the Avars; and the ancient Bulgars.
In northern and eastern Siberia there live, besides the Samoyed, a
series of non-Ural-Altaic peoples, truly peripheral and retarded in
culture, who seem once to have occupied larger areas but to have
shrunk or been partially absorbed before Ural-Altaic expansion. These
include the tribes sometimes grouped as Yeniseian; the Yukaghir; the
Kamchadal-Koryak-Chukchi group; a few Eskimo who have either failed to
cross Behring strait or have come across it from America; and perhaps the
Ainu of Japan and Sakhalien. These have been called the Palæo-Asiatic
peoples, though their diverse languages render their community of origin
dubious. How far they may be considered as following a positively similar
culture, except in direct response to an extreme climate, is also
doubtful. Their rigorously marginal position and depriving environment
stamp their culture with a preponderance of negative traits. The
possession of domesticated reindeer is common to several of these peoples
as well as to the Tungus and the Finno-Ugric Lapps of northern Russia and
Scandinavia. Reindeer-breeding among these groups appears to be due to
a transmission, in the sense of being a reflex of contact, an imitation
of the cattle or horse breeding of the more favorably situated nations
to the south. It is also interesting and probably significant that the
American Eskimos never domesticated the reindeer, although they depended
largely upon its hunt.
Racially the array of north and central Asiatic peoples shades from
pronounced Caucasian to extreme Mongoloid type. The Mongols have given
name to their whole larger racial stock, and the Tungus-Manchu and
northeast Siberian savages clearly form part thereof. The Turks in the
main are rather Caucasian, although all intergradations occur according
to region; as also among the Finno-Ugrians. The Hungarians to-day are
not only Caucasians but Alpines; the Finns definite Nordics; the Lapps a
strange partial graft of Nordic traits on broad faced and broad headed
Mongolian physique.
257. INDIA
India is not a country, but a connected block of lands shut off from the
remainder of the world by lofty mountains and harboring a population
approximating those of Europe and of China. Its 300,000,000 inhabitants
constitute nearly a fifth of humanity. Historically, India forms a
continent as fully as does Africa. Culturally, it must be equated with
the Occidental or Mediterranean area and with China as one of the three
great and substantially coördinate focal points which civilization
developed in the eastern hemisphere.
Racially the peoples of India are prevailingly Caucasian, but both the
two other great stocks are represented. Nearly everywhere, but especially
in the south, there is an evident admixture of a dark skinned, broad
nosed, long headed type. This is more likely to have had Australoid
than Negro affinities before its absorption; remnants of it, like the
Veddas of Ceylon and Irulas and some other tribes of the Deccan, are
often grouped with more easterly peoples as representatives of an
original Indo-Australoid race (§ 24, 27, 260). So far as this race can
be reconstructed, it seems to have been less Negroid than the Australian
of to-day; that is, it possessed more Caucasian resemblances. In fact,
it might almost be described as proto-Caucasian. In this light the
modern Hindu[37] would be a varying mixture of two related strains—the
undifferentiated proto-Caucasian, approximating the Australian and
perhaps having ultimate Negroid relations without being Negroid; and
the specialized Caucasian typical of the Occident; the former strongest
in the south, the latter almost pure in the northwest of India. This
hypothesis has this to commend it: it squares with the facts that the
Hindu in spite of his dark complexion makes almost universally the
impression of being essentially “white” in race; and that he differs
outstandingly from what a mulatto-like blend of Negro and Caucasian would
be.
In the north and east of India, Mongolian resemblances begin to appear,
as the natural result of thousands of years of contact of two stocks.
It would seem that the proportions of racial blood in India, and in the
rough their geographical distribution, parallel the proportions of the
numbers of speakers of tongues belonging to the several families. More
than three-fourths of the Hindus speak Indo-European dialects. Most of
the remainder are Dravidas in the south and Kolarians in the east central
parts—the same regions in which the Indo-Australoid or proto-Caucasian
element is most conspicuous. Along the northeastern edge, Tibeto-Burman
speech has spilled in with the Mongolian type. However, while the races
have blended, the languages have remained distinct. As almost everywhere,
the linguistic classification is therefore clearer cut in India than
the racial one. Consequently it is misleading to infer from a Hindu’s
speaking a Sanskrit-derived language that his Caucasian blood is pure,
or conversely to conclude that all Dravidians have broad noses and black
skins.
The Kolarians have been thought by some to possess ancient linguistic
relatives to the east (§ 50), and certainly possess cultural ones in this
direction (§ 262). Dravidian speech has not been thus connected, even
tentatively, and one indication points to its former westward extension:
the Brahui language in Beluchistan, which appears to be the remnant of an
old Dravidian offshoot.
The ancient culture of India is inadequately known. Archæological
exploration and analysis have been insufficient; yet they have gone far
enough to suggest that the prehistoric development followed different
lines from those in the West, so that the findings of European prehistory
cannot be applied to interpret such knowledge as there is on India. Thus
the Lower Palæolithic stage is well represented in India, but there
is nothing to show whether or not it was contemporaneous with that of
Europe. There is some possibility that it passed into the Neolithic
without the intervening Upper Palæolithic which is so important in
western Europe (§ 213). It seems dubious whether there was a true Bronze
Age in India. More pre-iron implements of pure copper seem to have been
found than of tin bronze.
The early Kolarian culture seems preserved in considerable degree among
the modern Kolarians, who are backward hill or forest tribes, that is,
internally peripheral to the prevalent higher civilization. At any
rate, their culture resembles that of many less advanced populations
to the east, well out into Oceania. This presumably ancient and partly
surviving “Indo-Oceanic” culture is discussed below (§ 262). As regards
its history within India, this is almost certain: the old culture is
nowhere any longer pure, but has regularly absorbed elements of the
advanced civilization that surrounds it; and conversely has contributed
to the latter. For instance, one of the great recognized cults of India
is Sivaism, which tends frequently to bloodiness and obscenity and is a
strange mixture of philosophical rationalization and crass superstition.
One of the most frequent attributes of Siva is a necklace of skulls; a
feature that looks as if it might go back to the skull cult which is a
typical ingredient of Indo-Oceanic culture.
The old Dravidian culture was probably more advanced than the Kolarian
but is more difficult to reconstruct because of its extensive blending
with the culture brought in or developed by Indo-Europeans. The
Dravidians, perhaps because they were the more advanced and populous,
were able to accept the intrusive culture and yet maintain themselves,
whereas the Kolarians either preserved themselves by resisting
civilization or had their speech and identity absorbed by it. When
the Dravidians first begin to creep into history, shortly before the
Christian era, they already possess cities, kingdoms, commerce, writing,
and philosophy. They have on the whole contributed less to Indian
civilization than the Indo-Europeans: its center always lay in the north;
but they have long formed an integral part of it.
The Indo-Europeans are first known to us from their religious hymns,
the Vedas, which have been preserved as sacrosanct by succeeding ages,
and constitute the oldest continuously transmitted documents in history.
They date from 2000 or 1500 to not after 1000 B.C., and are in Sanskrit,
which is fairly close to Avestan or Old Persian, the two languages and
their descendants constituting the Indo-Iranian or proper Aryan branch of
Indo-European. When Indo-European as a whole is designated as Aryan, it
is by an extension of the term. The region of India to which the Vedas
almost wholly refer is the Indus drainage, that is the northwest, the
parts adjoining the Iranian highland, whence the invaders came or through
which they passed.
Vedic Aryan culture was of late Bronze Age type. Whether the bronze was
really such, or copper, it is mentioned more frequently than iron, as in
Homer and the older books of the Bible. Grains, cattle, horses, chariots
and wagons, the plow, wool and weaving, gold, patriarchal chieftains
and a tribal society, a nature mythology, non-communal rituals with
constant but prevailingly bloodless sacrifices, are the characteristics
of this culture. It smacks more of the Europe of its time than of the
contemporary Orient. It is unbound, ready to pack up and move without
being essentially nomadic; half peasant-like and half aristocratic; an
uncitified semi-civilization, pioneer rather than backwoods. The temples
and writing, walled towns and kingdoms, district gods and royal tombs of
Egypt, Babylon, Canaan, Minoan Greece are wanting. The picture is that
of the first historic Indo-Europeans elsewhere, in eastern and central
Europe; with whom the Aryans undoubtedly were or had been in connection
through the countries north of the Black and Caspian seas.
A few centuries after the Vedas, the culture depicted by the literary
remains is profoundly altered. The scene has shifted to the Ganges
valley. There are cities and palaces, wealth and pomp. There are kings,
priests, townsmen, peasants, hermits and ascetics. Caste is in vogue.
Cotton and rice are in use. There is a deal of philosophizing; life
appears complex and difficult; pessimism is abroad, soul rebirth taken
for granted, spirituality emphasized. Concepts to which western science
later returned, the atom and ether, are familiar. In all essentials,
post-Christian Hinduism had been blocked out in this pre-Christian
period. Only a few elements like money and writing are lacking.
This change from the Vedic age is not fully accounted for, and the time
usually allowed for its occurrence is insufficient. Buddha was born B.C.
563 or 557. His religion assumes ideas which are part of the Sankhya
philosophy—in many ways the subtlest philosophy of all India and one of
the great thought systematizations of the world. Its founder Kapila is
placed about 600 B.C., and must have had predecessors. Caste seems a
thing of development. It is absent in the Vedas, but Buddhism is already
in a measure a protest against it. It seems difficult to squeeze such
growths into a few hundred years. It is true that the florescence of
Greece came with a rush; but Greek civilization rose from the debris of
the older Minoan one and was in contact with the cultures of Asia. In
India there is no sign of an antecedent high civilization, and a greater
dearth of known foreign influences between 1000 and 600 B.C. than at
any other period. The transposition of the cultural center eastward
must enter into the problem. Perhaps a larger and wealthier pre-Aryan
population was encountered by the Aryans along the Ganges, contact
and mixture with whom proved provocative of innovation. Or possibly
the movement and development in the east began while the Vedas were
still being composed along the Indus, and were ignored by them. Or,
conceivably, the Aryans on the Ganges may have been the first comers,
who quickly altered in the direction of their future civilization but
remained obscure to our vision during the period in which the Vedas
were being made or retained by the later comers of the Punjab, in whose
memories and sub-arid environment their former steppe culture remained
more unmodified. These are only speculations: they emphasize the gap in
our understanding of this important chapter of world culture history.
258. INDIAN CASTE AND RELIGION
Caste is peculiarly Indian. Nowhere else is it so complex, so
systematically worked out and endlessly reinforced by ritual and taboo,
so pervasive of conduct and thought. It has been ascribed to the
conflict of races, to the drawing of a color line by conquerors in order
to keep their lineage and culture pure. If so, it has failed egregiously,
as the physical anthropology of modern India shows. The explanation is
obviously inadequate. Castes do represent race to a certain extent, but
they also represent nationalities, tribes, common residence, religious
distinctness, occupations, cultural status. Whatever sets off a group in
any way may be sufficient to make it a caste in India. If groups diverge
within an established caste, they become recognized as sub-castes,
perhaps finally to develop into wholly separate castes. Priests, nobles,
clerks, fishermen, street-sweepers are castes; so are the Parsis; so are
hill tribes that maintain their primitive customs—the Dravidian Todas
for instance are reckoned a high caste. Clearly we have here a generic
system, a pattern of organizing society, into which every sort of group
as it actually forms is fitted. Caste is a way of thought which the Hindu
has tried to universalize.
All Indian castes are in theory strictly endogamous: intermarriage is
intolerable. All possess an intrinsic, unchangeable worth. Thus they
automatically rank themselves. Each possesses an occupation, a mode of
life and customs, a set of prescribed rituals, inherently peculiar to
it. The greater the restrictions and prohibitions incumbent upon it, the
less it relaxes to comfort and indifference, and the more spiritual it
is, the higher its grade. In consequence it is also the more pollutable,
and so its restrictions are drawn the closer. The wider the gap of
non-intercourse, of non-contact with lower castes, the greater becomes
its purity. Caste observance is thus a virtue, an aid to religion
and morality; breaking caste an ultimate indecency; the offspring of
inter-caste unions necessarily lower than either parent, and their
descendants, unless from matings with their own miserable kind, lower
still, in an infinitely descending series. There is no elevating a caste.
The very attempt to rise is a vice that brings degradation as a result,
since castes are eternal, founded in nature, absolute, so that alteration
is of necessity a sullying.
Such is the Hindu scheme—which in actuality is lived up to in no single
point. Perverse as the system seems to men reared in other cultures, it
must be admitted to possess completeness, self-consistency, and the
desire to preserve inward worth. It differs from the basic assumptions of
our civilization in that it sees value as something already existing and
therefore to be maintained, not to be created; it tries to fit life into
a theoretical pattern; it is futureless. Yet all the facts show that as
historical realities castes have changed enormously and are changing now.
Obviously therefore each generation ignores the changes last made and
repeats its insistence on caste perpetuity and unalterability. Such is
the hold of patterns on men’s minds.
The theorizing which the Hindu does about caste is characteristic of him
in all cultural manifestations. The relation which can be thought out
between one fact or act and others, the compartment to which it can be
assigned in a system, are of more interest to him, as compared with the
fact itself, than to peoples of other civilizations. Hence philosophy
has flourished in India, but native history has been inadequate and
disorderly. Hence too the abstract sciences of logic, mathematics,
grammar enjoyed an early original development, equal for a long time
and in part antecedent to that which they attained in the West. On the
other hand the astronomical and still more the physical and biological
sciences remained backward: they were concerned with concrete objects.
The Hindus seem never to have made a move of their own toward devising
a system of writing; but once the Semitic alphabet had been introduced,
they modified, expanded, and rearranged it into a more logical scheme,
a more consistent one phonetically, than any other people has given it
(§ 146). It is probably no accident that chess and our “Arabic” position
numerals with a symbol for zero (§ 109) are Hindu inventions, and that it
is only in India that priests have for age after age been ranked higher
than rulers.
It is natural that a culture of such inclinations should exalt the
mind and soul above the body. Hence the extraordinary development of
asceticism in Indian religion; its deep pessimism as regards life on
this earth; its insistence on the superior reality of soul, with which
is connected the universal assumption of rebirths; the working out of a
system of unescapable moral causality called _karma_ in place of a scheme
of mechanical causation; the tendencies toward pantheistic identification
of soul and God, or atheistic denial of divinity as distinct from
soul; and the thoroughly anti-materialistic bent of almost all Hindu
philosophy. It is also intelligible that these qualities should have
imparted to Indian religion a superior degree of spiritual intensity
which was appreciated by the nations to the north and east when Buddhism
was presented to them, and caused them to embrace it.
Like Christianity, however, Buddhism found no permanent favor among
the people and in the land of its origin. It flourished in India for a
time, but was rarely looked upon as more than a sect; after something
over a thousand years it died out completely, except in Ceylon, at the
very period that its hold on non-Indian nations to the north and east
was strengthening. Its place was taken in India by the miscellaneous
assemblage of cults, all theoretically recognizing Brahman ascendancy,
that in the aggregate constitute what is known as Hinduism. Hinduism
is not a religion in the sense that Christianity, Mohammedanism,
Buddhism are “religions.” It recognizes no personal founder, no head or
establishment; it tends to exclude foreigners rather than to convert
them; it is national instead of universal. It accepts and reinforces the
existing institutions of its particular culture: caste, for instance,
which Buddhism tried to transcend. Hinduism is therefore comparable to
the ancient Greek and early west Asiatic religions in consisting of a
series of locally or tribally different cults never integrated or fully
harmonized, conscious and tolerant of one another, resting on common
assumptions and similar in content, everywhere in accord with tradition
and usage, resistive to organization into a larger whole but tied into a
certain unity through reflecting a more or less common civilization.
Hinduism is also comparable to Confucianism and Shintoism with this
difference. These grew up analogously, but early became associated with
the central government or imperial authority, to which India never
attained. They gradually became official religions, as which they
survive; such religious piety as the population of China and Japan
experiences finding its outlet chiefly through Buddhism. Buddhism may be
said to have failed in India because it aimed at being a world religion;
because it tried to be international instead of national, to overlie all
cultures instead of identifying itself with one. The Hindu like the Jew
preferred remaining within the limits of his nationality and particular
civilization.
259. RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA AND THE OUTER WORLD
The first culture influence whose entry into India can be traced in any
detail was that carried by the Vedic Aryans from the northwest. In fact,
as already mentioned, more is known about this importation than of what
it encountered in India. In the post-Vedic period, the introduction of
the Semitic alphabet suggests that other cultural ingredients also flowed
into India from the west without direct record being preserved of their
transmission. The Persian and Macedonian conquests extended only over
the westernmost margin of India and were of little direct influence.
But the latter was followed by a semi-Hellenization of southwestern
Asia, including for instance the establishment of a Græco-Bactrian
kingdom in southern Turkistan and Afghanistan, adjacent to India; and
for several centuries a stream of Greek culture elements trickled into
the heart of India. Sculpture, architecture, astronomy, drama, coinage,
derived new impetus, in some cases even their origin, from this source.
In some instances the Hindus were no more than copiers of Hellenistic
models: Greek hangs and folds were given to sculptured garments, Greek
astronomical measurements taken over without change. Yet as the centuries
wore on and new imports along these lines lessened and then died out,
the introduced elements became more deeply incorporated into Indian
civilization, modified and encrusted more and more heavily by distinctive
Hindu styles, until now their superficial appearance makes an impression
of independent native growth. The working over of the Semitic alphabet
into its Hindu forms may be taken as typical of the nature and degree of
this remodeling of the Hellenistic culture imports.
Soon after 700 A.D. commenced a series of Mohammedan invasions and
conquests—Arab, Afghan, and Mongol-Turkish—also from the northwest, and
of course accompanied by a new series of culture influences—firearms, for
instance, and the true arch—which in their turn underwent absorption and
partial transformation.
The flow of culture between India and the Mediterranean world has not
been wholly eastward. Cotton; the common domestic fowl; probably the
buffalo and rice; perhaps asceticism, monastic life, and certain mystic
points of view; position numerals with zero; chess; and some of the
concepts of modern philology, were transmitted westward. Eastern Africa
was influenced, largely through the medium of Arab sea trade. Towards
the north and northeast as far as Mongolia and Japan, India has been
a dispenser of culture content and has taken little in return. Toward
the southeast, Indian influence has been the largest component in the
civilization of Indo-China and the East Indian archipelago, which as
regards their higher attainments may be regarded as cultural dependencies
or extensions of India.
260. INDO-CHINA
Farther India or Indo-China, the great southeastern peninsula of Asia,
falls somewhat short of India and China in area, is less densely
inhabited, and contains a population which is of definitely Mongolian
type except for some scattered fragments of hill tribes. On the basis
of speech, four groups are to be distinguished. In the southwestern and
southeastern corners of the peninsula, in the former kingdoms of Pegu
and Cambodia, are the Mon and the Khmer, certainly related to each other
and perhaps distantly connected with the Malayo-Polynesian family. On
the east are the Anamese, with a monosyllabic, tonal language whose
affiliations are doubtful. It contains a Chinese element, but perhaps
by absorption rather than by original connection. The center and west
of Indo-China are occupied respectively by the peoples of the T’ai or
Siamese-Shan and Tibeto-Burman groups, both probably collateral offshoots
with Chinese from what may be called the original Sinitic stock (§ 50).
The movement of population has clearly been out of inner Asia into the
peninsula. The Mon-Khmer are situated like half submerged remnants. Burma
on the map hangs from Tibet like the outgrowth that it probably is. Seven
centuries ago, the T’ai empire was centered in Yünnan, in southwestern
China. Siam represents a southward shift of the seat of T’ai power after
Mongol conquest (Fig. 12).
The Malay peninsula is Siamese in its narrow or neck portion. The head
is inhabited by three racial groups. The Semang in the interior are
pure Negritos. The Sakai or Senoi, also in the interior, are short in
stature, dark, and broad nosed, but wavy-haired. They resemble a series
of hill tribes scattered from India to the East Indies: the Vedda of
Ceylon, the Irula and other tribes of southern India, the Toala of
Celebes (§ 27, 257). Perhaps the Kolarians or Munda-Kol of central
India, the Moi and other groups of Indo-China, the Nicobar islanders,
and certain nationalities of Sumatra are also to be reckoned as
partial representatives of the same type. This race, if it is such, is
generalized, with certain Caucasian and other Negroid but few Mongoloid
resemblances. It is perhaps to be classed as Australoid, and has been
named Indo-Australoid. The third racial group of the peninsula are the
Malays, who, at least in large part, are emigrants in comparatively
recent centuries from Sumatra. Culturally the Malay peninsula belongs
with the East Indies rather than with Indo-China.
Three main layers of civilization are evident in Indo-China. The old
native culture was allied to that of the East Indies and the islands
beyond—whatever the speech may have been. Even to-day backward tribes of
both regions, especially inland, often show strikingly similar customs:
the use of bark cloth, for instance, separate houses for unmarried men
and girls. This culture remains fairly well defined in spots as far west
as Assam and the Kolarian region of India.
The two other civilizations have flowed in from India and China.
Practically everything of higher culture in Indo-China traces back
directly to these two countries. The Indian influence has been both wider
and deeper than the Chinese. It brought in Buddhism and writing, and
colored art and architecture. This Indian influence began more than two
thousand years ago, and while it may have weakened somewhat after India’s
return from Buddhism to Brahmanism, it has never ceased. As there were
no notable Indian conquests, this influence is an excellent example of
the normal, gradual type of cultural pervading. Chinese contacts are
equally old as the Indian, but have mostly remained confined to the area
adjacent to the Middle Kingdom. The Anamese have adopted the Chinese
system of family names, Confucianism, literary examinations, and the
like, sometimes more largely as a conscious endeavor than in fact.
261. OCEANIA
From the Malay peninsula the vast island region of Oceania stretches
eastward to within two thousand miles of America. Australia deserves
to be set apart on account of its continental size, isolation, and
ancient biological independence. Oceania proper falls into five natural
divisions. These are Indonesia or Malaysia[38] or the East Indies, where
large islands are scattered among many small ones; Papua or New Guinea;
and three tracts of relatively small, widely separated islands rising out
of the depths of the Pacific: Melanesia, a broken chain southeastward
from New Guinea; Micronesia, to the northeast; and Polynesia, far
eastward. Two primary facts stand out in regard to the inhabitants. Papua
and Melanesia are peopled with blacks, the Oceanic Negroids; the other
regions have brown inhabitants of prevailingly Mongoloid affiliations.
Linguistically a single fundamental speech, the Malayo-Polynesian,
prevails over all of Oceania except Papua, whose tongues so far as known
fail to connect with any others or with one another. Large unanswered
problems inhere in these distributions: how the Oceanic Negroids are
related to those of Africa, from whom they are so remote geographically
but whom they resemble so strikingly in type; how the black Melanesians
came to talk dialects of Malayo-Polynesian,[39] which otherwise is a
speech of brown peoples. More in detail, there are questions such
as where and how the Polynesians developed their somewhat aberrant
racial characteristics; what may be the relations of a more and a less
specifically Mongoloid, a broader and a longer headed strain, among the
East Indians; and whether the latter of these connects racially with the
“Indo-Australians.”
262. THE EAST INDIES
Culturally, the East Indies are the most diverse of the Oceanic regions,
in that the various islands, and within the larger islands adjacent
districts, sometimes contain populations heavily tinctured with Asiatic
civilization, sometimes tribes whose customs are far more aboriginal.
However, there is no people in the East Indies that has wholly escaped
the influence of Asiatic culture: the difference is always one of degree,
although ranging from what is currently called semi-civilization to
savagery. The profoundest influence has been exerted by India. This began
nearly two thousand years ago and remained active for over a thousand; it
introduced architecture, sculpture, writing, monarchy, religion, iron,
cotton, and a host of other elements of higher culture. The earlier
Indian influence was Buddhist and its seat of power centered in southern
Sumatra; the later was Brahman and reached its zenith in Java. The
number of immigrants was probably small, their effect enormous. A group
of refugees, a younger son of a royal house with his retinue, a band of
adventurers, would found a colony, sometimes conquering the natives,
sometimes attaching them peacefully to their leadership, and soon a
little kingdom was flourishing, which in time sent out other offshoots or
absorbed its rivals until its name commanded respect and tribute for long
distances across the sea. It was a procedure which the Mohammedanized
Malays later repeated over the East Indies, and which on the Asiatic
continent some centuries earlier had carried Chinese civilization far to
the north and south of its original limits, and Aryan speech and culture
throughout India. The kingdoms struggled, throve, decayed, and succeeded
one another; the permanent aspect of the process was the ever deeper
though irregular permeation of life with new arts and ideas.
The influence of China came later and was less than that of India. In the
thirteenth century the Sumatran Malays were converted to Mohammedanism
and began a career of expansion which culminated in the complete conquest
of Java by 1478, carried their faith over much of the area, and was
checked only by the advent of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Dutch.
Mohammedanism, besides its cult and law, introduced some new elements of
culture, such as firearms; but perhaps its most important effect was that
it put an end to the growth of the specifically Indian type of influence
in Malaysia.
Underlying these strains from the historic civilizations of Asia was a
semi-primitive culture, many of whose elements were shared by the East
Indians with the Indo-Chinese and Melanesians, and which in part can
be traced from India to Polynesia. This Indo-Oceanic culture included
agriculture—with rice and sugar cane in Malaysia and on the mainland;
domestic animals of its own—the buffalo, pig, and fowl—different from
those of north and west Asia; pottery, bark clothing, possibly bronze,
though if so this was intrusive; men’s clubs or sleeping houses; a
non-political organization of society on the basis of kinship and tribal
community; and such practices as head hunting and skull cult. The
employment of bamboo and rattan was a prime characteristic, and seems to
have prevented a vigorous stone age from having flourished in the East
Indies and adjacent regions. Bamboo is perhaps capable of serving more
different cultural uses than any one other plant. It makes satisfactory
houses, rafts, knives, spears, bows, arrows, blowguns, textiles, cooking
vessels, receptacles, and musical instruments, with a minimum of labor.
It is best worked with metal tools, and has therefore perhaps experienced
its most thorough utilization at the hands of peoples too backward
to secure a large supply of metals for themselves but able to obtain
a limited stock of iron from their neighbors. Nevertheless even the
prehistoric culture of the region is likely to have made large use of
bamboo.
This primitive culture of course varied locally. It was also not of
unitary origin. It certainly contained elements that were older than
others, or that originated in different parts of the area. Rice and fowls
for instance are likely to be more recent than skull cult and use of
bamboo. The culture may even resolve, when it shall have been analyzed
more intensively, into two or more fairly separable strata. But, taken
in block, it must once have prevailed with fundamental similarity from
eastern India well out into the Pacific, since everywhere within this
tract there are to-day hill and jungle peoples whose culture conforms
at least roughly to the type. It is necessary to remember, however,
that nowhere does this culture survive in purity. To some degree the
influence of the greater Asiatic civilizations has made itself felt among
the most aloof tribes. They mix a few Hindu religious concepts with
their head hunting rituals, for instance, or know how to forge imported
iron, or even grow American maize. They have everywhere been exposed in
some degree to contact with cultures of subsequent level. Thus it is
characteristic that the Negritos, whose scattered distribution indicates
that they may have been the first inhabitants of the East Indies, possess
a debased or parasitic Malaysian culture instead of a specific Negrito
one.
263. MELANESIA AND POLYNESIA
As one passes out from the East Indies into New Guinea and Melanesia, the
mass effect of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization comes to an end, and
the primitive culture that has been outlined is altered. Metals, rice,
the buffalo, disappear. The growing of taro and other tropical plants,
the pig and fowl, the use of bamboo where nature permits, skull cult or
cannibalism, remain. Other features, such as the totemic and matrilinear
moiety organization of society and adolescence rites for girls, obtrude,
and are sometimes elaborately developed. How far such traits represent
secondary local developments or on the other hand survivals from a
Negroid culture phase anterior to that of primitive Malaysian-Southeast
Asiatic culture, is not clear. Local diversity of custom is unusually
great in both New Guinea and Melanesia.
Micronesia and Polynesia present a different although allied set of
problems. The Polynesians in particular manifest a remarkable uniformity
of speech and, on the whole, of culture, especially in view of the
thousands of miles of ocean through which their island groups are
dispersed. This uniformity suggests that the language and culture became
characterized in a limited area from which they spread over Polynesia
after or while contact with the remainder of the world was lost. But
it is difficult to settle even tentatively on such an area of original
characterization because certain sides of Polynesian culture are
relatively high and carry suggestions of Asia, whereas other elements
are lacking which would be expectable if higher Asiatic influences had
ever carried to the ancestral Polynesians. Royal lineage, for example,
bears to the Polynesians a powerful implication of sanctity, of descent
from the gods, such as is unparalleled among any truly primitive people.
Religion and mythology also contain an abstract, spiritual strain that
is almost reminiscent of Buddhism. Yet there seems no single specific
idea or name that can be traced to an Asiatic source; and the essentially
ancient ideas of magic and taboo are strong—the word taboo itself is
Polynesian. There are structures and sculpture in stone, sometimes
monumental, but never more than barbaric in quality. The absence of
metals may mean little, since they might have been possessed but the art
have been lost in the island habitat, often coralline. Yet pottery, the
bow and arrow, the men’s club house, the clan or moiety type of society,
are also wanting or weakly developed. On the other hand, the dog, pig,
and fowl, cultivated plants like taro, bark cloth, cannibalism, and human
sacrifice are shared with the island regions to the west.
The various Polynesians possess genealogies and often migration
traditions which on comparison, and after computation of the number of
generations, seem to point to two waves of migration, both within the
Christian era, perhaps about the fifth and tenth centuries respectively.
The traditions fail, however, to throw clear light on the area of origin,
since they attribute this either to Hawaiki, which may be either Java or
a mythical land, or crisscross back and forth among the island groups
within Polynesia. Something of the mysteriousness which the discoverers
felt continues to attach to the origin and history of this people, and
is deepened by the fact that the affiliations of their racial type remain
ambiguous.
264. AUSTRALIA
The human history of Australia is as detached from that of the remainder
of the world as its biological history. The race is distinctive:
sub-Negroid, it might be called. The languages relate to no other. The
culture is primitive and well characterized. The isolation of Australia
was aided by the fact that the one approach to it other than by a
sea-voyage of some length, the approach across Torres Straits, was
blocked by New Guinea, the area of most backward culture in Oceania.
The Papuans did not possess enough civilization to hand on much to the
Australians; but they prevented higher elements from Asia from flowing to
them.
The Australians lacked not only all agriculture and domestic animals, but
pottery, the bow, and apparently the harpoon. These deficiencies would at
once stamp their culture as pre-Neolithic in type, were it not that they
grind some stone implements.
All in all, Australian culture is unusually meager on the industrial and
economic side. Houses, clothing, weapons, boats, tools, are most scantily
developed: often lacking and always rude. This poverty of Australian
material culture cannot be explained wholly from the prevailing desert
character of a large part of the continent, since the natives of the most
favored regions were not appreciably better off as regards variety of
arts conducive to comfort.
Social organization is much more complicated than the arts. Most of the
Australians are divided into moieties, which frequently are subdivided
into four classes or eight-sub-classes, all exogamous. A frequent
peculiarity is that the child belongs to a different class from both
its parents. So far as the moiety is concerned, custom varies locally
as to whether the child is born into the mother’s or father’s side of
the community. Frequently there are also hereditary totemic groups.
These may be subdivisions of the moieties or descend independently of
them. A few tribes, chiefly in southeastern Australia, are without
moieties or classes; some are totemless (Fig. 29). The moiety scheme
of course prescribes equally that one must marry into the opposite
moiety and out of one’s own. The extension of this principle to classes
and sub-classes still farther limits the group among whom marriage is
permissible, thereby emphasizing its prescriptive character. Where the
individual belongs to a third or different class from his parents,
his wife must come from the fourth or remaining one, and his children
will belong again to the first or second, according as moiety descent
is patrilinear or matrilinear. Consequently he has blood relatives in
every class; and conversely all the members of each class stand in a
certain defined kinship to every individual in the community, according
to their respective sex and age. This means not only that certain
relatives are within the absolutely prohibited degrees, but that others
are prescriptive spouses. These are only a few of the innumerable
ramifications and variations of Australian social organization.
The origin of these social schemes is in dispute. Some ethnologists
interpret them as original inventions of the Australians, manifestations
of their peculiar primitiveness. Others look upon then as evolved
somewhere in the region between India and Melanesia where analogous
institutions are frequently encountered, and as carried into Australia
by diffusion or migrations. The contiguity of Australia to the
Indo-Melanesian area of totems, moieties, unilateral descent, etc., is
not likely to be wholly a matter of coincidence (§ 110). Moreover, the
strongest development of this type of organization within Australia is
on the whole in the northern part, the tribes that show least or none of
it being in the south, farthest from the presumptive entrance via New
Guinea. On the other hand, certain features of the systems are confined
to Australia: the classes and sub-classes, the occasional coexistence
but non-relation of totems and moieties, for instance. These variations
must have originated among the Australians; and this raises the question
whether many other traits may also be indigenous. The most probable
course of events would appear to have been the importation of the basic
pattern of exogamy, followed by its diffusion with numerous new growths
in Australia.
Religious status fits the same interpretation. Ceremonial practices
are often, both abundant and elaborate, but ring the changes on
fundamentally primitive concepts like imitative magic, bewitching, taboo,
adolescence and other crisis rites. These concepts, as implicit in a
series of customary acts, might all have been imported at a very early
time; in fact in the main very likely go back to Palæolithic culture.
On this foundation the Australians developed their locally varying
superstructures of religion, which often differ conspicuously in specific
content, and into which they poured a notable quantity of imagination or
social creativeness. They evolved nothing of a fundamentally “higher”
type of cult because of their unusual degree of insulation from all the
more important later streams of culture. There occurred no significant
import of either new religious elements as such, nor of material factors
like agriculture which might have raised the economic status, increased
the population,[40] forced a political organization, and ultimately led
to the growth of basically new religious patterns among the Australians
themselves.
To return to material culture, it may be noted that the boomerang
groups with Australian rites and social organization in being a highly
specialized form of a fundamentally simple and presumably early type,
namely the throwing stick or flat club. Crescentic throwing sticks are in
use in Asia and America: they fly faster and straighter than rod shaped
or knobbed ones. The Australians alone added the twist which gives the
boomerang its peculiar flight. They may have been led to evolve this
feature through not having higher types of weapons such as bows and
arrows to engage their interest and energies. At any rate, the discovery
of the quality imparted by the twist may have been made by accident, such
as the warping of an implement, and random experimenting may have brought
the improvements.
Whether the relatively unimportant implements of ground stone in
Australia represent an invention made there or should be considered one
of the small group of culture elements which like the moiety system may
have been imported subsequently to the main stock of Australian culture,
remains to be ascertained. This main stock is certainly ancient, and
in its content may be regarded as approximately equivalent to the
Palæolithic culture of Europe and probably connected with it by an early
diffusion; although in the specific forms taken by their corresponding
types the two cultures obviously differ greatly, as indeed the lapse of
time and stretch of distance between them would render inevitable.
265. TASMANIA
Tasmania is situated toward Australia as Australia is toward
Asia-Oceania. It constitutes an ultimate periphery. Of what little
culture Australia had received from the remainder of the hemisphere,
Tasmania again received only a part. The prevailing opinion that the
Tasmanians were the most primitive of recent peoples is therefore
probably justified. They lacked everything that the Australians lacked;
and in addition lacked spear-throwers, boomerangs, shields, and ground
stone tools. They are the one population among whom it seems reasonably
certain that a culture of Palæolithic type was preserved unmixed until
modern times. They had chipped knives, axes, scrapers, and similar
tools; wooden spears and clubs; bark rafts; windbreak huts; cordage and
baskets; paint; ornaments of bone and other animal parts. Unfortunately
the Tasmanians numbered only a few thousands, died rapidly on contact
with civilization, and became extinct in the nineteenth century before
scientific study of their culture or speech had been made. Their religion
and society therefore perished almost unrecorded. Their racial type is
preserved in skeletal material and photographs. It is clear that it
differed from that of the Australians. Their hair was woolly. They have
consequently sometimes been reckoned as Oceanic Negroes rather than as
an Australian sub-type. It is likely that they represent the first human
strain to enter Australia, which was later absorbed or exterminated on
that continent by the Australians, surviving only in the protected island
of Tasmania.
266. AFRICA
Africa is the second largest of the continents, the most compact and
least indented, and, except for Australia, the most deficient in great
mountain systems and the most arid. The only considerable forested area
lies in its west central portion; the remainder ranges from parkland
through steppe to desert. The population is the densest of any continent
reckoned as prevailingly uncivilized: a hundred and twenty-five millions
or more, some ten to a dozen souls to the square mile.
As regards its races, it is important to remember that the northern
third or half of Africa is inhabited by native “whites.” There is much
confusion on this point. We tend to say African when we mean Negro. Until
recently the word Moor in north European countries often meant Negro,
although it denotes Mauretanians, Moroccans, who are Caucasians. It is
true that almost across the breadth of Africa there is a transition zone
in which it is arbitrary to classify the population as definitely Negro
or Caucasian. But over the vaster bulk of the continent, there is never
doubt as to the substantial distinctness of the racial stocks.
The oldest stone age is well represented. Implements of Chellean type in
particular have been discovered in a number of areas. Whether these are
contemporary with the Chellean remains of Europe is not wholly certain,
since they are generally surface finds. An Upper Palæolithic phase, the
Capsian, with three sub-periods, is well established for North Africa
(§ 215). It was approximately coeval with the Aurignacian, Solutrean,
Magdalenian, and probably Azilian of western Europe, and influenced them.
Syria and Spain were largely Capsian in culture. The Neolithic is less
well marked as a distinctive phase in Africa; and evidences of a separate
Bronze Age, other than in Egypt, have nowhere been discerned. There is a
bronze art with casting in lost molds in Benin. This is of undetermined
origin. It may be ancient; but so far as can be told to-day, iron came
into use in much of Africa as early as bronze, and is worked by modern
tribes who do not know bronze. Dolmens and other megalithic monuments
are abundant in north Africa, absent south of the Sahara. Some of them
are later than the similar European megaliths, since iron horse-bits
have been found associated with them. It is evident from this summary
that Europe and Africa have been closely associated in their prehistoric
culture, especially in its remote stages. Two sets of fossil human
remains corroborate the connection: Grimaldi man of Italy was pre-Negroid
in type, Rhodesian man more or less Neandertaloid.
Iron is smelted, worked, and used throughout Africa except among the
dwarf tribes. Apparatus and technique are usually simple, but efficient.
Smiths often constitute a caste, sometimes a wandering one. Some tribes
rank them highly, others repute them wizards, nearly all accord them a
special social position. There is no other area so large and culturally
so backward as Africa south of the Mohammedan belt, in which an iron
industry flourishes. The existence of the art therefore raises a problem.
Some have thought that its origin was indigenous, that perhaps even Egypt
derived its knowledge of iron from Negro peoples. On the whole, however,
it is much more probable that the reverse holds. In the more than three
thousand years since iron was worked in Egypt, the process could readily
have been transmitted through the continent. The long lapse of time, the
distances traversed, the comparative cultural backwardness of central and
south Africa, would allow for, in fact would almost dictate, both the
simplicity and the specializations of the technique.
267. EGYPTIAN RADIATIONS
Ancient Egyptian influences have penetrated Africa more significantly
than has generally been thought. It is only recently that a beginning
has been made in tracing them out in detail in the Nile Sudan. For so
intensive a civilization as that of Egypt to exist in juxtaposition to
the southeastern Hamitic tribes and the Negroes for five or six thousand
years without radiating innumerable elements of culture into their life
would be unparalleled. In fact the dynastic Egyptians used materials like
ostrich feathers that were imported from far south, and depicted Negroid
physical types. The trade and association involved must have flowed both
ways. The elements most typical of Egyptian civilization, and its fabric
and organization, need by no means have been imparted along with the
elements that were transmitted. The fact that they were not seems to be
what has delayed wide recognition of Egyptian influence in Negro Africa.
The general character of the culture of a modern central African tribe
and of the ancient Egyptians being so profoundly different, diffused
culture ingredients would therefore often appear among the Negroes in
a different form, and always in a different setting, thus tending to
disguise their historic connection. The failure of certain Egyptian
traits to seep through Africa is also readily accounted for. A backward
population broken up into small communities without much stability
would have difficulty fitting such an art as writing into their scheme
of life, in fact would find it useless. It is therefore not surprising
that none of the un-Mohammedanized tribes of the continent write.
Similarly, masonry would be needless, perhaps economically unfeasible,
under the prevailing social conditions of central Africa. On the other
hand, so obviously utilitarian an art as iron working might be quickly
taken up, once it had been brought into a simple technique. In the same
way, an adaptable domestic animal or plant would tend to be accepted
and diffused, while a concomitant scheme of political organization or
elaborated religious system might fail to make even a beginning of
penetration. It is in this way that several animals of Asiatic origin
came to be kept through considerable parts or almost the whole of Africa;
the horse, camel, sheep, fowl, for instance, of which at least the first
two entered through the gateway of Egypt.
This does not mean that all constituents of African culture have their
origin in Egypt; still less that the colors or patterns of African
cultures can be derived from that country. However great a bulk of
culture may be absorbed by one people from another, the organization
which is given this, the stamp put upon it, is necessarily more or less
distinctive, because the introduced constituents meet others already
established; and especially because the recipient culture, even if low,
already possesses a form of its own into which it unconsciously attempts
to fit the new content, and into which, unless the influx is sudden
and great, it usually succeeds in fitting the imports for a time.
However, any specific culture trait common to ancient Egypt and the
modern Negroes is suspect of a common origin, which ordinarily—though
not universally—would mean an Egyptian or more remote origin. Yet the
resolution of such a suspicion is not always easy. Much depends on the
extent and continuity of the geographical distribution of the trait, and
on the actuality and specificity of the resemblance. On these points the
necessary information is often still incomplete.
The general relation of Africa as a whole to Egypt is paralleled by the
relation of western Europe of four thousand years ago to the Orient.
The bronze, cereals, tamed animals, and many other culture elements of
Europe, including religious traits like the ax cult, can be derived
from the Near East. But the cities, monarchies, temples, inscriptions,
astronomy, and art of the Orient had not penetrated to farther
Europe. Moreover, European Bronze Age culture was not merely Oriental
civilization with half or three-fourths its content omitted. It enjoyed
an organization of its own, followed local and at least partly original
trends, possessed what might metaphorically be called an organic unity as
great as that of any Oriental culture.
268. THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER CULTURES
Two other great cultural influences have long affected Africa. As far
back as the strictly historic period extends, its Mediterranean shore
has been generally under the control of peoples belonging to Western
civilization—Carthaginians, Romans, or Arabs. As in the case of Egypt,
it is unthinkable that the cultures thus planted in the north could
have been wholly without effect on the remoter parts of the continent.
In fact, for the Arabs, who both penetrated the farthest and are the
most recent comers, influence far into the Sudan is manifest. The other
exposure was toward the east, and here, as might be expected, Indian
influences, chiefly sea-borne through Arab restlessness, have been
potent. Eastern Africa has hump-backed cattle, cotton, the pit-loom,
perhaps the fowl, from this source. Madagascar, though mainly Negro in
race, is Malaysian in speech and prevailingly Malaysian in culture as the
result of similar maritime influences from the east.
In these lights, much of African culture which cannot yet be definitely
traced to an extra-African source and which until recently was
generally assumed to be of purely native origin, may prove to be due
to transmission from Asia or Europe. The powerful kingdoms repeatedly
established by successful leaders among both Sudan and Bantu Negroes,
kingdoms embracing diverse tribes and sometimes continuing under the
same dynasty for several centuries, may be due to Egyptian or Mohammedan
example. The same can be said for the prevalence of slavery, which is
both more widespread and more important economically in Africa than in
any other large region of similarly retarded cultural level. Possibly
the frequency of polygyny belongs in the same category. It is true that
Negro economic life is generally so organized that wives represent
investment and create wealth. This fact might be the result of the
influence of old economic tendencies upon introduced polygyny. Or the
form of marriage might be the outcome of the economic scheme of life
characteristic of Africa. Yet even in the latter case an indirect foreign
causation can be suspected, since primitive peoples, at any rate those
unquestionably beyond the influences of the Eur-Asian civilizations, like
the Australians and Americans, generally do not place heavy social stress
on wealth. The African point of view as regards economic success, with
the African attitude toward marriage as a consequence, may therefore be
partly due to extra-African stimulus and example.
Such stimulus seems more easily demonstrable for the proverbs and riddles
which abound in Africa, since proverbs were completely and riddles
almost wholly wanting in the western hemisphere, and are therefore not
the native and spontaneous outflow of the human mind which our own
familiarity with them might tempt us to take for granted (§ 90).
The totemic and exogamic institutions of Negro Africa (§ 110) are
difficult to understand. Their distribution, both in totality and
as regards their several forms, is patchy. Clans sometimes coexist
with castes or occupational classes, sometimes tend to coincide with
them. Matrilineal institutions crop up irregularly among prevailingly
patrilineal ones. In several separate areas the totemic and exogamic
groups are divorced, even following opposite lines of descent. The large
blocks of peoples sharing substantially the same form of organization in
Australia, the regularity of regional and typological graduation of forms
of organization characteristic of North America, find no counterpart in
Africa. The reason would seem to be that the Australian and American
cultures developed in isolation and from within, undisturbed; whereas
Africa has long been subjected to a cultural bombardment which constantly
mingled new traits with old, foreign with acclimated, and acclimated
with indigenous. The native cultures were therefore unable to follow
the relatively smooth sequence of development by area or stage which
occurred in Australia and America; the injected ferments caused a
cultural bubbling in which elements dissociated, combined, intensified,
or disappeared according to intricate circumstances. It is possible that
other phases of African culture owe their appearance of randomness under
classification to the same set of causes.[41]
269. THE BUSHMEN
Two local culture-areas, as they would be called on American soil, emerge
with fair distinctness: The Bushman and the West African.
The Bushmen of the far south about the Kalahari desert are distinctive
in both race (§ 26) and speech. Culturally they also stand apart as an
exceptionally primitive people, lacking the agriculture, cattle and
fowls, and iron working of the Negroes. They are expert hunters, stalking
or wearing down game until it is within range of their poisoned bone or
stone pointed arrows, while the women pry up roots with stone weighted
digging sticks. They live under rock shelters or on the leeward side
of rude windbreaks. Subterranean water is sucked up through reeds and
kept in ostrich egg shells. All this suggests an early Neolithic or even
largely Palæolithic culture type, which accords well with the remote
and environmentally unfavorable habitat. It is as if the peripherally
situated Bushmen had retained up to the present, and with few additions,
the culture that prevailed in Europe ten thousand years ago. It is
certainly striking that they carve and paint animal figures on rock faces
and in caves with a fidelity and unconstrained naturalism that remind of
Magdalenian art.
The Hottentots, who are neighbors of the Bushmen and approach them in
physical type, appearing to be a mixture of Bushman and other blood,
are culturally less retarded, having cattle and iron. In central Africa
another dwarf black race, the Pygmies or Negrillos, probably represent
a people of once primitive status. But their actual cultural condition
is parasitic rather than natively primitive, thus resembling that of
their relatives the East Indian Negritos. They live among Negro tribes,
acknowledge their kings, trade forest and hunting products for the
agricultural yield and manufactures of the Negroes, and speak dialects of
the latter’s languages. They thus constitute a racially accentuated caste
or economic class within Bantu culture; and although shy and backward,
cannot be said to preserve a relatively pure early culture as do the
Bushmen.
270. THE WEST AFRICAN CULTURE-AREA AND ITS MEANING
Over the larger northern portion of the Congo drainage and along the
Guinea coast from the Niger mouth to the Senegal, there prevails a well
defined West African culture. This is marked by a number of traits which
within Africa are approximately confined to it. These traits include
the cultivation of the banana but general absence of millet and cattle;
gabled houses of thatch, other Africans building domed or conical
structures or mud dwellings; clothing of palm fiber or bark; straight
self-bows with pointed ends and encircling ridges for the attachment of
the looped cord of rattan; shields of wood or cane, in place of which
other Africans employ leather bucklers, shields of hide, or parrying
sticks; face masks for religious purposes; carvings of the human form;
slit wooden drums; xylophones; and a number of other traits.
Two interpretations can be suggested for this consistent and
geographically limited association of traits. One makes use of the
recurrence of many of the elements in the Indo-Oceanic and especially
the Melanesian area. As the latter is also Negroid territory, an ancient
connection is conceivable. This would obviously have to be old enough
to precede the Egyptian, west Asiatic, and Indian-East African culture
developments. These later growths would be interpreted as having spread
less far, although obliterating the antecedent Negroid culture so far
as they did diffuse. This explanation fits well with the principle
that, other things equal, superposed culture strata appear centrally,
underlying ones survive marginally. Proof, however, must depend on
whether the parallel traits are really specifically similar, whether they
constitute a reasonably large proportion of the culture of the two areas,
and whether they are lacking in the intervening region. This evidence is
naturally difficult to assemble.
The other interpretation is less incisive. It looks upon the resemblances
as at least partly conditioned by environment; and would tend to explain
the remainder as due to a diffusion, early indeed, but gradual and
applying to single elements or small clusters of traits rather than to
an association of traits large enough to form a culture and moving as
a single block. In this connection it is significant that the Oceanic
area is one of tropical forest, and the West African area the only
large forested tract in its continent. Hence the absence of cattle
and open-country grains, the use made of the banana. Hence too the
possibility of bark cloth; and the extremely serviceable rattan cord,
which in turn may have demanded a certain type of bow; whereas other
types, like the sinew-backed bow, would be unsatisfactory in the humid
climate. And the carving of wood, while not due to the forest, was at
least made possible by it. In short, diffusion may have been the motive
power involved, but like environmental conditions in the two areas caught
and helped to preserve such elements as were diffused—stabilized the
culture once it was adapted to the soil and rendered it more resistive
to importations of traits worked out in different climates. This
interpretation at any rate makes smaller assumptions than its competitor,
and serves as an illustration of the need of environmental conditions
being kept in mind in the explanation of culture, even though the
essential explanation be in social or cultural terms.
271. CIVILIZATION, RACE, AND THE FUTURE
Culture may be independent of race; possibly is wholly so. But culture
must be carried by races of some sort; and it may be of interest to
consider whether the sweep of culture history reveals certain races as
the most favorable carriers or as inherently constituted to be producers
and dispensers of civilization (§ 44-46).
On the whole, the greatest share of culture production has fallen to
Caucasians. The art of Upper Palæolithic Europe, the laying of the
foundations of modern civilization along the Nile and Euphrates six
or seven thousand years ago, the more special ancient efflorescences
like that of Crete, not to mention most of the advances of the last
twenty-five hundred years, all fall to the account of the white race.
The part of the Mongoloids must not be underestimated. Even if the
foundation of Chinese civilization prove to be largely western, its main
structure is native, and the alien elements that flowed in during the
last three thousand years have been thoroughly adapted to this structure.
The fact that derivative civilizations like the Japanese have succeeded
in reaching a high degree of organization and refinement argues still
further for the vigor of Chinese culture. Then, the East Indians, another
Mongoloid branch, have shown a fair power of assimilation. In the past
two thousand years they may be said to have accepted and digested at
least as much of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization as the North Europeans
took over from Mediterranean sources between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D.
Finally, the achievements of the American Mongoloids in Mexico and Peru
must be given heavy weight because they appear to have been made in utter
isolation, without the stimulus of contact or import, and on the basis of
nothing more than a late Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic culture.
The share of the Negroids in the higher advances has been small. Africa,
to be sure, lies off to one side from the great Eur-Asian axis, and
like southern India and Arabia has suffered from constituting almost a
blind alley. Yet central Africa is no farther from the Mediterranean
than is northern Europe. East Africa lies open to Egypt which six and
five and four thousand years ago represented the apex of civilization.
Yet Negro Africa to-day possesses scarcely more culture elements of
Egypto-Babylonian origin than remote Scandinavia had absorbed by 500
B.C., and far fewer than Scandinavia had in 1000 A.D. It is hard to
believe that this difference is due wholly to desert and jungle and
tropical heat.
There is a parallel in the Oceanic Negroes. The Australians may be
disregarded in this connection, both on account of the isolation of their
continent and the doubt whether they are to be reckoned as a branch
of the Negroid stem. But the Papuans and Melanesians are undisputedly
Negroid and far less touched by influences of higher culture than the
adjacent East Indians. It may be only geographic accident that writing
and iron and kingship and Hindu and Arab religion traversed the Oceanian
islands as far as the brown Mongoloids inhabited them, but stopped
dead at the threshold of the blacks. Even the brown Polynesians, much
more remote in the central Pacific than the Melanesians, possess more
elements that are presumably traceable to Asia—such as their cosmogony,
genealogies, kingship.
It is of course not fair to argue from cultural accomplishment to racial
faculty unless all times and parts of the world are considered equally,
and not safe to interpret the evidence too rigorously then. But the
consistent failure of the Negro race to accept the whole or even the
main substance of the fairly near-by Mediterranean civilization, or to
work out any notable sub-centers of cultural productivity, would appear
to be one of the strongest of the arguments that can be advanced for an
inferiority of cultural potentiality on their part.
Yet the weakness of correlation of race faculty and civilization, except
in the most general way, can be driven home to North Europeans and North
Americans as soon as the relative parts played in culture history by
the several Caucasian divisions are examined. On the ground of long
continued lead in productivity, of having reared the largest portion of
the structure of existing civilization, the Mediterranean branch of the
Caucasian race would have to be awarded the palm over all others. To it
belonged the Egyptians; the Cretans and other Ægeans; the Semitic strain
in the Babylonians; the Phœnicians and Hebrews; and a large element in
the populations of classic Greece and Italy, as well as the originators
of Mohammedanism. With the Hindus added as probably nearly related, the
dark whites have a clear lead.
The next largest share civilization would owe to the Alpine-Armenoid
broad-headed Caucasian branch. This may have included the Sumerians, if
they were not Mediterranean; comprised the Hittites; and contributed
important strains to the other peoples of Western Asia and Greece and
Italy.
By comparison, the Nordic branch looms insignificant. Up to a thousand
years ago the Nordic peoples had indeed contributed ferment and
unsettling, but scarcely a single new culture element, certainly not
a new element of importance and permanence. For centuries after that,
the center of European civilization remained in Mediterranean Italy or
Alpine France. It is only after 1500 A.D. that any claim for a shift of
this center to the Nordic populations could be alleged. In fact, most
of the national and cultural supremacy of the Nordic peoples, so far as
it is real, falls within the last two hundred years. Against this, the
Mediterraneans and Alpines have a record of leading in civilizational
creativeness for at least six thousand years.
It is clear therefore that any fears of the arrest and decay of human
progress if a particular race should lose in fertility or become absorbed
in others, are unfounded. Such alarms may be attributed to egocentric
imagination. They resemble the regrets of an individual at the loss which
the world will suffer when he dies; what he really fears is his own
death. When we loosen the hold of such narrow and essentially personal
emotions, and allow our minds to range over the whole of the labors and
gradual achievements of humanity, irrespective of millenium or continent,
the result is an imperturbed equanimity as to the slight and temporary
predominance of this or that racial strain and as to the stability or
future of culture. To contribute to this larger tolerance and balance of
mind is one of the functions of anthropology.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Ethnography is sometimes separated, as more descriptive, from
Ethnology as more theoretically inclined.
[2] The place or “station” Grimaldi must not be confused with the
Grimaldi race mentioned below. The grottos at Grimaldi contained two
skeletons of Grimaldi racial type and a larger number of Cro-Magnon type.
The Grimaldi race is therefore really not the most representative one of
the locality Grimaldi; but as it has not yet been discovered elsewhere,
there seems no choice but to call it by that name.
[3] It has been maintained that individuals of Cro-Magnon type can still
be found in southern France and reckoned as a distinct element in the
population of certain districts; but the Cro-Magnon race as such has
disappeared.
[4] The usual nomenclature for cephalic index is on the basis of round
numbers: broad or round headed or brachycephalic above 80; medium
headed or mesocephalic between 75 and 80; narrow or long headed or
dolichocephalic below 75. Yet, as the average for mankind is in the
neighborhood of 79, this terminology makes far more brachycephalic than
dolichocephalic peoples. Groups frequently spoken of as long headed are
often really mesocephalic by the accepted definition: a large proportion
of Europeans, for instance. It would result in both more accuracy and a
better balancing of the limits if the three types of head form were set,
as has been suggested, at 81 and 77 in place of 80 and 75.—The index of
the skull (strictly, the cranial index) is two units less than that taken
on the living head.
[5] On the living, platyrhine noses have an index of breadth compared
with length above 85, mesorhine between 70 and 85, leptorhine below 70;
skeletally, the same three terms denote proportions above 53, between 48
and 53, and below 48.
[6] The distribution of the races is described as it existed before
the era of exploration and colonization that began toward the end of
the fifteenth century. Although for practical purposes they have been
submerged by Caucasians in the greater part of the Americas, Australia,
and South Africa, it is the native races whose distribution is referred
to.
[7] Noun incorporation is really an etymological process rather than a
grammatical one. In most cases it is the result of a language permitting
compounds of nouns with verbs, or verbs with verbs, to form verbs: “to
rabbit-kill,” “to run-kill,” and so on. This construction, which is
perfectly natural and logical, happens to be so alien to the genius of
the Indo-European languages that it has been singled out as far more
notable and significant than it deserves. Pronominal incorporation is
discussed below (§ 60).
[8] Recently, certain “rostro-carinate” pre-Palæolithic implements have
been much discussed by British archæologists, and in the past year or two
there have been some adherents of other nationalities. The implements are
referred in part to the Pliocene, that is, late Tertiary, and are said to
be accompanied by hearths. The evidence to be adjudicated is technical,
and some years will probably elapse before expert opinion settles into
tolerable agreement on the authenticity of the objects as artifacts and
their age.
[9] The Krapina bones (§ 14) are by some assigned to the Chellean or
Acheulean.
[10] It will be noted that the second of these tables is an amplification
of the upper part of the first.
[11] A Pre-Chellean period, without large picks, and associated with the
Second Interglacial fauna (§ 69, 214), is recognized by some specialists.
[12] A period known as the Azilian, dated about 10,000-8,000 B.C.,
usually included in the Palæolithic, is discussed in chapter XIV in
connection with a review of the Palæolithic outside Europe and of the
relations between the Palæolithic and Neolithic.
[13] Of course this does not mean that the tribes beyond the edge are
without culture. They would normally be under influences from other
centers. And in a certain degree every people possesses initiative and is
constantly tending to invent or produce culture, though perhaps only of a
simple order. It is only from the point of view of the Southwest and its
Pueblo focus that the extra-marginal tribes possess a zero culture.—For
examples of other cultural step pyramids, see § 164, 175, Fig. 35.
[14] It has not been. The Maya series runs: 1 not made out, 2
rattlesnake, 3 tortoise, 4 scorpion, 5 king vulture, 6 marine monster,
7 bird, 8 frog (?), 9 deer (?), 10 and 11 not made out, 12 death,
13 peccary. Comparison with the Old World list shows 8-scorpion and
4-scorpion, and 1-ram and 9-deer (?), as the only resemblances.
[15] Grammarians generally recognize a greater number because they follow
the example of ancient grammarians and are interested in the history or
theory of language. But any one giving a purely empirical picture of
French or English would put the situation as it is put here.
[16] 12 × 10 = 120 ÷ 2 (highest common factor of 10 and 12) = 60.
[17] Or 360 and 7,200 respectively in calendrical notations.
[18] This section will not be found confusing if it is read with the
following points clearly in mind. A tribe is a political unit, a sib or
clan or moiety a social unit forming one of several divisions of such a
political unit. A tribe corresponds in savage or barbarous life to the
state or nation among ourselves. The sib is a sort of enlarged family.
The blood relationship is often mainly fictitious, but it is considered
actual or treated as such, and is the basis of the prohibition of
marriage within the sib. The origin of the sib seems to have been the
family. The terms sib, clan, and gens are here used synonymously. Some
writers restrict “clan” to sibs with descent in the female line, “gens”
to sibs with male descent. Sib is perhaps the best general term, clan the
one most used.
[19] Three out of four, to be exact; but two eastern areas, which are
almost in contact and perhaps rather closely connected in history, are
for convenience treated here as if they were one.
[20] It is perhaps hardly necessary to remark that the association
here found between the various elements of the exogamic complex would
not conflict with patrilinear descent being on the whole the earlier
and matrilinear the later phase to appear in each of the independent
developments of the complex. Nor would it prevent each separate
continental development from undergoing its own history of diffusion, as
represented in § 185.
[21] It seems quite doubtful whether any American people held seven as a
mystic number in pre-Columbian times. The case most frequently cited is
that of the Zuñi. But these people had a Christian mission in their town
for two centuries; they still employ four and six far more frequently
than seven in their rituals; and their unmissionized neighbors the Hopi
and Navaho esteem four or six but not seven. The other Indians stressing
seven lived either on the Atlantic slope, such as the Delaware and
Cherokee, and have therefore long been in contact with the colonists;
or in the Plains—notably the Siouan tribes—and there came into direct
and indirect relations with the French for two hundred years before
ethnologists visited them. Moreover, the number which the Plains tribes
most frequently used in regard to sacred matters was four. The mystic
value of seven may therefore be traceable to European influence wherever
it appears in America.
[22] Except perhaps for the fragments of the Baal Lebanon bowl.
[23] These areas are discussed further in the next chapter, especially in
§ 174.
[24] Mexico, Central America, and the coast and mountain parts of
Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
[25] Maize is the name of the plant in England, continental Europe, and
Latin America. In the United States “corn,” short for Indian corn, is in
current usage; but this word means grain or cereal in general.
[26] The contrary has been alleged. To dispose of the allegations
seriatim would involve the minute examination of much evidence. Clan
organization is here used in reference to arbitrary, named, intratribal
exogamic groups to which the individual belongs inalienably by virtue
of his birth, his descent being necessarily reckoned on one side only;
and totemic phenomena being usually though not always associated with
the group. A segregation of society into groups based primarily on
blood kinship, co-residence, town quarters, occupation, social rank,
or subordination to a chieftain is not a clan organization. Nor is the
unilateral reckoning of descent a sufficient criterion. Our modern family
names descend patrilineally without any historical connection between
them and a clan organization. In general, statements as to the existence
of clan systems in Middle America, at least among the advanced nations of
Mexico and Peru, rest either on a loose use of terms; on the assumption
that they must have existed at the time of discovery; or on a forward
projection into the historic period of the belief that they had once
existed. This belief is accepted here without such projection.
[27] Why the Southwest with its solid towns of a thousand and more
inhabitants, its generally greater advancement, and proximity to Mexico,
should never have progressed to larger political units, is not wholly
clear. The reason may be that the Pueblo was a heavily ritualized
culture, whose emphasis was on the priest, not the governor or councilor.
Such government as the Pueblos had was distinctly theocratic. They were
also disinclined to fight. Southeastern religion was quite simple in
comparison, an important priesthood lacking, and the warlike spirit
rather strong.
[28] The kiva or estufa of the Southwest, a ceremonial chamber, is a
partial exception. Yet even it differs from the living room of the
same region chiefly in use. Structurally it may be somewhat larger, or
circular instead of rectangular, but does not depart widely from the
dwellings. Functionally it is a development of the primitive “men’s
house,” not a temple.
[29] Some of the Eskimo followed a solstitial reckoning also, but
probably as a result of the unusual astronomical phenomena of their high
latitudes rather than as the consequence of cultural influence.
[30] The tonalamatl was not divided into 13 discrete month periods of
20 days each, but was a permutation system of 20 names with 13 numbers,
yielding a recurrent cycle of 260 days each designated by its particular
combination of name and number. See § 106.
[31] The years in this reckoning were somewhat short: 360 days.
[32] So primary is the distinction within the Palæolithic of its
Lower and Upper halves, that some authors, for purposes of elementary
presentation, have felt justified in calling these halves the Old and the
Middle Stone Ages. This is unfortunate because this “Middle” Stone Age is
in scientific writings always included in the Palæolithic, whereas the
Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age of many archæologists embraces the more
or less transitional periods such as the Azilian and Maglemose (below,
§ 216) between the end of the Palæolithic and the definitive or Full
Neolithic. Nevertheless, the unorthodox terminology has the merit of
condensing detail with a broad sweep.
[33] These are the proportions of implements of flint to those of bone or
horn in several stations of different age:
Hundsteig, Austria, early Aurignacian 20,000 2
Sirgenstein, Würtemberg, Aurignacian 1,000 rare
Sirgenstein, Würtemberg, early Solutrean 700 10
Predmost, Czecho-Slovakia, Solutrean 25,000 many
Schweizersbild, Switzerland, late Magdalenian 14,000 1,300
Maglemose, Denmark, Azilian 881 294
Oban, Scotland, Azilian 20 150
[34] The horse seems to have survived wild in parts of Europe until the
Neolithic, but the first domesticated forms, in the Bronze Age, appear to
have been brought in from Asia.
[35] In France, four or five periods are distinguished: 2500-1900;
1900-1600; 1600-1300; 1300-900 B.C. The first of these is a time of
copper rather than bronze, with northern France still Neolithic. If five
periods are admitted, an era around 1300 B.C. is recognized as a separate
division.
[36] A Uralic Bronze Age culture-area is recognizable as stretching with
considerable uniformity from the Dniepr in southwestern Russia to Lake
Baikal in the latitude of eastern Mongolia, and centering about Minusinsk
on the upper Yenisei. It possessed horse trappings, an abundance of
sickles that argue a population primarily agricultural, and socketed axes
related to the type that occurred in western Europe between about 1400
and 1000 B.C. This bronze culture shows definite resemblances on the one
hand to that of the Danubian area—and, it may be added, of the Caucasus;
on the other, to the ancient bronzes of China.
[37] In India, “Hindu” means any native who adheres to the higher cults
of native origin which collectively constitute the “religion” known as
Hinduism; in effect, the non-savage and non-Mohammedan inhabitants.
Hindus and Mohammedans are contrasted in local usage. In this book, Hindu
is synonymous with Indian, irrespective of religion.
[38] The Malays proper, whose home until the twelfth or thirteenth
century lay in Sumatra, are to be distinguished as a particular people
from the Malaysian or East Indian group which we name after them, in the
same way that the Mongols are a nation which is but one of many that
constitute the Mongolian race and Mongoloid stock.
[39] Several languages in the interior of the larger Melanesian islands
have been described as non-Malayo-Polynesian. If they confirm as such,
they may be regarded as survivals of a group of languages which were the
original tongues of the Melanesians and are probably to be classed with
the Papuan languages. The Malayo-Polynesian speech of the majority of the
modern Melanesians may in that case be considered as having been taken
over through contacts with brown peoples of a higher culture. A similar
situation exists in Madagascar, which in race is predominantly Negroid,
but whose speech is purely and whose culture largely Malaysian.
[40] The population attained only to a minority fraction of a million,
perhaps not over 150,000 all told.
[41] It may be corroborative of this interpretation that totemism and
exogamy are more irregularly distributed, and therefore more difficult
to reconstruct as to their history, in South than in North America. The
Tropical Forest area, in which these institutions occur in South America,
has long been exposed to the influence of the higher civilization of the
Andean region, much as Africa has been exposed to Europe and Asia.
INDEX
Abbeville, 398
Abyssinian, 96, 135, 451
Academies, 132
Acceleration, 395
Achæmenian, 452
Achenschwankung, 406
Acheulean, 153, 395-410
Adolescence Rite, _see_ Girls’ Rite
Adriatic, 53, 424
Ægean, 418, 423, 425, 432, 456, 457, 459, 505;
sea, 457
Æthiopian, _see_ Ethiopian
Afghan, Afghanistan, 211, 284, 484
Agamemnon, 457
Agglutinating languages, 100, 102
Agra, 251
Agriculture, 184, 211, 218, 238, 294, 329, 354, 370, 379, 381, 383,
389, 414, 442, 446, 449, 492, 501
Ainu, 35, 40, 41, 42, 51, 53, 73, 470, 475
Akkad, 434, 451, 458
Alabama, 78
Alaska, 213, 218, 295, 303, 345, 347, 350, 351, 421
Alarcón, 318
Albanian, 95, 105
Alcalar, 420
Aleph, 270, 271
Aleutian Islands, 350
Alexander, 255, 451
Alexandria, 255
Algiers, 400
Algonkin, 100, 135, 352, 389
Alignments, 416
Allées couvertes, 430
Alloy, 426
Alpha, 270
Alphabet, 223, 224, 241, 264, 269-292, 326, 329, 330, 333, 426, 438,
442, 448, 454, 469, 482, 484
Alpine (race), 41, 42, 43, 55, 63, 77, 472, 476, 506
Alps, 149, 150, 400, 406
Altaic, 95, 469, 474
Altamira, 408
Altars, 187, 188, 294, 310, 368
Amazon, 338, 340, 382
Amber, 166
Amenhotep IV, 458
American Indians, 38, 39, 41, 44, 47, 64, 67, 73, 145, 197, 199, 252,
324, 343, 348, 421
Amorites, 451, 472
Analytical languages, 220
Anam, Anamese, 96, 465, 485, 487
Anau, 449, 450, 473
Ancestor worship, 466, 471
_Ancylus fluviatilis_, lake, period, 428
Andaman Islands, 45
Andes, Andean area, 228, 338, 342, 354, 381, 382, 384, 501
Anglo-Saxon, 56, 83, 104, 113, 117, 118, 221, 346, 347
Animal speech, 106
Animism, 218
Anthropoid, 13, 21, 32, 63, 109, 152
Anthropometry, 30
Anthropomorphize, 106, 219
Antilles, Antillean area, 339, 356, 361, 369, 382, 385
Anvils, 165
Apache, 181, 187, 188
Aphrodite, 256
Apostles, 195
Arab, Arabs, Arabia, Arabic, 53, 96, 104, 111, 113, 136, 205, 208,
210, 211, 213, 230, 258, 269, 282, 285, 286, 287, 290, 449,
451-456, 467, 472, 473, 484, 485, 499, 504, 505
Aram, Aramæan, Aramaic, 270, 285, 287, 422, 451, 454, 455
Arapaho, 135, 294
Araucanian, 100
Arawak, 100, 352
Arch, 209, 241-252, 326, 418, 448;
corbelled, 245, 420;
true, 246, 438, 485
Archimedes, 425
Architecture, 229, 241, 371, 418, 424, 426, 433, 484, 488
Arctic, Arctic area, 236, 295, 336, 388, 389, 391
Argentina, 218, 338, 370
Arizona, 187, 294, 296, 303, 304, 310, 348
Armenia, Armenian, 43, 53, 95, 207, 260, 262, 452
Armenoid, 505
Armor, 129, 391
Arsenic, 374