Semi-Arianism

“ There is another reason for supposing that the Aryan nations came from Atlantis.
We find all Europe, except a small corner of Spain and a strip along the Arctic Circle, occupied by nations recognized as Aryan; but when we turn to Asia, there is but a corner of it, and that corner in the part nearest Europe, occupied by the Aryans. All the rest of that great continent has been filled from immemorial ages by non-Aryan races. ”

“ The fathers of the Aryan race must have dwelt for many thousand years so completely protected from barbarians and wild beasts that they at last lost all memory of them, and all words descriptive of them; and where could this have been possible save in some great, long-civilized land, surrounded by the sea, and isolated from the attack of the savage tribes that occupied the rest of the world? And if such a great civilized nation had dwelt for centuries in Asia, Europe, or Africa, why have not their monuments long ago been discovered and identified? ”

“ We say no longer vaguely and poetically Ex Oriente Lux, but we know that all the most vital elements of our knowledge and civilization,—our languages, our alphabets, our figures, our weights and measures, our art, our religion, our traditions, our very nursery stories, come to us from the East; and we must confess that but for the rays of Eastern light, whether Aryan or Semitic or Hamitic, that called forth the hidden germs of the dark and dreary West, Europe, now the very light of the world, might 326 have remained forever a barren and forgotten promontory of the primeval Asiatic continent. ”

“ According to this catalogue of the nations, which shows the extension of the Semitic race from the mountains of Armenia southward to the Persian Gulf, eastward to the mountains of Iran, westward into Asia Minor, we follow the Semites along the course of the two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, to the south. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And if the Aryans moved at a comparatively recent date into Europe from Bactria, where are the populations that then inhabited Europe—the men of the ages of stone and bronze? We should expect to find the western coasts of Europe filled with them, just as the eastern coasts of Asia and India are filled with Turanian populations. On the contrary, we know that the Aryans descended upon India from the Punjab, which lies to the north-west of that region; and that their traditions represent that they came there from the west, to wit, from the direction of Europe and Atlantis. ”

“ The name of Aryan has been given to the races speaking languages derived from, or akin to, the ancient form of Sanskrit, who now occupy the temperate zone extending from the Mediterranean, across the highlands of Asia Minor, Persia and Afghanistan, to India. The races speaking the languages akin to the ancient Assyrian, which are now mainly represented by Arabic, have been Aryans. called Semitic, and occupy the countries south-west of Persia, including Syria and Arabia, besides extending into North Africa. ”

“ What distinguishes them is their spiritual bent and especially their language, sometimes also their religion. Scholars by common consent call those peoples Aryan who speak an Aryan language: in Asia, the Hindoos and Persians; in Europe, the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs (Russians, Poles, Serfs) , and Celts. [5]
Similarly, we call Semites those peoples who speak a Semitic language: Arabs, Jews and Syrians. But a people may speak an Aryan or a Semitic language and yet not be of Aryan or Semitic race; a negro may speak English without being of English stock. ”

“ The languages of the Arabians, the Semitic tribes of the south, the Aramæans and Canaanites in the west, and the Babylonians and Assyrians in the east, are three ramifications springing from one and the same stem of language, which spreads from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to the Arabian and Persian Gulfs. Living under different conditions, the Semitic nations attained to different degrees of civilization. The tribes of the desert did not go beyond the simplest and most primitive forms, at which point a considerable portion of them still remain ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is, nevertheless, indisputable that, compared with the races in which the Aryan element has been observed in its purity, those races, especially those which have drawn largely from the Semitic fountain, are incomparably more fitted to acclimatize themselves, and propagate themselves in the midst of the new conditions in which they are placed in hot countries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has been observed, and not without reason, that the great Asiatic desert has exercised a fatal influence on the destinies of the human race; that it has arrested the extension of the Semitic civilization. ”

“ It seems to me that the moral and intellectual life of the civilised nations of Europe is the product of that interaction, sometimes in the way of antagonism, sometimes in that of profitable interchange, of the Semitic and the Aryan races, which commenced with the dawn of history, when Greek and Phœnician came in contact, and has been continued by Carthaginian and Roman, by Jew and Gentile, down to the present day. Our art (except, perhaps, music) and our science are the contributions of the Aryan; but the essence of our religion is derived from the Semite. ”

“ If it can only be proved that the religions of the Aryan nations are united by the same bonds of a real relationship which have enabled us to treat their languages as so many varieties of the same type—and so also of the Semitic—the field thus opened is vast enough, and its careful clearing, and cultivation will occupy several generations of scholars. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Arabia, like the plains of Central Asia, was, in fact, one of the main breeding-grounds of the human race, and during the historic period we may trace four great migrations of Semitic nomad tribes, which successively broke away from the northern margin of the Arabian pasture-lands and spread over the neighbouring countries like a flood. The first great racial movement of the kind is that of which the effects were chiefly apparent in Akkad, or Northern Babylonia, where the Semites first obtained a footing when overrunning the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. ”

“ We no longer hold that it was from the high plateau of Asia that swept those tribes who eventually peopled Europe, but that they radiated from the centre of Europe herself. Far from forming the majority of the inhabitants of the Continent, the Aryans, if that term still preserves its meaning, are but one of its elements. They have mingled everywhere in variable quantities among the different hordes of Finnish and other races who have overrun our continent. ”

“ As our Aryan forefathers, in their earlier movements, and before their first division, passed between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, they skirted the northern borders of the great peninsula of Arabia, into which none of them, not even those who turned southward, seem to have attempted to penetrate. This peninsula was at that time, we may be sure, although there is neither evidence of the fact nor testimony to it, occupied by the Semitic race; a race of great power and peculiar genius, which has had an influence upon the world hardly less than that of the Aryan peoples. ”

“ Aryan-speaking people had recently made their appearance on the stage of history for the first time, in Asia Minor and around the head waters of the Euphrates in Syria, and in the approaching disruption of the powers of Western Asia, the influence of these people of Indo-European speech was destined to make itself obtrusive in Persia and India and exert a growing influence upon religious beliefs and social practices. ”

“ In our accounts of the development of the Western world we have had occasion to name the Scythians, and to explain the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Medes, Persians, Parthians, Goths,{v1-545} and other more or less nomadic, more or less Aryan peoples who drifted to and fro in a great arc between the Danube and Central Asia. While sections of the Aryans were moving south and acquiring and developing civilization, these other Aryan peoples were developing mobility and nomadism; they were learning the life of the tent, the wagon, and the herd. ”

“ The Babylonian elements of culture which the early Semitic invaders brought with them to Egypt were, then, ultimately of Sumerian origin. Sumerian civilization had profoundly influenced the Semitic tribes for centuries before the Semitic conquest of Babylonia, and when the Sumerians became more and more a conquered race, finally amalgamating with their conquerors and losing their racial and linguistic individuality, they were conquered by an alien race but not by an alien culture. For the culture of the Semites was Sumerian, the Semitic races owing their civilization to the Sumerians. ”

“ And in the [72] days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional. The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist, [67] and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent ”

“ When Assyria fell, the New Babylonian empire kept guard over the west. With the end of Babylonian rule, and the ascendency of Persia, Semitic dominance came to an end. Under Persia, and later under Greece, new states came into existence and Aryan rule began.
In the ages with which we are at present concerned, however, Syria remained to the portion of Semitic tribes. We have found Arabia the original home of this race. Providing at best but a scanty living for her children, when tribes multiplied rapidly Arabia seems to have cast out a portion of her inhabitants to make room for the rest. ”

“ On the theory which seems thus rendered probable, that the early Europeans were of the same race as the Indians of America, we are able to account for certain characteristics of the modern nations of Europe, which would otherwise present to the student of anthropology a perplexing problem. The Aryans of Asia, ancient and modern, as we know them in the Hindoos, the Persians, and the Armenians, with the evidence afforded by their history, their literature and their present condition, have always been utterly devoid of the sentiment of political rights. ”

“ Somewhere north of the great {168} territory of the Semites, there came gradually down into Nineveh and Babylon and through Armenia a people of different type from the Semites and from the Egyptians. They lived on the great grassy plains of central Asia, wandering with their flocks and herds, and settling down long enough to raise a crop, and then move on. They lived a simple life, but were a vigorous, thrifty, and family-loving people; and while the great civilization of Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt was developing, they were pushing down from the north. ”

“ 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. ”