The Indo' Europeans. 241
period of the Indo-European speech ; their grammar
has a very archaic character, especially in the declen-
sions. The various branches of the group are closely
connected. Safarick tells us that a Bohemian under-
stands Slovac, a Slovac Polish, a Pole the Wendic of
Lusatia. A modern Russian can still with a little
attention follow the Bulgarian oflBce of the ninth cen-
tury. Russian and Polish, though belonging to two
distinct classes, hardly differ from each other more
than do Spanish and Italian.
The South of Europe belongs to the Italic and
Hellenic families. The one has given birth to our
languages, the other by its literature has formed our
mind. They are in the first rank, — the finest impres-
sion of the Indo-European type.
Latin was at first a very small central group of
dialects, Sabine, Volscian, Latin, superposed upon
the unknown languages of the aborigines, Ausonians,
Auronci, and Siculi. Its history is that of Rome
itself. From the eighth to the fourth century B.C. it
was written only in certain Annals, in a few liturgical
books and songs, and in the Law of the twelve tables,
and remained confined to Latiura, between two kindred
languages, Samnite to the south, Umbrian to the north,
surrounded by Etruscan in Tuscany and in the Cam-
pania. Celtic reigned in the valley of the Po, Greek
in the two Sicilies. Samnite or Oscan, spoken and
understood in Rome as well as Latin, and Umbrian,
still heard on the right bank of the Upper Tiber at
the time bf the Antonines, have left valuable inscrip-
tions, deciphered by Mommsen, Aufrecht, and Kirch-
hoff (1845-1851), and completely elucidated by Michel
Br^al. The tables of Agnona and Iguvium show us
very peculiar forms and a remarkable phonetic system.
Digitized by VjOOQIC
242 Distribution of Languages and Races.
which certainly influenced the Latin pronunciation.
Latin very early outgrew its primitive rudeness, of
which a few inscriptions have preserved examples, and
took that gravity, that harmonious strength, which
command our admiration. By the first century of our
era this tribal dialect, the language of Plautus, of
Ennius, of Lucretius, of Cicero, of Virgil, and of
Tacitus, had conquered not only Italy, but also Spain,
Gaul, and Northern Africa; and until the eighth
century it remained the idiom of the civilised or half-
barbarous West. But this language of literature and
of the government had not suppressed the provincial
patois, the Latin of the people, imported into the
countries conquered by the legionaries. The Latin
of the country and of the camp (rusticvs, castrensis),
modified, contracted, mutilated by Dacians, Germans,
Gallo-Franks, Celtiberians, gave birth, towards the
ninth century, to seven new groups of dialects,
called Neo-Latin or Romance : French (of the Isle of
France, Burgundian, Picard, Walloon, Norman), Pro-
vencal (Dauphinese, Genovese, Piedmontese, Limousin,
Toulousain, Bearnais, Catalan), Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian (Venetian, Lombard, Tuscan, Corsican, Sardinian,
Neapolitan, Sicilian), Latin (Friulian, Tyrolese),'and
Roumanian (Moldo-Wallachian), which, more or less
mixed with foreign words, have kept the vocabulary
and the accent of their mother-tongue, but have carried
the Indo-European elements from the synthetic to the
analytic stage. The history of the development of
these languages, all daughters of provincial Latin,
shows us the gradual transformation of an idiom into
free and original derivatives. This phenomenon, which
has taken place, as it were, before our eyes, will explain
what took place when the Indo-European speech split
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The Indo-Europeans. 243
into the various families: history throws light even
upon pre-historic time.
Greek, the most complex, the most subtle, and the
most learned of the languages of antiquity, was de-
veloped centuries before Latin ; the traditions of the
Hellenes take us back 1 800 years before our era ; the
name of the Achaians figures on an Egyptian inscrip-
tion of the fourteenth century B.C. Asia Minor was
colonised in the eleventh century, the epoch of the
Homeric poems, which were collected in the sixth.
Tradition tells first of the legendary heroes, -^olus,
Achadus, Ion, and Dorus, who descended by Mount
Haemus among the Thracians, the Pelasgians, and the
Epirotes, whose languages are perhaps preserved for
us in Albanian and Etruscan, and established them-
selves in the mountainous districts of Thessaly, of
Pieria, and of Phtiotide, round Dodona and Delphi ;
then from the Hellad and the Peloponnesus, which they
rapidly conquered, the four or five tribes sent out
swarms into Asia, Africa, into Italy and Gaul, where
they everywhere succeeded the Phoenicians. The
various co-existing dialects, -^olian, the link between
Greek and Latin, the Ionian of Homer, Hesiod, and
Herodotus, the Attic of Plato and Demosthenes, the
Dorian of Pindar, the choruses of the tragedians and
the idylls of Theocritus, Cretan, Laconian, Macedonian,
&c., preserved either by an imperishable literature or
in abundant inscriptions, allow us to study in a most
complete manner the structure and the history of Greek.
Towards the time of Alexander its dialects, though
they had not completely disappeared, were confounded
in a uniform literary language, that of Poly bins,
of Plutarch, of Lucian, which was spoken and under-
stood from Marseilles to the Euphrates, from Byzantium
Digitized by VjOOQIC
244 Distribution of Languages and Races.
to Alexandria and Cyrene; it was characterised by
the predominance of Attic. Towards the fifth centniy
the Greek pronanciation became cormpt ; this was the
Byzantine age, from which the language passed by
degrees into Romaic or modem Greek, now spoken
in Greece, in the Archipelago, and on the coasts of
European and Asiatic Turkey. The vast river at
whose waters all thinking humanity slaked its thirst
has now dwindled to this little stream.
Leaving Europe, we find in Asia Minor a few extinct
and little known languages, of which the inscriptions
will doubtless determine the character, Phrygian, Carian,
Lycian; they were certainly related to Greek, and
perhaps also to the Iranian group, of which we find
the vanguard in Armenian, Kiurd, and Ossetan or Iron
of the Caucasus. We cannot tarry over these, which
are, however, very interesting (especially Armenian).
We can only enumerate also the Iranian dialects of
the East, Afghan or Pushtu, and Beluchistan ; ancient
Persian claims our attention.
The discovery of the Iranian group, which is re-
presented by the charming language of Firdousi (tenth
century), of Hafiz, and of Saadi, is one of the most
glorious achievements of modern philology. The ad-
venturous Anquetil Duperron, a Frenchman, at the
price of unnumbered and unimaginable fatigues, after
having learned Tamil, Persian, and Pehlevi at Surat
and at Pondicherry, acquired from the Destours, or
priests, i8o manuscripts, among others the Zend-
Avesta, accompanied by Pehlevi, Sanscrit, and Persian
translations, and escaping with them from the hands
of the English, who had taken him prisoner, deposited
them at last in the Royal Library at Paris (1754—
1762). The translation which he published in 1772,
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The IndO'Europeans. 245
made from the Persian, is extremely imperfect ; but it
arrested the attention of the philosophers and philo-
logists. Rask, a Dane, was the first after him to
attempt a translation of the original text; but the
honour of founding the study of Iranian belongs to
Eugene Burnouf. By comparing the Zend with the
bad Sanscrit of the translator, Neriosengh, Burnouf
discovered, with its grammar as well as its vocabu-
lary, a language which enabled him to read the cunei-
form inscriptions of Xerxes and Darius. His works
("Commentary on the Ya^na," 1833; *' Memoir on
the Inscriptions of Hamadan," 1836; " Studies on the
Zend Texts," 1840— 1850) have been taken up and
completed by Brockhaus, 1850, Westergaard, 1853,
Haug, Kossowics, Justi, Spiegel (185 1—56-63), and
lastly by MM. Michel Br^al, Hovelacque, and De
Harlez.
The most ancient Iranian monuments of which the
date is certainly known are the inscriptions of the
Achemenides (Hamadan, Bisoutoun) ; they belong to
Persian proper. The Zend texts, in the state in
which we have them, are probably later than the
origin of the Husvarech or Pehlevi of the Sassanides,
and of Parsee ; their date may be fixed at the third
century of our era (226). Yet their language presents
forms of the highest antiquity, almost always twins of the
Sanscrit forms. This is because these Gathas, liturgical
litanies, the remains of a literature which had already
been extinct for perhaps five centuries, belong to an
epoch which witnessed a restoration of Magism, and
have preserved for us an idiom spoken by Zoroaster, in
Media and Bactriana, some three thousand years ago,
and carried eastward by the ancestors of the Medes
and Persians when they came to establish themselves
\1
Digitized by VjOOQIC
246 Distribution of Languages and Races.
to the north of the Elamites and of the Assyrians, while
the Ossetes and Armenians, connected with the Slavs by
the Scythian dialects, passed along the western coast
of the Caspian and the mountains of the Caucasus.
Meanwhile the Aryans of India (this title will not
be denied them any more than to the kings of Persia,
who claim it), the future conquerors of Bengal, advanced
slowly into the Punjab among the affluents of the
Upper Indus, stopping here and there to build houses,
to till the ground, pasture their flocks, to wage war
among themselves, celebrating the discovery of fire
upon the sacred hearth, associating in their sacrifices
their ancestors, the forces of nature, and the brilliant
gods of the storm and of light. Towards the tenth
century they reached the Ganges and the mouths of
the Indus ; they penetrated into the great peninsula,
took possession of Ceylon, and overflowed into Burmah,
Gambodge, and the Malay Islands. They acquired
the art of writing late, only in the third century, when
classical Sanscrit had ceased to be spoken, and was
merely the language of literature ; they fixed the text
of the Vedas, preserved by oral tradition, and composed
in a language older than Zend. But though replaced
in common use by Prakrit, by Maghadi, the language
of Buddhism, by Pali, the sacred language of Ceylon,
it remains the idiom of the philosophers, grammarians,
and poets, of the great epics, of the drama, of the
Puranas ; it has not ceased down to modern times to
be the sacred language of the Brahmans, who still write
and speak it. Around it flourish the modern dialects,
its children and grandchildren, Hindi, Hindustani,
Bengali, Mahratta, Guzerati, the Romany of the gypsies,
and its powerful influence is felt even in Malay, through
Kawi, the sacred language of Japan.
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The IndO'Europeans, 247
In order to prove the original unity of all these
languages it would suflSce to compare a few hundreds
of words taken at hazard from the several grammatical
categories ; bat even more convincing is the study of
the transformations undergone, from age to age and
from nation to nation, by the elements, roots, and
suflSxes which are common to them all. It is, in fact,
the constancy of the formal and phonetic changes in
each group and each idiom of the family respectively
which has served as the basis of comparative grammar.
This phenomenon has allowed Bopp and Schleicher to
measure as it were the degrees of relationship between
kindred languages, to distinguish between the elements
common to all, and the particular use of these elements,
from which results the original development of each
idiom ; to bring etymology into accord with the law
of dialectal alteration ; and lastly, to discover for each
root, and for a great number of words which are con-
jugated and declined, a primitive form, or, if not primi-
tive, at least anterior to the variants of which it is
the point of departure and the source. So that the
divergences of the dialects furnish the surest proofs
of their genealogical affinity, and by bringing back
the student to the type of which they have blurred
the outlines, they reveal to him the features, certain
or probable, of the ancient Indo-European organism ;
just as the numismatist traces in certain Merovingian
or feudal coins the features of Probus, Aurelian, or
Philip, disfigured by the clumsy tool of the ignorant
and barbarous copyist.
Thus it is that comparative grammar is enabled to
re-establish, according to all probability, the organic
forms of the Indo-European idiom, at the moment
when, having already attained to the inflected state, it
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248 Distribution of Languages and Races.
was about to undergo those alterations and trans-
formations which cleft it into eight mother-tongues.
Suppose that Latin had disappeared ; an attentive
comparison of the seven Romance idioms which arose
from it would enable us to reconstitute it. So with
Indo-European ; bold or prudent philologists, Chav^e,
Schleicher, analysed its mechanism ; Fick drew up its
dictionary.
The organic form so discovered becomes the term of
comparison among all those which are more or less
diflTerent from it, without, however, losing all trace of
it. And it becomes clear at once that no idiom tends
towards the organic state, but that all ten^ away from
it ; all in varying degrees are, not sketches, but modi-
fied effigies ; not embryos, but remnants and vestiges of
an earlier unknown type.
Again, it is easy, as we compare root with root,
termination with termination, to show that the altera-
tion, the wear of the elements common to the different
vocabularies, increases as we go westwards, from the
Sanscrit of the Vedas to Zend, from Zend to Slav,
from Zend to Greek, from Slav to German, from Greek
to Latin, from German and Latin to Celtic. Partial
exceptions are assuredly numerous, but there is a
general law. Avoiding absolut.e formulas, we may say
that the eastern branch of the Aryan tongues, Sanscrit
and Persian, is in a far better state of preservation, far
nearer the organic state than the north-western and
south-western branches.
If, then, Indo-European has existed, with its roots
and terminations, its declension and conjugation, with
its typical gi*ammar, it must have taken rise in a region
where the ancestors, the linguistic ancestors, of the
Hindu and the Persian, of the Greek, the Latin, and
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The Indo^Europeans, 249
the Celt, of the Goth, the Scandinavian, the Teuton,
the Slav, and of the Lithuanian could know and under-
stand each other. The trunk can only be found where
the branches spring.
What does tradition or documentary history tell us ?
With regard to the past of the Hindus and the Persians,
we have the testimony of the Vedas, of the epics, and
of the Zend-Avesta. We can determine the march
from the gorges of the Hindu-Kush of the wandering
tribes who advanced by slow degrees from the Punjab
to Bengal and the Dekkan, and conquered the great
peninsula, without, however, destroying the conquered
races. They came from the north, and none of their
traditions points to a distant Western origin. Their
primitive country, which they call Aryavarta, is the
same as the Arya-Vaedja of the Iranians, who, there is
no sort of doubt, remained in it longer than they — long
enough to forget them. Now the Persian Aryans
came from Bactriana, where the Gathas of the Avesta
were composed ; from Bactriana, whence they were
driven by the Turanians, the Turks, their legendary
and historic enemies, who were still cursed in the
tenth century of our era in the Shahnameh, The name
Arie, Ariana, given to a region which lies between
Afghanistan and Media, marks the second stage of
these Persian Aryans, some of whom decided to go
round the Caspian to gain Media and Armenia, the
others massing themselves by degrees in Persia proper,
until the day when the Medes and the Assyrians
yielded them the empire.
Long before the arrival of the* Persians in Western
Asia, and even before that of the Hindus in the valley
of the Ganges, history shows us relations of the Greeks,
the Phrygians, and the Lycians installed in Asia Minor,
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250 Distribution of Languages and Races,
and the Hellenes themselves in the valleys of the
Hsemus and of the Pindus, having already left Thrace,
of which they knew and celebrated the mountains,
Ehodope and Ismara. There is no doubt a vast hiatus
between the Caspian and Thrace, and the Hellenes did
not recollect the journey that they must have made.
Here, however, mythology and philology come to the
aid of history ; it is impossible to separate the language
of Homer and that of the Vedas ; the legends crystal-
lisied by the Hellenes, the Phrygians, and the Cretans
round Olympus and Ida come direct from the fount at
which the Aryan rhapsodists drank. The march of
the Hellenic tribes towards the Hellad and the Pelo-
ponnesus is the continuation of the movement which
bore them into Phthiotide and into Pieria. Lastly, the
fable of the Argonauts, the expansion of their colonies
on the northern shore of the Black Sea, denotes an
earlier acquaintance with Colchida and the Chersonese
of Tauru3. It was to the Caucasus that Zeus bound
Prometheus. Are not these reminiscences of the lands
which they had travelled over, pressed by the Cimerians
(the Cymri or Gauls) and the Scythians, who were
doubtless Slavs, mingled with the Finno-Mongols ?
The Latins are even more ignorant than the Greeks
of their origin, since their history only begins in the
eighth century B.C., and their Trojan traditions were
borrowed from the Etruscans and from the Greeks of
Cumae. But they could not have learned or created
their language in Italy ; it proceeds directly from the
Indo-European source, and is connected with the most
ancient form of Greek, with -^olian. Nor did they
invent their Jupiter, the- Dyauspitar of the Aryans.
Few in number, a small tribe, lost between the Hellenic
nations and the Gallic mass making its way up the
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The Indo' Europeans. 251
Danube, they must have passed unperceived along the
Alps and the Adriatic, borne onwards by the migra-
tion of the Umbrians (fourteenth century B.C.), or
urged forward in the tenth century B.C. by the exodus
of the Pelasgians or Etruscans. Then they encamped
between the Albi and the Curii and vegetated there,
until the day when they took part in the foundation
of Rome.
The dark-haired Celts, of whom ethnography finds
the traces from Dacia to Artnorica and Ireland, the
fair-haired Gauls (Volk, Bolg, whence Belg-ian and
Welsh; Eng. folk)^ the Gauls, who at the time of
Ambigat and Biturix occupied the whole of Germany,
and soon after of Gaul, Great Britain, and the west and
centre of Spain, the Cymri, who were probably identical
with the Cimmerians, all these peoples, who spoke Indo-
European dialects, certainly progressed from east to
west; so much so, that they were driven to the Rhine
and the Atlantic by the Germans and the Slavs. The
Gallic language, which has almost entirely disappeared,
was, it is well kuown, related to Latin, which explained
its rapid disappearance. As for the Neo-Celtic dialects,
in spite of the modifications they have undergone, they
are none the less marked with the family features.
The Germians, Slavs, and Lettic race remain to be
considered ; their origin cannot admit of a doubt. The
first did not occupy their present country at the time
of the Gallic dominion, or at most they were disputing
the coasts of the Baltic with their Finnish predecessors.
It was only in the middle of the first century before
our era that the Suevi appeared in force on the Lower
Rhine ; Caesar kept them to the right bank. By
degrees Germany filled up between the Oder and the
Rhine, between Jutland and the Alps; it swarmed
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252 Distribution of Languages and Races,
with once-famous tribes, whose names have now dis-
appeared from our maps, Cherusci, Irminoni, Iscaevoni,
Ingaevoni, Quedi, Marcomanni, who were either de-
stroyed in their long wars with the Roman world or
in their intestine broils ; they existed obscurely up to
the fourth century in the Decumatian lands, more or
less subject to tribute, and penetrated as far as the
Weser by the Eoman legions and influence. Behind
them stretched the land of the Goths, the most
powerful of the Germanic races, who in the fourth
century covered, from the Baltic to the Dniester, what
was afterwards the Polish dominion ; they came from
more distant lands. The proof of this is found in the
pressure of the Slavs, themselves harassed by the Huns
in their Scythian pastures ; this flood threw one branch
of the Goths upon Sweden, the Visigoths and the
Ostrogoths on to the right bank of the Danube, and
penetrated into the heart of Germany.
The Germans of the north, the Lombards, the Bugi,
Heruli, Vandals, urged by the Borusses and the Lithu-
anians, were already in movement, wandering where
chance led them, some to Italy, some to Spain, and
even Africa; then the Suevi, the Burgundians, and
the Franks arrive in turn in the valleys of the Meuse,
of the Scheldt, of the Somme. The Teuton tribes
who remained in Germany, Alamanni, Suevi, Franconians,
Saxons, were crowded between the Rhine and the Weser,
sometimes attained to the Elbe ; everywhere the Huns
dominated, followed by the Slava The ancient Teutons
dwelt in more or less scattered or dense masses in
Scandinavia, England, the north-west of Gaul, Spain,
and Cisalpine Gaul.
But I have already sketched the table of these
complicated events, which will suffice to destroy the
Digitized by VjOOQIC
The Indo' Europeans, 253
pretensions of our neighbours to the lands to which
emigration once carried them, and where their bands,
dominant for a time, ended by becoming absorbed into
the earlier population, and also to show the Eastern
origin of the Teutons.
In the case of tho Slavs, the point is not likely to
be called in question; but it may be necessary to
insist upon the fact that the numerous and very rich
languages of these peoples could not have been framed
in the lands where they are now spoken, or have issued
the one from the other ; they betray their close rela-
tionship with the organic Indo-European.
As long as no sign shall have been discovered of a
Western origin in the case of the Slavs and Iranians,
of the two groups which remained together longest in
the neighbourhood of the common cradle, so long as it
has not been demonstrated that the Celts and the
Gauls progressed without an obvious reason from the
west towards the east, or that the German hive, solid
in its centre from all time, sent forth swarms to the
right and the left, Celts, Gauls, Slavs, and Persians, even
Latins and Hellenes, so long we shall be constrained
to place the Indo-European country somewhere between
the eastern and western branches. But even sup-
posing that the smallest particle of evidence could be
alleged in support of one of these hypotheses, com-
parative grammar would still be there to tell us that
no one of these idioms can render an account of its
forms and its rules. None can explain itself, but all
can be explained by each other; none of them is a
sketch of a type towards which it tends ; all are the
various modifications of a common stock, of an earlier
language, which has disappeared just because all have
carried it away with them. Languages only travel with
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254 Distribution of Languages and Races.
those who speak them. Those which concern us now
have therefore been imported by immigrants, who
were probably too few in number to modify materially
the mixture of more ancient ethnic elements, but
powerful enough to impose their language, their intel-
lectual discipline, and in some cases the corresponding
civilisation.
For speech, being the expression of thought, assuredly
reveals the aptitudes, the faculties of the brain, the
industrial, aesthetic, and social condition of each human
race and group. The Indo-European unity was not
merely a matter of grammar and lexicon, but of in-
tellect and morals. If the majority of the sister
languages designate by the same word a thing, a
being, a relation, a sentiment, an abstract idea, is it
not evident that these were already known to the
primitive group ? Among all the roots which might
characterise them, it had already chosen those which