“I visited four other villages or goungs, and there may be as many more in Assam, each containing about three or four hundred people. Every community is under the patriarchal government of a chief, from whom the village takes its name.... The chiefs of villages would combine against a common enemy, but are as independent of each other as the old Highland heads of clans.... I was curiously reminded of the clan distinctions, by observing that the home-grown cotton cloths differed in pattern in the different villages. In all cases chequered patterns were worn, presenting as various combinations of colours and stripes as our own tartans, and each village possessed a pattern peculiar to itself, generally, though not universally, affected by the inhabitants.”—Travels in Northern Assam, Field, i., 1870; vide also Hunter’s “Rural Bengal,” 1868, p. 217.
[26] “Hunter’s Memoir of his Captivity (from childhood to the age of nineteen) among the Indians,” p. 180, 181. He also adds (p. 307):—“The Indians do not pretend to any correct knowledge of the tumuli or mounds that are occasionally met with in their country.... One tradition of the Quapaws states that a nation differing very much from themselves inhabited the country many hundred snows ago, when game was so plenty that it required only slight efforts to procure subsistence, and when there existed no hostile neighbours to render the pursuit of war necessary.” And Stephen’s “Central America” (i. 142) notices the absence of all weapons of war from the representations in sculpture at Copan, and says:—“In other countries, battle scenes, warriors, and weapons of war, are among the most prominent subjects of sculpture; and from the entire absence of them here, there is reason to believe that the people were not warlike, but peaceable, and easily subdued.”
[27] III., ch. xxxvii. Leges, 337.
[28] I find incidental corroboration of this view in “The Archæology of Prehistoric Annals” of Scotland, by Dr Wilson—“The infancy of all written history is necessarily involved in fable. Long ere scattered families had conjoined their patriarchal unions into tribes, and clans acknowledging some common chief, and submitting their differences to the rude legislation of the arch-priest or civil head of the commonwealth, treacherous tradition has converted the story of their birth into the wildest admixture of myth and legendary fable.”—Introd., p. 12.
Even in the plain of Sennaar (Shinar) we see something of this fusion of tribes—“Besides these two main constituents of the Chaldæan race there is reason to believe that both a Semitic and Aryan element existed.... The subjects of the early kings are continually designated in the inscriptions by the title of ‘Kiprat-arbat,’ which is interpreted to mean ‘the four nations’ or ‘tongues’” (Rawlinson’s “Ancient Monarchies,” i. p. 69). Professor Rawlinson is also of opinion, that “the league of the four kings in Abraham’s time seems correspondent to a four-fold ethnic division.”
Does not the above also correspond to the four-fold ethnic division of the Vedas?—Vide infra, [p. 39]. Compare also the four-fold division of the world or of Peru, according to various Indian traditions, between Manco Capac and his brothers.—Vide Hakluyt Society’s edition of Garcilasso de la Vega, i. 71–75. If these are not traditions of fusions of races, they can only be diluvian traditions of the four couples who came out of the ark, which was the conjecture of the Spaniards in the case of Manco Capac.
[29] This view will be found in the first chapter of Mr J. S. Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy,” ch. i. p. 6. “There is perhaps no people or community now existing which subsist entirely on the spontaneous produce of vegetation.” [Whether mankind ever lived “entirely on,” &c., may be questioned, but it is implied in Gen. ix. 3 that man did not subsist on animal food until after the Deluge, a fact which lies at the foundation of Porphyry’s work, “De Abstinentia.”] “But many tribes still live exclusively, or almost exclusively, on wild animals, the produce of hunting or fishing.... The first great advance beyond this state consists in the domestication of the more useful animals: giving rise to the the pastoral or nomad state.... From this state of society to the agricultural, the transition is not indeed easy (for no great change in the habits of mankind is otherwise than difficult, and in general either painful or very slow), but it lies in what may be called the spontaneous course of events.”
[30] Mr Hepworth Dixon’s “New America,” vol. i. p. 113.
[31] Vide Sir S. Baker; vide [note], ch. xiii., Noah.
[32] The following passage, inter alia, from Herodotus seems to sustain this—“To the eastward of those Scythians, who apply themselves to the culture of the land, and on the other side of the river Panticapes, the country is inhabited by Scythians who neither plough nor sow, but are employed in keeping cattle.”—Herod., iv., Mel.