If the Aryan language were invented and developed by these Armenoid Alpines we should be obliged to assume that they introduced it along with bronze culture into Europe about 3000 B. C. and taught the Nordics both their language and their metal culture. There are, however, in western Asia many Alpine peoples who do not speak Aryan languages and yet are Alpine in type, such as the Turcomans and in Asia Minor the so-called Turks are also largely Islamized Alpines of the Armenoid subspecies who speak Turki. There is no trace of Aryan speech south of the Caucasus until after 1700 B. C. and the Hittite language spoken before that date in central and eastern Asia Minor, although not yet clearly deciphered, was Anaryan to the best of our present knowledge. The Hittites themselves were probably ancestral to the living Armenians.
We are sufficiently acquainted with the languages of the ancient Mesopotamian countries to know that the speech of Accad and Sumer, of Susa and Media was agglutinative and that the languages of Assyria and of Palestine were Semitic. The speech of the Kassites was Anaryan, but they seem to have been in contact with the horse-using Nordics and some of their leaders bore Aryan names. The language of the shortlived empire of the Mitanni in the foothills south of Armenia is the only one about the character of which there can be serious doubt. There is, therefore, much negative evidence against the existence of Aryan speech in that part of the world earlier than its known introduction by Nordics.
If, then, the last great expansion into Europe of the Alpine race brought from Asia the Aryan mother tongue, as well as the knowledge of metals, we must assume that all the members of the Nordic race thereupon adopted synthetic speech from the Alpines.
We know that these Alpines reached Britain about 1800 B. C. and probably they had previously occupied much of Gaul, so that if they are to be credited with the introduction of the synthetic languages into western Europe, it is difficult to understand why we have no known trace of any form of Aryan speech in central Europe or west of the Rhine prior to 1000 B. C. while we have some, though scanty, evidence of Non-Aryan languages.
It may be said in favor of this claim of the Alpine race to be the original inventor of synthetic speech, that language is ever a measure of culture and the higher forms of civilization are greatly hampered by the limitations of speech imposed by the less highly evolved languages, namely, the monosyllabic and the agglutinative, which include nearly all the Non-Aryan languages of the world. It does not seem probable that barbarians, however fine in physical type and however well endowed with the potentiality of intellectual and moral development, dwelling as hunters in the bleak and barren north along the edge of the retreating glaciers and as nomad shepherds in the Russian grasslands, could have evolved a more complicated and higher form of articulate speech than the inhabitants of southwestern Asia, who many thousand years earlier were highly civilized and are known to have invented the arts of agriculture, metal working and domestication of animals, as well as of writing and pottery. Nevertheless, such seems to be the fact.
To summarize, it appears that a study of the Mediterranean race shows that so far from being purely European, it is equally African and Asiatic and that in the narrow coastal fringe of southern Persia, in India and even farther east the last strains of this race gradually fade into the Negroids through prolonged cross breeding. A similar inquiry into the origin and distribution of the Alpine subspecies shows clearly the fundamentally Asiatic origin of the type and that on its easternmost borders in central Asia it marches with the round skulled Mongols, and that neither the one nor the other was the inventor of Aryan speech.
XIII
ORIGIN OF THE ARYAN LANGUAGES
By the process of elimination set forth in the preceding chapter we are competed to acknowledge that the strongest claimant for the honor of being the race of the original Aryans, is the tall, blond Nordic. An analysis of the various languages of the Aryan group reveals an extreme diversity which can be best explained by the hypothesis that the existing languages are now spoken by people upon whom Aryan speech has been forced from without. This theory corresponds exactly with the known historic fact that the Aryan languages, during the last three or four thousand years at least have, again and again, been imposed by Nordics upon populations of Alpine and Mediterranean blood.
Within the present distributional area of the Nordic race on the Gulf of Riga and in the very middle of a typical area of isolation, are the most generalized members of the Aryan group, namely Lettish and Lithuanian, both almost Proto-Aryan in character. Close at hand existed the closely related Old Prussian or Borussian, very recently extinct. These archaic languages are relatively close to Sanskrit and exist in actual contact with the Anaryan speech of the Esthonians and Finns.
The Anaryan languages in eastern Russia are Ugrian, a form of speech which extends far into Asia and which appears to contain elements which unite it with synthetic speech and may be dimly transitory in character. In the opinion of many philologists, a primitive form of Ugrian might have given birth to the Proto-Aryan ancestor of existing synthetic languages.