Published by Kenneth S. Doig
In the preceding chapters, we have found it necessary to use archaeology as a system of landmarks by which to chart the movements of human groups and their relationships with one another; this study of race in terms of culture was essential. Ideas are originated, diffused, and conserved by people, and people interbreed. A complete and sudden replacement of one culture by another implies a drastic change of personnel, while a gradual merging of a new culture with an old one must equally imply the survival, at least in part, of the older population. By following these rules we have seen that racial and cultural movements are truly connected, and in no instance in which the skeletal record is adequate could any contradiction be seen.
The subject of this book, however, is race, not culture; although culture in the archaeological sense has been a valuable guide. But once we arrive at the period of history it is no longer necessary to deal exclusively with pots and axes and methods of burial; we may consider people as linguistic and political groups, with known names and ethnic relationships. This has already been possible with the civilized nations of preclassical antiquity, such as the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and to a certain extent with the Cretans and Hittites, whose writings have so far furnished little or nothing in the way of documentary information, as well as with the early ancestors of the Greeks.
The peoples of central and northern Europe did not learn to write until relatively recent times-in most instances well after the beginning of the Christian era, and in some cases only within the current millennium.
But their identities are in many instances known to us from the writings of the classical geographers and historians, and, in the Dark Ages, from Arabic sources as well. Farther east, in central Asia, the diligence of Chinese historians has been of great assistance. In our study of the early part of the Iron Age, archaeology will still be needed; but by the time of the Christian era it will be possible, for our purposes, to dispense with it almost completely, for in treating fully historical and living cultures, language serves as the best-known, most easily designated, and most convenient framework available for the creation of units suitable for racial study.
Heretofore, we have said little about language. The speech of the peoples with whom we have dealt has been unknown to us in almost all instances. The exceptions are few: The Egyptians, as we well know, spoke a language of the Hamitic stock, with considerable Semitic influence. The Babylonians and Assyrians spoke Semitic, while the Sumerian language, although it can be read, has not yet been related with certainty to any other known tongue or linguistic family.1 During the third millennium, therefore, Hamitic and Semitic languages were used by civilized peoples, as was the still unclassified Sumerian.
Besides these known linguistic groupings found in antiquity, there was another group or rather collection of languages spoken in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. These included Lydian, and its probable derivative Etruscan; languages of the Caucasus, some of which still survive; a few languages of the Himalayas, such as Burushaski;2 and a whole group in Greece and the Aegean Islands, if not farther west, known to us almost entirely by place names. Cretan may possibly have also belonged to this class of languages.
A school of linguistic experts headed by the late Professor Marr, and championed in the English-speaking world by Dr. Ephraim Speiser,3 would group all of these languages together, including a whole row of extinct tongues stretching around the so-called "Fertile Crescent" from Syria to Elam. The name given this group is "Japhetic," coined to complete, with Hamitic and Semitic, a Biblical trinity. The living examples of this alleged class or family of languages, notably Georgian and Circassian, employ a number of sounds unfamiliar to the Indo-European, Semitic, and Hamitic families, and reminiscent of American Indian languages.
No one denies the wide distribution and importance of these languages in ancient times, but there is serious doubt that they may be united into a single stock comparable to Semitic, Hamitic, Indo-European, etc. It is more likely that this grouping includes a number of independent families, but at present it is too early to say what these may be; especially since most of them are extinct and will never, in all likelihood, be resuscitated. At any rate, it is probable that some of the seafarers of the Late Neolithic and of the Bronze Age who migrated westward along the Mediterranean to Italy, the Italian islands, and Spain, and thence to Britain, France, and Scandinavia, spoke languages derived from the eastern Mediterranean. It is furthermore possible that modern Basque may be the only survivor of this linguistic migration; but this suggested relationship, referred to in the preceding chapter, must by no means be accepted as a certainty.
MAP 4: Iron Age Races of Europe, before Huns and Turks
We do not know the languages of the Early Neolithic swineherds who introduced a food-producing economy to Spain and western Europe, including the lake shores of Switzerland, and we are not likely to find out. We do not, furthermore, know what medium the Danubians who performed the same pioneering function in another quarter used. The speech of the Corded people is equally unknown, and the old idioms of the Palaeolithic survivors in the far north, of the midden dwellers of Denmark, and of the Azilian survivors in Switzerland, are far past reconstruction. In Europe we must start as late as the Iron Age in our attempt to allocate languages to cultural or racial groups.