The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

THE ARYAN CRADLE 137
The use made of the Aryan Nordic equation by German political propagandists has
inclined, French and, to some extent, English writers, to reject this view. This objection
has been in a large measure due to misunderstandings, and in any case it is unscientific to
allow national and poUtical prejudices to influence our opinions on such questions.
If, then, we agree with Penka that there must have been an original Aryan race,
or, as we shall call them, Wiros, it is important to ascertain what part of the world it was,
from which these languages spread to Ireland and Bengal. This is the problem of
the Aryan cradle.
In the early days of the hypothesis students noted that Sanskrit was the most
archaic of the languages, and forgetting that the Vedic hymns were composed 1000 or
1500 B.C., while the earliest Greek literature dated from 800 or 900 B.C., there was a
tendency to derive the whole group from North India," Subsequently, when the close
connection between Sanskrit and Zend, the ancient Persian tongue, was recognised,
and it was realised that the Vedic folk were recent arrivals in the Punjab when the Vedic
hjrnins were being composed, the Aryan cradle was removed to the region watered by
the Oxus and the Jaxartes, and the slopes of the Hindu Kush."
Here the cradle remained for a long time. Pott, hypnotised by his aphorism ex
oriente lux, drew a wonderful picture of the westward advance of the Wiros from their
eastern home. Others filled in, largely from their own imaginations, the remaining
details. And so we get the mid-nineteenth century view of these Aryan super-men,
with a language containing potentialities of all that is fine in literature, with a social
organisation and morality which was to reform benighted Europe, worshipping deities
which were the products either of solar or chthonic myths or of diseases of language,
setting forth from the western slopes of the Himalayan massif, urged on " by an
irresistible impulse " towards the setting sun, migrating westward and ever westward,
canying their wives and famihes in the famous Aryan cart provided for them by a
distinguished anthropologist. '^ Such was the view imanimously held by all Europe,
and which figures still in too many text-books. One man only was left crying in the
wilderness, or at least in the steppe, and he was an EngUshman. As Hehn'* wrote in 1874,
" Adelung {1806-17) " ^- '^ Tylor (1881) 79-82.
« Pott (1840) 19. '4 Hehn (1874) quoted by Taylor (1889) 23.