Dionysius tells us that one night the Sabines issued from Amiternum and seized Liste, the capital of the Aborigines, who retired to Reatæ, whence they endeavoured to recapture it.[476] They appear to have been successful eventually in recovering the land around Lake Fucino, but would seem to have lost the territory to the north-west around Reatæ. About the same time many of them migrated south-westwards to the lands around Rome.[477] As one of their original cities had been called Palatium it seems likely that it was they who gave its name to the Palatine Hill.

The general agreement between the area in which we find the leaf-shaped swords, the area occupied by the Aborigines before the Sabine expedition, and the area of Q speech, suggests that these three are one especially as there is a progressive abandonment of the north-western portion and a movement towards the south-west near the mouth of the Tiber. My suggestion is that the Aborigines were the descendants of the leaf-shaped sword people and the ancestors of the Q speaking Latin peoples of later days.

Umbrian speech, though it extended towards the south-east and surrounded the Latin tongues, is found mainly on the north-east of the Apennines, and seems to have come from that direction; before the advent of the Gauls it reached, as we have seen, to the foot of the Alps. This is the region in which we find the chief remains of the Villa-nova culture, which is not unlike that of the Dorians, so that it seems reasonable to equate this culture with the Osco-Umbrian or P dialects.

The Sabines, as we have seen, are said to have come from Amiternum, which is on the north-eastern slope of the Apennines, or rather in a valley which opens out on that side. We should, therefore, expect them to have been a P people. But, according to Dionysius, they over-ran a region peopled by the Aborigines, who we have found reason for thinking were a Q people, and, though doubtless they expelled the fighting men, a good number are likely to have remained behind. It is not surprising, therefore, that there should be some uncertainty as to whether the original Sabines spoke a P or a Q dialect.

All the Italian evidence is consistent with the view that the men of the leaf-shaped sword were Q speaking, while the men with the iron sword spoke P tongues, but before we come finally to a decision, it might be well to make a further test elsewhere. We have seen that the refugees from the mountain zone, armed with Type G swords, fled down the Rhone, the Loire, and the Seine, and that, while the men with the iron swords pursued them down the two former valleys, they left the Seine valley alone. Sir John Rhys and his supporters have suggested that Q speech was at one time spoken in Gaul, and have cited certain place-names in support of their case.[478] The value of this evidence has been disputed, but there is one name, in two forms, which so obviously belongs to Q speech, that its value cannot well be denied, and this is Sequana, the ancient name for the Seine, and Sequani, the tribe who lived by its banks. It cannot be merely a coincidence that the best attested Q names have been noted just where Type G swords are found not followed by iron swords, and this case, bearing out as it does the general tenour of the Italian evidence, seems to me to be conclusive.

I would submit, therefore, that the archæological evidence, which I have given in this and in previous chapters, proves, as conclusively as the circumstances of the case are likely to admit, that the thesis of Sir John Rhys that two waves of people left Central Europe for Italy and the west, the first speaking a Q and the second a P tongue, is absolutely correct, though modifications need to be made in the application of this theory to Greek lands. His view that the P Folk were the people of the Swiss lake-dwellings we have seen good reason to reject.

CHAPTER XIV
THE WANDERINGS OF THE WIROS

I HAVE now cited almost all the evidence which I have collected to solve the question of the Aryan cradle and the dispersal of the Wiros from Central Europe, especially of their raids into the Celtic lands of the west. Except for a few details I have found myself in agreement with other writers, sometimes with this, at others with that authority. This is not surprising, for so many shots have been made, often at random, and without sufficient evidence, that it would be strange if some of them had not hit the mark.