The Yellow
Races.
race, and perhaps their most typical representatives are the Chinese. The type is a sufficiently familiar one. ‘The skull of the yellow race is rounded in form. The oval of the head is larger than with Europeans. The cheek-bones are very projecting; the cheeks rise towards the temples, so that the outer corners of the eyes are elevated; the eyelids seem half closed. The forehead is flat above the eyes. The bridge of the nose is flat, the chin short, the ears disproportionately large and projecting from the head. The colour of the skin is generally yellow, and in some branches turns to brown. There is little hair on the body; beard is rare. The hair of the head is coarse, and, like the eyes, almost always black.’[41] In the present day the different families of the globe have gone through the changes which time and variety of climate slowly bring about in all; and the yellow race has not escaped these influences. While some of its members have by a mixture with white races or by gradual improvement, reached a type not easily distinguishable from the European, others have, through the effect of climate, approached more nearly to the characteristics of the black family. We may, however, still class these divergent types under the head of the yellow race, which we consequently find extending over a vast portion of our globe. Round the North Pole the Eskimo, the Lapps, and the Finns form a belt of people belonging to this division of mankind. Over all Northern and Central Asia the various tribes of Mongolian or Turanian race inhabiting the plains of Siberia and of Tartary, and again the Thibetans, the Chinese, Siamese, and other kindred peoples of Eastern Asia, are members of this yellow family. From the Malay peninsula the same race has spread southward, passing from land to land over the countless isles which cover the South Pacific, until they have reached the islands which lie around the Australian continent, the islands of Polynesia in the South Pacific, and have mingled with the negro race that had preceded them there and that remains unmixed in the Melanesian islands. The Maoris, the inhabitants of New Zealand, belong to this yellow race; and the Australians, perhaps, represent a mixture of negro and yellow races. In all, this division of mankind covers an immense portion of the globe stretching from Greenland in a curved line, through North America and China, downwards to New Zealand, and again westward from China through Tartary or Siberia, up to Lapland in the north of Europe. And it must be added that many anthropologists consider the red races of America only a variety of this wide-spread yellow race.
The White
Races.
From the results of the previous chapter we see that to the yellow race must be attributed all those peoples of Europe and Asia which speak agglutinative languages, and therefore that for the white race are left the inflected tongues. These it will be remembered, we divided into two great families, the Semitic and the Aryan or Japhetic. We thus see that from the earliest times to which we are able to point we have living in Europe and Asia these three divisions of the human family, whom some have looked upon as the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. What relationship the other excluded races of mankind, the black and red, bear to the Hamites, Shemites, and Japhetites, has not been suggested. It seems more reasonable to consider Noah as merely the ancestor of the white races, and, therefore, so far as our linguistic knowledge goes, of the Semitic and Aryan families of speech only. But outside the pure Semites there lived a race of a less pure nationality, springing, probably, from a mixture of Semites with earlier black and yellow races. These people we may distinguish as Hamites. A division of this race were the Cushites, the stock from which the Egyptian, the Chaldæan, and many of the Canaanite nations were mainly formed.
But though from the earliest times there were probably in Asia these three divisions of mankind, their relative position and importance was very different from what it is now. At the present time the Turanian races are everywhere shrinking and dwindling before the descendants of Japhet. At the moment at which I write it is the Aryan Slavs who are pushing the yellow-skinned Tartars farther and farther back in Siberia and Central Asia, and are endeavouring to push the Mongolian Turks from their last foothold in Europe.[42] The Tartar races have had their era of great conquest too, for to them belong those races—Huns, Avars, Magyars—who have spread such devastation in Europe, to them belong such conquerors as Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timûr Lenk (Tamerlane). In the first few centuries after Mohammedism was introduced among them, the Turanians of Central Asia rose into power. Several different Tartar races in succession—Seljûks, Ayyûbites, Mongols (Moghuls), etc.—rose upon the ruins of the Arab Chalifate, and invaded India, Persia, Africa, and Europe. The last of these is the race of the Osmanlîs, or, as we call them simply, the Turks. Their days of conquest are past, and therefore, great as is the space which the Turanian people now occupy over the face of the globe, there is reason to believe that in early prehistoric times they were still more widely extended. In all probability the men of the polished-stone age in Europe and Asia were of this yellow-skinned Mongolian type. We know that the human remains of this period seem to have come from a short and round-skulled people; and this roundness of the skull is one of the chief marks of the Mongolians as distinguished from the white races of mankind.
We know, too, that the earliest inhabitants of India belonged to a Turanian, and therefore to a yellow, race; and that Turanians mingled with one of the oldest historical Semitic peoples, and helped to produce the civilization of the Chaldæans. And as, moreover, we find in various parts of Asia traces of a civilization similar to that of Europe during the latter part of the polished-stone age, it seems not unreasonable, in casting our eyes back upon the remotest antiquity on which research sheds any light, to suppose an early widespread Turanian or Mongolian family extending over the greater part of Europe and Asia. These Turanians were in various stages of civilization or barbarism, from the rude condition of the hunters and fishers of the Danish shell-mounds to a higher state reigning in Central and Southern Asia, and similar to that which was afterwards attained towards the end of the polished-stone age in Europe. The earliest home of these pure Turanians was probably a region lying somewhere to the east of Lake Aral. ‘There,’ says a writer from whom we have already quoted, ‘from very remote antiquity they had possessed a peculiar civilization, characterized by gross Sabeism, peculiarly materialistic tendencies, and complete want of moral elevation; but at the same time, by an extraordinary development in some branches of knowledge, great progress in material culture in some respects, while in others they remained in an entirely rudimentary state. This strange and incomplete civilization exercised over great part of Asia an absolute preponderance, lasting, according to the historian Justin, 1500 years.’[43]
As regards its pre-historic remains, we know that this civilization, or half-civilization, was especially distinguished by the raising of enormous grave-mounds and altar-stones, and it must have been characterized by strong, if not by the most elevated, religious ideas, and by a peculiar reverence paid to the dead. Now, we have seen that it is by characteristics very similar to these that the civilization of Egypt is distinguished, and Egypt, of all nations which have possessed a history, is the oldest.
Egypt.
These are reasons, therefore, for considering the Egyptian civilization, which is in some sort the dawn of history in the world, as the continuation—the improvement, no doubt, but still the continuation—of the half-civilization of the age of stone, a culture handed on from the Turanian to the Cushite peoples. We may look upon this very primitive form of culture as spreading first through Asia, and later on outwards to the west. Four thousand and five thousand years before Christ are the dates disputed over as those of Menes, the first recorded King of Egypt.[44] And Egypt even at this early time seems to have emerged from the age of stone, and been possessed, at least, of bronze, possibly of iron. The later date, 4000 B.C., probably marks the beginning of the stone-age life corresponding to the more extensive remains in Europe. It was therefore with this early culture as it has been with subsequent fuller civilizations—
‘Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.’