Except in the British Isles and in Brittany Celtic languages have left no modern descendants, but have everywhere been replaced by languages of Neo-Latin or of Teutonic origin. Outside of Brittany one of the last, if not quite the last, reference to Celtic speech in Gaul is the historic statement that “Celtic” tribes, as well as “Armoricans,” took part at Châlons in the great victory in 451 A. D. over Attila the Hun and his confederacy of subject nations.
On the continent the only existing populations of Celtic speech are the primitive inhabitants of central Brittany, a population noted for their religious fanaticism and for other characteristics of a backward people. This Celtic speech is claimed to have been introduced about 450–500 A. D. by Britons fleeing from the Saxons. These refugees, if there were any substantial number of them, must have been dolichocephs of either Mediterranean or Nordic race or both. We are asked by this tradition to believe that their long skull was lost, but that their language was adopted by the round skulled Alpine population of Armorica. It is much more probable that the Cymric-speaking Alpines of Brittany have merely retained in this isolated corner of France a form of Celtic speech which was prevalent throughout northern Gaul and Britain before these provinces were conquered by Rome and Latinized and which, perhaps, was reinforced later by British Cymry. Cæsar remarked that there was little difference between the speech of the Belgæ in northern Gaul and in Britain. In both cases the speech was Cymric.
Long after the conquest of Gaul by the Goths and Franks Teutonic speech remained predominant among the ruling classes and, by the time it succumbed to the Latin tongue of the Romanized natives, the old Celtic languages had been entirely forgotten outside of Brittany.
An example of similar changes of language is to be found in Normandy where the country was inhabited by the Nordic Belgæ speaking a Cymric language before that tongue was replaced by Latin. This coast was ravaged about 300 or 400 A. D. by Saxons who formed settlements along both sides of the Channel and the coasts of Brittany which were later known as the Litus Saxonicum. Their progress can best be traced by place names as our historic record of these raids is scanty.
The Normans landed in Normandy in the year 911 A. D. They were heathen, Danish barbarians, speaking a Teutonic tongue. The religion, culture and language of the old Romanized populations worked a miracle in the transformation of everything except blood in one short century. So quick was the change that 155 years later the descendants of the same Normans landed in England as Christian Frenchmen armed with all the culture of their period. The change was startling, but the Norman blood remained unchanged and entered England as a substantially Nordic type.
XIV
THE ARYAN LANGUAGE IN ASIA
In the Ægean region and south of the Caucasus Nordics appear after 1700 B. C. but there were unquestionably invasions and raids from the north for many centuries previous to our first records. These early migrations were probably not in sufficient force to modify the blood of the autochthonous races or to substitute Aryan languages for the ancient Mediterranean and Asiatic tongues.
These men of the North came from the grasslands of Russia in successive waves and among the first of whom we have fairly clear knowledge were the Achæans and Phrygians. Aryan names are mentioned in the dim chronicles of the Mesopotamian empires about 1700 B. C. among the Kassites and later, Mitanni. Aryan names of prisoners captured beyond the mountains in the north and of Aryan deities before whom oaths were taken are recorded about 1400 B. C. but one of the first definite accounts of Nordics south of the Caucasus describes the presence of Nordic Persians at Lake Urmia about 900 B. C. There were many incursions from that time on, the Cimmerians raiding across the Caucasus as early as 650 B. C. and shortly afterward overrunning all Asia Minor.
The easterly extension of the Russian steppes or Kiptchak north of the Caspian-Aral Sea in Turkestan as far as the foothills of the Pamirs was occupied by the Sacæ or Massagetæ, who were also Nordics and akin to the Cimmerians and Persians, as were, perhaps, the Ephtalites or White Huns in Sogdiana north of Persia, destroyed by the Turks in the sixth century.
For several centuries groups of Nordics drifted as nomad shepherds across the Caucasus into the empire of the Medes, introducing little by little the Aryan tongue which later developed into Old Persian. By 550 B. C. these Persians had become sufficiently numerous to overthrow their rulers and under the leadership of the great Cyrus they organized the Persian Empire, one of the most enduring of Oriental states. The base of the population of the Persian Empire rested on the round skulled Medes who belonged to the Armenoid subdivision of the Alpines. Under the leadership of their priestly caste of Magi these Medes rebelled again and again against their Nordic masters before the two peoples became fused.