The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

140 THE BRONZE AGE AND THE CELTIC WORLD
grain might well be the name they used for this kind of booty, nor need we exclude the
possibility that when times were hard they acquired grain by trade from their settled
neighbours, as Abraham, a nomad steppe-man, purchased com from Egypt. The
argument from the words for grain seems indecisive, and the balance of the evidence
cited by Schrader seems in favour of a nomad existence.
Dr. Giles feels that " the close similarity between the various languages spoken by
them would lead us to infer that they must have hved for long in a severely
circumscribed area, so that their peculiarities developed for many generations in
common."*^ This, as we have seen, was Cuno's idea, and is an eminently sound
conclusion. But Dr. Giles would see in this circumscribed area one surrounded with a
ring of mountains, while Cuno thought that it demanded an extensive steppe. The
difference between the two views seems to depend upon whether the Wiros were nomad
or settled, and I have already given reasons for believing them to have been nomads.
Dr. Giles objects to the steppe-cradle. He gives as his reason that this region
has not on the whole the characteristics required by the conclusions drawn from
Unguistic palaeontology;*' on the other hand Schrader, who has studied this side of
philology more exhaustively than most inquirers, believes that the conditions are fulfilled.*'
Neither argument is perhaps conclusive, and both deserve serious attention ;
the decision
must rest upon evidence drawn from those other sciences which deal with the far past.
We have found reason for believing that in neoUthic days the Russian steppe east
of the Dnieper was inhabited by a nomad steppe-folk, who had domesticated horses and
cattle, and perhaps sheep. As they Hved on a plain they had probably not met with
the goat, which is a mountain beast, and it is to be noted that the name for goat varies
in nearly all the Wiro languages.'' These nomad steppe-folk, who buried their dead in
a contracted position covered with red ochre under kurgans or barrows, were, we believe,
Nordic or proto-Nordic in type, and some, at least, of their skeletons remind us of the
Briinn-Brux-Combe-Capelle type,^" who hunted horses in late Aurignacian and
Solutrean times.
'' Giles (1922) 66. »9 Giles (1922) 67.
«7 Giles (1922) 69. 30 Fleure (1922) 13.
»8 Schrader (1890) 438.