Aryan civilization

“ If we dig down far enough into the English language, we reach an old civilization flourishing somewhere round the banks of the Dnieper; of what was going on in these islands at that time we hear scarcely the faintest reverberation.
There is little doubt that the ancient inhabitants of Western Europe as a whole differed from their Aryan successors in two important customs. They buried their dead, whereas the Aryans invariably used cremation; and they were organized in systems of matriarchies. Aryan culture is patriarchal to its very foundations. ”

“ The hoary antiquity of this ancient monument, the picture it affords of the earliest form of civilization that the Aryans developed in any part of the world, and the flood of light it throws on the origin of the myths and religions of all Aryan nations, make the Rig-Veda deeply interesting. It is, moreover, the oldest work in the Aryan world. It gives us a picture of the oldest civilization that the Aryans developed, and it enlightens and clears up much that is dark and obscure in the religions and myths of Aryan nations all over the world. ”

“ It must be regarded as a marvelous fact that a portion of mankind five thousand years ago, less or more, attained to civilization. In strictness but two families, the Semitic and the Aryan, accomplished the work through unassisted self-development. The Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress, because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming the control of the earth. And yet civilization must be regarded as an accident of circumstances. ”

“ Such was the being encountered by the Aryan, when he penetrated the mysterious land beyond the confines of Greece and Italy.
The extermination, and perhaps, to some extent, assimilation, of this terrible race must have required centuries of brutalizing conflict, and, it is easy to imagine, would have produced just such men as were the northern barbarians, who for five hundred years terrorized Europe: men insensible to fear, terrible, fierce, but with fine instincts for civilization—dormant Aryan germs, which quickly developed when brought into contact with a superior race. ”

“ The historian of man does not find in Aryan history any traces of hetairism (or of promiscuous relationship between the sexes) , of families being reckoned on the mother's side, or of inheritance by the female line. On the contrary, the father was the protector and the nourisher of the family, the mother looked after and fed the children, the daughter milked the cattle, and relationship by marriage was recognized. Probably the primitive Aryans had already reached a higher state of civilization than promiscuous living would imply. ”

“ They have perfected society and morals, and we learn from their literature and works of art the elements of science, the laws of art, and the principles of philosophy. In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and Mongolian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization, commerce, and religion. ”

“ The population, which in some parts attains extraordinary density and lives almost exclusively on the fruits of the soil, is of the old Dravidian stock, industrious and frugal as in other parts of India, and of a placid and gentle temper. Nowhere else in India does one come into such close contact with its original non-Aryan peoples; and nowhere else has the earliest type of religious and social institutions evolved by the superior civilization of the Aryans been so completely preserved from the disturbing influences of later ages. ”

“ If this theory is correct, the nations of modern Europe have derived those traits of character and those institutions which have given them their present headship of power and civilization among the peoples of the globe, not from their Aryan forefathers, but mainly from this other portion of their ancestry, belonging to the earlier population which the Aryans overcame and absorbed. ”

“ The problem of the cradle of the Aryan race will probably never be solved with certainty. Airyana-vaejah, 'the stem-land of the Aryans,' is spoken of as the first of the good lands created by Ahura Mazda. ”

“ All then that I wish to put clearly before you is this, that the Aryan man, who had to fulfil his mission in India, might naturally be deficient in many of the practical and fighting virtues, which were developed in the Northern Aryans by the very struggle without which they could not have survived, but that his life on earth had not therefore been entirely wasted. His very view of life, though we cannot adopt it in this Northern climate, may yet act as a lesson and a warning to us, not, for the sake of life, to sacrifice the highest objects of life. ”

“ It was suggested, also, that if the Aryan intruders, entering Europe from the East, encountered and absorbed a population resembling the American aborigines, the fact would account for the great change which the Aryan speech underwent in Central and Western Europe. It would also account for the remarkable change which took place in the character of the intruding race. The Aryans, who in the East have always been a submissive and contemplative race, devoid of the idea of popular government, became, in Europe, a high-spirited, practical, and liberty-loving people. ”

“ Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. ”

“ But with the loss of India the Aryan Way ceased to rule the lives of any Aryan peoples. It is curious to note that while the{v1-441} one great Aryan religion is now almost exclusively confined to Mongolian peoples, the Aryans themselves are under the sway of two religions, Christianity and Islam, which are, as we shall see, essentially Semitic. ”

“ The outward movement in modern times of the Aryan-speaking peoples of Europe, that is to say, the expansion of Europe into Greater Europe and the Europeanizing of the world, is merely the continuation—and an illustration—of the Aryan expansion movement which went on in the obscurity of the prehistoric ages. Thus we see what leading parts, after what we may call the Semitic age, Aryan-speaking peoples have borne in the great drama of history. ”

“ That portion of the ancient Aryan race which poured from the central plain of Asia, through the rocky defiles of what we now call “The Frontier,” to populate the fertile lowlands of India, had gods who must once have been wholly heroic, but who came in time to be more degraded than the most vicious of lustful criminals. And the Greeks, Latins, Teutons, Celts, and Slavonians, who came of the same mighty Aryan stock, did even as those with whom they owned a common ancestry. ”

“ The distinctive physical features, therefore, of the Aryan conquerors might soon wear out and be lost in those of the nations they overran; yet many of the words, and, what is more in point, some of the grammatical forms of their language, might be retained by the masses which they had governed for centuries, these masses continuing to preserve the same features of race which had distinguished them long before the Aryan invasions. ”

“ According to the evidence of their languages, there must have been a time and a place, in the remote past, when and where a primitive Aryan race, which was ancestral to all these nations, lived and multiplied until it outgrew its original country and began to send forth successive "swarms," or migrating hordes, as many unsettled races have been seen to do within the historic age. {991} It is hopeless, perhaps, to think of determining the time when such a dispersion of the Aryan peoples began ”

“ If the Aryan speech was imposed by one race upon other and different races, may not the complex of myths and customs which we are accustomed to call Aryan, be likewise the exclusive property of one race, and have been accepted with the Aryan speech by the inferior races whom the Aryans dominated, and upon whom they impressed their civilisation, whether that civilisation be regarded as a special product of the Aryans or as taken over by them from older, presumably Eastern, civilisations? ”

“ Caste reserved some privileges for priests, and some privileges for warriors, in ancient times; but never divided and disunited the Aryan people. Priests and warriors and citizens, though following their hereditary professions from generation to generation, felt that they were one nation and one race, received the same religious instructions, attended the same schools of learning, possessed the same literature and traditions, ate and drank together, intermarried and intermixed in all respects, and were proud to call themselves the Aryan race. ”

“ Travellers refuse to believe that ‘Aryanism’ was born on the bald, bleak highlands of Central Asia, or that ‘Semitism’ derives from the dreary, fiery deserts of Arabia. We do not believe India to be ‘the country which even more than Greece or Rome was the cradle of grammar and philology.’ I cannot but hold that England has, of late years, been greatly misled by the ‘Aryan heresy’ ”

“ Preceding the Aryans, and surviving the Aryan conquest all over Europe, was a large non-Aryan population, which must have had its own gods, who would retain their worship, be revered by successive generations, and remain rooted to the soil. ”

“ It is maintained, therefore, that the relationship of the Aryan peoples is not one of race but only of language and of culture; the word Aryan denotes no more than a certain type of speech, and of accompanying civilisation, which spread over all the peoples in question at a very early time. ”

“ It cannot be denied, however, that they are open to attack from various sides. In the first place, there is the preliminary question whether there is an Aryan race-group and consequently an “Aryan epic tradition” at all. ”

“ The home of the Aryans, instead of being found in Central Asia, is traced to Europe, so that the Aryan invaders of India, many centuries before Christ, were men of European descent who pushed their way eastward and gradually extended their dominion first over Iran and subsequently over Northern India, having scaled the snowclad Himalayas, literally in search of “fresh fields and pastures new.” When they reached India, after a long sojourn in Eastern countries, they were a mixed European and Asiatic race, with probably a large share of Turanian blood, [7] speaking a language of Aryan origin. ”

“ So the ancient Aryan rises to the mind's eye as a big, stalwart, high-nosed, fair-skinned man, with a smile and a liking for exhilarating liquor, who, after long wanderings with his herds over the plains of Central Asia--where, reading the stars at night, he sang as he watched his flocks to Pushan the Path-finder--looked down one day from the heights of the Himalayas over a fair expanse of new-born land by the ripples of a receding sea, and found that it was good. ”

“ Such is the race whose ancestors achieved the conquest of Europe some two or three thousand years before the Christian era, subduing gradually the scattered and disorganized tribes of Semitic, Iberian, and Uralian origin. As has been already noted, the two traits of Aryan character which, in addition to the personal valor shared by them with their opponents, especially insured the success of the invaders, were their worship of hereditary rank—a base sentiment, almost unknown to the other great races of mankind—and their ruthless cruelty to the conquered. ”

“ Though I realize this, still, having faith in the creative instinct of the Aryan race, I believe that among all the races it is only the Aryan that can direct the current of the tragic life of humanity into other and less turbulent channels and that, having succeeded in creating a material world organization, it will find within itself sufficient strength and idealism to evolve a moral organization comprising all mankind. ”

“ As it is assumed that all Aryans were blond and traced descent through males, so it is held that all Europeans, who are dark-complexioned, and whose forefathers traced descent through women, are non-Aryan in race, and that, although they now in almost every case speak an Aryan tongue, this is not their primitive speech, but simply that learned from their Aryan conquerors. ”

“ The Aryan branch includes nearly all the present and past nations of Europe, the Greeks, Latins, Teutons or Germans, Celts and Slavonians; as well as three Asiatic peoples,—the Hindus, the Persians, and the Afghans and the modern Americans. It is the Aryans that have been the parents of new nations, and that have reached the highest point of intellectual development, as shown in their political freedom, and in their science, literature, and art. ”

“ The Aryan settler lived on excellent terms with his bright gods. He asked for protection, with an assured conviction that it would be granted. At the same time, he was deeply stirred by the glory and mystery of the earth and the heavens. Indeed, the majesty of nature so filled his mind, that when he praises any one of his Shining Gods, he can think of none other for the time being, and adores him as the supreme ruler. Verses may be quoted declaring each of the greater deities to be the One Supreme: "Neither gods nor men reach unto thee, O Indra!" ”

“ In the last century it was long held that in countries of Aryan speech the essential features of their civilisation, their religious ideas, their social institutions, nay, more, their inhabitants themselves, were of Aryan origin.
A more critical investigation has, however, enabled us to distinguish clearly between the development of various factors of human life which in their evolution can follow and often have followed more or less independent lines. The physical history of race, for instance, forms a problem by itself and must be studied by anthropological and ethnological methods. ”