This leaves the probability that an Asiatic stock, without previous settled sedentary habits of life, acquired the domesticated animals from the sedentary and peaceable communities of Anau, or from some similar village (pueblo) or villages of western Turkestan, and then through a (moderately) long experience of nomadic pastoral life acquired also the predatory habits and institutions that commonly go with a pastoral life on a large scale. These cultural traits they acquired in such a degree of elaboration and maturity as is implied by the primitive Aryan (or, better, proto-Aryan) speech, including a more or less well developed patriarchal system; so that they would presently become a militant and migratory community somewhat after the later-known Tatar fashion, and so made their way westward as a self-sufficient migratory host and carried the new material culture into Europe together with the alien Aryan speech. It is at the same time almost unavoidable that in such an event this migratory host would have carried with them into the West an appreciable servile contingent made up primarily of enslaved captives from the peaceable agricultural settlements of the Mediterranean race, which had originally supplied them with their stock of domestic animals.
Along with these new technological elements and the changes of law and custom which their adoption would bring on, there will also have come in the new language that was designed to describe these new ways and means of life and was adapted to express the habits of thought which the new ways and means bred in the peoples that adopted them. The immigrant pastoral (proto-Aryan) language and the pastoral (patriarchal and predatory) law and custom will in some degree have been bound up with the technological ways and means out of which they arose, and they would be expected to have reached and affected the various communities of Europe in somewhat the same time and the same measure in which these material facts of the pastoral life made their way among these peoples. In the course of the diffusion of these cultural elements, material and immaterial, among the European communities the language and in a less degree the domestic and civil usages and ideals bred by the habits of the pastoral life might of course come to be dissociated from their material or technological basis and might so be adopted by remoter peoples who never acquired any large measure of the material culture of those pastoral nomads whose manner of life had once given rise to these immaterial features of Aryan civilisation.
Certain considerations going to support this far-flung line of conjectural history may be set out more in detail: (a) The Aryan civilisation is of the pastoral type, with such institutions, usages and preconceptions as a large-scale pastoral organisation commonly involves. Such is said by competent philologists to be the evidence of the primitive Aryan speech. It is substantially a servile organisation under patriarchal rule, or, if the expression be preferred, a militant or predatory organisation; these alternative phrases describe the same facts from different points of view. It is characterised by a well-defined system of property rights, a somewhat pronounced subjection of women and children, and a masterful religious system tending strongly to monotheism. A pastoral culture on the broad plains and uplands of a continental region, such as west-central Asia, will necessarily fall into some such shape, because of the necessity of an alert and mobile readiness for offense and defense and the consequent need of soldierly discipline. Insubordination, which is the substance of free institutions, is incompatible with a prosperous pastoral-nomadic mode of life. When worked out with any degree of maturity and consistency the pastoral-nomadic culture that has to do with sheep and cattle appears always to have been a predatory, and therefore a servile culture, particularly when drawn on the large scale imposed by the topography of the central-Asiatic plains, and reënforced with the use of the horse. (The reindeer nomads of the arctic seaboard may appear to be an exception, at least in a degree, but they are a special case, admitting a particular explanation, and their case does not affect the argument for the Aryan civilisation.) The characteristic and pervasive human relation in such a culture is that of master and servant, and the social (domestic and civil) structure is an organisation of graded servitude, in which no one is his own master but the overlord, even nominally. The family is patriarchal, women and children are in strict tutelage, and discretion vests in the male head alone. If the group grows large its civil institutions are of a like coercive character, it commonly shows a rigorous tribal organisation, and in the end, with the help of warlike experience, it almost unavoidably becomes a despotic monarchy.
It has not been unusual to speak of the popular institutions of Germanic paganism—typified, e.g., by the Scandinavian usages of local self-government in pagan times—as being typically Aryan institutions, but that is a misnomer due to uncritical generalisation guided by a chauvinistic bias. These ancient north-European usages are plainly alien to the culture reflected by the primitive Aryan Speech, if we are to accept the consensus of the philological ethnologists to the effect that the people who used the primitive Aryan speech must have been a community of pastoral nomads inhabiting the plains and uplands of a continental region. That many of these philological ethnologists also hold to the view that these Aryans were north-European pagan blonds may raise a personal question of consistency but does not otherwise touch the present argument.
(b) A racial stock that has ever been of first-rate consequence in the ethnology of Europe (the Alpine, brachycephalic brunet, the homo alpinus of the Linnean scheme) comes into Europe at this general period, from Asia; and this race is held to have presently made itself at home, if not dominant, throughout middle Europe, where it has in historic times unquestionably been the dominant racial element.
(c) The pastoral-nomadic institutions spoken of above appear to have best made their way in those regions of Europe where this brachycephalic brunet stock has been present in some force if not as a dominant racial factor. The evidence is perhaps not conclusive, but there is at least a strong line of suggestion afforded by the distribution of the patriarchal type of institutions within Europe, including the tribal and gentile organisation. There is a rough concomitance between the distribution of these cultural elements presumably derived from an Aryan source on the one hand, and the distribution past or present of the brachycephalic brunet type on the other hand. The regions where this line of institutions are known to have prevailed in early times are, in the main, regions in which the Alpine racial type is also known to have been present in force, as, e.g., in the classic Greek and Roman republics.
At the same time a gentile organisation seems also to have been associated from the outset with the Mediterranean racial stock and may well have been comprised in the institutional furniture of that race as it stood before the advent of the Alpine stock; but the drift of later inquiry and speculation on this head appears to support the view that this Mediterranean gentile system was of a matrilinear character, such as is found in many extant agricultural communities of the lower barbarian culture, rather than of a patriarchal kind, such as characterises the pastoral nomads. The northern blond communities alone appear, on the available evidence, to have had no gentile or tribal institutions, whether matrilinear or patriarchal. The classic Greek and Roman communities appear originally to have been of the Mediterranean race and to have always retained a broad substratum of the Mediterranean stock as the largest racial element in their population, but the Alpine stock was also largely represented in these communities at the period when their tribal and gentile institutions are known to have counted for much, as, indeed, it has continued ever since.
Apart from these communities of the Mediterranean seaboard, the peoples of the Keltic culture appear to have had the tribal and gentile system, together with the patriarchal family, in more fully developed form than it is to be found in Europe at large. The peoples of Keltic speech are currently believed by ethnologists to have originally been of a blond type, although opinions are not altogether at one on that head,—the tall, perhaps red-haired, brachycephalic blond, the "Saxon" of Beddoe, the "Oriental" of Deniker. But this blond type is perhaps best accounted for as a hybrid of the dolicho-blond crossed on the Alpine brachycephalic brunet. Some such view of its derivation is fortified by what is known of the prehistory and the peculiar features of the early Keltic culture. This culture differs in some respects radically from that of the dolicho-blond communities, and it bears more of a resemblance to the culture of such a brunet group of peoples as the early historic communities of upper and middle Italy. If the view is to be accepted which is coming into currency latterly, that the Keltic is to be affiliated with the culture of Hallstatt and La Tène, such affiliation will greatly increase the probability that it is to be counted as a culture strongly influenced if not dominated by the Alpine stock. The Hallstatt culture, lying in the valley of the Danube and its upper affluents, lay in the presumed westward path of immigration of the Alpine stock; its human remains are of a mixed character, showing a strong admixture of the brachycephalic brunet type; and it gives evidence of cultural gains due to outside influence in advance of the adjacent regions of Europe. This Keltic culture, then, as known to history and prehistory, runs broadly across middle Europe along the belt where blond and brunet elements meet and blend; and it has some of the features of that predatory-pastoral culture reflected by the primitive Aryan speech, in freer development, or in better preservation, than the adjacent cultural regions to the north; at the same time the peoples of this Keltic culture show more of affiliation to or admixture with the brachycephalic brunet than the other blond-hybrid peoples do.
On the other hand the communities of dolicho-blond hybrids on the shores of the narrow Scandinavian waters, remote from the centers of the Alpine culture, show little of the institutions peculiar to a pastoral people. These dolicho-blond hybrids of the North come into history at a later date, but with a better preserved and more adequately recorded paganism than the other barbarians of Europe. The late-pagan Germanic-Scandinavian culture affords the best available instance of archaic dolicho-blond institutions, if not the sole instance; and it is to be noted that among these peoples the patriarchal system is weak and vague,—women are not in perpetual tutelage, the discretion of the male head of the household is not despotic nor even unquestioned, children are not held under paternal discretion beyond adult age, the patrimony is held to no clan liabilities and is readily divisible on inheritance, and so forth. Neither is there any serious evidence of a tribal or gentile system among these peoples, early or late, nor are any of them, excepting the late and special instance of the Icelandic colony, known ever to have been wholly or mainly of pastoral habits; indeed, they are known to have been without the pastoral animals until some time in the neolithic period. The only dissenting evidence on these heads is that of the Latin writers, substantially Cæsar and Tacitus, whose testimony is doubtless to be thrown out as incompetent in view of the fact that it is supported neither by circumstantial evidence nor by later and more authentic records. In speaking of "tribes" among the Germanic hordes these Latin writers are plainly construing Germanic facts in Roman terms, very much as the Spanish writers of a later day construed Mexican and Peruvian facts in mediæval-feudalistic terms,—to the lasting confusion of the historians; whereas in enlarging on the pastoral habits of the Germanic communities they go entirely on data taken from bodies of people on the move and organised for raiding, or recently and provisionally settled upon a subject population presumably of Keltic derivation or of other alien origin and inhabiting the broad lands of middle Europe remote from the permanent habitat of the dolicho-blond. Great freedom of assumption has been used and much ingenuity has been spent in imputing a tribal system to the early Germanic peoples, but apart from the sophisticated testimony of these classical writers there is no evidence for it. The nearest approach to a tribal or a gentile organisation within this culture is the "kin" which counts for something in early Germanic law and custom; but the kin is far from being a gens or clan, and it will be found to have more of the force of a clan organisation the farther it has strayed from the Scandinavian center of diffusion of the dolicho-blond and the more protracted the warlike discipline to which the wandering host has been exposed. All these properly Aryan institutions are weakest or most notably wanting where the blond is most indubitably in evidence.
Taking early Europe as a whole, it will appear that among the European peoples at large institutions of the character reflected in the primitive Aryan speech and implied in the pastoral-nomadic life evidenced by the same speech are relatively weak, ill-defined or wanting, arguing that Europe was never fully Aryanised. And the peculiar geographical and ethnic distribution of this Aryanism of institutions argues further that the dolicho-blond culture of the Scandinavian region was less profoundly affected by the Aryan invasion than any other equally well known section of Europe. What is known of this primitive Aryan culture, material, domestic, civil and religious, through the Sanskrit and other early Asiatic sources, may convincingly be contrasted with what is found in early Europe. These Asiatic records, which are our sole dependence for a competent characterisation of the Aryan culture, shows it to have resembled the culture of the early Hebrews or that of the pastoral Turanians more closely than it resembles the early European culture at large, and greatly more than it resembles the known culture of the early communities of dolicho-blond hybrids.