Here the cradle remained for a long time. Pott, hypnotised by his aphorism ex oriente lux, drew a wonderful picture of the westward advance of the Wiros from their eastern home. Others filled in, largely from their own imaginations, the remaining details. And so we get the mid-nineteenth century view of these Aryan super-men, with a language containing potentialities of all that is fine in literature, with a social organisation and morality which was to reform benighted Europe, worshipping deities which were the products either of solar or chthonic myths or of diseases of language, setting forth from the western slopes of the Himalayan massif, urged on “by an irresistible impulse” towards the setting sun, migrating westward and ever westward, carrying their wives and families in the famous Aryan cart provided for them by a distinguished anthropologist.[436] Such was the view unanimously held by all Europe, and which figures still in too many text-books. One man only was left crying in the wilderness, or at least in the steppe, and he was an Englishman. As Hehn[437] wrote in 1874, “so it came to pass that in England, the native land of fads, there chanced to enter into the head of an eccentric individual the notion of placing the cradle of the Aryan race in Europe.”
Those of us who live “in that land of fads” may well be proud of Dr. Latham, who advanced these views in 1851, and subsequently enlarged upon them.[438] In due course nearly all other philologists followed suit, and Max-Müller alone was unrepentent, and as late as 1887 wrote “I should still say, as I said forty years ago, ‘Somewhere in Asia,’ and no more.”[439] But by then the Asiatic cradle had gone to the limbo of exploded hypotheses.
In 1868 Benfey, in a preface to Fick’s work,[440] acknowledged the value of Latham’s protests, and, arguing for the first time from the type of evidence known as linguistic palæontology, advocated a European as distinguished from an Asiatic cradle, and suggested, as Latham had done earlier, the region north of the Black Sea. He was followed in 1871 by Geiger,[441] who with national pride wished to prove that the super-man had always lived in the plain of North Germany, to which, some years later, Piètrement[442] retorted by suggesting that Geiger’s arguments would apply equally well to the neighbourhood of Lake Balkash and the Ala-tau mountains.
In the same year in which Geiger’s work appeared Cuno made a notable contribution to the hypothesis.[443] He contended that the original undivided Wiros were not a small clan, but must have been a numerous, nomad pastoral people, inhabiting an extensive steppe region. For the evolution of the parent tongue with its elaborate grammar a long period, several thousands of years, must have been needed, and during this time the Wiros must have moved freely over the area of the cradle, having frequent intercourse with one another, but little or none with outsiders. These conditions, he thought, could only be obtained on a vast plain, undivided by lofty mountain barriers or impassable forests; this cradle must have been in a temperate climate, tolerably uniform in character, where there would have been ample room for the growth of a numerous people. Such an area can only be found in the great plain of Northern Europe, stretching from the north of France to the Ural mountains.
Further investigation has shown that much of this plain was filled with dense forests and impassable morasses, but that the open steppe begins in Russia, and extends uninterruptedly to the slopes of the Hindu Kush, with certain westward prolongations, especially the sandy heaths to the north of the Carpathians, stretching from the Russian steppe, across Galicia, to the neighbourhood of Breslau. North of this, too, is a belt of parkland, opening on to the steppe, where nomad herdsmen could drive their cattle when the grass of the steppe became burnt up. Here, it would seem, was an area which would meet the needs of the linguistic palæontologist, and it was in this region that the Aryan cradle was placed by Dr. Schrader in 1883,[444] and here it has remained without opposition until quite recently.
During the last few months there has appeared the first volume of the Cambridge History of India, to which Dr. Peter Giles had contributed a chapter on the Aryans.[445] In this, in which he has repeated his suggestion that these people should in future be called Wiros, he has put forward views which differ in material respects from those hitherto held. His suggestion is, in fact, that the Aryan cradle is to be sought for in the plain of Hungary.
In contradistinction to views previously advanced, he believes that the original Wiros were settled agriculturists and not nomad herdsmen.[446] He bases this conclusion, apparently, on the fact that they knew of corn. A careful study of all the evidence on this subject collected by Schrader[447] convinces me, however, that it is far from certain that the undivided Wiros were acquainted with cultivated grain, for the terms used, few if any of which run through all the languages, may well apply to wild grain, and oats grow wild on the Russian steppe,[448] and may well have been used as food for man and beast. Moreover it is not an unknown thing for nomad people to grow scratch crops of grain. Such crops of barley I have myself seen grown by nomad Bedawin in the clay deserts behind Alexandria. The steppe-folk, too, like most nomads, were probably in the habit of making occasional raids on the settled lands on their margin, and we have actual evidence that this occurred. We know also that settled cultivators were living both at Tripolje and at Anau on the edge of the steppe. The original Wiro word for grain might well be the name they used for this kind of booty, nor need we exclude the possibility that when times were hard they acquired grain by trade from their settled neighbours, as Abraham, a nomad steppe-man, purchased corn from Egypt. The argument from the words for grain seems indecisive, and the balance of the evidence cited by Schrader seems in favour of a nomad existence.
Dr. Giles feels that “the close similarity between the various languages spoken by them would lead us to infer that they must have lived for long in a severely circumscribed area, so that their peculiarities developed for many generations in common.”[449] This, as we have seen, was Cuno’s idea, and is an eminently sound conclusion. But Dr. Giles would see in this circumscribed area one surrounded with a ring of mountains, while Cuno thought that it demanded an extensive steppe. The difference between the two views seems to depend upon whether the Wiros were nomad or settled, and I have already given reasons for believing them to have been nomads.
Dr. Giles objects to the steppe-cradle. He gives as his reason that this region has not on the whole the characteristics required by the conclusions drawn from linguistic palæontology;[450] on the other hand Schrader, who has studied this side of philology more exhaustively than most inquirers, believes that the conditions are fulfilled.[451] Neither argument is perhaps conclusive, and both deserve serious attention; the decision must rest upon evidence drawn from those other sciences which deal with the far past.