The Aryans

V. Gordon Childe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415155649
• eBook ISBN: 9781136193118
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published between 1920-70,The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings:
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Chapter I

Language and Prehistory

Man’s progress from savagery to civilization is intimately bound up with the advance of abstract thinking, which enables him to rise above the chaos of particular sensations and to fashion therefrom an ordered cosmos. The growth of reasoning in its turn goes hand in hand with the development of language. The substratum of modern intellectual activities is very largely composed of those syntheses of audile and muscular sensations or images which represent words. These are not only means of communication, but also the vehicles of our abstract ideas. Words are the very stuff of thought. It follows then that a common language does imply a common mental outlook in its speakers; it not only reflects but also conditions ways of thinking peculiar to the users of the tongue in question. Moreover, intellectual progress may to a large extent be measured by the refinement of language. Hence to inherit an exceptionally delicate linguistic structure gives a people a vantage point on the path of progress.

Philology may therefore claim a place among the historical disciplines, the functions of which are to reanimate and interpret the process whereby man has raised himself from animalism to savagery, from savagery to barbarism, from barbarism to civilization. The painful steps of this advance at first lie beyond the reach of all written records. That is especially the case with the early cultures from which the contemporary civilization of the white races in Europe and in America is directly descended. Archæology, co-operating with anthropology, can indeed throw much light on the later phases of the process; it can provisionally identify the material forces under which certain types of culture have been generated and flourished, and the currents of trade and of migration which fostered their growth. But the individuality of the groups thus distinguished eludes explanation in abstract material terms. Why, for instance, had Europe, starting on the race 1,500 years behind Mesopotamia and Egypt, outstripped those pioneers in a millennium? Why did our continent then continue to progress while the Ancient East stagnated or declined? Favourable climatic conditions, peculiar natural resources, a happy conjuncture of trade routes do not suffice to explain this phenomenon; behind it lurks the true historic fact of personal initiative. That archæology cannot grasp, indeed the concrete person lies beyond the sphere of prehistory. But an approximation thereto in terms of racial individuality is attainable with the aid of philology. Language, albeit an abstraction, is yet a more subtle and pervasive criterion of individuality than the culture-group formed by comparing flints and potsherds or the “races” of the skull-measurer. And it is precisely in Europe, where the critical point of cultural evolution lies enshrouded in the gloom of the prehistoric period, that the linguistic principles just enunciated are most readily applicable.

Most of the languages of Europe, America, and India to-day belong to one linguistic family generally called the Indo-European. The direct ancestors of these modern tongues were already diffused from the Atlantic to the Ganges and the Tarim many centuries before our era opens; all seem to be descended from a common parent language (or, rather, group of dialects) which comparative philology can reconstruct in a schematic way. Naturally the parent language must have been spoken by actual people. These we shall call Aryans, and about them we can predicate two things.

To whatever physical race or races they belonged, they must have possessed a certain spiritual unity reflected in and conditioned by their community of speech. To their linguistic heirs they bequeathed, if not skull-types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and more precious spiritual identity. Anyone who doubts this would do well to compare the dignified narrative carved by the Aryan Darius on the rock of Behistun with the bombastic and blatant self-glorification of the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal or Nebuchadrezzar.

Secondly the Indo-European languages and their assumed parent-speech have been throughout exceptionally delicate and flexible instruments of thought. They were almost unique, for instance, in possessing a substantive verb and at least a rudimentary machinery for building subordinate clauses that might express conceptual relations in a chain of ratiocination. It follows then that the Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in enjoyment of a high material culture. This is more than mere inference. It is no accident that the first great advances towards abstract natural science were made by the Aryan Greeks and the Hindus, not by the Babylonians or the Egyptians, despite their great material resources and their surprising progress in techniques—in astronomical observation for example. In the moralization of religion too Aryans have played a prominent rôle. The first great world religions which addressed their appeal to all men irrespective of race or nationality, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, were the works of Aryans, propagated in Aryan speech.

It is quite possible that the Iranian Zoroaster anticipated even the Hebrew prophets in sublimating the idea of divinity, emancipating it from tribal or material trappings and enthroning an abstract righteousness where personified natural or magical forces had previously reigned. It is certain that the great concept of the Divine Law or Cosmic Order is associated with the first Aryan peoples who emerge upon the stage of history some 3,500 years ago (see p. 20 below). Even the original Aryans themselves worshipped at least one deity, a Sky Father,¹ who, although still anthropomorphic, materialistic and barbaric, was, nevertheless, exalted far above the nameless spirits and magic forces of mere savagery (see p. 81).

Nor were the potentialities of Aryan speech solely intellectual. Poetry in which a fixed metrical structure combines with sweet-sounding words to embody beautiful ideas seems peculiarly Aryan: Semitic poetry, for example, does not rest upon a regular metrical structure involving a fixed number of syllables in the verse. The correspondences between the metres of the Hindu Vedas, the Iranian Gathas, and the Greek lyrics, in fact, allow us to infer some form of common metrical tradition inherited from an earlier epoch.²

Thus philology reveals to us a folk whose language was pregnant with great possibilities. Now it was the linguistic heirs of this people who played the leading part in Europe from the dawn of history and in Western Asia during the last millennium before our era. It is perhaps then not overbold to hope that a collaboration between the two prehistoric disciplines of philology and archæology, at least in this modest domain, may help to solve certain problems that either science alone is powerless to resolve.

The Indo-European languages, when they first come within our ken in the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C., appear already dispersed in several distinct groups. The parent speech from which all are descended is itself preserved in no written documents, we can only reconstruct it approximately by comparative methods. Philologists to-day recognize eleven groups of languages descended from the Aryan root, each group embracing a plurality of languages and each language being in actual life divided up into a multiplicity of dialects. The principal groups known to-day are: (1) Celtic surviving only in Gaelic, Irish, Manx, Welsh, and Breton, but once spoken over a vast area in Western and Central Europe; (2) the Teutonic languages, including Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages, the oldest extant remains being a translation of the Gospels into Gothic by Ulfilas composed about 500 A.D.; (3) the Italic group—Latin, Oscan, and Umbrian all known from about 400 B.C.—together with their modern descendants, Italian, French, Spanish, Roumanian, etc.; (4) Albanian, possibly a survival of ancient Illyrian or Thracian; (5) Greek, in classical times divided into four groups of dialects; (6) the Slavonic tongues—Russian, Polish, Czech, Croat, Serbian, Bulgarian, and many others—the oldest monuments of which were written in Old Bulgarian or Church Slavonic about 900 A.D.; (7) the Baltic family Lithuanian, Old Prussian, and Lettic, all known only from a comparatively late epoch; (8) Armenian with a literature beginning in the sixth century A.D.; (9) Iranian dialects represented first in the Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings on the one hand, and in the Gathas and later sacred books of the Parsis (Zend) on the other, and then in a great number of disparate dialects once diffused over an enormous area from Eastern Turkestan to the Caucasus and Europe (with the Alans) and still surviving in Ossetian, Kurdish, Persian, etc.; (10) Indic, primarily Sanskrit, then the ancient Prakrits, and finally the modern vernaculars; (11) Tocharian—an extinct language with two dialects known only from ancient manuscripts recently unearthed among the buried cities of the Tarim valley and probably dating from the later half of the 1st millennium A.D.

These eleven groups are doubtless only a fraction of the total number of Aryan languages which have once existed. The scanty fragments of ancient Phrygian, Messapian, and Venetic make it probable that these extinct tongues belonged to the Indo-European family. How many others there may have been which have vanished without leaving any trace we can only surmise. At the moment of writing quite unexpected traces of an Aryan language spoken in Cappadocia during the 2nd millennium B.C. are coming to light. Are these eleven divisions final? Many endeavours have been made to simplify the scheme.

And, in fact, the eleven distinct families may be reduced to nine. The Baltic tongues, although more archaic, are so closely related in phonetics, structure, syntax, and vocabulary to the Slavonic that the two may be conveniently treated as a single group under the name of Balto-Slavonic. The same procedure can be applied with even greater security to the Indic and Iranian groups : the Sanskrit of the Rigveda and the Iranian of the inscriptions of Darius the Great and the Gathas of Zoroaster are so much alike that they might almost be regarded as just dialectic varieties of a common stock. Indeed, the connections of the Indians and the Iranians are not linguistic only. Both people called themselves by the common name of Āryas (Airya, Ariya), both had once known a common set of rivers and places (e.g. Sarasvati and Hara’uvatiš), worshipped the same deities (Mitrá, Aryamán, N

satyā, etc.), with psalms of the same metrical structure, and shared in the Soma sacrifice and other rites presided over by the same priests (hótar-zoatar, Átharvanathravan).³ Such correspondences allow us to conclude that the Indians and Iranians are, indeed, two branches of one and the same people who had lived together long after their separation fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Plates
• Preface
• Chapter I. Language and Prehistory
• Chapter II. The First Appearance of the Aryans on the Stage of History
• Chapter III. The Aryanization of the Mediterranean
• Chapter IV. Primitive Aryan Culture reconstructed by Linguistic Palæontology
• Chapter V. The Case for an Asiatic Cradle of the Aryans
• Chapter VI. Did the Aryans Originate in Central Europe?
• Chapter VII. The Theory of a North European Cradle
• Chapter VIII. The Aryans in South Russia
• Chapter IX. The Rôle of the Aryans in History
• Bibliographical Note
• Index