The thirteenth century brought the Greeks, then a rude, hardy, and at first non-maritime people, fighting their way south and wrecking or sapping the Ægean civilization. Culture lost its bloom, life became hard, the outlook contracted. Art shriveled into crude geometric ornamentation, the forms became childishly inept, intercourse with the Orient sank to a minimum, and when trade and foreign stimulation revived they were at first in Phœnician hands. It is not until the seventh century that true history begins in Greece, and in the main only to the sixth that the rudiments of that characteristic Hellenic philosophy, literature, and art can be traced, which were released after the Persian wars early in the fifth century. Yet the half thousand and more years of dark ages between Ægean and classic Greek civilization did not entail a complete interruption. The Greek often enough smote the Mycenæan or Minoan. More often, perhaps, he settled alongside him, possibly oppressed him, but learned from him. He choked out Ægean culture, but nourished his own upon it. The Homeric poems, composed in Greek during this period of retrogression, picture a civilization essentially Ægean; and along with them much other cultural tradition must have been passed on.
At any rate, when Greek culture reëmerged, it was charged with Oriental elements and influences, but perhaps even more charged with Ægean ones. Its games, its unponderous architecture, its open city life, the free quality of its art, its political particularity, its peculiar alert tenseness and feeling for grace, had all flourished before on Greek soil. Their flavor is un-Asiatic and un-Egyptian of whatever period. We have here another instance of the tenacity of the attachment of cultural qualities to the soil; of the faculty, at once absorptive and resistive, that for thousands of years, however inventions might diffuse and culture elements circulate, succeeded in keeping China something that can fairly be called Chinese, India Indian, Egypt Egyptian, the Northwest and Southwest of America Northwestern and Southwestern respectively; in a degree even kept Europe, so long culturally dependent on the Orient, always European.
250. Europe
With Greece we have entered the realm of what is conventionally regarded as history. For the rest of Europe, prehistoric archæology and its record of illiterate peoples abut so closely on history in the ordinary sense, that a tracing of the transition takes one promptly into documentary study. There is much in this early historical field that is of anthropological interest, and just back of it lies more that is specifically so: where the round headed peoples came from who began to appear in Europe during the Neolithic; whether peoples like Ligurians, Sicilians, Scythians, were Indo-Europeans or not, and of what branch; where the blond Nordic type took shape and whether it originally spoke dialects of the Germanic group; who built Stonehenge and the other megalithic monuments of western Europe; where the first home of the Indo-Europeans lay. But such problems are intricate, and usually answerable, if at all, from stray indications scattered among masses of literary and historical data controllable only by the specialist, whose primary interests tend in other directions. Where these documented indications fail, the problems become speculative. We have no clear record of any indubitable Indo-European people, in or out of Europe, before the second millenium B.C. When they appear in history, they are already differentiated into their familiar main divisions. The Bronze Age Scandinavians seem likely to have been Indo-Europeans and perhaps of the Germanic branch; for the Neolithic an identification would be mere guessing. The LaTène Iron culture is characteristically Keltic, that of the Hallstadt period and area less certainly Illyrian and Keltic. And after all, such considerations concern speech, or race, which can be associated with any culture. Our present concern being primarily with the latter, it will be more profitable to pass on from these questions and turn to regions remote from those in which Occidental civilization assumed its modern form.
251. China
China, far from Europe and known to the outside world only recently, possesses a civilization so different from ours in a multitude of aspects, that thought of connection between the cultures seems at first unreasonable. One thinks of rice, pagodas, bound feet, queues, silk, tea, ancestor worship, a strange, chopped, singing speech, and writing in still stranger characters. Yet the Chinese have long had a civilization identical in many of its constituents with our own: civil government, rimed poetry, painting, trousers, wheat and barley, our common domestic animals, bronze and iron, for instance. Since most of these culture elements are wanting in Africa and Oceania, as well as in native America, there is no inherent reason why they should be expectable in China. Their repetition in China and in the West as the result of independent causes would be remarkable. Evidently many if not all of this group of common traits represent absorptions into the civilization of China, or diffusions out of it into the West, much as the larger part of early European civilization was imported out of the nearer Orient.
In the broader perspective of culture history, then, China no longer stands aloof. The roots of her civilization are largely the same as those of our own. In this light, understanding of Chinese civilization involves two steps. The first is the tracing of the elements derived from the west or imparted to it. The second is the recognition of how these were remodeled and combined with elements of local growth and thereby given their peculiarly Chinese cast and setting.