ORIGINAL HOME of the ARYAN TRIBES
with their ROUTES OF MIGRATION.
After the last emigration of Aryans to the west, the parent community extended its settlements southward into the Tableland of Iran (érahn) (modern Persia, Afghanistan, and Beloochistan; see Map), and finally, in consequence of a religious difference, separated into two great branches. One remained on the Iranian plateau, and was ultimately known in history as the Medes and Persians. The other made its way through the mountain-passes, crossed the upper Indus (at some uncertain date, between 2000 and 1400 B.C.), and in time effected the conquest of the rich peninsula of Hindostan. The invaders were the “fair-complexioned” Indo-Aryans, who spoke the polished Sanscrit, and among whom sprung up the institution of caste and many gross superstitions.
Aryan Languages.—Similarity in the words and grammatical structure of their languages proves that the Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Celtic races, the Slavonian and Teutonic nations,—all had a common origin; that the frozen Icelander and Indian fire-worshipper, the outcast Gypsy and the plaided Highlander, the English master and his Cooley servant, are brothers of the same stock. Their tongues have been derived from the same parent—a language full of poetic grandeur, older than Greek or Sanscrit, and containing the germs of both—a language which has perished.
Spoken as we have seen from India to the west of Europe, these tongues have been called Indo-European. They embrace the dialects of India and Persia; the Welsh, and the Celtic of Scotland and Ireland; the Latin and its derivatives, the Romance languages, viz., Italian, Spanish, French, etc.; Greek; Russian and Polish; English, German, Danish, and Swedish (see diagram preceding the title-page).
Some philologists hold that the primitive home of the Indo-European race cannot be determined, and incline to the opinion that the Asiatic representatives of the family emigrated from Europe into Asia. (Consult Brugman’s “Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages,” p. 2.)
THE SEMITES.
The Semitic Languages, in like manner, may all be traced to a common source. To this group belong the Syriac, the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Ethiopic, the ancient Phœnician, and the Carthaginian; while the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria are the written characters of a Semitic tongue common to those countries. (See Chart, p. 85.)
Philology has not followed the Semites to a home as limited as that of the Aryans; though tradition points to Armenia as their early domicile, ethnological science to Arabia or Africa. It declares, however, the Semitic and the Aryan to be distinct forms of speech, perhaps branches of a common stem, but neither derivable from the other.