The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

82 THE BRONZE AGE AND THE CELTIC WORLD
accustomed on its back to drive bands of cattle over the grassy steppes. If we may
judge from the views of many of their modern representatives, they despise menial
work, such as ploughing the land or digging the soil, just as they prefer cattle and beef
to sheep or mutton, and have a contempt for fish-eaters and vegetarians. The Nordic
also has a natural instinct for governing and administration.
As I have shown elsewhere,^ if two such peoples come into contact, and settle
down together, there can be but one result : the Nordic becomes a lord and his people
a privileged nobility, while the Alpine becomes eventually a serf. With a strong racial
exclusiveness, or, as we call it to-day, colour prejudice, the Nordics decHne to take
wives from the subject class, and, though irregular unions may in time take place,
marriage is strictly forbidden. In this we have the germs of the caste system so well
known in India. Similar objections to such inter-marriages are a marked feature of
the Briton throughout the empire. This custom has given rise to the strict marriage
regulations, which existed until lately among aU royal and many noble families in
Europe, and among the descendants of the Visigoths in Spain. The marriage laws
of Athens and Rome seem to imply a similar point of view. Another steppe-folk, entering
a mountain zone fiUed with an eastern Alpine population, issued a similar edict, which
they credited to their tribal god.* Thus in the mountain zone Nordic and Alpine lived
together, apparently in harmony, as lord and serf, never intermarrying and rarely,
if ever, mating with one another.
In the plain, however, the Alpines seem to have been absent, or at any rate few in
number. Here we may well imagine the Nordics continued their nomadic existence,
driving their cattle from one pasture to another. Thus the population tended to
divide into two groups, the people of the mountains and the people of the plain.
When the first group of Nordics arrived in this region, both they and their
Alpine predecessors were ignorant of metal, but a few centuries later implements of
copper began slowly to penetrate the whole area. Perhaps these arrived from the
east, up the Danube valley, either from Hissarhk II. or from those ^gean merchants,
who, as we have seen, were trading for Transylvanian gold, or taking copper axes to
the Tripolje folk. Or it may be that other ^Egean folk had by this time reached the head
3 Peake (1922) 1. 70-72. 4 Deuteronomy vii. 3.