A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
19.THE PRIMITIVE ARYANS
Four thousand years ago, that is to say about 2000 B.C., central and south-eastern Europe and central Asia were probably warmer, moister and better wooded than they are now. In these regions of the earth wandered a group of tribes mainly of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race, sufficiently in touch with one another to speak merely variations of one common language from the Rhine to the Caspian Sea. At that time they may not have been a very numerous people, and their existence was unsuspected by the Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws, or by the already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt which was tasting in those days for the first time the bitterness of foreign conquest.
These Nordic people were destined to play a very important part indeed
in the world’s history. They were a people of the parklands and the
forest clearings; they had no horses at first but they had cattle; when
they wandered they put their tents and other gear on rough ox waggons;
when they settled for a time they may have made huts of wattle and mud.
They burnt their important dead; they did not bury them ceremoniously
as the brunette peoples did. They put the ashes of their greater
leaders in urns and then made a great circular mound about them. These
mounds are the “round barrows” that occur all over north Europe. The
brunette people, their predecessors, did not burn their dead but buried
them in a sitting position in elongated mounds; the “long barrows.”
The Aryans raised crops of wheat, ploughing with oxen, but they did not
settle down by their crops; they would reap and move on. They had
bronze, and somewhen about 1500 B.C. they acquired iron. They may have
been the discoverers of iron smelting. And somewhen vaguely about that
time they also got the horse—which to begin with they used only for
draught purposes. Their social life did not centre upon a temple like
that of the more settled people round the Mediterranean, and their
chief men were leaders rather than priests. They had an aristocratic
social order rather than a divine and regal order; from a very early
stage they distinguished certain families as leaderly and noble.
A BEAUTIFUL ARCHAIC AMPHORA
Compare the horses and other animals with the Altamira drawing on p.54, and also with the Greek frieze, p. 140
They were a very vocal people. They enlivened their wanderings by
feasts, at which there was much drunkenness and at which a special sort
of man, the bards, would sing and recite. They had no writing until
they had come into contact with civilization, and the memories of these
bards were their living literature. This use of recited language as an
entertainment did much to make it a fine and beautiful instrument of
expression, and to that no doubt the subsequent predominance of the
languages derived from Aryan is, in part, to be ascribed. Every Aryan
people had its legendary history crystallized in bardic recitations,
epics, sagas and vedas, as they were variously called.
The social life of these people centred about the households of their
leading men. The hall of the chief where they settled for a time was
often a very capacious timber building. There were no doubt huts for
herds and outlying farm buildings; but with most of the Aryan peoples
this hall was the general centre, everyone went there to feast and hear
the bards and take part in games and discussions. Cowsheds and
stabling surrounded it. The chief and his wife and so forth would
sleep on a dais or in an upper gallery; the commoner sort slept about
anywhere, as people still do in Indian households. Except for weapons,
ornaments, tools and suchlike personal possessions there was a sort of
patriarchal communism in the tribe. The chief owned the cattle and
grazing lands in the common interest; forest and rivers were the wild.
This was the fashion of the people who were increasing and multiplying
over the great spaces of central Europe and west central Asia during
the growth of the great civilization of Mesopotamia and the Nile, and
whom we find pressing upon the heliolithic peoples everywhere in the
second millennium before Christ. They were coming into France and
Britain and into Spain. They pushed westward in two waves. The first
of these people who reached Britain and Ireland were armed with bronze
weapons. They exterminated or subjugated the people who had made the
great stone monuments of Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge and Avebury
in England. They reached Ireland. They are called the Goidelic Celts.
The second wave of a closely kindred people, perhaps intermixed with
other racial elements, brought iron with it into Great Britain, and is
known as the wave of Brythonic Celts. From them the Welsh derive their
language.
THE MOUND OF NIPPUR
The site of a city which recent excavations have proved to date from at
least as early as 5000 B.C., and probably 1000 years earlier
Kindred Celtic peoples were pressing southward into Spain and coming
into contact not only with the heliolithic Basque people who still
occupied the country but with the Semitic Phœnician colonies of the sea
coast. A closely allied series of tribes, the Italians, were making
their way down the still wild and wooded Italian peninsula. They did
not always conquer. In the eighth century B.C. Rome appears in
history, a trading town on the Tiber, inhabited by Aryan Latins but
under the rule of Etruscan nobles and kings.
At the other extremity of the Aryan range there was a similar progress
southward of similar tribes. Aryan peoples, speaking Sanskrit, had
come down through the western passes into North India long before 1000
B.C. There they came into contact with a primordial brunette
civilization, the Dravidian civilization, and learnt much from it.
Other Aryan tribes seem to have spread over the mountain masses of
Central Asia far to the east of the present range of such peoples. In
Eastern Turkestan there are still fair, blue-eyed Nordic tribes, but
now they speak Mongolian tongues.
Between the Black and Caspian Seas the ancient Hittites had been
submerged and “Aryanized” by the Armenians before 1000 B.C., and the
Assyrians and Babylonians were already aware of a new and formidable
fighting barbarism on the north-eastern frontiers, a group of tribes
amidst which the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians remain as
outstanding names.
But it was through the Balkan peninsula that Aryan tribes made their
first heavy thrust into the heart of the old-world civilization. They
were already coming southward and crossing into Asia Minor many
centuries before 1000 B.C. First came a group of tribes of whom the
Phrygians were the most conspicuous, and then in succession the Æolic,
the Ionic and the Dorian Greeks. By 1000 B.C. they had wiped out the
ancient Ægean civilization both in the mainland of Greece and in most
of the Greek islands; the cities of Mycenæ and Tiryns were obliterated
and Cnossos was nearly forgotten. The Greeks had taken to the sea
before 1000 A.D., they had settled in Crete and Rhodes, and they were
founding colonies in Sicily and the south of Italy after the fashion of
the Phœnician trading cities that were dotted along the Mediterranean
coasts.
So it was, while Tiglath Pileser III and Sargon II and Sardanapalus
were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and Egypt,
the Aryan peoples were learning the methods of civilization and making
it over for their own purposes in Italy and Greece and north Persia.
The theme of history from the ninth century B.C. A.D. onward for six
centuries is the story of how these Aryan peoples grew to power and
enterprise and how at last they subjugated the whole Ancient World,
Semitic, Ægean and Egyptian alike. In form the Aryan peoples were
altogether victorious; but the struggle of Aryan, Semitic and Egyptian
ideas and methods was continued long after the sceptre was in Aryan
hands. It is indeed a struggle that goes on through all the rest of
history and still in a manner continues to this day.