  The Monosyllabic Area—the T?hay—the MÔn and KhÔ—Tables—the B?hot—the Chinese—Burmese—Persia—India—Tamulian family—the BrahÚi—the Dioscurians—the Georgians—IrÔn—Mizjeji—Lesgians—Armenians—Asia Minor—Lycians—Carians—Paropamisans—Conclusion. Our plan is now to take up the different lines of migration at the points where they were respectively broken off. This was at their different points of contact with Asia. The first line was— I. The American.—In affiliating the American with the Asiatic, the ethnologist is in the position of an irrigator, who supplies some wide tract of thirsty land with water derived from a higher level, but kept from the parts below by artificial embankments. These he removes; his process being simple but effectual, and wholly independent of the clever machinery of pumps, water-wheels, and similar branches of hydraulics. The obstacle being taken away, gravitation does the rest. The over-valuation of the Eskimo peculiarities is the great obstacle in American ethnology. When these are cut down to their due level, the connexion between America and Asia is neither more nor less than one of the clearest we have. Indeed, there is no very great break, either philologically or anatomically, until we reach the confines of China. Here, the physical conformation keeps much the same: the language, however, becomes monosyllabic. Now many able writers lay so much stress upon this monosyllabic character, as to believe that the separation between the tongues so constituted and those wherein we have an increase of syllables with a due amount of inflexion besides, is too broad to be got over. If speech were a mineral, this might, perhaps, be true. But speech grows, and if one philological fact be more capable of proof than another, it is that of a monosyllabic and uninflected tongue being a polysyllabic and inflected one in its first stage of development—or rather in its non-development. The Kamskadale, the Koriak, the Aino-Japanese, and the Korean are the Asiatic languages most like those of America. Unhesitatingly as I make this assertion—an assertion for which I have numerous tabulated vocabularies as proof—I am by no means prepared to say that one-tenth part of That the philological affinities necessary for making out the Asiatic origin of the Americans lie anywhere but on the surface of the language, I confess. Of the way whereby they should be looked for, the following is an instance. The Yukahiri is an Asiatic language of the Kolyma and Indijirka. Compare its numerals with those of the other tribes in the direction of America. They differ. They are not Koriak, not Kamskadale, by no means Eskimo; nor yet KolÚch. Before we find the name of a single Yukahiri unit reappearing in other languages, we This phÆnomenon would be repeated in English if our numerals ran thus:—1.one; 2.pair; 4.four; 8.two-fours; in which case all arguments based upon the correspondence or non-correspondence of the English numerals with those of Germany and Scandinavia would be as valid as if the word two were the actual name of the second unit. Indeed, in one respect they would be more so. The peculiar way in which the Hailtsa malÚk reappears in the Yukahiri is conclusive against the name being borrowed. Whether it is accidental is quite another question. This depends upon the extent to which it is a single coincidence, or one out of many. All that is attempted, at present, is to illustrate the extent to which resemblances may be disguised, and the consequent care requisite for detecting them II. The connexion between Oceanica and South-eastern Asia.—The physical conformation of the This brings us to the great area of the monosyllabic tongues itself. Geographically, it means China, Tibet, the Transgangetic Peninsula, and the Sub-Himalayan parts of northern India, such as Nepal, Sikkim, Assam, the Garo country, and other similar localities. Politically, it means the Chinese, Nepalese, Burmese and Siamese empires, along with several British-Indian and independent tribes. The chief religion is Buddhism; the physical conformation unequivocally Mongolian. The transition from mono-syllabic to poly-syllabic has never created much difficulty with myself: nor do I think it will do so with any writer who considers the greater difficulties involved in the denial of it. What these are will become apparent when we look at the map of Asia, and observe the tongues which come in contact with those of the class in question. Then it will become clear that unless we allow it to form a connecting link, it not only stands alone itself, but isolates other families. Thus, it is only through the Transgangetic Peninsula that the Oceanic family can be connected with the Indian; a connexion which rests on grounds sufficiently good to have induced careful writers A difficulty of far greater magnitude arises from the following considerations:—There are two principles upon which languages may be classified. According to the first, we take two or more languages as we find them, ascertain certain of their characteristics, and then inquire how far these characteristics coincide. Two or more languages, thus taken, may agree in having a large per-centage of grammatical inflexions, in which case they would agree in certain positive characters. On the other hand, two or more languages may agree in the negative fact of having a small and scanty vocabulary, and an inflexional system equally limited. The complication here suggested lies in a fact of which a little reflection will show the truth, viz. that negative points of similarity prove nothing in the way of ethnological connexion; whence, as far as the simplicity of their respective grammars is concerned, the Siamese, Burmese, Chinese and Tibetan may be as little related to each other, or to a common mother-tongue, as the most unlike languages of the whole world of Speech. Again—it by no means follows that because all the tongues of the family in question are comparatively destitute of inflexion, they are all in the same class. A characteristic of the kind may arise from two reasons; non-development, or loss. There is a stage anterior to the evolution of inflexions, when each word has but one form, and when relation is expressed by mere juxtaposition, with or without the superaddition of a change of accent. The tendencies of this stage are to combine words in the way of composition, but not to go further. Every word retains, throughout, its separate substantive character, and has a meaning independent of its juxtaposition with the words with which it combines. But there is also a stage subsequent to such an evolution, when inflexions have become obliterated and when case-endings, like the i in patr-i, are replaced by prepositions (in some cases by postpositions) like the to in to father; and when personal endings, like the o in voc-o, are replaced by pronouns, like the I in I call. Of the first of these stages, the Chinese is the language which affords the most typical specimen that can be found in the present late date of languages—late, considering that we are looking for a sample of its earliest forms. Of the last of these stages the Hence—
In answer to this, it is safe to say (a.)that they are all uninflected, because inflexions have yet to be evolved; not because they have been evolved and lost—as is the case with the English, a language which stands at one end of the scale, just as the Chinese does at the other. (b.) They are, also, all connected by a bon fide ethnological relationship; as can be shown by numerous tables; the Chinese and Tibetans being, apparently, the two extremes, in the way of difference. As for their geographical distribution, it is a blank-and-prize lottery, with large and small areas in juxtaposition and contrast, just as has been the case in America and in Africa; the Sub-Himalayan parts of British India, Sikkim Again—whenever the latter distribution occurs we have either a mountain-fastness, political independence, or the primitive pagan creed—generally all three. The population speaking a monosyllabic language which is in the most immediate contact with the continental tribes of the Oceanic stock, is the Southern Siamese. This reaches as far as the northern frontier of Kedah (Quedah), about 8°N.L. Everything north of this is monosyllabic; with the exception of a Malay settlement (probably, though not certainly, of recent origin) on the coast of Kambogia. Now the great stock to which the Siamese belong is called T?hay. Its direction is from north to south, coinciding with the course of the great river Menam; beyond the head-waters of which the T?hay tribes reach as far as Assam. Of these northern T?hay, the Khamti are the most numerous; and it is important to know that as many as 92 words out of 100 are common to this dialect and to the classical Siamese of Bankok. Again, the intermediate tribes of the Upper and I think that even in the minuter details that now suggest themselves we can see our way; so far, at least, as to determine in which direction the movement took place—whether it were from north to south or from south to north. Few classes of tongues can be better studied for ethnological purposes than the monosyllabic. A paper of Buchanan’s, and another of Leyden’s, are amongst the most valuable articles of the Asiatic Researches. One of Mr.Brown’s in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal gives us numerous tabulated vocabularies for the Burmese, Assamese and Indian frontiers. Mr.Hodgson and Dr.Robertson have done still more for the same parts. Lastly, the chief southern dialects, which have been less studied, are tabulated in the second volume of ‘Crawfurd’s Embassy to Siam.’ Upon looking over these, we find specimens of Now, separated as they are, the MÔn and KhÔ are liker to each other than either is to the interjacent Siamese; the inference from this being that at one time they were connected by transitional and intermediate dialects, aboriginal to the lower Menam, but now displaced by the Siamese of Bankok introduced from the parts to the northwards. If this be the case, the monosyllabic tongue most closely allied to those of the Malayan Peninsula (which are not monosyllabic) is not the present Siamese, but the language which the present Siamese displaced. How far this view is confirmed by any special affinities between the Malay dialects with the MÔn and KhÔ is more than I can say. The examination, however, should be made. The southern T?hay dialects are not only less like the MÔn and KhÔ than is expected from their locality, but the northern ones are less like those of the Indo-Burmese frontier and Assam than the geographical contiguity prepares us to surmise; since the per-centage of words common to the Khamti and the other dialects of Munipur and Assam is only as follows
This shows that their original locality is to be sought in an eastern as well as in a northern direction. If the T?hay dialects are less like the Burmese than most other members of their class, they are more like the B?hot of Tibet.
The B?hot itself is spoken over a large area with but little variation. We anticipate the inference. It is an intrusive tongue, of comparatively recent diffusion. What has been its direction? From east to west rather than from west to east; at least such is the deduction from its similarity to the T?hay, and from the multiplicity of dialects—representatives of a receding population—in the Himalayas of NepÂl and Sikkim. This, however, is a point on which I speak with hesitation. Dialects of the B?hot class are spoken as far westward as the parts about CashmÍr and the watershed of the Indus and Oxus. This gives us the greatest extent eastwards of any unequivocally monosyllabic tongue. The Chinese seem to have effected displacements as remarkable for both breadth and length as the T?hay were for length. We get at their original locality by the exhaustive process. On the northern and western frontier they keep encroaching In fixing upon these as the parent provinces, the evidence of ethnology on the one side, and that of the mass of tradition and inference which passes under the honourable title of Chinese history on the other, disagree. This latter is as follows:— At some period anterior to 550B.C., the first monarch with whom the improvement of China began, and whose name was Yao, ruled over a small portion of the present empire, viz. its north-west district; and the first nations that he fought against were the Yen and Tsi, in Pe-tche-li and Shantong respectively. Later still, Honan was conquered. B.C. 550. All to the south of the Ta-keang was barbarous; and the title of King of Chinese was only Vang or prince, not Hoang-te or Emperor. At this time Confucius lived. Amongst other things he wrote the Tschan-tsen, or Annals of his own time. B.C. 213. Shi-hoang-ti, the first Emperor of all China, built the great wall, colonized Japan, conquered the parts about Nankin, and purposely destroyed all the previously existing documents upon which he could lay hand. B.C. 94. Sse-mats-sian lived. What Shi-hoang-ti missed in the way of records, Sse-mats-sian preserved, and, as such, passes for the Herodotus China. A destruction of the earlier records, with a subsequent reconstruction of the history which they are supposed to have embodied, is always suspicious; and when once the principle of reconstruction is admitted, no value can be attached to the intrinsic probability of a narration. It may be probable. It may be true. It cannot, however, be historical unless supported by historical testimony; since, if true, it is a guess; and if probable, a specimen of the tact of the inventor. At best, it can but be a tradition or an inference, the basis of which may be a certain amount of fact—little or great according to the temperament of the investigator. Now, in the previous notice of the history of Chinese civilization, we have placed its claims to a high antiquity under as favourable a point of view as is allowable. They bear the appearance of truth—so much so, that if we had reason to believe that there were any means of recording them at so early an epoch as 600yearsB.C., and of preserving them to so late a one as the year’51, scepticism would be impertinent. But this is not the case. An historical fact must be taken upon evidence, not upon probabilities; and to argue the antiquity of a civilization like the Chinese from the antiquity of its history, and afterwards to claim an historical value for remote traditions on the strength of an early civilization, is to argue in a circle. Without saying that all argument upon the antiquity of the Chinese Empire is of this sort, it may fairly be said that much of it has been so—so much as to make Confucius as mythological a character as Minos, and to bring the earliest reasonable records to an epoch subsequent to the introduction of Buddhism from India. Even this antiquity is only probable. A square block of land between the Ganges and Upper Irawaddi is occupied by one dominant, and upwards of thirty subordinate sections of one and the same population—the Burmese. Some of these are mountaineers, and have retreated before No great family has its distribution so closely coincident with a water-system as the one in question. The plateau of Mongolia and the Himalayas are its boundaries. It occupies the whole Upon the principle of taking the questions in the order of complexity, so as to dispose of the simplest first, I pass over, for the present, the connexion between Africa and South-Western Asia, and take the easier of the two European ones. The Turanians.—The line which, beginning at Lapland, and, after exhibiting the great Turanian affiliations, ends at the wall of China, comprising the Ugrians, Samoeids A great part of Northern Europe, Independent Tartary, Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet, China, and the Transgangetic Peninsula, has now been disposed of. Nevertheless, India, Persia, Asia Minor, and Caucasus remain; in size inconsiderable, in difficulty great—greatly difficult because the points of contact between Europe and Asia, and Africa and Asia, fall within this area; greatly difficult because the displacements have been enormous; greatly difficult because, besides displacement, there has been intermixture as well. Lest any one undervalue the displacement, let him look at Asia Minor, which is now Turk, which has been Roman, Persian and Greek, and which has no single unequivocal remnant of its original population throughout its whole length and breadth. Yet, great as this is, it is no more than what we expect À priori. What families are and have been more encroaching than the populations hereabouts—Turks from the north, Arabs from the south, and Persians from the east? The Africa has but one point of contact with Asia, i.e. Arabia. It is safe to say this, because, whether we carry the migration over the Isthmus of Suez or the Straits of Babel-Mandeb, the results are similar. The Asiatic stock, in either case, is the same—Semitic. But Europe, in addition to its other mysteries, has two; perhaps three. One of these is simple enough—that of the Lap line and the Turanian stock. But the others are not so. It is easy to make the Ugrians Asiatic; but by no means easy to connect the other Europeans with the Ugrians. The Sarmatians, nearest in geography, have never been very successfully affiliated For reasons like these, the parts forthcoming will be treated with far greater detail than those which have preceded; with nothing like the detail of minute ethnology, but still slowly and carefully. All that thus stands over for investigation is separated from the area already disposed of by that line of mountains which is traced from the Garo Hills in the north-east of Bengal to the mouth of the Kuban in the Black Sea. First come the Eastern Himalayas, which, roughly speaking, may be said to divide the Indian kingdoms and dependencies from the Chinese Empire. They do not do so exactly, but they do so closely enough for the present purpose. They may also be said, in the same way, to divide the nations of the Hindu from those of more typically Mongolian conformation. They may also be said, in the same way, to divide the Indian tongues from the monosyllabic. On the north side of this range, languages undoubtedly, monosyllabic are spoken as far westwards Then comes a change. To the north and west of CashmÍr is a Kohistan, or mountain-country, which will soon require being described in detail. The line, however, which we are at present engaged upon is that of the northern boundary of the Valley of the KabÚl River, the mountains between Cabul and Herat, and the continuation of the same ridge from Herat to the south-eastern corner of the Caspian. North of this we have—roughly speaking—the Uzbek and Turcoman Turks; south of it, the Afghans and Persians Proper. Bokhara, however, is Persian, and the Kohistan in question is not Turk—whatever else it may be. To proceed—this line runs nearly parallel to the southern shore of the Caspian. Of the provinces to the north of it, Asterabad is partly Turk and partly Persian; Mazenderan and Ghilan, Persian. From Ghilan northwards and westwards, the valleys of the Cyrus and Araxes form the chief exception—but, saving these, all is mountain and mountaineership. Indeed, it is Ararat and Armenia which lie on our left, and the vast and vague Caucasus which rears itself in front. The simplest ethnology of the parts between this range, the Semitic area, and the sea, is that of The northern frontier is Turcoman, where the pastoral robbers of the parts between Bokhara and the Caspian encroach, and have encroached. As far south as Shurukhs they are to be found; and east of Shurukhs they are succeeded by the Hazarehs—probably wholly, certainly partially, of Mongolian blood. Abbasabad on the north-west is a Georgian colony. On the line between Meshed and Herat are several Kurd colonies. In Seistan we have Kerman is also Persian; and that to a greater degree than Khorasan. Fars is the same; yet west of Fars the population changes, and Arabian elements occur. They increase in Khuzistan; and in Irak Arabi we, at one and the same time, reach the rich alluvia of the Tigris and Euphrates and a doubtful frontier. Whether this was originally Arab or Persian is a matter of doubt. From Irak we must subtract Laristan, and the Baktyari Mountains, as well as the whole north-western half. Hamadan is the ancient Ecbatana; the ancient Ecbatana was Median—but that the Medes and Persians were as closely allied in blood as we suppose them to have been in their unalterable laws, is by no means a safe assumption. The existence of a third language in the arrow-headed inscriptions yet awaits a satisfactory explanation. On the other hand, Mazenderan is wholly Persian; and so is Ghilan Proper. The Talish, however, to the north of that province, are, possibly, of another stock. Asterabad, as stated above, is a frontier province. I think that there is good reason for believing Ajerbijan to have been, originally, other than Persian. In Balkh and Bokhara, the older—but not Here the proper Persian population ends—but not either wholly or abruptly. Three modifications of it occur—
Besides which, there are Persians encroaching upon the Armenian and Caucasian area in Shirvan, Erivan, and Karabagh—in all of which countries, as well as in Ajerbijan, I believe it to have been intrusive. The Biluch.—East and south-east of the proper Persians of Kerman come the Biluch, of Biluchistan. There is certainly a change of type here. Physically, the country is much like the table-land of Kerman. India, however, is approached; so that the Biluch are frontier tribes. To a certain extent they are encroachers. We find them in Sind, in MÚltan, and in the parts between the Indus and the Sulimani Mountains, and in the middle part of the Sulimani Mountains themselves. They style themselves Usul or The Pure, a term which implies either displacement or Captain Postans distinguishes the Biluch from the Mekrani of Mekran; but of this latter people I know no good description. They are, probably, Kerman Persians. The hill-range between Jhalawan and Sind is occupied by a family which has commanded but little notice; yet is it one of the most important in the world, the BrahÚi. The Kurds.—A line drawn obliquely across Persia from Biluchistan towards the north-west brings us to another frontier population; a population conterminous with the Semitic Arabs of The Afghans.—The Afghan area is very nearly the water-system of the river Helmund. The direction in which it has become extended is east and north-east; in the former it has encroached upon Hindostan, in the latter upon the southern members of a class that may conveniently be called the Paropamisan. In this way (I think) the Valley of the Cabul River has become Afghan. Its relations to the Hazareh country are undetermined. Most of the Hazarehs are Mongolian in physiognomy. Some of them are Mongolian in both physiognomy and language. This indicates intrusion and intermixture—intrusion and intermixture which history tells us are subsequent to the time of Tamerlane. PhÆnomena suggestive of intrusion and intermixture are rife and common throughout Afghanistan. In some cases—as in that of Hazarehs—it is recent, or subsequent to the Afghan occupation; in others, it is ancient and prior to it. Bokhara.—I have not placed the division containing the Tajiks of Balkh, KÚnduz, Durwaz, Badukshan, and Bokhara, on a level with that containing the Afghans, Kurds and Biluch, because But Bactria and Sogdiana were Persian at the time of Alexander’s successors; they were Persian at the very beginning of the historical period. Be it so. The historical period is but a short one, and there is no reason why a population should All the parts enumerated, and all the divisions, are so undoubtedly Persian, that few competent authorities deny the fact. The most that has ever been done is to separate the Afghans. SirW.Jones did this. He laid great stress upon certain Jewish characteristics, had his head full of the Ten Tribes, and was deceived in a vocabulary of their languages. Mr. But the complexities of the Persian population are not complete. There is the division between the Tajiks and the Iliyats; the former being the settled occupants of towns and villages speaking Persian, the others pastoral or wandering tribes speaking the Arab, Kurd, and Turk languages. That Tajik is the same word as the root Taoc, in Taoc-ene, a part of the ancient country of Persis (now Fars), and, consequently, in a pre-eminent Persian locality, is a safe conjecture. The inference, The antiquities and history of Persia are too well-known to need more than a passing allusion. The creed was that of Zoroaster; still existent, in a modified (perhaps a corrupted, perhaps an improved) form, in the religion of the modern Parsis. The language of the Zoroastrian Scriptures was called Zend. Now the Zend is Indo-European—Indo-European and highly inflected. The inflexions, however, in the modern Persian are next to none; and of those few it is by no means certain that they are Zend in origin. Nevertheless, the great majority of modern Persian words are Zend. What does this mean? It means that the philologist India.—In the time of Herodotus, and even earlier, India was part of the Persian empire. Yet India was not Persia. It was no more Persia in the days of Darius than it is English now. The original Indian stock was and is peculiar—peculiar in its essential fundamentals, but not pure and unmodified. The vast extent to which this modification implies encroachment and intermixture is the great key to nine-tenths of the complexities of the difficult ethnology of Hindostan. Whether we look to the juxtaposition of the different forms of Indian speech, the multiform degrees of fusion between them, the sections and sub-sections of their creeds—legion by name,—the fragments of ancient paganism, the differences of skin and feature, or the institution of caste, intrusion followed by intermixture, and intermixture in every degree and under every mode of manifestation, is the suggestion. And now we have our duality—viz. the primitive element and the foreign one—the stock and the graft. Nothing is more certain than that the graft came from the north-west. Does this necessarily mean from Persia? Such is the current opinion; or, if not from Persia, from some of In the south of India the foreign element is manifested less than in the north; so that it is the south of India which exhibits the original stock in its fullest form. Its chief characteristics are referable to three heads, physical form, creed, and language. In respect to the first, the southern Indian is darker than the northern—cÆteris paribus, i.e. under similar external conditions; but not to the extent that a mountaineer of the Dekhan is blacker than a Bengali from the delta of the Ganges. Descent, too, or caste influences colour, and the purer the blood the lighter the skin. Then the lips are thicker, the nose less frequently aquiline, the cheek-bones more prominent, and the eyebrows less regular in the southrons. The most perfect form of the Indian face gives us regular and delicate features, arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, an oval contour, and a clear brunette complexion. All this is Persian. Depart from it and comparisons suggest themselves. If the lips thicken and the skin blackens, we think of the Negro; if the cheek-bones stand out and if the eye—as it sometimes does—become oblique, the Mongol comes into our thoughts. The original Indian creeds are best characterized by negatives. They are neither Brahminic nor The language, for the present, is best brought under the same description. No man living considers it to be Indo-European. In proportion as any particular Indian population is characterized by these three marks, its origin, purity, and indigenous nature become clearer—and vice versÂ. Hence, they may be taken in the order of their outward and visible signs of aboriginality. First come—as already stated—the Southrons of the Continent In the plains the language is Tamulian, but the creed Brahminic; a state of evidence which reaches as far north as the parts about Chicacole east, and Goa west. In the South, then, are the chief samples of the true Tamulian aborigines of Indian; the characteristics of whom have been preserved by the simple effect of distance from the point of disturbance. Distance, however, alone has been but a weak preservative. The combination of a mountain-stronghold has added to its efficiency. In Central India one of these safeguards is impaired. We are nearer to Persia; and it is only in the mountains that the foreign elements are sufficiently inconsiderable to make the Tamulian character of the population undoubted and undeniable. In the Mahratta country and in Gondwana, the Ghonds, in Orissa the Kols, Khonds, Now the Mahratta, Udiya Intermediate to the Khonds and the Bengali, in respect to the evidence of their Tamulian affinities, are the mountaineers of north-western India. Here, the preservative effects of distance are next to nothing. Those, however, of the mountain-fastnesses supply the following populations—Berdars, Ramusi, Wurali, Paurias, Kulis, Bhils, Mewars, Moghis, Minas, &c. &c., speaking languages of the same class with the Mahratta, Udiya, and Bengali, but all imperfectly Brahminic in creed. The other important languages of India in the same class with those last-mentioned, are the Guzerathi of Guzerat, the HindÚ of Oude, the Punjabi of the Punjab, and several others not enumerated—partly because it is not quite certain how we are to place them These have been dealt with. But there is one population, belonging to these selfsame areas, with which we have further dealings, BilÚchistan has been described; but not in detail. The BilÚch that give their name to the country have been noticed as Persian. But the BilÚch are as little the only and exclusive inhabitants of it, as the English are of Great Britain. We have our Welsh, and the BilÚch have their BrahÚi. Again—the range of mountains that forms the western watershed of the Indus is not wholly Afghan. It is BilÚch as well. But it is not wholly BilÚch. The BilÚch reach to only a certain point southwards. The range between the promontory of Cape Montze and the upper boundary of Kutch Gundava is BrahÚi. There is no such word as BrahÚistan; but it would be well if there were. Now the language of the BrahÚi belongs to the Tamulian family. The affinity by no means lies on the surface—nor is it likely that it should. The nearest unequivocally Tamulian dialect on the same side of India is as far south as Goa—such as exist further to the north being either central or eastern. Supposing, then, the original continuity, how great must have been the However, the BrahÚi affinities by no means lie on the surface. The language is known from one of the many valuable vocabularies of Leach. Upon this, no less a scholar than Lassen commented. Without fixing it, he remarked that the numerals were like those of Southern India. They are so, indeed; and so is a great deal more; indeed the collation of the whole of the BrahÚi vocabularies with the Tamul and Khond tongues en masse makes the BrahÚi Tamulian. Is it original or intrusive? All opinion—valeat quantum—goes against it being the former. The mountain-fastness in which it occurs goes the other way. Our sequence is logical rather than geographical, i.e. it takes localities and languages in the order in which they are subservient to ethnological argument rather than according to their contiguity. This justifies us in making a bold stride, in passing over all Persia, and in taking next in order—Caucasus, with all its conventional reminiscences and suggestions. The languages of Caucasus fall into a group, 1. The Georgians.—It is the opinion of Rosen that the central province of Kartulinia, of which Tiflis is the capital, is the original seat of the Georgian family; the chief reasons lying in the fact of that part of the area being the most important. Thus, the language is called Kartulinian; whilst the provinces round about Kartulinia are considered as additions or accessions to the Georgian domain, rather than as integral and original portions of it—a fact which makes the province in question a sort of nucleus. Lastly, the Persian and Russian names, Gurg-istan and Gr-usia, by which the country is most widely known, point to the valley of the Kur. To all this I demur. The utmost that is proved thereby is the greater political prominence of the occupants of the more favoured parts of the country; as the middle course of the Kur really is. Of the two sides of the watershed that separates the rivers of the Black Sea More weighty still is the evidence derived from the dialects. The Kartulinian is spoken over more than half the whole of Georgia: whereas, for the parts not Kartulinian, we hear of the following dialects:—
I believe, then, that in Central Caucasus the Kartulinian Georgians have been intrusive; and this is rendered probable by the character of the populations to the north and east of them. Between Georgia and Daghestan we have, in the pre-eminently inaccessible parts of the eastern half of Caucasus With such reasons for believing the original direction of the Georgian area to have been westernly, we may continue the investigation. That they were the occupants of a considerable portion of the eastern half of the ancient Pontus, is probable from the historical importance of the Lazi in the time of Justinian, when a Lazic war disturbed the degenerate Romans of Constantinople. It is safe to carry them as far west as Trebizond. It is safe, too, to carry them farther. One of the commonest of the Georgian terminations is the syllable -pe or -bi, the sign of the plural number; a circumstance which gives the town of Sino-pe a Georgian look—Sinope near the promontory of Calli-ppi. 2. The IrÔn.—To the north-west of Tiflis we have the towns of Duchet and Gori, one on the Kur itself, and one on a left-hand feeder of it. The mountains above are in the occupation of the IrÔn or Osetes. In Russian Georgia they amount to about 28,000. The name IrÔn is the one they give themselves; Oseti is what they are called by the Georgians. Their language contains so great a per-centage of Persian words or vice versÂ, that it is safe to put them both in the same class. This has, accordingly, been done—and a great deal more which is neither safe nor sound has been done besides. 3. The Mizjeji.—Due east of the mountaineer IrÔn come the equally mountaineer Mizjeji, a family numerically small, but falling into divisions and subdivisions. Hence, it has a pre-eminent claim to be considered aboriginal to the fastnesses in which it is found. The parts north of Telav, to the north-east of Tiflis, form the Mizjeji area. It is a small one—the Circassians bound it on the north, and on the east— 4. The Lesgians of Eastern Caucasus or Daghestan, next to the Circassians the most independent family of Caucasus. None falls into more divisions and subdivisions: e.g.
The displacements of the IrÔn and Mizjeji—and from the limited area of their occupancies, displacement is a legitimate inference—must have been chiefly effected by the Georgians alone; that of the Lesgians seems referable to a triple influence. That the Talish to the north of Ghilan are Lesgians who have changed their native tongue for the Persian, is a probable suggestion of Frazer’s. If correct, it makes the province of Shirvan a likely part of the original Lesgian area—encroachment having been effected by the Armenians, Persians, and Georgians. 5. The Circassians occupy the northern Caucasus from Daghestan to the Kuban; coming in contact with the Slavonians and Tartars, for the parts between the Sea of Azov and the Caspian. As both these are pre-eminent for encroachment, the earlier contact was, probably, that of the most northern members of the Circassian family, and the southern Ugrians. The divisions and subdivisions of the Circassian family are both numerous and strongly marked. The Armenians.—Except amongst the mountaineer A great deal has been said about the extent to which the Armenian language differs from the Georgian, considering the geographical contact between the two. True it is that the tongues are in contact now, and so they probably were 2000 years ago. Yet it by no means follows that they were always so. The Georgian has encroached, the IrÔn retreated; a fact which makes it likely that, at a time when there was no Georgian east of Imiritia, the Osetic of Tshildir and the Armenian of Kars met on the Upper Kur. The inference drawn from the relations between the MÔn, KhÔ, and T?hay tongues is repeated here, Asia Minor.—From Armenia the transition is to Asia Minor. One of the circumstances which give a pre-eminent interest and importance to the ethnology of Asia Minor is the certainty of the original stock being, at the present moment, either wholly extinct, or so modified and changed as to have become a problem rather than a fact. There is neither doubt nor shadow of doubt as to this—since it is within the historical period that this transformation has taken place. It is within the historical period that the Osmanli Turks, spreading, more immediately from the present country of Turkestan, but remotely from the chain of the Altaic Mountains, founded the kingdom of Roum under the Seljukian kings, and as a preliminary to the invasion and partial occupation of Europe, made themselves masters of the whole country limited by Georgia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Syria on the east and south, and by the Euxine, the Bosporus, the Propontis, the Hellespont, and the Ægean Sea westwards. Since then, whatever may be the blood, the language has been Turk. This is, of course, prim facie evidence of the stock being Turk also. Nor are there any very cogent reasons Such is what we get from the general traveller—and a more minute ethnology than this has not yet been applied. What will be the result, when a severer test is applied, is another question. It is most probable that points of physiognomy, fragmentary traditions and superstitions, old customs, and peculiar idiotisms in the way of dialect, will point to a remnant of the older stock immediately preceding it. In such a case, the ethnological question becomes complicated—since the present Turks will be then supposed to have mixed with the older natives, rather than to have replaced them in toto: so that the phÆnomena will rather be those exhibited in England (where the proportion of the older Celtic and the newer Anglo-Saxon is an open question) than those of the United States of America, where the blood is purely European, and where the intermixture of the aboriginal Indian—if any—goes for nothing. Of the occupants of Asia Minor previous to the Osmanli Turks we can ascertain the elements, but not the proportions which they bore to each other.
All this suggests numerous questions—but they are questions of minute rather than general ethnology.
Of these, the last are recent intruders; so that the real ethnology to be considered is that of ancient Thrace. Unfortunately this is as obscure as that of Asia Minor itself. The Greeks of the Ægean are probably intrusive; the other three are ancient occupants of their present areas. Now, in arguing upon the conditions afforded by this frontier, it is legitimate to suppose that each of the populations belonging to it had some extension beyond their present limits, in which case the À-priori probabilities would be that—
Now, the population of Asia Minor may have been a mere extension of the populations of the frontiers—one or all. But it also may have been separate and distinct from any of them. In this case, we are again supplied with an alternative.
Dealing with these questions, we first ask what are the reasons for supposing the population—whether single or subdivided—of Asia to have been peculiar, i.e. different from that of the frontier areas—Georgia, Thrace, Armenia, Mesopotamia and Syria? This is answered at once by the evidence of the Lycian Inscriptions, which prove the Lycian, at least, to have been distinct from all or any of the tongues enumerated. The following extracts, however, from Herodotus carry us farther:— “The Lycians were originally out of Crete; since, in the old times, it was the Barbarians who held the whole of Crete. When, however, there was a difference in Crete, in respect to the kingdom, between the sons of Europa, Minos and Sarpedon, and when Minos got the best in the Whilst Asia Minor was being conquered for And now we have a second fact, the following, viz.—that what the Lycians were the Caunians were also. 1. The Caunians.—According to the special evidence of Herodotus, the Caunians had two peculiar customs—one, to make no distinction between age and sex at feasts, but to drink and junket promiscuously Were any other nations thus Lycian? Caunian? Lyco-Caunian? or Cauno-Lycian? since the particular designation is unimportant. The Carians.—The language of the Carians and the Caunians was the same; since Herodotus writes—The Caunian nation has either adapted itself to the Carian tongue, or the Carian to Caunian. 2. On the other hand, the worship of the national Eponymus was different. The Lydians and Mysians share in the worship of the Carian Jove. These do so. As many, however, of different nations (?????) as have become identical in language with the Carians do not do so. And here comes a difficulty—one part of the facts connects, the other disconnects the Carians from the Lycians. The language goes one way, the customs another. But this is not the only complication introduced by the Carian family. The whole question of their origin is difficult, and that of their affinities is equally so. It was from the islands to This would connect the—
The native tradition.—The Carian race is not insular, but aboriginal to the continent; bearing from the earliest times the name it bears at the present time. As a proof of this, the worship of the Carian Jupiter is common to two other, unequivocally continental nations—the Lydians and the Mysians. All three have a share in a temple at Mylasa, and each of the three is descended from one of three brothers—Car, Lydus, or All this is not written for the sake of any inference; but to illustrate the difficulties of the subject. A new series of facts must now be added—or rather two new ones.
The reader is in possession of a fair amount of complications. They can easily be increased. Instead of enlarging on them, I suggest the following doctrine:—
Of these, the former was, perhaps, Sarmatian, whilst the latter may have borne the same relation to the Carian as the Malay of Sumatra does to that of the Orang BinÚa of the Malayan Peninsula. It may be added, that the similarity of the name Thekhes, the mountain from which the 10,000 Greeks saw the sea, to the Turk Tagh, Lastly—The Of the glosses collected by Jablonsky, none are illustrated by any modern language, except the following:—
There is no denying that these affinities are Indo-European rather than aught else, and that they are Armenian as well—an objection to several of the views laid down in the preceding pages which I have no wish to conceal. However, all questions of this kind are a balance of conflicting difficulties. As a set-off to this, take the following table, where the Armenian affinities are Turk, Dioscurian, and Siberian also.
The watershed of the Oxus and Indus.—We are in the north-eastern corner of Persia. The PÚshta-Khur mountain, like many other hills of less magnitude, contains the sources of two rivers, different in their directions—of the Oxus that falls into the Sea of Aral; and of the right branch of the KÚner, a feeder of the CabÚl river—itself a member of the great water-system of the Indus. Its south-western prolongation gives us the corresponding watershed. This is a convenient point for the study of a difficult but interesting class of mountaineers, who may conveniently be called Paropamisans from the ancient name of the Hindu-kÚsh. Their northern limits are the heights in question. Southwards they reach the Afghan frontier in the Kohistan of CabÚl. Eastward they come in contact with India. There is no better way of taking them in detail than that of following the water-courses, and remembering the watersheds of the rivers. I. The Oxus.—At the very head-waters of the Oxus, and in contact with the Kirghiz Turks of Pamer, comes the small population of Wokhan, speaking a language neither Turk nor Persian— II. The Indus.—1. The Indus.—The Gilghit 2. The Jhelum.—This is the river of the famous valley of CashmÍr—the population whereof (with some hesitation) I consider Paropamisan. 3. The Cabul River.—1. The KÚner.—The eastern watershed of the Upper KÚner is common to the Gilghit river. The population is closely akin to the Dardoh and Dungher; its area being Upper and Lower Chitral, its language the Chitrali, its religion Shia Mahometanism. South of the Chitral, on the middle KÚner, the creed changes, and we have the best known of the Paropamisans, the Kaffres of Kafferistan, reaching as far westwards and northwards as Kunduz and Badukshan—the Kaffres, or Infidels, so called by their Mahometan neighbours, because they still retain their primitive paganism. Now when we approach the CabÚl river itself, the direction of which, from west to east, is nearly at right angles with the KÚner, the characteristics of the Dardoh, Chitrali, and Kaffre populations decrease—in other words, the area is irregular, and the populations themselves either partially isolated or intermixed. Thus, along the foot of the mountains north of the CabÚl river and west of the KÚner comes the Lughmani country; the language being by no means identical with the Kafir, and the Kafir paganism being reduced to an imperfect Mahometan—nÉmchÚ Mussulman, or half Mussulman, being the term applied to the speakers of the Lughmani tongue of the valley of the Nijrow and the parts about it. The Der, Tirhye, and Pashai vocabularies of Leach all represent Paropamisan forms of speech spoken by small and, more or less, fragmentary populations. The valley of the Lundye has, almost certainly, been within a recent period, Paropamisan. Thus is it that Elphinstone writes of its chief occupants:—“The SwatÍs, who are also called Deggauns, appear to be of Indian origin. They formerly possessed a kingdom extending from the western branch of the Hydaspes to near Jellabahad. They were gradually confined to narrower limits by the Afghan tribes; and Swaut and BÚnÉr, their last seats, were reduced by the Eusofzyis in the end of the fifteenth century. They are still very numerous in those countries.” By Indian I believe a population akin to that of Cashmeer is denoted—I do not say intended. Another extract carries us further still:—“The Shulmauni formerly inhabited Shulmaun, on the banks of the Korrum. They afterwards moved to TÍra, and in the end of the fifteenth century they were in Hustnugger, from which they were expelled by the Eusofzyes. The old Afghan writers reckon them Deggauns, but they appear to have used this word loosely. There are still a few Shulmauni in the Eusofzye country who have some remains of a peculiar language.” Hence, the Paropamisans may safely be considered as a population of a receding frontier, the encroachment upon their area having been Afghan. With these the Asiatic populations end. If we now look back upon the ground that has been gone over, we shall find that the evidence of the human family having originated in one particular spot, and having diffused itself from thence to the very extremities of the earth, is by no means absolute and conclusive. Still less is it certain that that particular spot has been ascertained. The present writer believes that it was somewhere in intratropical Asia, and that it was the single locality of a single pair—without, however, professing to have proved it. Even this centre is only hypothetical—near, indeed, to the point which he looks upon as the starting-place of the human migration, but by no means identical with it. The Basks and Albanians he does not pretend to have affiliated; but he does not, for this reason, absolutely isolate them. They have too many miscellaneous affinities to allow them to stand wholly alone. In the way of physical conformation, the Hottentot presents the maximum of peculiarities. The speech, however, of the latter is simply African; whilst, in form and colour, the Basks and Albanians As for the detail of the chief difficulties, the writer believes that he, unwillingly and with great deference, differs from the best authorities, in making so little of the transition from America to Asia, and so much of that between Europe and Asia. The conviction that the Semitic tongues are simply African, and that all the theories suggested by the term Indo-European must be either abandoned or modified, is the chief element of his reasoning upon this point—reasoning far too elaborate for a small work like the present. He also believes that the languages of Kafferistan, the Dardoh country, and north-eastern Afghanistan, are transitional to the monosyllabic tongues THE END. FOOTNOTESPRINTED BY RICHARD TAYLOR, London, January 1863. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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