Aryan migration

“ If we admit, then, that it was from Armenia the Aryans stocked Europe and India, there is no reason why the original population of Armenia should not have been themselves colonists from Atlantis.
But we have seen that in the earliest ages, before the first Armenian migration of the historical Aryans, a people went from Iberian Spain and settled in Ireland, and the language of this people, it is now admitted, is Aryan. And these Iberians were originally, according to tradition, from the West. ”

“ The Story of Nala and Damayantī.
§1. The trend of Aryan migration in India has been from the extreme north. west to the south-east, across the region drained by the Indus and its affluents, and called the Panjāb or Land of the Five Rivers; and again south-east, down the valleys of the Jumna and Ganges. One prominent group of Aryan immigrant tribes was that of the Kosalas, Videhas, and Magadhas, who settled in the lower valley of the Ganges, east of its confluence with the Jumna, in the districts now named Oudh and Behar, the Palestine of Buddhism. ”

“ It is hard to draw any certain bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see page 109) , for in their course of migration and conquest they so mingled with other races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. ”

“ The substantial unity of the species having become an accepted fact along with the doctrine of evolution, the migration and consequent acclimatization of the various branches of the parent stock follow as a matter of course. The modern problem plainly stated is this: First, can a single generation of European emigrants live? and, secondly, living, can they perpetuate their kind in the equatorial regions of the earth? Finally, if the Aryan race is able permanently so to sustain itself, will it still be able to preserve its peculiar civilization in these lands ”

“ This theory, however, has pretty well broken down, since it has been shown that other branches of the Aryan languages, specially the Lithuanian, contain more archaic elements than either Sanscrit or Zend; that language is often no conclusive test of race; that Aryan migrations have quite as often or oftener been from west to east than from east to west; and that all history, prehistoric traditions, and linguistic palæontology point to the principal Aryan races having been located in Northern and Central Europe and in Central and 412 Southern Russia very much as we find them at the present day. ”

“ Tribes which remain entirely isolated may utilize the suggestions and facilities of life which are afforded them by their localities, and when these are exhausted become permanently stationary, but tribes impelled by want of subsistence, or the desire of conquest to migrate to other localities, as is stated to have been the case with the Aryan race in their migration from the East to the West, gather up the separate civilizations as they advance, and hence, by accretion or intercourse with others, rise to a higher plane. ”

“ There could hardly be a better example of the uneasy movement of Aryan migrations than the history of the settlement of the British Isles. We find them, first of all, as far back as we can look, inhabited by an unknown population who left their barrows and tumuli dotted about the country, whose society seems to have been matriarchally organized, and who, if the name Pict may be taken as any indication, probably had the habit of painting or tattooing their bodies. ”

“ So it may well have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward—to people, at last, all the countries of Europe. ”

“ The first incursion of the fair Aryans from the northwest settled down, it is claimed, in the northern portions of the country. They gradually mingled and intermarried with the dark-skinned Dravidian and aboriginal population, with the natural [94] consequence of a loss of race-purity and of whiteness of complexion. A subsequent descent of a new Aryan host upon the plains of northern India found the descendants of their predecessors of darker hue than themselves, which bespoke their race degeneracy ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the back of this unsettled question lies the interesting subject of the civilisation of pre-Aryan races on the European-Asiatic Continent. In the Newer Stone Age this continent was inhabited by races of short stature, with long and narrow skulls, and probably dark complexions, races whom the Aryans, a tall, round-skulled, fair-complexioned race, conquered, and with whom they so largely intermingled that the varieties of fair and dark people in Europe at this day, speaking an Aryan language, are past finding out. Indeed, there are probably no unmixed races throughout Europe and Asia ”

“ After the fall of Nineveh they coalesced with the Medes, and, in common with all the nations inhabiting the high plateaus of Asia Minor, Armenia and Persia, became gradually Aryanized, owing to the immigration at this period of history of tribes in overwhelming numbers which, from whatever quarter they may have sprung, belonged certainly to the Aryan family. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Aryans in Europe have dwelt there apparently since the close of the Stone Age, if not before it, while the movements of the Aryans in Asia are within the Historical Period, and they appear as intrusive stocks, forming a high caste amid a vast population of a different race. The Vedas are supposed to date back to 2000 B.C., while there is every reason to believe that the Celt inhabited Western Europe 5000 B.C. If the Aryan race had originated in the heart of Asia, why would not its ramifications have extended into Siberia, China, and Japan, and all over Asia? ”

“ The new generation presents a mixed race of hardy trappers, mingling the aptitudes of both races in the wild life of the frontier. With the increase of population, and the more settled life of the clearing, the traces of mixed blood are lost sight of; but it is to a large extent only a repetition of what appears to have marked the advent of the Aryan immigrants into Europe. The new, but more civilised race predominated. Literal extermination, no doubt, did its work, and the aborigines to a large extent perished. ”

“ It is not probable that the Aryans became predominant in the basin of the Ganges more than 2000 B.C. But it is equally improbable that a race which gave civilization and a ruling caste to Egypt 2000 to 3000 years previously, did not begin to affect the ethnology of India until this period. The preservation of such a race during so long a period of a rigid exclusion would be an ethnic anomaly. * * "
Page 37.—"The Aryan race appears to have begun to spread from the western side of the Jumna into the basin of the Ganges probably less than 4000 years ago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The overflow of the population of Europe into the different regions of the New World, is simply a continuation of the prehistoric migrations of the members of the primitive Aryan household.
Everywhere the other races and families have given way before the advance of the Aryan peoples, who have assumed the position of leaders and teachers among the families of mankind, and are rapidly spreading their arts and sciences and culture over the earth. ”

“ Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life [pg 127] to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. ”

“ The prevailing population of this region within the historic period has always been a division of the Aryan race, of the great Indo-Germanic family of mankind, who at some early epoch spread themselves across two continents, from the frontiers of Burmah to the Atlantic seaboard {375} of Europe. ”

“ It seems very doubtful whether an Aryan emigration from India to China took place at any time. India always offered full scope for all Aryan energies; indeed we know that the Aryans by no means became so universally predominant, even in India, as one might gather from the early and wide extension of their language and religion. If there really is an Aryan element among the tribes of western China it would be curious to speculate on the possibility of its having come by a non-Indian route. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The simple formula, pre-Aryan, Aryan, non-Aryan, affords the key to the historical development of European ethnology. PRE-ARYAN PEOPLES. Of the presumably pre-Aryan peoples of western Europe the Iberians occupy easily the first place. The seat of this people at the dawn of history was in Spain and southern France; their ethnology belongs entirely to the realm of conjecture. They are of much darker complexion than the Aryans and their racial characteristic is conservatism even to stubbornness, which places them in marked contrast to their immediate Aryan neighbors, the volatile Celts. ”

“ In accordance with this law, the yellow-haired Achæans decayed in Greece, the Lombards in North Italy, the Vandals in Spain and Africa. After a few generations of life in a warm climate the Aryan stock invariably disappears. We shall show reasons for thinking that this theory is much exaggerated; but there is undoubtedly some truth in it. It has been found to be impossible for white men to colonise India, Burma, tropical America, and West Africa. ”

“ The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word "Arya," meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history. ”

“ 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. ”