The Hypothesis Concerning The Asiatic Origin Of The Aryans

: INTRODUCTION.
: Teutonic Mythology

When the question of the original home of the Aryan language and race

was first presented, there were no conflicting opinions on the main

subject.[2] All who took any interest in the problem referred to Asia as

the cradle of the Aryans. Asia had always been regarded as the cradle of

the human race. In primeval time, the yellow Mongolian, the black

African, the American redskin, and the fair European had there tented

si e by side. From some common centre in Asia they had spread over the

whole surface of the inhabited earth. Traditions found in the

literatures of various European peoples in regard to an immigration from

the East supported this view. The progenitors of the Romans were said to

have come from Troy. The fathers of the Teutons were reported to have

immigrated from Asia, led by Odin. There was also the original home of

the domestic animals and of the cultivated plants. And when the

startling discovery was made that the sacred books of the Iranians and

Hindoos were written in languages related to the culture languages of

Europe, when these linguistic monuments betrayed a wealth of inflections

in comparison with which those of the classical languages turned pale,

and when they seemed to have the stamp of an antiquity by the side of

which the European dialects seemed like children, then what could be

more natural than the following conclusion: The original form has been

preserved in the original home; the farther the streams of emigration

got away from this home, the more they lost on the way of their language

and of their inherited view of the world; that is, of their mythology,

which among the Hindoos seemed so original and simple as if it had been

watered by the dews of life's dawn.



[Footnote 2: Compare O. Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte

(1883).]



To begin with, there was no doubt that the original tongue itself, the

mother of all the other Aryan languages, had already been found when

Zend or Sanscrit was discovered. Fr. v. Schlegel, in his work published

in 1808, on the Language and Wisdom of the Hindoos, regarded Sanscrit

as the mother of the Aryan family of languages, and India as the

original home of the Aryan family of peoples. Thence, it was claimed,

colonies were sent out in prehistoric ages to other parts of Asia and to

Europe; nay, even missionaries went forth to spread the language and

religion of the mother-country among other peoples. Schlegel's

compatriot Link looked upon Zend as the oldest language and mother of

Sanscrit, and the latter he regarded as the mother of the rest; and as

the Zend, in his opinion, was spoken in Media and surrounding countries,

it followed that the highlands of Media, Armenia, and Georgia were the

original home of the Aryans, a view which prevailed among the leading

scholars of the age, such as Anquetil-Duperron, Herder, and Heeren, and

found a place in the historical text-books used in the schools from 1820

to 1840.



Since Bopp published his epoch-making Comparative Grammar the illusion

that the Aryan mother-tongue had been discovered had, of course,

gradually to give place to the conviction that all the Aryan languages,

Zend and Sanscrit included, were relations of equal birth. This also

affected the theory that the Persians or Hindoos were the original

people, and that the cradle of our race was to be sought in their homes.



On the other hand, the Hindooic writings were found to contain evidence

that, during the centuries in which the most of the Rigveda songs were

produced, the Hindooic Aryans were possessors only of Kabulistan and

Pendschab, whence, either expelling or subjugating an older black

population, they had advanced toward the Ganges. Their social condition

was still semi-nomadic, at least in the sense that their chief property

consisted in herds, and the feuds between the clans had for their object

the plundering of such possessions from each other. Both these facts

indicated that these Aryans were immigrants to the Indian peninsula, but

not the aborigines, wherefore their original home must be sought

elsewhere. The strong resemblance found between Zend and Sanscrit, and

which makes these dialects a separate subdivision in the Aryan family of

languages, must now, since we have learned to regard them as

sister-tongues, be interpreted as a proof that the Zend people or

Iranians and the Sanscrit people or Hindoos were in ancient times one

people with a common country, and that this union must have continued to

exist long after the European Aryans were parted from them and had

migrated westwards. When, then, the question was asked where this

Indo-Iranian cradle was situated, the answer was thought to be found in

a chapter of Avesta, to which the German scholar Rhode had called

attention already in 1820. To him it seemed to refer to a migration from

a more northerly and colder country. The passage speaks of sixteen

countries created by the fountain of light and goodness, Ormuzd (Ahura

Mazda), and of sixteen plagues produced by the fountain of evil, Ahriman

(Angra Mainyu), to destroy the work of Ormuzd. The first country was a

paradise, but Ahriman ruined it with cold and frost, so that it had ten

months of winter and only two of summer. The second country, in the name

of which Sughda Sogdiana was recognised, was rendered uninhabitable by

Ahriman by a pest which destroyed the domestic animals. Ahriman made the

third (which by the way, was recognised as Merv) impossible as a

dwelling on account of never-ceasing wars and plunderings. In this

manner thirteen other countries with partly recognisable names are

enumerated as created by Ormuzd, and thirteen other plagues produced by

Ahriman. Rhode's view, that these sixteen regions were stations in the

migration of the Indo-Iranian people from their original country became

universally adopted, and it was thought that the track of the migration

could now be followed back through Persia, Baktria and Sogdiana, up to

the first region created by Ormuzd, which, accordingly, must have been

situated in the interior highlands of Asia, around the sources of the

Jaxartes and Oxus. The reason for the emigration hence was found in the

statement that, although Ormuzd had made this country an agreeable

abode, Ahriman had destroyed it with frost and snow. In other words,

this part of Asia was supposed to have had originally a warmer

temperature, which suddenly or gradually became lower, wherefore the

inhabitants found it necessary to seek new homes in the West and South.



The view that the sources of Oxus and Jaxartes are the original home of

the Aryans is even now the prevailing one, or at least the one most

widely accepted, and since the day of Rhode it has been supported and

developed by several distinguished scholars. Then Julius v. Klaproth

pointed out, already in 1830, that, among the many names of various

kinds of trees found in India, there is a single one which they have in

common with other Aryan peoples, and this is the name of the birch.

India has many kinds of trees that do not grow in Central Asia, but the

birch is found both at the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the

southern spurs of the Himalaya mountains. If the Aryan Hindoos

immigrated from the highlands of Central Asia to the regions through

which the Indus and Ganges seek their way to the sea, then it is

natural, that when they found on their way new unknown kinds of trees,

then they gave to these new names, but when they discovered a tree with

which they had long been acquainted, then they would apply the old

familiar name to it. Mr. Lassen, the great scholar of Hindooic

antiquities, gave new reasons for the theory that the Aryan Hindoos were

immigrants, who through the western pass of Hindukush and through

Kabulistan came to Pendschab, and thence slowly occupied the Indian

peninsula. That their original home, as well as that of their Iranian

kinsmen, was that part of the highlands of Central Asia pointed out by

Rhode, he found corroborated by the circumstance, that there are to be

found there, even at the present time, remnants of a people, the

so-called Tadchiks, who speak Iranian dialects. According to Lassen,

these were to be regarded as direct descendants of the original Aryan

people, who remained in the original home, while other parts of the same

people migrated to Baktria or Persia and became Iranians, or migrated

down to Pendschab and became Hindoos, or migrated to Europe and became

Celts, Greco-Italians, Teutons, and Slavs. Jacob Grimm, whose name will

always be mentioned with honour as the great pathfinder in the field of

Teutonic antiquities, was of the same opinion; and that whole school of

scientists who were influenced by romanticism and by the philosophy of

Schelling made haste to add to the real support sought for the theory in

ethnological and philological facts, a support from the laws of natural

analogy and from poetry. A mountain range, so it was said, is the

natural divider of waters. From its fountains the streams flow in

different directions and irrigate the plains. In the same manner the

highlands of Central Asia were the divider of Aryan folk-streams, which

through Baktria sought their way to the plains of Persia, through the

mountain passes of Hindukush to India, through the lands north of the

Caspian Sea to the extensive plains of modern Russia, and so on to the

more inviting regions of Western Europe. The sun rises in the east, ex

oriente lux; the highly-gifted race, which was to found the European

nations, has, under the guidance of Providence, like the sun, wended its

way from east to west. In taking a grand view of the subject, a mystic

harmony was found to exist between the apparent course of the sun and

the real migrations of people. The minds of the people dwelling in

Central and Eastern Asia seemed to be imbued with a strange instinctive

yearning. The Aryan folk-streams, which in prehistoric times deluged

Europe, were in this respect the forerunners of the hordes of Huns which

poured in from Asia, and which in the fourth century gave the impetus to

the Teutonic migrations, and of the Mongolian hordes which in the

thirteenth century invaded our continent. The Europeans themselves are

led by this same instinct to follow the course of the sun: they flow in

great numbers to America, and these folk-billows break against each

other on the coasts of the Pacific Ocean. "At the breast of our Asiatic

mother," thus exclaimed, in harmony with the romantic school, a scholar

with no mean linguistic attainments--"at the breast of our Asiatic

mother, the Aryan people of Europe have rested; around her as their

mother they have played as children. There or nowhere is the playground;

there or nowhere is the gymnasium of the first physical and intellectual

efforts on the part of the Aryan race."



The theory that the cradle of the Aryan race stood in Central Asia near

the sources of the Indus and Jaxartes had hardly been contradicted in

1850, and seemed to be secured for the future by the great number of

distinguished and brilliant names which had given their adhesion to it.

The need was now felt of clearing up the order and details of these

emigrations. All the light to be thrown on this subject had to come from

philology and from the geography of plants and animals. The first author

who, in this manner and with the means indicated, attempted to furnish

proofs in detail that the ancient Aryan land was situated around the

Oxus river was Adolphe Pictet. There, he claimed, the Aryan language had

been formed out of older non-Aryan dialects. There the Aryan race, on

account of its spreading over Baktria and neighbouring regions, had

divided itself into branches of various dialects, which there, in a

limited territory, held the same geographical relations to each other

as they hold to each other at the present time in another and immensely

larger territory. In the East lived the nomadic branch which later

settled in India; in the East, too, but farther north, that branch

herded their flocks, which afterwards became the Iranian and took

possession of Persia. West of the ancestors of the Aryan Hindoos dwelt

the branch which later appears as the Greco-Italians and north of the

latter the common progenitors of Teutons and Slavs had their home. In

the extreme West dwelt the Celts, and they were also the earliest

emigrants to the West. Behind them marched the ancestors of the Teutons

and Slavs by a more northern route to Europe. The last in this

procession to Europe were the ancestors of the Greco-Italians, and for

this reason their languages have preserved more resemblance to those of

the Indo-Iranians who migrated into Southern Asia than those of the

other European Aryans. For this view Pictet gives a number of reasons.

According to him, the vocabulary common to more or less of the Aryan

branches preserves names of minerals, plants, and animals which are

found in those latitudes, and in those parts of Asia which he calls the

original Aryan country.



The German linguist Schleicher has to some extent discussed the same

problem as Pictet in a series of works published in the fifties and

sixties. The same has been done by the famous German-English scientist

Max Mueller. Schleicher's theory, briefly stated, is the following: The

Aryan race originated in Central Asia. There, in the most ancient Aryan

country, the original Aryan tongue was spoken for many generations. The

people multiplied and enlarged their territory, and in various parts of

the country they occupied, the language assumed various forms, so that

there were developed at least two different languages before the great

migrations began. As the chief cause of the emigrations, Schleicher

regards the fact that the primitive agriculture practised by the Aryans,

including the burning of the forests, impoverished the soil and had a

bad effect on the climate. The principles he laid down and tried to

vindicate were: (1) The farther East an Aryan people dwells, the more it

has preserved of the peculiarities of the original Aryan tongue. (2) The

farther West an Aryan-derived tongue and daughter people are found, the

earlier this language was separated from the mother-tongue, and the

earlier this people became separated from the original stock. Max Mueller

holds the common view in regard to the Asiatic origin of the Aryans. The

main difference between him and Schleicher is that Mueller assumes that

the Aryan tongue originally divided itself into an Asiatic and an

European branch. He accordingly believes that all the Aryan-European

tongues and all the Aryan-European peoples have developed from the same

European branch, while Schleicher assumes that in the beginning the

division produced a Teutonic and Letto-Slavic branch on the one hand,

and an Indo-Iranian, Greco-Italic, and Celtic on the other.



This view of the origin of the Aryans had scarcely met with any

opposition when we entered the second half of our century. We might add

that it had almost ceased to be questioned. The theory that the Aryans

were cradled in Asia seemed to be established as an historical fact,

supported by a mass of ethnographical, linguistic, and historical

arguments, and vindicated by a host of brilliant scientific names.