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Title: Anthropology
Author: Kroeber, Alfred L.
Language: English
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ANTHROPOLOGY
_By_
A. L. KROEBER
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
In the preparation of Chapters II, III, and VI of this book I have drawn
on a University of California syllabus, “Three Essays on the Antiquity
and Races of Man”; for Chapter VII, on an article “Heredity, Environment,
and Civilization” in the _American Museum Journal_ for 1918; and Chapter
V makes use of some passages of “The Languages of the American Indians”
from the _Popular Science Monthly_ of 1911. In each case there has been
revision and for the most part rewriting.
Whatever quality of lucidity the volume may have is due to several
thousand young men and women with whom I have been associated during many
years at the University of California. Without their unwitting but real
co-authorship the book might never have been written, or would certainly
have been written less simply.
A. L. K.
Berkeley, California, January 22, 1923.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF ANTHROPOLOGY 1
1. Anthropology, biology, history.—2. Organic and
social elements.—3. Physical anthropology.—4. Cultural
anthropology.—5. Evolutionary processes and evolutionistic
fancies.—6. Age of anthropological science.
II. FOSSIL MAN 11
7. The “Missing Link.”—8. Family tree of the Primates.—9.
Geological and glacial time.—10. Place of man’s origin and
development.—11. Pithecanthropus.—12. Heidelberg man.—13. The
Piltdown form.—14. Neandertal man.—15. Rhodesian man.—16. The
Cro-Magnon race.—17. The Brünn race.—18. The Grimaldi race:
Neolithic races.—19. The metric expression of human evolution.
III. LIVING RACES 34
20. Race origins.—21. Race classification.—22. Traits on which
classification rests.—23. The grand divisions or primary
stocks.—24. Caucasian races.—25. Mongoloid races.—26. Negroid
races.—27. Peoples of doubtful position.—28. Continents
and oceans.—29. The history of race classifications.—30.
Emergence of the three-fold classification.—31. Other
classifications.—32. Principles and conclusions common to all
classifications.—33. Race, nationality, and language.
IV. PROBLEMS OF RACE 58
34. Questions of endowment and their validity.—35. Plan
of inquiry.—36. Anatomical evidence on evolutionary
rank.—37. Comparative physiological data.—38. Disease.—39.
Causes of cancer incidence.—40. Mental achievement and
social environment.—41. Psychological tests on the sense
faculties.—42. Intelligence tests.—43. Status of hybrids.—44.
Evidence from the cultural record of races.—45. Emotional
bias.—46. Summary.
V. LANGUAGE 87
47. Linguistic relationship: the speech family.—48. Criteria
of relationship.—49. Sound equivalences and phonetic laws.—50.
The principal speech families.—51. Classification of language
by types.—52. Permanence of language and race.—53. The
biological and historical nature of language.—54. Problems
of the relation of language and culture.—55. Period of the
origin of language.—56. Culture, speech, and nationality.—57.
Relative worth of languages.—58. Size of vocabulary.—59.
Quality of speech sounds.—60. Diffusion and parallelism in
language and culture.—61. Convergent languages.—62. Unconscious
factors in language and culture.—63. Linguistic and cultural
standards.—64. Rapidity of linguistic change.
VI. THE BEGINNINGS OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION 137
65. Fossils of the body and of the mind.—66. Stone and
metals.—67. The old and the new stone ages.—68. The Eolithic
Age.—69. The Palæolithic Age: duration, climate, animals.—70.
Subdivisions of the Palæolithic.—71. Human racial types
in the Palæolithic.—72. Palæolithic flint implements.—73.
Other materials: bone and horn.—74. Dress.—75. Harpoons and
weapons.—76. Wooden implements.—77. Fire.—78. Houses.—79.
Religion.—80. Palæolithic art.—81. Summary of advance in the
Palæolithic.
VII. HEREDITY, CLIMATE, AND CIVILIZATION 180
82. Heredity.—83. Geographical environment.—84. Diet.—85.
Agriculture.—86. Cultural factors.—87. Cultural
distribution.—88. Historical induction.
VIII. DIFFUSION 194
89. The couvade.—90. Proverbs.—91. Geographic distribution.—92.
The magic flight.—93. Flood legends.—94. The double-headed
eagle.—95. The Zodiac.—96. Measures.—97. Divination.—98.
Tobacco.—99. Migrations.
IX. PARALLELS 216
100. General observations.—101. Cultural context.—102.
Universal elements.—103. Secondary parallelism in the
Indo-European languages.—104. Textile patterns and
processes.—105. Primary parallelism: the beginnings of
writing.—106. Time reckoning.—107. Scale and pitch of Pan’s
pipes.—108. Bronze.—109. Zero.—110. Exogamic institutions.—111.
Parallels and psychology.—112. Limitations on the parallelistic
principle.
X. THE ARCH AND THE WEEK 241
113. House building and architecture.—114. The problem of
spanning.—115. The column and beam.—116. The corbelled
arch.—117. The true arch.—118. Babylonian and Etruscan
beginnings.—119. The Roman arch and dome.—120. Mediæval
cathedrals.—121. The Arabs: India: modern architecture.—122.
The week: holy numbers.—123. Babylonian discovery of
the planets.—124. Greek and Egyptian contributions: the
astrological combination.—125. The names of the days and the
Sabbath.—126. The week in Christianity, Islam, and eastern
Asia.—127. Summary of the diffusion.—128. Month-thirds and
market weeks.—129. Leap days as parallels.
XI. THE SPREAD OF THE ALPHABET 263
130. Kinds of writing: pictographic and mixed phonetic.—131.
Deficiencies of transitional systems.—132. Abbreviation
and conventionalization.—133. Presumptive origins of
transitional systems.—134. Phonetic writing: the primitive
Semitic alphabet.—135. The Greek alphabet: invention of
the vowels.—136. Slowness of the invention.—137. The Roman
alphabet.—138. Letters as numeral signs.—139. Reform in
institutions.—140. The sixth and seventh letters.—141. The
tail of the alphabet.—142. Capitals and minuscules.—143.
Conservatism and rationalization.—144. Gothic.—145. Hebrew and
Arabic.—146. The spread eastward: the writing of India.—147.
Syllabic tendencies.—148. The East Indies: Philippine
alphabets.—149. Northern Asia: the conflict of systems in Korea.
XII. THE GROWTH OF A PRIMITIVE RELIGION 293
150. Regional variation of culture.—151. Plains, Southwest,
Northwest areas.—152. California and its sub-areas.—153. The
shaping of a problem.—154. Girls’ Adolescence Rite.—155. The
First Period.—156. The Second Period: Mourning Anniversary and
First-salmon rite.—157. Era of regional differentiation.—158.
Third and Fourth Periods in Central California: Kuksu and
Hesi.—159. Third and Fourth Periods in Southern California:
Jimsonweed and Chungichnish.—160. Third and Fourth Periods
on the Lower Colorado: Dream Singing.—161. Northwestern
California: world-renewal and wealth display.—162. Summary
of religious development.—163. Other phases of culture.—164.
Outline of the culture history of California.—165. The question
of dating.—166. The evidence of archæology.—167. Age of the
shell mounds.—168. General serviceability of the method.
XIII. THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN NATIVE AMERICA 326
169. Review of the method of culture examination.—170.
Limitations on the diffusion principle.—171. Cultural
ranking.—172. Cultural abnormalities.—173. Environmental
considerations.—174. Culture areas.—175. Diagrammatic
representation of accumulation and diffusion of culture
traits.—176. Representation showing contemporaneity and
narrative representation.—177. Racial origin of the American
Indians.—178. The time of the peopling of America.—179.
Linguistic diversification.—180. The primitive culture of
the immigrants.—181. The route of entry into the western
hemisphere.—182. The spread over two continents.—183. Emergence
of middle American culture: maize.—184. Tobacco.—185. The
sequence of social institutions.—186. Rise of political
institutions: confederacy and empire.—187. Developments
in weaving.—188. Progress in spinning: cotton.—189.
Textile clothing.—190. Cults: Shamanism.—191. Crisis rites
and initiations.—192. Secret societies and masks.—193.
Priesthood.—194. Temples and sacrifice.—195. Architecture,
sculpture, towns.—196. Metallurgy.—197. Calendars and
astronomy.—198. Writing.—199. The several provincial
developments: Mexico.—200. The Andean area.—201. Colombia.—202.
The Tropical Forest.—203. Patagonia.—204. North America: the
Southwest.—205. The Southeast.—206. The Northern Woodland.—207.
Plains area.—208. The Northwest Coast.—209. Northern marginal
areas.—210. Later Asiatic influences.
XIV. THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD PREHISTORY AND ARCHÆOLOGY 393
211. Sources of knowledge.—212. Chronology of the grand
divisions of culture history.—213. The Lower and Upper
Palæolithic.—214. Race influence and regional differentiation
in the Lower Palæolithic.—215. Upper Palæolithic culture
growths and races.—216. The Palæolithic aftermath:
Azilian.—217. The Neolithic: its early phase.—218. Pottery and
the bow.—219. Bone tools.—220. The dog.—221. The hewn ax.—222.
The Full Neolithic.—223. Origin of domesticated animals and
plants.—224. Other traits of the Full Neolithic.—225. The
Bronze Age: Copper and Bronze phases.—226. Traits associated
with bronze.—227. Iron.—228. First use and spread of iron.—229.
The Hallstadt and La Tène Periods.—230. Summary of Development:
Regional differentiation.—231. The Scandinavian area as an
example.—232. The late Palæolithic Ancylus or Maglemose
Period.—233. The Early Neolithic Litorina or Kitchenmidden
Period.—234. The Full Neolithic and its subdivisions
in Scandinavia.—235. The Bronze Age and its periods in
Scandinavia.—236. Problems of chronology.—237. Principles of
the prehistoric spread of culture.
XV. THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY 440
238. The early focal area.—239. Egypt and Sumer and their
background.—240. Predynastic Egypt.—241. Culture growth
in dynastic Egypt.—242. The Sumerian development.—243.
The Sumerian hinterland.—244. Entry of Semites and
Indo-Europeans.—245. Iranian peoples and cultures.—246. The
composite culture of the Near East.—247. Phœnicians, Aramæans,
Hebrews.—248. Other contributing nationalities.—249. Ægean
civilization.—250. Europe.—251. China.—252. Growth and spread
of Chinese civilization.—253. The Lolos.—254. Korea.—255.
Japan.—256. Central and northern Asia.—257. India.—258.
Indian caste and religion.—259. Relations between India and
the outer world.—260. Indo-China.—261. Oceania.—262. The East
Indies.—263. Melanesia and Polynesia.—264. Australia.—265.
Tasmania.—266. Africa.—267. Egyptian radiations.—268. The
influence of other cultures.—269. The Bushmen.—270. The West
African culture-area and its meaning.—271. Civilization, race,
and the future.
INDEX 507
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE PAGE
1. The descent of man: diagram 12
2. The descent of man, elaborated 14
3. The descent of man in detail, according to Gregory 16
4. The descent of man in detail, according to Keith 17
5. Antiquity of man: diagram 20
6. Fossil and modern skull outlines superposed 25
7. Measurements made on fossil skulls 31
8. Relationship of the races: diagram 47
9. Family tree of the human races 48
10. Map: distribution of primary racial stocks 50
11. Map: circumpolar distribution of the races 51
12. Map: linguistic families of Asia and Europe (_facing_) 94
13. Map: linguistic families of Africa 97
14. Map: principal linguistic families of North America 99
15. Map: principal linguistic families of South America 101
16. Map: type stations of the Palæolithic periods 153
17. Earliest prehistory of Europe: diagram 156
18. Palæolithic flint implements, illustrating the principal
techniques 159
19. Flint core with reassembled flakes 163
20. Aurignacian sculpture: human figure 173
21. Magdalenian sculpture: horse 174
22. Magdalenian engraving of a mammoth 175
23. Magdalenian engraving of a herd 176
24. Magdalenian engraving of a browsing reindeer 177
25. Growth of civilization during the Palæolithic: diagram 178
26. Culture distribution and history in the Southwest: diagram 191
27. Map: diffusion of the Magic Flight tale 201
28. Maya symbols for zero 230
29. Map: types of exogamic institutions in Australia 233
30. Map: the spread of alphabetic writing (_facing_) 284
31. Map: culture-areas of native California 297
32. Map: the growth of rituals in native California 308
33. Distribution of culture elements indicative of their
history: diagram 328
34. Map: culture-areas of America 337
35. Occurrence of elements in the culture-areas of
America: diagram (_facing_) 340
36. Development of American civilization in time, according
to Spinden: diagram (_facing_) 342
37. Map: Europe in the early Lower Palæolithic 399
38. Map: Europe in the Aurignacian and Lower Capsian 401
39. Map: Europe in the Solutrean, Magdalenian, and Upper Capsian 403
40. Map: Europe in the Azilian and Terminal Capsian 409
41. Prehistoric corbelled domes in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland 420
42. Growth and spread of prehistoric civilization in Europe,
according to Müller: diagram 436
ANTHROPOLOGY
CHAPTER I
SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF ANTHROPOLOGY
1. Anthropology, biology, history.—2. Organic and
social elements.—3. Physical anthropology.—4. Cultural
anthropology.—5. Evolutionary processes and evolutionistic
fancies.—6. Age of anthropological science.
1. ANTHROPOLOGY, BIOLOGY, HISTORY
Anthropology is the science of man. This broad and literal definition
takes on more meaning when it is expanded to “the science of man and
his works.” Even then it may seem heterogeneous and too inclusive.
The products of the human mind are something different from the body.
And these products, as well as the human body, are the subjects of
firmly established sciences, which would seem to leave little room for
anthropology except as a less organized duplication. Ordinary political
history, economics, literary criticism, and the history of art all deal
with the works and doings of man; biology and medicine study his body. It
is evident that these various branches of learning cannot be relegated to
the position of mere subdivisions of anthropology and this be exalted to
the rank of a sort of holding corporation for them. There must be some
definite and workable relation.
One way in which this relation can be pictured follows to some extent
the course of anthropology as it grew into self-consciousness and
recognition. Biology, medicine, history, economies were all tilling their
fields of knowledge in the nineteenth century, some with long occupancy,
when anthropology shyly entered the scene and began to cultivate a
corner here and a patch there. It examined some of the most special and
non-utilitarian aspects of the human body: the shape of the head, the
complexion, the texture of the hair, the differences between one variety
of man and another, points of negligible import in medicine and of quite
narrow interest as against the broad principles which biology was trying
to found and fortify as the science of all life. So too the historical
sciences had preëmpted the most convenient and fruitful subjects within
reach. Anthropology modestly turned its attention to nations without
records, to histories without notable events, to institutions strange in
flavor and inventions hanging in their infancy, to languages that had
never been written.
Yet obviously the heterogeneous leavings of several sciences will never
weld into an organized and useful body of knowledge. The dilettante, the
collector of oddities who loves incoherence, may be content to observe
to-day the flare of the negro’s nostrils, to-morrow the intricacy of
prefixes that bind his words into sentences, the day after, his attempts
to destroy a foe by driving nails into a wooden idol. A science becomes
such only when it learns to discover relations and a meaning in facts.
If anthropology were to remain content with an interest in the Mongolian
eye, the dwarfishness of the Negrito, the former home of the Polynesian
race, taboos against speaking to one’s mother-in-law, rituals to make
rain, and other such exotic and superseded superstitions, it would earn
no more dignity than an antiquarian’s attic. As a co-laborer on the
edifice of fuller understanding, anthropology must find more of a task
than filling with rubble the temporarily vacant spaces in the masonry
that the sciences are rearing.
The other manner in which the subject of anthropology can be conceived
is that this is neither so vast as to include everything human, nor
is it the unappropriated odds and ends of other sciences, but rather
some particular aspect of human phenomena. If such an aspect exists,
anthropology vindicates its unity and attains to integrity of aim.
2. ORGANIC AND SOCIAL ELEMENTS
To the question why a Louisiana negro is black and thick lipped, the
answer is ready. He was born so. As dogs produce pups, and lions cubs,
so negro springs from negro and Caucasian from Caucasian. We call the
force at work, heredity. The same negro is lazy by repute, easy going
at his labor. Is this too an innate quality? Off-hand, most of us
would reply: Yes. He sings at his corn-hoeing more frequently than the
white man across the fence. Is this also because of his heredity? “Of
course: he is made so,” might be a common answer; “Probably: why not?”
a more cautious one. But now our negro is singing Suwanee River, which
his great-grandfather in Africa assuredly did not sing. As regards the
specific song, heredity is obviously no longer the cause. Our negro
may have learned it from an uncle, perhaps from his schoolmates; he
can have acquired it from human beings not his ancestors, acquired it
as part of his customs, like being a member of the Baptist church and
wearing overalls, and the thousand other things that come to him from
without instead of from within. At these points heredity is displaced by
tradition, nature by nurture, to use a familiar jingle. The efficient
forces now are quite different from those that made his skin black and
his lips thick. They are causes of another order.
The particular song of the negro and his complexion represent the
clear-cut extremes of the matter. Between them lie the sloth and the
inclination to melody. Obviously these traits may also be the result of
human example, of social environment, of contemporary tradition. There
are those that so believe, as well as those who see in them only the
effects of inborn biological impulse. Perhaps these intermediate dubious
traits are the results of a blending of nature and nurture, the strength
of each factor varying according to each trait or individual examined.
Clearly, at any rate, there is room here for debate and evidence. A
genuine problem exists. This problem cannot be solved by the historical
sciences alone because they do not concern themselves with heredity. Nor
can it be solved by biology which deals with heredity and allied factors
but does not go on to operate with the non-biological principle of
tradition.
Here, then, is a specific task and place in the sun for anthropology:
the interpretation of those phenomena into which both organic and social
causes enter. The untangling and determination and reconciling of these
two sets of forces are anthropology’s own. They constitute, whatever
else it may undertake, the focus of its attention and an ultimate goal.
No other science has grappled with this set of problems as its primary
end. Nor has anthropology as yet much of a solution to offer. It may be
said to have cleared the ground of brush, rather than begun the felling
of its tree. But, in the terminology of science, it has at least defined
its problem.
To deal with this interplay of what is natural and nurtural, organic and
social, anthropology must know something of the organic, as such, and of
the social, as such. It must be able to recognize them with surety before
it endeavors to analyze and resynthesize them. It must therefore effect
close contact with the organic and the social sciences respectively,
with “biology” and “history,” and derive all possible aid from their
contributions to knowledge. Up to the present time, a large part of
the work of anthropology has consisted in acquiring the fruits of the
activity of these sister sciences and applying them for its own ends;
or, where the needed biological and historical data were not available,
securing them.
3. PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The organic sciences underlie the social ones. They are more directly
“natural.” Anthropology has therefore found valuable general principles
in biology: laws of heredity, the doctrines of cell development and
evolution, for instance, based on facts from the whole range of life.
Its business has been to ascertain how far these principles apply to
man, what forms they take in his particular case. This has meant a
concentration of attention, the devising of special methods of inquiry.
Many biological problems, including most physiological and hereditary
ones, can be most profitably attacked in the laboratory, or at least
under experimental conditions. This method, however, is but rarely
open as regards human beings, who must ordinarily be observed as they
are. The phenomena concerning man have to be taken as they come and
laboriously sifted and re-sifted afterward, instead of being artificially
simplified in advance, as by the experimental method. Then, too, since
anthropology was operating within the narrow limits of one species, it
was driven to concern itself with minute traits, such as the zoölogist
is rarely troubled with: the proportions of the length and breadth of
the skull—the famous cephalic index—for instance; the number of degrees
the arm bones are twisted, and the like. Also, as these data had to be
used in the gross, unmodifiable by artificially varied conditions, it
has been necessary to secure them from all possible varieties of men,
different races, sexes, ages, and their nearest brute analogues. The
result is that biological or physical anthropology—“Somatology” it is
sometimes called in Anglo-Saxon countries, and simply “anthropology” in
continental Europe—has in part constituted a sort of specialization or
sharpening of general biology, and has become absorbed to a considerable
degree in certain particular phenomena and methods of studying them about
which general biologists, physiologists, palæontologists, and students of
medicine are usually but vaguely informed.
4. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The historical or social sciences overlie the organic ones. Men’s bodies
and natural equipment are back of their deeds and accomplishments as
transmitted by tradition, primary to their culture or civilization. The
relation of anthropology to historical science has therefore been in a
sense the opposite of its relation to biological science. Instead of
specializing, anthropology has been occupied with trying to generalize
the findings of history. Historians cannot experiment. They deal with the
concrete, with the unique; for in a degree every historical event has
something unparalleled about it. They may paint with a broad sweep, but
they do not lay down exact laws.
Moreover, history inevitably begins with an interest in the present and
in ourselves. In proportion as it reaches back in time and to wholly
foreign peoples, its interest tends to flag and its materials become
scant and unreliable. It is commonly considered useful for a man to
know that Napoleon was a Corsican and was defeated at Waterloo in 1815,
but a rather pedantic piece of knowledge that Shi Hwang-ti was born
in northwestern China and unified the rule of China in 221 B.C. From
a theoretical or general point of view, however, one of these facts
is presumably as important as the other, for if we wish to know the
principles that go into the shaping of human social life or civilization,
China counts for as much as France, and the ancient past for as much as
the nearby present. In fact, the foreign and the old are likely to be
inquired into with even more assiduity by the theoretically minded, since
they may furnish wholly new clues to insight, whereas the subjects of
conventional history have been so familiarized as to hold out less hope
of novel conclusions still to be extricated from them.
Here, then, is the cause of the seeming preoccupation of social or
cultural anthropology with ancient and savage and exotic and extinct
peoples: the desire to understand better all civilizations, irrespective
of time and place, in the abstract or in form of generalized principle
if possible. It is not that cave men are more illuminating than Romans,
or flint knives more interesting than fine porcelains or the art of
printing, that has led anthropology to bear so heavily on the former,
but the fact that it wanted to know about cave men and flint knives as
well as about Romans and printing presses. It would be irrational to
prefer the former to the latter, and anthropology has never accepted
the adjudication sometimes tacitly rendered that its proper field is
the primitive, as such. As well might zoölogy confine its interest
to eggs or protozoans. It is probably true that many researches into
early and savage history have sprung from an emotional predilection for
the forgotten or neglected, the obscure and strange, the unwonted and
mysterious. But such occasional personal æsthetic trends can not delimit
the range of a science or determine its aims and methods. Innumerable
historians have been inveterate gossips. One does not therefore insist
that the only proper subject of history is backstairs intimacies.
This, then, is the reason for the special development of those
subdivisions of anthropology known as Archæology, “the science of what
is old” in the career of humanity, especially as revealed by excavations
of the sites of prehistoric occupation; and Ethnology, “the science of
peoples,” irrespective of their degree of advancement.[1]
5. EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES AND EVOLUTIONISTIC FANCIES
In their more elementary aspects the two strands of the organic and
the social, or the hereditary and environmental, as they are generally
called with reference to individuals, run through all human life and
are distinguishable as mechanisms, as well as in their results. Thus a
comparison of the acquisition of the power of flight respectively by
birds in their organic development out of the ancestral reptile stem some
millions of years ago, and by men as a result of cultural progress in
the field of invention during the past generation, reveals at once the
profound differences of process that inhere in the ambiguous concept of
“evolution.” The bird gave up a pair of walking limbs to acquire wings.
He added a new faculty by transforming part of an old one. The sum total
of his parts or organs was not greater than before. The change was
transmitted only to the blood descendants of the altered individuals.
The reptile line went on as it had been before, or if it altered, did so
for causes unconnected with the evolution of the birds. The aeroplane,
on the contrary, gave men a new faculty without impairing any of those
they had previously possessed. It led to no visible bodily changes,
nor alterations of mental capacity. The invention has been transmitted
to individuals and groups not derived by descent from the inventors;
in fact, has already influenced their careers. Theoretically, it is
transmissible to ancestors if they happen to be still living. In sum, it
represents an accretion to the stock of existing culture rather than a
transformation.
Once the broad implications of the distinction which this example
illustrates have been grasped, many common errors are guarded against.
The program of eugenics, for instance, loses much of its force. There is
certainly much to be said in favor of intelligence and discrimination
in mating, as in everything else. There is need for the acquisition
of exacter knowledge on human heredity. But, in the main, the claims
sometimes made that eugenics is necessary to preserve civilization from
dissolution, or to maintain the flourishing of this or that nationality,
rest on the fallacy of recognizing only organic causes as operative,
when social as well as organic ones are active—when indeed the social
factors may be much the more powerful ones. So, in what are miscalled
race problems, the average thought of the day still reasons largely from
social effects to organic causes and perhaps vice versa. Anthropology is
by no means yet in a position to state just where the boundary between
the contributing organic and social causes of such phenomena lies. But
it does hold to their fundamental distinctness and to the importance of
this distinctness, if true understanding is the aim. Without sure grasp
of this principle, many of the arguments and conclusions in the present
volume will lose their significance.
Accordingly, the designation of anthropology as “the child of Darwin” is
most misleading. Darwin’s essential achievement was that he imagined,
and substantiated by much indirect evidence, a mechanism through which
organic evolution appeared to be taking place. The whole history of
man however being much more than an organic matter, a pure Darwinian
anthropology would be largely misapplied biology. One might almost as
justly speak of a Copernican or Newtonian anthropology.
What has greatly influenced anthropology, mainly to its damage, has been
not Darwinism, but the vague idea of evolution, to the organic aspect of
which Darwin gave such substance that the whole group of evolutionistic
ideas has luxuriated rankly ever since. It became common practice in
social anthropology to “explain” any part of human civilization by
arranging its several forms in an evolutionary sequence from lowest
to highest and allowing each successive stage to flow spontaneously
from the preceding—in other words, without specific cause. At bottom
this logical procedure was astonishingly naïve. We of our land and day
stood at the summit of the ascent, in these schemes. Whatever seemed
most different from our customs was therefore reckoned as earliest,
and other phenomena disposed wherever they would best contribute to
the straight evenness of the climb upward. The relative occurrence of
phenomena in time and space was disregarded in favor of their logical
fitting into a plan. It was argued that since we hold to definitely
monogamous marriage, the beginnings of human sexual union probably lay
in indiscriminate promiscuity. Since we accord precedence to descent
from the father, and generally know him, early society must have
reckoned descent from the mother and no one knew his father. We abhor
incest; therefore the most primitive men normally married their sisters.
These are fair samples of the conclusions or assumptions of the classic
evolutionistic school of anthropology, whose roster was graced by some
of the most illustrious names in the science. Needless to say, these men
tempered the basic crudity of their opinions by wide knowledge, acuity or
charm of presentation, and frequent insight and sound sense in concrete
particulars. In their day, a generation or two ago, under the spell of
the concept of evolution in its first flush, such methods of reasoning
were almost inevitable. To-day they are long threadbare, descended to
material for newspaper science or idle speculation, and evidence of a
tendency toward the easy smugness of feeling oneself superior to all the
past. These ways of thought are mentioned here only as an example of the
beclouding that results from baldly transferring biologically legitimate
concepts into the realm of history, or viewing this as unfolding
according to a simple plan of progress.
6. AGE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCE
The foregoing exposition will make clear why anthropology is generally
regarded as one of the newer sciences—why its chairs are few, its places
in curricula of education scattered. As an organized science, with
a program and a method of its own, it is necessarily recent because
it could not arise until the biological and social sciences had both
attained enough organized development to come into serious contact.
On the other hand, as an unmethodical body of knowledge, as an interest,
anthropology is plainly one of the oldest of the sisterhood of sciences.
How could it well be otherwise than that men were at least as much
interested in each other as in the stars and mountains and plants and
animals? Every savage is a bit of an ethnologist about neighboring
tribes and knows a legend of the origin of mankind. Herodotus, the
“father of history,” devoted half of his nine books to pure ethnology,
and Lucretius, a few centuries later, tried to solve by philosophical
deduction and poetical imagination many of the same problems that modern
anthropology is more cautiously attacking with the methods of science.
In neither chemistry nor geology nor biology was so serious an interest
developed as in anthropology, until nearly two thousand years after these
ancients.
In the pages that follow, the central anthropological problems that
concern the relations of the organic and cultural factors in man will
be defined and solutions offered to the degree that they seem to have
been validly determined. On each side of this goal, however, stretches
an array of more or less authenticated formulations, of which some
of the more important will be reviewed. On the side of the organic,
consideration will tend largely to matters of fact; in the sphere of
culture, processes can here and there be illustrated; in accord with
the fact that anthropology rests upon biological and underlies purely
historical science.
CHAPTER II
FOSSIL MAN
7. The “Missing Link.”—8. Family tree of the Primates.—9.
Geological and glacial time.—10. Place of man’s origin and
development.—11. Pithecanthropus.—12. Heidelberg man.—13. The
Piltdown form.—14. Neandertal man.—15. Rhodesian man.—16. The
Cro-Magnon race.—17. The Brünn race.—18. The Grimaldi race:
Neolithic races.—19. The metric expression of human evolution.
7. THE “MISSING LINK”
No modern zoölogist has the least doubt as to the general fact of organic
evolution. Consequently anthropologists take as their starting point the
belief in the derivation of man from some other animal form. There is
also no question as to where in a general way man’s ancestry is to be
sought. He is a mammal closely allied to the other mammals, and therefore
has sprung from some mammalian type. His origin can be specified even
more accurately. The mammals fall into a number of fairly distinct
groups, such as the Carnivores or flesh-eating animals, the Ungulates
or hoofed animals, the Rodents or gnawing animals, the Cetaceans or
whales, and several others. The highest of these mammalian groups, as
usually reckoned, is the Primate or “first” order of the animal kingdom.
This Primate group includes the various monkeys and apes and man. The
ancestors of the human race are therefore to be sought somewhere in the
order of Primates, past or present.
The popular but inaccurate expression of this scientific conviction is
that “man is descended from the monkeys,” but that a link has been lost
in the chain of descent: the famous “missing link.” In a loose way this
statement reflects modern scientific opinion; but it certainly is partly
erroneous. Probably not a single authority maintains to-day that man is
descended from any species of monkey now living. What students during
the past sixty years have more and more come to be convinced of, was
already foreshadowed by Darwin: namely that man and the apes are both
descended from a common ancestor. This common ancestor may be described
as a primitive Primate, who differed in a good many details both from the
monkeys and from man, and who has probably long since become extinct.
[Illustration: FIG. 1. Erroneous (left) and more valid (right)
representation of the descent of man.]
The situation may be clarified by two diagrams (Fig. 1). The first
diagram represents the inaccurate view which puts the monkey at the
bottom of the line of descent, man at the top, and the missing link in
the middle of the straight line. The illogicality of believing that our
origin occurred in this manner is apparent as soon as one reflects that
according to this scheme the monkey at the beginning and man at the end
of the line still survive, whereas the “missing link,” which is supposed
to have connected them, has become extinct.
Clearly the relation must be different. Whatever the missing link may
have been, the mere fact that he is not now alive on earth means that we
must construct our diagram so that it will indicate his past existence
as compared with the survival of man and the apes. This means that the
missing link must be put lower in the figure than man and the apes,
and our illustration therefore takes on the form shown in the right
half of figure 1, which may be described as Y-shaped. The stem of the
Y denotes the pre-ancestral forms leading back into other mammalian
groups and through them—if carried far enough down—to the amphibians and
invertebrates. The missing link comes at the fork of the Y. He represents
the last point at which man and the monkeys were still one, and beyond
which they separated and became different. It is just because the missing
link represented the last common form that he was the link between man
and the monkeys. From him onwards, the monkeys followed their own course,
as indicated by the left-hand branch of the Y, and man went his separate
way along the right-hand branch.
8. FAMILY TREE OF THE PRIMATES
While this second diagram illustrates the most essential elements in
modern belief as to man’s origin, it does not of course pretend to give
the details. To make the diagram at all precise, the left fork of the Y,
which here stands for the monkeys as a group—in other words, represents
all the living Primates other than man—would have to be denoted by a
number of branching and subdividing lines. Each of the main branches
would represent one of the four or five subdivisions or “families” of the
Primates, such as the Anthropoid or manlike apes, and the Cebidæ or South
American monkeys. The finer branches would stand for the several genera
and species in each of these families. For instance, the Anthropoid line
would split into four, standing respectively for the Gibbon, Orang-utan,
Chimpanzee, and Gorilla.
The fork of the Y representing man would not branch and rebranch so
intricately as the fork representing the monkeys. Many zoölogists regard
all the living varieties of man as constituting a single species, while
even those who are inclined to recognize several species limit the number
of these species to three or four. Then too the known extinct varieties
of man are comparatively few. There is some doubt whether these human
fossil types are to be reckoned as direct ancestors of modern man, and
therefore as mere points in the main human line of our diagram; or
whether they are to be considered as having been ancient collateral
relatives who split off from the main line of human development. In the
latter event, their designation in the diagram would have to be by
shorter lines branching out of the human fork of the Y.
[Illustration: FIG. 2. The descent of man, elaborated over Figure 1. For
further ramifications, see Figures 3, 4, 9.]
This subject quickly becomes a technical problem requiring rather
refined evidence to answer. In general, prevailing opinion looks upon
the later fossil ancestors of man as probably direct or true ancestors,
but tends to regard the earlier of these extinct forms as more likely to
have been collateral ones. This verdict applies with particular force
to the earliest of all, the very one which comes nearest to fulfilling
the popular idea of the missing link: the so-called _Pithecanthropus
erectus_. If the Pithecanthropus were truly the missing link, he would
have to be put at the exact crotch of the Y. Since he is recognized,
however, as a form more or less ancestral to man, and somewhat less
ancestral to the apes, he should probably be placed a short distance up
on the human stem of the Y, or close alongside it. On the other hand,
inasmuch as most palæontologists and comparative anatomists believe that
Pithecanthropus was not directly ancestral to us, in the sense that
no living men have Pithecanthropus blood flowing in their veins, he
would therefore be an ancient collateral relative of humanity—a sort of
great-great-granduncle—and would be best represented by a short stub
coming out of the human line a little above its beginning (Fig. 2).
Even this figure is not complete, since it is possible that some of the
fossil types which succeeded Pithecanthropus in point of time, such as
the Heidelberg and Piltdown men, were also collateral rather than direct
ancestors. Some place even the later Neandertal man in the collateral
class. It is only when the last of the fossil types, the Cro-Magnon race,
is reached, that opinion becomes comparatively unanimous that this is a
form directly ancestral to us. For accuracy, therefore, figure 2 might
be revised by the addition of other short lines to represent the several
earlier fossil types: these would successively spring from the main human
line at higher and higher levels.
In order not to complicate unnecessarily the fundamental facts of
the case—especially since many data are still interpreted somewhat
variously—no attempt will be made here to construct such a complete
diagram as authoritative. Instead, there are added reproductions of the
family tree of man and the apes as the lineages have been worked out
independently by two authorities (Figs. 3, 4). It is clear that these two
family trees are in substantial accord as regards their main conclusions,
but that they show some variability in details. This condition reflects
the present state of knowledge. All experts are in accord as to certain
basic principles; but it is impossible to find two authors who agree
exactly in their understanding of the less important data.
9. GEOLOGICAL AND GLACIAL TIME
A remark should be made here as to the age of these ancestral forms.
The record of life on earth, as known from the fossils in stratified
rocks, is divided into four great periods. The earliest, the _Primary_ or
_Palæozoic_, comprises about two-thirds of the total lapse of geologic
time. During the Palæozoic all the principal divisions of invertebrate
animals came into existence, but of the vertebrates only the fishes.
In the _Secondary_ or _Mesozoic_ period, evolution progressed to the
point where reptiles were the highest and dominant type, and the first
feeble bird and mammal forms appeared. The Mesozoic embraces most of the
remaining third or so of the duration of life on the earth, leaving only
something like five million years for the last two periods combined, as
against thirty, fifty, ninety, or four hundred million years that the
Palæozoic and Mesozoic are variously estimated to have lasted.
[Illustration: FIG. 3. The descent of man in detail, according to
Gregory (somewhat simplified). Extinct forms: 1, Parapithecus; 2,
Propliopithecus; 3, Palæosimia; 4, Sivapithecus; 5, Dryopithecus; 6,
Palæopithecus; 7, Pliopithecus; P, Pithecanthropus erectus; H, Homo
Heidelbergensis; N, Homo Neandertalensis.]
[Illustration: FIG. 4. The descent of man in detail, according to
Keith (somewhat simplified). Extinct forms: 2, 5, 6, 7 as in Figure 3;
Pith(ecanthropus), Pilt(down), Neand(ertal). Living forms: Gb, Or, Ch,
Go, the anthropoid apes as in Figure 3.]
These last five million years or so of the earth’s history are divided
unequally between the _Tertiary_ or Age of Mammals, and the _Quaternary_
or Age of Man. About four million years are usually assigned to the
Tertiary with its subdivisions, the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, and
Pliocene. The Quaternary was formerly reckoned by geologists to have
lasted only about a hundred thousand years. Later this estimate was
raised to four or five hundred thousand, and at present the prevailing
opinion tends to put it at about a million years. There are to be
recognized, then, a four million year Age of Mammals before man, or even
any definitely pre-human form, had appeared; and a final period of about
a million years during which man gradually assumed his present bodily
and mental type. In this Quaternary period fall all the forms which are
treated in the following pages.
The Quaternary is usually subdivided into two periods, the Pleistocene
and the Recent. The Recent is very short, perhaps not more than ten
thousand years. It represents, geologically speaking, the mere instant
which has elapsed since the final disappearance of the great glaciers.
It is but little longer than historic time; and throughout the Recent
there are encountered only modern forms of man. Back of it, the much
longer Pleistocene is often described as the Ice Age or Glacial Epoch;
and both in Europe and North America careful research has succeeded
in demonstrating four successive periods of increase of the ice. In
Europe these are generally known as the Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm
glaciations. The probable American equivalents are the Nebraskan,
Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsin periods of ice spread. Between each
of these four came a warmer period when the ice melted and its sheets
receded. These are the “interglacial periods” and are designated as the
first, second, and third. These glacial and interglacial periods are of
importance because they offer a natural chronology or time scale for
the Pleistocene, and usually provide the best means of dating the fossil
human types that have been or may hereafter be discovered (Fig. 5).
10. PLACE OF MAN’S ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
Before we proceed to the fossil finds themselves, we must note that
the greater part of the surface of the earth has been very imperfectly
explored. Africa, Asia, and Australia may quite conceivably contain
untold scientific treasures which have not yet been excavated. One cannot
assert that they are lying in the soil or rocks of these continents; but
one also cannot affirm that they are not there. North and South America
have been somewhat more carefully examined, at least in certain of their
areas, but with such regularly negative results that the prevailing
opinion now is that these two continents—possibly through being shut off
by oceans or ice masses from the eastern hemisphere—were not inhabited
by man during the Pleistocene. The origin of the human species cannot
then be sought in the western hemisphere. This substantially leaves
Europe as the one continent in which excavations have been carried on
with prospects of success; and it is in the more thoroughly explored
western half of Europe that all but two of the unquestioned discoveries
of ancient man have been made. One of these exceptional finds is from
Africa. The other happens to be the one that dates earliest of all—the
same Pithecanthropus already mentioned as being the closest known
approach to the “missing link.” Pithecanthropus was found in Java.
Now it might conceivably prove true that man originated in Europe and
that this is the reason that the discoveries of his most ancient remains
have to date been so largely confined to that continent. On the other
hand, it does seem much more reasonable to believe that this smallest of
the continents, with its temperate or cold climate, and its poverty of
ancient and modern species of monkeys, is likely not to have been the
true home, or at any rate not the only home, of the human family. The
safest statement of the case would be that it is not known in what part
of the earth man originated; that next to nothing is known of the history
of his development on most of the continents; and that that portion of
his history which chiefly is known is the fragment which happened to take
place in Europe.
[Illustration: FIG. 5. Antiquity of man. This diagram is drawn to scale,
proportionate to the number of years estimated to have elapsed, as far
down as 100,000. Beyond, the scale is one-half, to bring the diagram
within the limits of the page.]
11. PITHECANTHROPUS
_Pithecanthropus erectus_, the “erect ape-man,” was determined from the
top part of a skull, a thigh bone, and two molar teeth found in 1891
under fifty feet of strata by Dubois, a Dutch surgeon, near Trinil, in
the East Indian island of Java. The skull and the thigh lay some distance
apart but at the same level and probably are from the same individual.
The period of the stratum is generally considered early Pleistocene,
possibly approximately contemporary with the first or Günz glaciation of
Europe—nearly a million years ago, by the time scale here followed. Java
was then a part of the mainland of Asia.
The skull is low, with narrow receding forehead and heavy ridges of bone
above the eye sockets—“supraorbital ridges.” The capacity is estimated
at 850 or 900 cubic centimeters—half as much again as that of a large
gorilla, but nearly one-half less than the average for modern man. The
skull is dolichocephalic—long for its breadth—like the skulls of all
early fossil men; whereas the anthropoid apes are more broad-headed. The
jaws are believed to have projected almost like a snout; but as they
remain undiscovered, this part of the reconstruction is conjectural. The
thigh bone is remarkably straight, indicating habitual upright posture;
its length suggests that the total body stature was about 5 feet 7
inches, or as much as the height of most Europeans.
Pithecanthropus was a terrestrial and not an arboreal form. He seems to
have been slightly more similar to modern man than to any ape, and is
the most primitive manlike type yet discovered. But he is very different
from both man and the apes, as his name indicates: _Pithecanthropus_ is a
distinct genus, not included in _Homo_, or man.
12. HEIDELBERG MAN
Knowledge of Heidelberg man rests on a single piece of bone—a lower jaw
found in 1907 by Schoetensack at a depth of nearly eighty feet in the
Mauer sands not far from Heidelberg, Germany. Like the Pithecanthropus
remains, the Heidelberg specimen lay in association with fossils of
extinct mammals, a fact which makes possible its dating. It probably
belongs to the second interglacial period, so that its antiquity is only
about half as great as that of Pithecanthropus (Fig. 5).
The jaw is larger and heavier than any modern human jaw. The ramus, or
upright part toward the socket, is enormously broad, as in the anthropoid
apes. The chin is completely lacking; but this area does not recede so
much as in the apes. Heidelberg man’s mouth region must have projected
considerably more than that of modern man, but much less than that of a
gorilla or a chimpanzee. The contour of the jaw as seen from above is
human (oval), not simian (narrow and oblong).
The teeth, although large, are essentially human. They are set close
together, with their tops flush, as in man; the canines lack the
tusk-like character which they retain in the apes.
Since the skull and the limb bones of this form are wholly unknown, it is
somewhat difficult to picture the type as it appeared in life. But the
jaw being as manlike as it is apelike, and the teeth distinctly human,
the Heidelberg type is to be regarded as very much nearer to modern man
than to the ape, or as farther along the line of evolutionary development
than Pithecanthropus; as might be expected from its greater recency. This
relationship is expressed by the name, _Homo Heidelbergensis_, which
recognizes the type as belonging to the genus man.
13. THE PILTDOWN FORM
This form is reconstructed from several fragments of a female brain case,
some small portions of the face, nearly half the lower jaw, and a number
of teeth, found in 1911-13 by Dawson and Woodward in a gravel layer at
Piltdown in Sussex, England. Great importance has been ascribed to this
skull, but too many of its features remain uncertain to render it safe
to build large conclusions upon the discovery. The age cannot be fixed
with positiveness; the deposit is only a few feet below the surface, and
in the open; the associated fossils have been washed or rolled into the
layer; some of them are certainly much older than the skull, belonging
to animals characteristic of the Pliocene, that is, the Tertiary. If
the age of the skull was the third interglacial period, as on the whole
seems most likely, its antiquity might be less than a fourth that of
Pithecanthropus and half that of Heidelberg man.
The skull capacity has been variously estimated at 1,170, nearly 1,300,
and nearly 1,500 c.c.; the pieces do not join, so that no certain proof
can be given for any figure. Except for unusual thickness of the bone,
the skull is not particularly primitive. The jaw and the teeth, on the
other hand, are scarcely distinguishable from those of a chimpanzee.
They are certainly far less human than the Heidelberg jaw and teeth,
which are presumably earlier. This human skull and simian jaw are an
almost incompatible combination. More than one expert has got over the
difficulty by assuming that the skull of a contemporary human being and
the jaw of a chimpanzee happened to be deposited in the same gravel.
In view of these doubts and discrepancies, the claim that the Piltdown
form belongs to a genus _Eoanthropus_ distinct from that of man is to
be viewed with reserve. This interpretation would make the Piltdown
type more primitive than the probably antecedent Heidelberg man. Some
authorities do regard it as both more primitive and earlier.
14. NEANDERTAL MAN
The preceding forms are each known only from partial fragments of the
bones of a single individual. The Neandertal race is substantiated by
some dozens of different finds, including half a dozen nearly complete
skulls, and several skeletons of which the greater portions have been
preserved. These fossils come from Spain, France, Belgium, Germany,
and what was Austro-Hungary, or, roughly, from the whole western
half of Europe. They are all of similar type and from the Mousterian
period of the Palæolithic or Old Stone Age (§ 70-72, Fig. 17); whereas
Pithecanthropus, Heidelberg, and perhaps Piltdown are earlier than the
Stone Age. The Mousterian period may be dated as coincident with the
peak of the last or Würm glaciation, that is, about 50,000 to 25,000
years ago. Its race—the Neandertal type—was clearly though primitively
human; which fact is reflected in the various systematic names that have
been given it: _Homo Neandertalensis_, _Homo Mousteriensis_, or _Homo
primigenius_.
THE MOST IMPORTANT NEANDERTAL DISCOVERIES
1856 Neandertal Near Düsseldorf, Skull cap and parts of
Germany skeleton
1848 Gibraltar Spain Greater part of skull
1887 Spy I Belgium Skull and parts of
skeleton
1887 Spy II Belgium Skull and parts of
skeleton
1889-1905 Krapina Moravia Parts of ten or more
skulls and skeletons
1908 La-Chapelle- Corrèze, France Skeleton including
aux-Saints skull
1908 Le Moustier Dordogne, France Skeleton, including
skull, of youth
1909 La Ferrassie I Dordogne, France Partial skeleton
1910 La Ferrassie II Dordogne, France Skeleton
1911 La Quina Charente, France Skull and parts of
skeleton
1911 Jersey Island in English Teeth
Channel
Neandertal man was short: around 5 feet 3 inches for men, 4 feet 10
inches for women, or about the same as the modern Japanese. A definite
curvature of his thigh bone indicates a knee habitually somewhat bent,
and probably a slightly stooping or slouching attitude. All his bones are
thickset: his musculature must have been powerful. The chest was large,
the neck bull-like, the head hung forward upon it. This head was massive:
its capacity averaged around 1,550 c.c., or equal to that of European
whites and greater than the mean of all living races of mankind (Fig. 6).
The head was rather low and the forehead sloped back. The supraorbital
ridges were heavy: the eyes peered out from under beetling brows. The
jaws were prognathous, though not more than in many Australians and
Negroes; the chin receded but existed.
SOME NEANDERTAL MEASUREMENTS
_Fossil_ _Skull _Stature_
Capacity_
Neandertal 1400 c.c. 5 ft. 4 (or 1) in.
Spy I 1550 c.c. 5 ft. 4 in.
Spy II 1700 c.c.
La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1600 c.c. 5 ft. 3 (or 2) in.
La Ferrassie I 5 ft. 5 in.
Average of male Neandertals 1550 c.c. 5 ft. 4 (or 3) in.
Average of modern European males 1550 c.c. 5 ft. 5 to 8 in.
Average—modern mankind 1450 c.c. 5 ft. 5 in.
Gibraltar 1300 c.c.
La Quina 1350 c.c.
La Ferrassie II 4 ft. 10 in.
Average of modern European females 1400 c.c. 5 ft. 1 to 3 in.
The artifacts found in Mousterian deposits show that Neandertal man
chipped flint tools in several ways, knew fire, and buried his dead. It
may be assumed as almost certain that he spoke some sort of language.
[Illustration: FIG. 6. Skulls of 1, Pithecanthropus; 2, Neandertal
man (Chapelle-aux-Saints); 3, Sixth Dynasty Egyptian; 4, Old Man of
Cro-Magnon. Combined from Keith. The relatively close approximation of
Neandertal man to recent man, and the full frontal development of the
Cro-Magnon race, are evident.]
15. RHODESIAN MAN
Quite recent is the discovery of an African fossil man. This occurred in
1921 at Broken Hill Bone Cave in northern Rhodesia. A nearly complete
skull was found, though without lower jaw; a small piece of the upper
jaw of a second individual; and several other bones, including a tibia.
The remains were ninety feet deep in a cave, associated with vast
quantities of mineralized animal bones. Their age however is unknown.
The associated fauna is one of living species only; but this does not
imply the same recency as in Europe, since the animal life of Africa has
altered relatively little since well back in the Pleistocene.
Measurements of Rhodesian man have not yet been published. The available
descriptions point to a small brain case with low vault in the frontal
region; more extremely developed eyebrow ridges than in any living or
fossil race of man, including Pithecanthropus; a large gorilla-like face,
with marked prognathism and a long stretch between nose and teeth—the
area covered by the upper lip; a flaring but probably fairly prominent
nose; an enormous palate and dental arch—too large to accommodate even
the massive Heidelberg jaw; large teeth, but without the projecting
canines of the apes and of the lower jaw attributed to Piltdown man; and
a forward position of the foramen magnum—the aperture by which the spinal
cord enters the brain—which suggests a fully upright position. The same
inference is derivable from the long, straight shin-bone.
On the whole, this seems to be a form most closely allied to Neandertal
man, though differing from him in numerous respects, and especially in
the more primitive type of face. It is well to remember, however, that of
none of the forms anterior to Neandertal man—Pithecanthropus, Heidelberg,
Piltdown—has the face been recovered. If these were known, the Rhodesian
face might seem less impressively ape-like. It is also important to
observe that relatively primitive and advanced features exist side by
side in Rhodesian man; the face and eyebrow ridges are somewhat off-set
by the prominent nose, erect posture, and long clean limb bones. It is
therefore likely that this form was a collateral relative of Neandertal
man rather than his ancestor or descendant. Its place in the history of
the human species can probably be fixed only after the age of the bones
is determined. Yet it is already clear that the discovery is important in
at least three respects. It reveals the most ape-like face yet found in a
human variety; it extends the record of fossil man to a new continent;
and that continent is the home of the two living apes—the gorilla and
chimpanzee—recognized as most similar to man.
16. THE CRO-MAGNON RACE
The Cro-Magnon race is not only within the human species, but possibly
among the ancestors of modern Europeans. While Neandertal man is
still _Homo Neandertalensis_—the genus of living man, but a different
species—the Cro-Magnon type is _Homo sapiens_—that is, a variety of
ourselves. The age is that of the gradual, fluctuating retreat of
the glaciers—the later Cave period of the Old Stone Age: the Upper
Palæolithic, in technical language, comprising the Aurignacian, the
Solutrean, and the Magdalenian (§ 70). In years, this was the time from
25,000 to 10,000 B.C.
SOME IMPORTANT REMAINS OF CRO-MAGNON TYPE
_Aurignacian_
1868 Cro-Magnon Dordogne, France 5 incomplete skeletons
1872-74 Grimaldi Mentone, N.W. Italy 12 skeletons
1909 Laugerie Haute Dordogne, France Skeleton
1909 Combe-Capelle Périgord, France Skeleton
_Magdalenian_
1872 Laugerie Basse Dordogne, France Skeleton
1888 Chancelade Dordogne, France Skeleton, nearly complete
1914 Obercassel Near Bonn, Germany 2 skeletons
The Cro-Magnon race of Aurignacian times, as represented by the finds
at Cro-Magnon and Grimaldi,[2] was excessively tall and large-brained,
surpassing any living race of man in both respects.
The adult male buried at Cro-Magnon measured 5 feet 11 inches in life;
five men at Grimaldi measured from 5 feet 10½ inches to 6 feet 4½ inches,
averaging 6 feet 1½ inches. The tallest men now on earth, certain Scots
and Negroes, average less than 5 feet 11 inches. A girl at Grimaldi
measured 5 feet 5 inches. This race was not only tall, but clean-limbed,
lithe, and swift.
Their brains were equally large. Those of the five male skulls from
Grimaldi contain from over 1,700 to nearly 1,900 c.c.—an average of 1,800
c.c.; that of the old man of Cro-Magnon, nearly 1,600 c.c.; of a woman
there, 1,550 c.c. If these individuals were not exceptional, the figures
mean that the size and weight of the brain of the early Cro-Magnon people
was some fifteen or twenty per cent greater than that of modern Europeans.
The cephalic index is low—that is, the skull was long and narrow, as in
all the types here considered; but the face was particularly broad. The
forehead rose well domed; the supraorbital development was moderate,
as in recent men; the features must have been attractive even by our
standards.
Three of the best preserved skeletons of the Magdalenian period are those
of women. Their statures run 4 feet 7 inches, 5 feet 1 inch, 5 feet 1
inch, which would indicate a corresponding normal height for men not far
from that of the average European of to-day. The male from Obercassel
attained a stature of about 5 feet 3 inches, a cranial capacity of 1,500
c.c., and combined a long skull with a wide face. The general type of the
Magdalenian period might be described as a reduced Cro-Magnon one.
The Cro-Magnon peoples used skilfully made harpoons, originated a
remarkable art, and in general attained a development of industries
parallel to their high degree of bodily progress.
17. THE BRÜNN RACE
Several remains have been found in central Europe which have sometimes
been considered as belonging to the Neandertal race and sometimes to
the subsequent Cro-Magnon race, but do not belong clearly with either,
and may perhaps be regarded as distinct from both and possibly bridging
them. The type is generally known as the Brünn race. Its habitat was
Czecho-Slovakia and perhaps adjacent districts; its epoch, postglacial,
in the Solutrean period of the Upper Palæolithic (§ 70). The Brünn race,
so far as present knowledge of it goes, was therefore both preceded and
succeeded by Cro-Magnon man.
1871 Brüx Bohemia Skull cap
1880 Predmost Moravia Parts of 20 skeletons
1891 Brünn Moravia Skeleton, 2 skulls
The Brünn race belongs with modern man: its species is no longer _Homo
Neandertalensis_, but _Homo sapiens_, to which we also belong. The
heavy supraorbital ridges of the earlier type are now divided by a
depression over the nose instead of stretching continuously across the
forehead; the chin is becoming pronounced, the jaws protrude less than
in Neandertal man. The skull is somewhat higher and better vaulted. In
all these respects there is an approach to the Cro-Magnon race. But the
distinctively broad face of the Cro-Magnon people is not in evidence.
A skull of uncertain geologic age, found in 1888 at Galley Hill, near
London, is by some linked with the Brünn race. The same is true of an
unusually well preserved skeleton found in 1909 at Combe-Capelle, in
Périgord, southern France. The period of the Combe-Capelle skeleton is
Upper Palæolithic Aurignacian. This was part of the era of the Cro-Magnon
race in western Europe; and as the Combe-Capelle remains do not differ
much from the Cro-Magnon type, they are best considered as belonging to
it.
18. THE GRIMALDI RACE: NEOLITHIC RACES
The Grimaldi race is to date represented by only two skeletons, those of
a woman and a youth—possibly mother and son—found in 1906 in a grotto at
Grimaldi near Mentone, in Italy, close to the French border. They reposed
in lower layers, above which subsequent Cro-Magnon burials of Aurignacian
date had been made. Their age is therefore early Aurignacian: the
beginning of the Upper Palæolithic or later Cave period of the Old Stone
Age. The statures are 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 1 inch—the youth was not
fully grown; the skull capacities 1,375 and nearly 1,600 c.c.
The outstanding feature of both skeletons is that they bear a number of
Negroid characteristics. The forearm and lower leg are long as compared
with the upper arm and thigh; the pelvis high and small; the jaws
prognathous, the nose flat, the eye orbits narrow. All these are Negro
traits. This is important, in view of the fact that all the other ancient
fossils of men are either more primitive than the living races or, like
Cro-Magnon, perhaps ancestral to the Caucasian race.
No fossil remains of any ancestral Mongolian type have yet been
discovered.
The New Stone Age, beginning about 10,000 or 8,000 B.C., brings the
Grenelle and other types of man; but these are so essentially modern that
they need not be considered here. In the Neolithic period, broad heads
are for the first time encountered, as they occur at present in Europe
and other continents, alongside of narrow ones. The virtual fixity of the
human type for these last ten thousand years is by no means incredible.
Egyptian mummies and skeletons prove that the type of that country has
changed little in five thousand years except as the result of invasions
and admixture.
19. THE METRIC EXPRESSION OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
The relations of the several fossil types of man and their gradual
progression are most accurately expressed by certain skull angles and
proportions, or indexes, which have been specially devised for the
purpose. The anthropometric criteria that are of most importance in the
study of living races, more or less fail in regard to prehistoric man.
The hair, complexion, and eye-color are not preserved. The head breadth,
as indicated by the cephalic index, is substantially the same from
Pithecanthropus to the last Cro-Magnons. Stature on the other hand varies
from one to another ancient race without evincing much tendency to grow
or to diminish consistently. Often, too, there is only part of a skull
preserved. The following proportions of the top or vault of the skull—the
calvarium—are therefore useful for expressing quantitatively the gradual
physical progress of humanity from its beginning.
Three anatomical points on the surface of the skull are the pivots on
which these special indexes and angles rest. One is the _Glabella_ (G
in figure 7), the slight swelling situated between the eyebrows and
above the root of the nose. The second is the _Inion_ (I), the most
rearward point on the skull. The third is the _Bregma_ (B) or point of
intersection of the sutures which divide the frontal from the parietal
bones. The bregma falls at or very near the highest point of the skull.
If now we see a skull lengthwise, or draw a projection of it, and connect
the glabella and the inion by a line GI, and the glabella and the bregma
by a line GB, an acute angle, BGI, is formed. This is the “bregma angle.”
Obviously a high vaulted skull or one that has the superior point B well
forward will show a greater angle than a low flat skull or one with its
summit lying far back.
[Illustration: FIG. 7. Indices and angles of special significance in the
change from fossil to living man. Calvarial height index, _BX_: _GI_.
Bregma position index, _GX_: _GI_. Bregma angle, _BGI_. Frontal angle,
_FGI_.]
Next, let us drop a vertical from the bregma to the line GI, cutting
it at X. Obviously the proportion which the vertical line BX bears to
the horizontal line GI will be greater or less as the arch or vault of
the brain case is higher or lower. This proportion BX: GI, expressed in
percentages, is the “calvarial height index.”
THE SKULL OF MODERN AND FOSSIL MAN
_Calvarial _Bregma _Bregma _Frontal
Height Angle_ Position Angle_
Index_ Index_
Maximum for modern man 68 66
Average for modern man 59 58 30.5 90
90 Central Europeans 60 61 31
28 Bantu Negroes 59 59 31
7 Greenland Eskimos 56 58 30
43 Australian natives 56 57.5 (33)
8 Tasmanian natives 56 57
Minimum for modern man 47.5 46 37 72
Chancelade 57 60
Combe-Capelle 54.5 58
Aurignac 54.5
Cro-Magnon I 50 54 33
Brünn I 51 52 75
Galley Hill 48 52 82
Brüx 48 51? 75?
Le Moustier 47
Krapina C 46 52 70
Spy II 44 50 35 67
Krapina D 42 50 32 66
Chapelle-aux-Saints 40.5 45.5 36.5 65
Spy I 41 45 35 57.5
Gibraltar 40 50 73?
Neandertal 40 44 38 62
Pithecanthropus 34 38 42 52.5
Maximum for any Anthropoid ape 38 39.5 63
Chimpanzee 32 34 47 56
Gorilla 20 22 42
Orang-utan 27 32 45
SUMMARIZED AVERAGES
Modern races 59 58 31 90
Cro-Magnon race 54 57 33
Brünn race 49 52 77
Neandertal man 42 48 35 66
Pithecanthropus 34 38 42 52
Anthropoid apes 26 30 45
If now we compute the proportion of the GX part of the line GI to the
whole of this line, we have the “bregma position index”; that is, a
numerical indication of how far forward on the skull the highest point B
lies. A sloping or retreating forehead naturally tends to have the bregma
rearward; whereas if the frontal bone is nearly vertical, resulting
in a high, domed expanse of forehead, the bregma tends to be situated
farther forward, the point X shifts in the same direction, the distance
GX becomes shorter in comparison to the whole line GI, and the “bregma
position index” falls numerically.
The “frontal angle,” finally, is determined by drawing a line GF from
the glabella tangent to the most protruding part of the frontal bone and
measuring the angle between this and the horizontal GI. A small frontal
angle obviously means a receding forehead.
All these data can be obtained from the mere upper fragment of a skull;
they relate to that feature which is probably of the greatest importance
in the evolution of man from the lower animals—the development of the
brain case and therefore of the brain, especially of the cerebrum or
fore-brain; and they define this evolution rather convincingly. The
table, which compiles some of the most important findings, shows that
progress has been fairly steadily continuous in the direction of greater
cerebral development.
CHAPTER III
LIVING RACES
20. Race origins.—21. Race classification.—22. Traits on which
classification rests.—23. The grand divisions or primary
stocks.—24. Caucasian races.—25. Mongoloid races.—26. Negroid
races.—27. Peoples of doubtful position.—28. Continents and
oceans.—29. The history of race classifications.—30. Emergence
of the threefold classification.—31. Other classifications.—32.
Principles and conclusions common to all classifications.—33.
Race, nationality, and language.
20. RACE ORIGINS
Almost every one sooner or later becomes interested in the problem of
the origin of the human races and the history of their development. We
see mankind divided into a number of varieties that differ strikingly in
appearance. If these varieties are modifications of a single ancestral
form, what caused them to alter, and what has been the history of the
change?
In the present state of science, we cannot wholly answer these important
questions. We know very little about the causes that change human types;
and we possess only incomplete information as to the history of races.
Stray bits of evidence here and there are too scattered to afford many
helpful clues. The very earliest men, as we know them from fossils, are
too far removed from any of the living varieties, are too primitive, to
link very definitely with the existing races, which can all be regarded
as intergrading varieties of a single species, _Homo sapiens_. In the
latter half of the Old Stone Age, in the Aurignacian period, at a time
estimated to have been from twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago,
we commence to encounter fossils which seem to foreshadow the modern
races. The so-called Grimaldi type of man from this period possesses
Negroid affinities, the contemporary Cro-Magnon and perhaps Brünn types
evince Caucasian ones. But we know neither the origin nor the precise
descendants of these fossil races.[3] They appear and then vanish from
the scene. About all that we can conclude from this fragment of evidence
is that the races of man as they are spread over the earth to-day must
have been at least some tens of thousands of years in forming. What
caused them to differentiate, on which part of the earth’s surface each
took on its peculiarities, how they further subdivided, what were the
connecting links between them, and what happened to these lost links—on
all these points the answer of anthropology is as yet incomplete.
It is no different in other fields of biology. As long as the
zoölogist or botanist reviews his grand classifications or the wide
sweep of organic evolution for fifty million years back, he seems to
obtain striking and simple results. When he turns his attention to a
small group, attempting to trace in detail its subvarieties, and the
relations and history of these, the task is seen to be intricate and
the accumulated knowledge is usually insufficient to solve more than a
fraction of the problems that arise.
There is, then, nothing unusual in the situation of partial bafflement in
which anthropology still finds itself as regards the human races.
21. RACE CLASSIFICATION
What remains is the possibility of making an accurate survey of the
living races in the hope that the relationships which a classification
brings out may indicate something as to the former development of
the races. If for instance it could be established that the Ainu or
aborigines of Japan are closely similar in their bodies to the peoples
of Europe, we would then infer that they are a branch of the Caucasian
stock, that their origin took place far to the west of their present
habitat, and that they have no connection with the Mongolian Japanese
among whom they now live. This is working by indirect evidence, it is
true; but sooner or later that is the method to which science always
finds itself reduced.
The desirability of a trustworthy classification of the human races
will therefore be generally accepted without further argument. But
the making of such a classification proves to be more difficult than
might be imagined. To begin with, a race is only a sort of average of a
large number of individuals; and averages differ from one another much
less than individuals. Popular impression exaggerates the differences,
accurate measurements reduce them. It is true that a Negro and a north
European cannot possibly be confused: they happen to represent extreme
types. Yet as soon as we operate with less divergent races we find that
variations between individuals of the same race are often greater than
differences between the races. The tallest individuals of a short race
are taller than the shortest individuals of a tall race. This is called
_overlapping_; and it occurs to such an extent as to make it frequently
difficult for the physical anthropologist to establish clear-cut types.
In addition, the lines of demarcation between races have time and again
been obliterated by interbreeding. Adjacent peoples, even hostile ones,
intermarry. The number of marriages in one generation may be small; but
the cumulative effect of a thousand years is often quite disconcerting.
The half-breeds or hybrids are also as fertile as each of the original
types. There is no question but that some populations are nothing but
the product of such race crossing. Thus there is a belt extending across
the entire breadth of Africa of which it is difficult to say whether the
inhabitants belong to the Negro or to the Caucasian type. If we construct
a racial map and represent the demarcation between Negro and Caucasian
by a line, we are really misrepresenting the situation. The truth could
be expressed only by inserting a transition zone of mixed color. Yet as
soon as we allow such transitions, the definiteness of our classification
begins to crumble.
In spite of these difficulties, some general truths can be discovered
from a careful race classification, and certain constant principles of
importance emerge from all the diversity.
22. TRAITS ON WHICH CLASSIFICATION RESTS
Since every human being obviously possesses a large number of physical
features or traits, the first thing that the prospective classifier of
race must do is to determine how much weight he will attach to each of
these features.
The most striking of all traits probably is _stature_ or bodily height.
Yet this is a trait which experience has shown to be of relatively
limited value for classifactory purposes. The imagination is easily
impressed by a few inches when they show at the top of a man and make
him half a head taller or shorter than oneself. Except for a few groups
which numerically are rather insignificant, there is no human race that
averages less than 5 feet in height. There is none at all that averages
taller than 5 feet 10 inches. This means that practically the whole range
of human variability in height, from the race standpoint, falls within
less than a foot. The majority of averages of populations do not differ
more than 2 inches from the general human average of 5 feet 5 inches.
Then, too, stature has been proved to be rather readily influenced by
environment. Each of us is a fraction of an inch taller when he gets
up in the morning than when he goes to bed at night. Two races might
differ by as much as a couple of inches in their heredity, and yet if all
the individuals of the shorter race were well nourished in a favorable
environment, and all those of the taller group were underfed and
overworked, the naturally shorter race might well be actually the taller
one.
The _cephalic index_, which expresses in percentage form the ratio of
the length and the breadth of the head, is perhaps the most commonly
used anthropological measurement.[4] It has certain definite advantages.
The head measurements are easily made with accuracy. The index is nearly
the same on the living head and on the dead skull; or one is easily
converted into the other. This enables present and past generations to
be compared. The index is also virtually the same for men and for women,
for children and for adults. Finally, it seems to be little affected
by environment. The consequence is that head form has been widely
investigated. There are few groups of people of consequence whose average
cephalic index we do not know fairly accurately. The difficulty about
the cephalic index from the point of view of race classification is that
it does not yield broad enough results. This index is often useful in
distinguishing subtypes, nation from nation, or tribe from tribe; but the
primary races are not uniform. There is, for instance, no typical head
form for the Caucasian race. There are narrow headed, medium headed, and
broad headed Caucasians. The same is true of the American Indians, who
are on the whole rather uniform, yet vary much in head form.
The _nasal index_, which expresses the relation of length and breadth
of nose, runs much more constant in the great races. Practically all
Negroids are broad-nosed, practically all Caucasians narrow-nosed, and
the majority of peoples of Mongolian affinities medium-nosed. But the
nasal index varies according to the age of the person; it is utterly
different in a living individual and a skull;[5] it seems to reflect
heredity less directly than the cephalic index; and finally it tells us
nothing about the elevation or profile or general formation of the nose.
_Prognathism_, or the degree of the protrusion of the jaws, is a
conspicuous feature of the profile, and would seem to be of some historic
importance as a sign of primitiveness, because all other mammals are more
prognathous than man. The trait also has a general correlation with the
fundamental racial types. Negroes are almost all prognathous, people of
Mongolian type moderately so, Caucasians very slightly. Prognathism is
however difficult to measure or to denote in figures. Various apparatuses
have been devised without wholly satisfactory results.
The _capacity of the skull_ is measured by filling it with shot or millet
seed. The latter yields figures that are lower by 50 or 100 c.c. The
average, by shot measure, for males the world over is about 1,450 to
1,500 c.c., for females about 10 per cent lower. European males range
from 1,500 to 1,600, Asiatic Mongoloids but little less, American Indians
and Polynesians from 1,400 to 1,500, Bushmen, Australians, Tasmanians,
Negritos, Veddas from 1,300 to 1,400. These last groups are all small
bodied. It appears that cranial capacity is considerably dependent on
bodily size. Slender as well as short races run to small capacities. The
heavy Bantu surpass the slighter framed Sudanese, and Hindus stand well
below European Caucasians; just as the shorter Japanese average less than
the Chinese. Broad headed populations show greater cranial capacity than
narrow headed ones: Alpine Europeans (§ 24) generally surpass Nordics
in spite of their shorter stature. Individual variability is also
unusually great in this measurement. The largest and smallest skulled
healthy individuals of the same sex in one population differ sometimes
by 500, 600, or 700 c.c., or more than one-third of the racial average.
Overlapping between races is accordingly particularly marked in cranial
capacity. Furthermore, the measurement obviously cannot be taken on the
living. In spite of its interest as an alleged and perhaps partially
valid index of mental faculty, cranial capacity is thus of restricted
value in distinguishing races.
The _texture of the hair_ is now universally regarded as one of the most
valuable criteria for classifying races, possibly the most significant
of all. Hair is distinguished as woolly in the Negro, straight in the
Mongolian, and wavy or intermediate in the Caucasian. This texture
depends principally on the diameters of each individual hair, as they
are revealed in cross-section under the microscope; in part also on
the degree of straightness or curvature of the root sacs of the hair
in the skin. Hair texture seems to run rather rigidly along hereditary
racial lines, and to be uninfluenced by factors of age, sex, climate, or
nourishment.
_Hairiness_ of the body as a whole is another trait to which more and
more attention is coming to be paid. The fullness or scantiness of the
beard, and the degree of development of the down which covers the body,
are its most conspicuous manifestations. Caucasians are definitely a
hairy race, Mongoloids and most Negroids glabrous or smooth-skinned.
It is largely on the basis of their hairiness that races like the
Australians have been separated from the Negroids, and the Ainus from the
Japanese.
Except possibly for stature, _color_ is probably the most conspicuous
trait of any race. Under color must be included the complexion of the
skin, the color of the hair, and the color of the eyes. All of these
however present difficulties to the anthropometrist. The pigment in every
human skin is the same: it differs only in amount. We have therefore a
complete series of transition shades, and it is difficult to express
these differences of shade quantitatively. They readily impress the eye,
but it is far from easy to denote them accurately in numbers. Environment
also affects skin color markedly. A day’s exposure to the sun will
darken an individual’s complexion by several shades. In spite of these
drawbacks, however, complexion remains sufficiently important to have to
be considered in every classification.
_Hair color and eye color_ are practically immune against direct change
by environment. They unquestionably are excellent hereditary criteria,
although they offer much the same resistance to measurement as does
complexion. The utility of these two traits is however limited by another
factor: their narrow distribution. Blue eyes and blond hair are racially
characteristic of only a single subrace, that of northern Europe. In
central Europe they are already much toned down: the prevailing type here
is brunet. In southern Europe, blue eyes and blondness scarcely occur at
all except where admixture with northern peoples can be traced. Outside
of the Caucasian stock, black hair and black eyes are the universal rule
for the human family.
Obviously it would be easiest to arrive at a clear-cut classification by
grouping all the peoples of the earth according to a single trait, such
as the shape of the nose, or color. But any such classification must be
artificial and largely unsound, just because it disregards the majority
of traits. The only classification that can claim to rest upon a true or
natural basis is one which takes into consideration as many traits as
possible, and weights the important more heavily than the unimportant
features. If the outcome of such a grouping is to leave some peoples
intermediate or of doubtful place in the classification, this result is
unfortunate but must be accepted.
RACIAL CLASSIFICATION OF MANKIND
_Texture _Hair of
of Hair Body and
_Primary Stocks and Races_ of Head_ Face_ _Head_ _Nose_
CAUCASIAN OR “WHITE”
Nordic Wavy Abundant Narrow Narrow
Alpine ” ” Broad ”
Mediterranean ” ” Narrow ”
Hindu ” ” ” Variable
MONGOLOID OR “YELLOW”
Mongolian Straight Slight Broad Medium
Malaysian ” ” ” ”
American Indian ” ” Variable ”
NEGROID OR “BLACK”
Negro Woolly Slight Narrow Broad
Melanesian ” ” ” ”
Dwarf Black ” ” Broad ”
OF DOUBTFUL CLASSIFICATION
Australian Wavy Abundant Narrow Broad
Vedda, Irula, Kolarians,
Moi, Senoi, Toala, etc. ” Moderate ” ”
Polynesian ” ” Variable Medium
Ainu ” Abundant Narrow ”
* * * * *
_Primary Stocks and Races_ _Prognathism_ _Skin Color_ _Stature_
CAUCASIAN OR “WHITE”
Nordic Slight Very “white” Tall
Alpine ” White Above aver.
Mediterranean ” Dark white Medium
Hindu Moderate Brown Above aver.
MONGOLOID OR “YELLOW”
Mongolian Medium Light brown Below aver.
Malaysian ” Brown ”
American Indian ” ” Tall to med.
NEGROID OR “BLACK”
Negro Strong “Black” Tall
Melanesian ” ” Medium
Dwarf Black Moderate ” Very short
OF DOUBTFUL CLASSIFICATION
Australian Strong Black Above aver.
Vedda, Irula, Kolarians,
Moi, Senoi, Toala, etc. Medium Dark brown Short
Polynesian ” Brown Tall
Ainu ” Light brown Medium
* * * * *
_Primary Stocks and Races_ _Remarks_
CAUCASIAN OR “WHITE”
Nordic Hair blond, eyes light.
Alpine Hair brown, eyes brown.
Mediterranean
Hindu Probable Australoid admixture in South.
MONGOLOID OR “YELLOW”
Mongolian “Mongolian” eye, broad face.
Malaysian
American Indian Broad face.
NEGROID OR “BLACK”
Negro
Melanesian
Dwarf Black Bushmen show several special features.
OF DOUBTFUL CLASSIFICATION
Australian Negroid traits preponderate, some Caucasian
resemblances.
Vedda, Irula, Kolarians, Generalized pre-Caucasian with Australoid
Moi, Senoi, Toala, etc. resemblances. “Indo Australians.”
Polynesian Perhaps Mongoloid with some Caucasian
traits and local Negroid admixture.
Ainu A generalized Caucasian or divergent
Mongoloid type.
Hair and eyes are “black” unless otherwise stated in Remarks.
23. THE GRAND DIVISIONS OR PRIMARY STOCKS
If now we follow this plan and review the peoples of the earth, each with
reference to all its physical traits, we obtain an arrangement something
like that which is given in the table on the previous page. It will be
seen that there are three grand divisions, of which the European, the
Negro, and the Chinaman may be taken as representative. These three
primary classes are generally called Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid.
The color terms, White, Black, and Yellow, are also often used, but it is
necessary to remember that they are employed merely as brief convenient
labels, and that they have no descriptive value. There are millions of
Caucasians who are darker in complexion than millions of Mongoloids.
These three main groups account for more than nine-tenths of all the
nations and tribes of the world. As to the number of individuals, they
comprise probably 99 per cent of all human beings. The aberrant forms
are best kept separate. Some of them, like the before-mentioned Ainu and
Australians, appear to affiliate preponderantly with one of the three
great classes, but still differ sufficiently in one or more particulars
to prevent their being included with them outright. Other groups, such as
the Polynesians, seem to be, at least in part, the result of a mixture
of races. Their constituent elements are so blended, and perhaps so far
modified after the blending, as to be difficult to disentangle.
Each of the three great primary stocks falls into several natural
subdivisions.
24. CAUCASIAN RACES
Three of the four Caucasian races live, in whole or part, in Europe;
the fourth consists of the Hindus.[6] The three European races are the
Nordic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean. Some authorities recognize
a greater number, but all admit at least these three. They occupy
horizontal belts on the map. Beginning with the Nordic and ending
with the Mediterranean they may be described as successively darker
skinned, darker eyed, darker haired, and shorter in stature. The Alpine
race, which lies between the two others, is however more than a mere
transition; for it is broad headed, whereas the Nordic and Mediterranean
are both narrow or long headed. The Nordic type is essentially
distributed around the Baltic and North seas. The Mediterranean race
occupies the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in Asia and Africa as well
as in Europe. In ancient times it seems to have prevailed everywhere
along these coasts. At present the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor are
mostly occupied by broad headed peoples of more or less close affinity
to the Alpines. This Alpine race is perhaps less homogeneous than the
two others. A central Frenchman, a Serb, a Russian, and an Armenian are
clearly far from identical (§ 30). They have enough in common, however, to
warrant their being put in the one larger group.
It must be clearly understood that these races have nothing to do with
the modern political nationalities of Europe. Northern Germany is
prevailingly Nordic, southern Germany, Alpine. Northern Italy is Alpine,
the rest of the peninsula Mediterranean. All three races are definitely
represented in France. The average north Frenchman stands racially nearer
to the north German than to his countryman from central France, whereas
the latter links up in physical type with the south German. Nationality
is determined by speech, customs, religion, and political affiliations.
Its boundary lines and those of race cut right across one another.
The British Isles did not escape the process of race blending that has
gone on in Europe for thousands of years. The bulk of the blood of their
inhabitants during the past thousand years has been Nordic, but there is
an Alpine strain, and most authorities recognize a definite “Iberian,”
that is, Mediterranean element. The first settlers in America carried
this mixture across the Atlantic, and through the years immigration
has increased its compositeness. Scandinavians and north Germans have
added to the Nordic component in the population of the United States;
south Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, and Jews to the Alpine; the
Italians have injected a definite Mediterranean element. The Negro alone
has not been admitted into the make-up of our white society; but the
reverse holds: a considerable and growing percentage of the “colored”
people in the United States are from one-sixteenth to fifteen-sixteenths
Caucasian.
The Hindu is in the main a narrow headed, dark skinned Caucasian, not
very different from the Mediterranean. When he entered India he probably
found there an aboriginal population which may have been Negroid but
more likely was related to the Australians or perhaps constituted a dark
proto-Caucasian or Indo-Australian race. A fairly thorough intermixture
has taken place in India during the last three thousand years, with the
result that the originally pure Caucasian type of the Hindu has been
somewhat modified, while most of the less numerous or less vigorous
aboriginal population has become submerged. The definite Caucasian type
is best preserved in the north; the traces of the dark skinned aboriginal
race are strongest in southern India.
25. MONGOLOID RACES
The Mongoloid stock divides into the Mongolian proper of eastern
Asia, the Malaysian of the East Indies, and the American Indian. The
differences between these three types are not very great. The Mongolian
proper is the most extreme or pronounced form. It was probably the latest
to develop its present characteristics. For instance, the oblique or
“Mongolian” eye is a peculiarity restricted to the people of eastern
Asia. The original Mongoloid stock must be looked upon as having been
more like present-day Malaysians or American Indians, or intermediate
between them. From this generalized type peoples like the Chinese
gradually diverged, adding the epicanthic fold of the oblique eye and
other peculiarities, while the less civilized peoples of America and
Oceania kept more nearly to the ancient type.
Within the East Indies, a more and a less specifically Mongoloid
strain can at times be distinguished. The latter has often been called
Indonesian. In certain respects, such as relatively short stature and
broad nose, it approaches the Indo-Australian type described below. Among
the American Mongoloids, the Eskimo appears to be the most particularized
subvariety.
26. NEGROID RACES
The Negroid stock falls into two large divisions, the African Negro
proper, and the Oceanic Melanesian; besides a third division, the Dwarf
Blacks or Negritos, who are very few in numbers but possess a wide and
irregular distribution. The Negroes and the Melanesians, in spite of
their being separated by the breadth of the Indian Ocean, are clearly
close relatives. A trained observer can distinguish them at sight, but
a novice would take a Papuan from New Guinea or a Melanesian from the
Solomon or Fiji Islands to be an African. Perhaps the most conspicuous
difference is that the broad nose of the African Negro is flat, the broad
nose of the Melanesian often aquiline. How these two so similar Negroid
branches came to be located on the opposite sides of a great ocean is a
fact that remains unexplained.
The Negrito or Dwarf Negroid race has representatives in New Guinea, in
the Philippines, in the Malay Peninsula, in the Andaman Islands, and
in equatorial Africa. These peoples are the true pygmies of the human
species. Wherever they are racially pure the adult males are less than 5
feet in stature. They also differ from other Negroids in being relatively
broad headed. Their skin color, hair texture, nose form, and most other
traits are, however, the same as those of the other Negroids. Their
scattered distribution is difficult to account for. It is possible that
they are an ancient and primitive type which once inhabited much wider
stretches of territory than now in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. On account
of their inoffensiveness and backwardness, the Negritos, according to
this theory, were gradually crowded to the wall by the larger, more
energetic populations with which they came in contact, until only a few
scattered fragments of them now remain.
The Bushmen and in some degree the Hottentots of South Africa may also
be provisionally included with the Negritos, although distinctive in a
number of respects. They are yellowish-brown in complexion, long headed,
short and flat eared, short legged, hollow backed, and steatopygous.
On the whole Negroid characteristics prevail among them. They are, for
instance, frizzy-haired. Their extremely short stature may justify their
tentative inclusion among the Negritos.
27. PEOPLES OF DOUBTFUL POSITION
One thing is common to the peoples who are here reckoned as of doubtful
position in the classification: they all present certain Caucasian
affinities without being similar enough to the recognized Caucasians
to be included with them. This is true of the black, wavy-haired,
prognathous, beetling-browed Australians, whose first appearance
suggests that they are Negroids, as it is of the brown Polynesians, who
appear to have Mongoloid connections through the Malaysians. In India,
Indo-China, and the East Indies live a scattered series of uncivilized
peoples more or less alike in being dark, short, slender, wavy haired,
longish headed, broad nosed. The brows are knit, the eyes deep set, the
mouth large, beard development medium. Resemblances are on the one hand
toward the Caucasian type, on the other toward the Australian, just as
the geographical position is intermediate. The name Indo-Australian is
thus appropriate for this group. Typical representatives are the Vedda
of Ceylon; the Irula and some of the Kolarian tribes of India; many of
the Moi of several parts of Indo-China; the Senoi or Sakai of the Malay
Peninsula; the Toala of Celebes. These are almost invariably hill or
jungle people, who evidently represent an old stratum of population,
pushed back by Caucasians or Mongoloids, or almost absorbed by them. The
dark strain in India seems more probably due to these people than to
any true Negroid infusion. Possibly the Indo-Australians branched off
from the Caucasian stem at a very early time before the Caucasian stock
was as “white” as it is now. In the lapse of ages the greater number of
the Caucasians in and near Europe took on, more and more, their present
characteristics, whereas this backward branch in the region of the
Indian Ocean kept its primitive and undifferentiated traits. This is a
tempting theory to pursue, but it extends so far into the realm of the
hypothetical that its just appraisal must be left to the specialist.
[Illustration: FIG. 8. Relationship of the human races. Distances between
the centers of circles are indicative of the degree of similarity.]
Figure 8 attempts to represent graphically the degree of resemblance
and difference between the principal physical types as they have been
summarized in the table and preceding discussion; the genealogical tree
in figure 9 is an endeavor to suggest how these types may have diverged
from one another in their development.
[Illustration: FIG. 9. Tentative family tree of the human races.]
28. CONTINENTS AND OCEANS
One fact about the classification stands out clearly, namely, that the
three grand races are not limited to particular continents. It is true
that the center of gravity of the Caucasians is in or near Europe, that
the biggest block of Negroids is situated in Africa, and the largest mass
of Mongoloids in Asia. It is even possible that these three types evolved
on these three continents. But each of them is _inter-continental_ in its
present distribution. Western Asia and northern Africa as well as Europe
are Caucasian. There are Negroids in Oceania as well as in Africa, and
the Mongoloids are found over Oceania, Asia, and both Americas.
In fact the distribution of the three primary races can better be
described as oceanically marginal than as continental. The Caucasian
parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa surround the Mediterranean Sea. The
African and the Oceanic branches of the Negroid race are situated on
the left and right sides of the Indian Ocean. The Mongoloid habitat in
Oceania, in eastern Asia, and in North and South America almost encloses
the Pacific Ocean. (Figs. 10 and 11.)
29. THE HISTORY OF RACE CLASSIFICATIONS
Most of the early classifications of mankind tried to identify races
and continents too closely. The first attempt was that of Linnæus in
the middle of the eighteenth century. He distinguished and described
four varieties of mankind, which he called _Europæus albus_, _Asiaticus
luridus_, _Americanus rufus_, and _Afer niger_; that is, European White,
Asiatic Yellow, American Red, African Black.
The next classification, that of Blumenbach in 1775, is essentially the
same except for adding a fifth or Oceanic variety. Blumenbach’s five
human races, the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan,
still survive in many of the geographies of our elementary schools,
usually under the designations of White, Yellow, Black, Red, and Brown;
but they no longer receive scientific recognition.
[Illustration: FIG. 10. Outline distribution of the primary racial
stocks of mankind according to the three-fold classification,
Australians, Ainu, Vedda, Polynesians, etc., being included in the stock
with which they appear to affiliate most closely. A larger map with
more shadings would be required to do even approximate justice to the
intricacies of a complete race classification.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11. Circumpolar map of primary race distribution
(legend as in Figure 10).]
As time went on, the continental principle of race classification
came to be recognized as inadequate, and there was a tendency among
anthropologists to accept the distinctness of certain specialized groups
like the Australians, Bushmen, Eskimo, and Ainu, which were often
elevated into races substantially equal in rank with the great races
like the Mongoloid. Thus Peschel distinguished: (1) Mediterranean or
Caucasian; (2) Mongoloid (including the East Indians and Americans); (3)
Negro; (4) Australian; but then separated off (5) Dravida of southern
India; (6) Papuans, and (7) Hottentot-Bushmen, as if these smaller groups
were coördinate with the grand ones. Nott and Gliddon also recognized
seven races, although somewhat different ones: European, Asiatic, Negro,
American, Malay, Australian, and Arctic. This is the fivefold scheme of
Blumenbach with Australian and Arctic added.
30. EMERGENCE OF THE THREEFOLD CLASSIFICATION
On the other hand the feeling gained ground, especially as the result
of the labors of French anthropologists, that mankind could be
satisfactorily accounted for by a division into Caucasian, Negroid, and
Mongoloid. Those who adopted this principle tried to fit divergent types
like the Australians and Polynesians into one or the other of these three
great groups. Some little doctoring had to be done in this process, and
some salient facts estimated rather lightly. It is for this reason that
it has seemed best here not to make our tripartite classification too
exhaustive. This threefold classification clearly absorbs the great mass
of mankind without straining, but it is soundest to recognize that this
same basic classification requires a certain margin of extensions along
the lines indicated in our table.
The classification made by the French anthropologist Deniker is one of
the most elaborate yet devised. It recognizes 6 grand divisions, 17 minor
divisions, and 29 separate races. The primary criterion of classification
is hair texture.
_Deniker’s Classification_
A. Hair woolly, with broad nose.
I. 1. Bushman.
II. Negroid.
2. Negrito.
3. Negro.
4. Melanesian (including Papuan of New Guinea).
B. Hair curly to wavy.
III. 5. Ethiopian (Sudan, etc.).
IV. 6. Australian.
V. 7. Dravidian (southern India).
VI. 8. Assyroid (Kurds, Armenians, Jews).
C. Hair Wavy.
VII. 9. Indo-Afghan.
VIII. North African.
10. Arab or Semite.
11. Berber (N. Africa).
IX. Melanochroid.
12. Littoral (W. Mediterranean).
13. Ibero-insular (Spain, S. Italy).
14. Western European.
15. Adriatic (N. Italy, Balkans).
D. Hair wavy to straight, with light eyes.
X. Xanthochroid.
16. North European.
17. East European.
E. Hair wavy to straight, with dark eyes.
XI. 18. Ainu.
XII. Oceanian.
19. Polynesian.
20. Indonesian (East Indies).
F. Hair straight.
XIII. American.
21. South American.
22. North American.
23. Central American.
24. Patagonian.
XIV. 25. Eskimo.
XV. 26. Lapp.
XVI. Eurasian.
27. Ugrian (E. Russia).
28. Turco-Tartar (S.W. Siberia).
XVII. 29. Mongol (E. Asia).
In spite of its apparent complexity, this classification coincides
quite closely with the classification which is followed in this book.
Inspection reveals that Deniker’s grand division A is Negroid, C and
D Caucasian, F Mongoloid. Of his two remaining grand divisions, B is
intermediate between A and C, that is, between Negroid and Caucasian,
and consists of peoples which are either, like the East Africans, the
probable result of a historical mixture of Negroids and Caucasians, or
which, like the Australians, share the traits of both, and are therefore
admitted to have a doubtful status. The other grand division, E, is
transitional between Caucasian D and Mongoloid F, and the peoples of
which it consists are those whom we too have recognized as difficult to
assign positively to either stock. In short, Deniker’s classification is
much the more refined, ours the simpler; but essentially they corroborate
one another.
31. OTHER CLASSIFICATIONS
Another classification that puts hair texture into the forefront is that
of F. Müller. This runs as follows:
A. Ulotrichi or Woolly-haired.
1. Lophocomi or Tuft-haired: Papua, Hottentot-Bushmen.
2. Eriocomi or Fleecy-haired: African Negroes.
B. Lissotrichi or Straight-haired.
3. Euthycomi or Stiff-haired: Australian, Malay, Mongolian,
Arctic, American.
4. Euplocomi or Wavy-haired: Dravidian (S. India), Nubian,
(Sudan), “Mediterranean” (Europe, N. Africa, etc.).
The distinction here made between the Tuft and Fleecy-haired groups is
unsound. It rests on a false observation: that a few races, like the
Bushmen, had their head-hair growing out of the scalp only in spots or
tufts. With the elimination of this group, its members would fall into
the Fleecy or Woolly-haired one, which would thus comprise all admitted
Negroids; whereas the two remaining groups, the Stiff and Wavy-haired,
obviously correspond to the Mongoloid and Caucasian. The only remaining
peculiarity of the classification—and in this point also it is
unquestionably wrong—is the inclusion of the Australians in the Stiff or
Straight-haired group. But even this error reflects an element of truth:
it emphasizes the fact that in spite of their black skins, broad noses,
and protruding jaws, the Australians are not straight-out Negroids.
The underlying feature of this classification, after allowing for its
errors, is that mankind consists of two rather than three main branches:
the Ulotrichi or Negroids, as opposed to the Lissotrichi or combined
Mongoloids and Caucasians. This basic idea has been advocated by others.
Boas, for instance, reckons Mongoloids and Caucasians as at bottom only
subtypes of a single stock with which the Negroids and Australians are to
be contrasted.
Somewhat different in plan is Huxley’s scheme, which recognizes four
main races, or five including a transitional one. These are (1)
Australioids, including Dravidians and Egyptians; (2) Negroids, with the
Bushmen and the Oceanic Papuans, Melanesians, Tasmanians, and Negritos
as two subvarieties; (3) Mongoloids, as customarily accepted; (4)
Xanthochroi, about equivalent to Nordics and Alpines; (5) Melanochroi,
nearly the same as the Mediterraneans, but supposed by Huxley to be
hybrid or intermediate between the Xanthochroi and Australioids. This
classification in effect emphasizes the connection between Australoids
and Caucasians, with the Negroids as a distinctive group on one side and
the Mongoloids on the other.
Haeckel’s classification is basically similar, in that besides the usual
three primary stocks—which he elevates into species—he recognizes a
separate group comprising the Australians, Dravidians, and Vedda-like
Indo-Australians.
32. PRINCIPLES AND CONCLUSIONS COMMON TO ALL CLASSIFICATIONS
It will be seen that in spite of the differences and uncertainties as
yet prevalent in any scheme for classifying the human species, certain
principles stand out both as regards method and results; and in regard to
these principles there is substantial agreement.
First, any valid classification must rest on a combination of as many
traits or features as possible.
Second, several features of the human body are of definite significance
for the discrimination of races. Hair and hairiness are unquestionably
of great importance; stature, except in extreme cases, much less
so. Color differences in the skin, hair, or eyes are important but
difficult to handle. Shape of nose and prognathism are useful for rough
classification. The cephalic index possesses an exceptional utility in
making the finer discriminations.
Third, it is clearly impossible to find a simple and consistent scheme
within which all the varieties of man can be placed. We must not attempt
more than nature allows.
On the other hand the vast bulk of mankind does fall naturally into
three great divisions, each of which again subdivides into three or four
principal branches, in regard to whose distinctness there is no serious
difference of opinion. The scattering remainder of races are allied
sometimes to one primary stock, sometimes to another, but always with
some special peculiarities.
From such a classification as this, especially after the accumulation of
large series of accurate measurements which will permit its being worked
out to greater exactness, we may hope ultimately to reconstruct the full
and true history of the races of men, or, in any event, some reasonable
hypothesis as to their development. As yet, however, we are not in a
position to account for the origin of the races except speculatively.
33. RACE, NATIONALITY, AND LANGUAGE
The term race has here been used in its biological sense, for a group
united in blood or heredity. A race is a subdivision of a species and
corresponds to a breed in domestic animals. Popularly, the word is used
in a different sense, namely that of a population having any traits
in common, be they hereditary or non-hereditary, biological or social
(Chapter I). It is customary, but scientifically inaccurate, to speak
of the French race, the Anglo-Saxon race, the Gypsy race, the Jewish
race. The French are a nation and nationality, with a substantially
common speech; biologically, they are three races considerably mixed,
but still imperfectly blended (§ 24). Anglo-Saxon refers primarily to
speech, incidentally to a set of customs, traditions, and points of view
that are more or less associated with the language. The Gypsies are a
self-constituted caste, with folkways, occupations, and a speech of
their own. The Jews, who were once a nationality, at present, of course,
form a religious body, which somewhat variably, in part from inner
cohesion and in part from outer pressure, tends also to constitute a
caste. They evince little hereditary racial type, measurements indicating
that in each country they approximate the physical type of the gentile
population.
It may seem of little moment whether the word race is restricted to its
strict biological sense or used more loosely. In fact, however, untold
loose reasoning has resulted from the loose terminology. When one has
spoken a dozen times of “the French race,” one tends inevitably to think
of the inhabitants of France as a biological unit, which they are not.
The basis of the error is confusion of organic traits and processes with
superorganic or cultural ones; of heredity with tradition or imitation.
That civilizations, languages, and nationalities go on for generations
is obviously a different thing from their being caused by generation.
Slovenly thought, tending to deal with results rather than causes or
processes, does not trouble to make this discrimination, and every-day
speech, dating from a pre-scientific period, is ambiguous about it.
We say not only “generation,” when there is no intent to imply the
reproductive process, but “good breeding” (literally, good brooding or
hatching or birth), when we mean good home training or education; just as
we “inherit” a fortune or a name—social things—as well as ineradicable
traits like brown eye-color. Biology has secured for its processes the
exclusive use of the term “heredity”; and biologists employ the term
“race” only with reference to a hereditary subdivision of a species. It
is equally important that the word be used with the same exact denotation
in anthropology, else all discussion of race degenerates irretrievably
into illogical sliding in and out between organic and social factors. The
inherently great difficulties which beset the understanding and solution
of what are generally called race problems, as discussed in the next
chapter, are considerably increased by a confusion between what is and
what is not racial and organic and hereditary.
CHAPTER IV
PROBLEMS OF RACE
34. Questions of endowment and their validity.—35. Plan
of inquiry.—36. Anatomical evidence on evolutionary
rank.—37. Comparative physiological data.—38. Disease.—39.
Causes of cancer incidence.—40. Mental achievement and
social environment.—41. Psychological tests on the sense
faculties.—42. Intelligence tests.—43. Status of hybrids.—44.
Evidence from the cultural record of races.—45. Emotional
bias.—46. Summary.
34. QUESTIONS OF ENDOWMENT AND THEIR VALIDITY
Are the human races alike or dissimilar in mentality and character?
Are some lower than others, or are they all on a plane as regards
potentiality? The answers to these questions are of theoretical import,
and naturally also bear on the solution of the practical race problems
with which many nations are confronted.
As long as an inquiry remains sufficiently abstract or remote, the
desirability of such inquiry is likely to go unquestioned. As soon,
however, as investigation touches conduct—for instance, our actual
relations with other races—a sentiment has a way of rising, to the effect
that perhaps after all the problem does not so much call for knowledge as
for action. Thus, in regard to the negro problem in the United States,
it is likely to be said that the immediate issue is what may be the
best attitude toward “Jim Crow” cars and other forms of segregation.
Are these desirable or undesirable, fair or unfair? Here are specific
problems which an actual condition presses to have answered. Under
the circumstances, it will be said, is not an inquiry into the innate
capacity of the negro rather remote, especially when every one can see
by a thousand examples that the negro is obviously inferior to the
Caucasian? He is poorer, more shiftless, less successful. He has made
no inventions, produced no geniuses. He clearly feels himself inferior
and comports himself accordingly. Why then raise the issue of capacity
at all, unless from a desire to befog it, to subvert the conclusions
of common sense and every-day experience by special pleading which
substitutes adroitness for sincerity? When a prisoner has been found
guilty it is the judge’s business to determine the length of sentence, to
decide how far justice should be tempered with mercy. Were he to reopen
the case from the beginning, he would be showing partiality. Is not the
situation of the scientist proposing to inquire into the accepted verdict
that the negro is inferior to the Caucasian, analogous to that of a judge
who insists on setting aside the verdict of twelve unprejudiced jurymen
in order to retry the defendant himself? In some such form as this,
objections may rise in the minds of some.
The answer to such criticism is first of all that racial inferiority and
superiority are by no means self-evident truths. Secondly, the belief in
race inequalities is founded in emotion and action and then justified by
reasoning. That is, the belief is rationalized, not primarily inferred by
pure reason. It may be true, but it is not proved true.
As to what is self-evident, there is nothing so misleading as direct
observation. We see the sun move and the earth stand still. It is
“self-evident” that the sun revolves around the earth. Yet after
thousands of years the civilized portion of mankind finally came to
believe that it was the earth that spun. Science had no perverse
interest, no insidious motive, in advocating the Copernican instead of
the Ptolemaic system; in fact, was driven to its new belief gradually and
reluctantly. It was pre-scientific humanity, with its direct, homespun,
every-day observation, which had really prejudged the matter, and which,
because it had always assumed that the earth was flat and stationary, and
because every idiot could see that it was so, long combated the idea that
it could be otherwise.
As to opinions founded in emotion and subsequently rationalized, instead
of being evolved by pure reason from evidence, it may suffice to quote
from a famous book on herd instinct, as to the relation of mass opinion
and science:
“When, therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the
basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to
inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable,
undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is
a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate
evidence.
“Opinions, on the other hand, which are acquired as the result of
experience alone do not possess this quality of primary certitude. They
are true in the sense of being verifiable, but they are unaccompanied by
that profound feeling of truth which belief possesses, and, therefore,
we have no sense of reluctance in admitting inquiry into them. That
heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are
truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with
impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their
basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by
human personality we hold the favorable or the adverse view with a
quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry
into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and
as wicked by orthodox religion. In relation to this subject, it may be
remarked, we often see it very interestingly shown that the holders of
two diametrically opposed opinions, one of which is certainly right, may
both show by their attitude that the belief is held instinctively and
non-rationally, as, for example, when an atheist and a Christian unite in
repudiating inquiry into the existence of the soul.”
Take the attitude of the average Californian or Australian about the
Mongolian; of the Texan about the Mexican; of the Southerner about
the Negro; of the Westerner about the local tribes of Indians; of the
Englishman about the Hindu—is not their feeling exactly described by the
statement that inquiry into the possibility of racial equality would be
“unnecessary,” “absurd,” or evilly motivated; and that their belief in
race superiority rests on an “a priori synthesis of the most perfect
sort,” and possesses “the quality of primary certitude”?
In short, the apparently theoretical beliefs held as to race capacity by
people who are actually confronted by a race conflict or problem are by
no means the outcome of impartial examination and verification, but are
the result of the decisions taken and emotions experienced in the course
of acts performed toward the other race. The beliefs rest ultimately on
impulse and feeling; their reasoned support is a subsequent bolstering
up. Of course, the fact that a belief springs from emotion does not
render that belief untrue, but does leave it scientifically unproved, and
calling for investigation.
These conclusions may vindicate inquiry into the relative capacity of
races from the charge of being finespun, insidious, impractical, or
immoral.
35. PLAN OF INQUIRY
In approach to the problem, a consideration stands out. If the
human races are identical in capacity, or if, though not absolutely
alike, they average substantially the same in the sum total of their
capacities, then such differences as they have shown in their history
or show in their present condition must evidently be the result mainly
of circumstances external to heredity. In that case, knowledge of the
historical or environmental circumstances, and analysis of the latter,
become all-important to understanding. On the other hand, if hereditary
racial inequalities exist, one can expect that the historical or cultural
influences, however great they may be, will nevertheless tend to have
their origin in the hereditary factors and to reinforce them. In that
case, differences between two groups would be due partly to underlying
heredity and partly to overlying cultural forces tending on the whole
in the same direction. Yet even in that case, before one could begin
to estimate the strength of the true racial factors, the historical
ones would have to be subtracted. Thus, in either event, the first crux
of the problem lies in the recognition and stripping off of cultural,
social, or environmental factors, so far as possible, from the complex
mass of phenomena which living human groups present. In proportion
as these social or acquired traits can be determined and discounted,
the innate and truly racial ones will be isolated, and can then be
examined, weighed, and compared. Such, at any rate, is a reasonable plan
of procedure. We are looking for the inherent, ineradicable elements
in a social animal that has everywhere built up around himself an
environment—namely, his culture—in which he mentally lives and breathes.
It is precisely because in the present inquiry we wish to get below
the effects of culture that we must be ready to concern ourselves
considerably with these effects, actual or possible.
36. ANATOMICAL EVIDENCE ON EVOLUTIONARY RANK
But first of all it may be well to consider the relatively simple
evidence which has to do with the physical form and structure of race
types. If one human race should prove definitely nearer to the apes in
its anatomy than the other races, there would be reason to believe that
it had lagged in evolution. Also there would be some presumption that its
arrears were mental as well as physical.
But the facts do not run consistently. One thinks of the Negro as simian.
His jaws are prognathous; his forehead recedes; his nose is both broad
and low. Further, it is among Caucasians that the antithetical traits
occur. In straightness of jaws and forehead, prominence and narrowness
of nose, Caucasians in general exceed the Mongoloids. Thus the order as
regards these particular traits is: ape, Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasian.
With ourselves at one end and the monkey at the other, the scale somehow
seems right. It appeals, and seems significant. Facts of this sort are
therefore readily observed, come to be remembered, and rise spontaneously
to mind in an argument on race differences.
However, there are numerous items that conflict with this sequence. For
instance, one of the most conspicuous differences of man from the apes is
his relative hairlessness. Of the three main stocks, however, it is the
Caucasian that is the most hairy. Both Mongoloids and Negroids are more
smooth-skinned on face and on body.
In hair texture, the straight-haired Mongoloid is nearest the apes, the
wavy-haired Caucasian comes next, and the woolly Negroid is the most
characteristically human, or at least unsimian.
In the length of head hair, in which man differs notably from the
monkeys, the relatively short-haired Negro once more approximates
most closely to the ape, but the long-haired Mongoloid surpasses the
intermediate Caucasian in degree of departure.
Lip color reverses this order. The apes’ lips are thin and grayish;
Mongoloid lips come next; then those of Caucasians; the full, vivid, red
lips of the Negro are the most unapelike of all.
It is unnecessary to multiply examples. If one human racial stock falls
below others in certain traits, it rises above them in other features,
insofar as “below” and “above” may be measurable in terms of degree
of resemblance to the apes. The only way in which a decision could
be arrived at along this line of consideration would be to count all
features to see whether the Negro or the Caucasian or the Mongoloid was
the most unapelike in the plurality of cases. It is possible that in such
a reckoning the Caucasian would emerge with a lead. But it is even more
clear that whichever way the majority fell, it would be a well divided
count. If the Negro were more apelike than the Caucasian in all of his
features, or in eight out of ten, the fact would be heavily significant.
With his simian resemblances aggregating to those of the Caucasian in
a ratio of say four to three, the margin would be so close as to lose
nearly all its meaning. It is apparently some such ratio as this, or an
even more balanced one, that would emerge, so far as we can judge, if it
were feasible to take a census of all features.
It should be added that such a method of comparison as this suffers
from two drawbacks. First, the most closely related forms now and then
diverge sharply in certain particulars; and second, a form which on the
whole is highly specialized may yet have remained more primitive, or have
reverted to greater primitiveness in a few of its traits, than relatively
unevolved races or species.
Thus, the anthropoid apes are brachycephalic, but all known types of
Palæolithic man are dolichocephalic. Matched against the apes, the
long-headed Negro would therefore seem to be the most humanly specialized
stock. Compared however with the fossil human forms, the Negro is the
most primitive in this feature, and the Mongoloid and Alpine Caucasian
could be said to have evolved the farthest because their heads are the
roundest. Yet their degree of brachycephaly is approximately that of
the anthropoid apes. To which criterion shall be given precedence? It
is impossible to say. Quite likely the round-headedness of the apes
represents a special trait which they acquired since their divergence
from the common hominid ancestral stem. If so, their round-headedness and
that of the Mongoloids is simply a case of convergent evolution, of a
character repeating independently, and therefore no evidence of Mongoloid
primitiveness. Yet, if so, the long-headedness common to the early human
races and the modern Negroids would probably also mean nothing.
It is even clearer that other traits have been acquired independently,
have been secondarily evolved over again. Thus the supraorbital ridges.
When one observes the consistency with which these are heavy in
practically all Neandertal specimens; how they are still more conspicuous
in Pithecanthropus and Rhodesian man; how the male gorilla shows them
enormously developed; and that among living races they are perhaps
strongest in the lowly Australian, it is tempting to look upon this
bony development as a definite sign of primitiveness. Yet there is an
array of contradicting facts. The youthful gorilla and adult orang are
without supraorbital development. The male gorilla has his powerful brows
for the same reason that he has the crest along the top of his skull:
they are needed as attachments for his powerful musculature. They are
evidently a secondary sex character developed within the species. So
among fossil men there seem to have been two strains: one represented by
Pithecanthropus and Neandertal man and the Rhodesian race, which tended
toward supraorbital massiveness; and another, of which Piltdown man is
representative, which was smooth of forehead. Among living races the
Asiatic Mongoloids lack marked supraorbital development; the closely
related American Indians possess it rather strongly; Caucasians and
Negroes show little of the feature; Australians most of all. Evidently
it would be unsafe to build much conclusion on either the presence or
absence of supraorbital ridges.
Perhaps these instances will suffice to show that even the mere physical
rating of human races is far from a simple or easy task. It is doubtful
whether as yet it is valid to speak of one race as physically higher or
more advanced, or more human and less brutish, than another. This is
not an outright denial of the possibility of such differential ratings:
it is a denial only of the belief that such differentials have been
established as demonstrable.
37. COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGICAL DATA
There is another angle of approach. This consists in abandoning the
direct attempt to rate the races in anatomical terms, and inquiring
instead whether they show any physiological differences. If such
differences can be found, they may then perhaps be interpretable
as differences in activity, responsiveness, endurance, or similar
constitutional qualities. If the bodies of two races behave differently,
we should have considerable reason to believe that their minds also
behaved differently.
Unfortunately, we possess fewer data on comparative physiology than on
comparative anatomy. The evidence is more fluctuating and intricate, and
requires more patience to assemble. Unfortunately, too, for the purposes
of our inquiry, the races come out almost exactly alike in the simpler
physiological reactions. The normal body temperature for Caucasian adults
is 37° (98.5 F.), the pulse about 70, the respiration rate around 17 or
18 per minute. If the Negro’s temperature averaged even a degree higher,
one might expect him to behave, normally, a little more feverishly, to
respond to stimulus with more vehemence, to move more quickly or more
restlessly. Or, if the pulse rate of Mongolians were definitely lower,
they might be expected to react more sluggishly, more sedately, like
aging Caucasians. But such observations as are available, though they
are far from as numerous as is desirable, reveal no such differences:
temperature, pulse, respiration, record the same as among Caucasians,
or differ so slightly, or so conflictingly, as to leave no room for
positive conclusions. Certainly if there existed any important racial
peculiarities, they would have been noted by the physicians who at one
time or another have examined millions of Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, and
thousands of Indians and Polynesians.
Apparently there is only one record that even hints at anything
significant. Hrdlička, among some 700 Indians of the Southwestern United
States and Northwestern Mexico, found the pulse to average about 60 per
minute, or ten beats less than among whites. This would seem to accord
with the general impression of Indian mentality as stolid, reserved,
slow, and steady. But the number of observations is after all rather
small; the part of the race represented by them is limited; and the
habitat of the group of tribes is mostly a high plateau, and altitude
notoriously affects heart action. Considerable corroboration will
therefore be needed before any serious conclusions can be built upon this
suggestive set of data.
There are other physiological functions that are likely to mean more than
the rather gross ones just considered: for instance, the activity of
the endocrines or glands of internal secretion. An excess or deficiency
of activity of the thyroid, pituitary, adrenals, and sex glands affects
not only health, but the type of personality and its emotional and
intellectual reactions. For example, cretinism with its accompaniment
of near-idiocy is the result of thyroidal under-development or
under-functioning, and is often cured by supplying the lack of thyroidal
substance and secretion. But this subject is as difficult as it is
interesting; to date, absolutely nothing is known about endocrine race
differences. It would be a relatively simple matter to secure first-hand
information on the anatomy of the endocrine glands in Negroes as compared
with whites; to ascertain whether these differed normally in size,
weight, shape, or structure, and how. But this knowledge has scarcely
been attempted systematically, and still less is any knowledge available
in the more delicate and complex field of the workings of the organs. To
be sure, theories have been advanced that race differentiation itself may
be mainly the result of endocrine differentiations. There is something
fascinating about such conjectures, but it is well to remember that they
are unmitigated guesses.
38. DISEASE
Pathology might seem to promise more than normal physiology. So far as
mortality goes, there are enormous differences between races. And the
mortality is often largely the result of particular diseases. Measles,
for instance, has often been a deadly epidemic to uncivilized peoples,
and smallpox has in some regions at times taken toll of a quarter of
the population in a year or two. Yet it is short-sighted to infer
from such cases any racial predisposition or lack of resistance. The
peoples in question have been free for generations, perhaps for their
entire history, from these diseases, and have therefore not maintained
or acquired immunity. Their difference from us is thus essentially in
experience, not hereditary or racial. This is confirmed by the fact that
after a generation or two the same epidemics that at first were so deadly
to Polynesians or American Indians sink to almost the same level of mild
virulence as they show among ourselves.
Then, too, immediate environment plays a part. The savage often has no
idea of contagion, and still less of guarding against it; he thinks
in terms of magic instead of physiology—and succumbs. How far heavy
mortality is the result of lack of resistance or of fundamentally
vicious treatment, is often hard to say. If we tried to cure smallpox by
subjecting patients to a steam-bath and then having them plunge into a
wintry river, we should perhaps look upon the disease as a very nearly
fatal one to the Caucasian race.
39. CAUSES OF CANCER INCIDENCE
It may be worth while to consider briefly the facts as to mortality from
cancer. This dread disease appears to be not contagious, so that the
factor of acquired immunity is eliminated. It is regarded as incurable,
except by operation, so that differences in treatment become relatively
unimportant. If therefore significant differences in racial liability to
cancer exist, they should emerge with unusual clearness and certainty.
At first sight they seem to. It has been alleged that the white race is
the most susceptible to this affliction. The supporting figures are as
follows: cancer deaths per year per 100,000 population.
1906-10 Denmark 137
England 94
United States 73
1909-11 Johannesburg, whites 52
Negroes 14
1906-10 Natal, Europeans 56
East Indians 11
1906-10 Hongkong, Europeans 53
Chinese 5
1912 Dutch East Indies, Europeans 81
1906-10 Singapore, natives 13
Straits Settlements, natives 10
Ceylon, natives 5
Calcutta, natives 11
1908-13 Manila, whites 51
Filipinos 27
Chinese 19
1910-12 United States, whites 77
Negroes 56
1914 United States, Indians 4
It would seem from these figures that Caucasians die more frequently of
cancer than members of the darker races. In fact, this has been asserted.
Let us however continue with figures.
1908-12 Large cities, latitudes 60°-50° North 106
50°-40° ” 92
40°-30° ” 78
30° North-30° South 38-42
30°-40° South 90
This table would make cancer mortality largely a function of geographical
latitude, instead of race.
Another factor enters: occupation. The following data give the death rate
per 100,000 population among males of 45-54 in England and Wales.
1890-92 1900-02
Lawyers 199 159
Physicians 102 121
Clergymen 81 91
Chimneysweeps 532 287
Brewers 190 239
Metal workers 120 137
Gardeners 88 93
All occupations 118 145
That the relative incidence is more than a temporary accident is shown by
the approximate recurrence of the frequencies after ten years.
In proportion as latitude and occupation influence the occurrence of
cancer, race is diminished as a cause. It is reduced still further
by other considerations. The rate for Austria in 1906-10 was 78, for
Hungary 44. Here the race is the same: the difference must be social.
Austria averaged higher in wealth, education, medical development. This
fact would tend to have a double effect. First, among the more backward
population, a certain proportion would die of internal cancers difficult
to diagnose, without the cause being recognized, owing to insufficient
medical treatment. Second, the general death rate would be higher. More
children and young people would die of infectious or preventable disease,
leaving fewer survivors to die of cancer in middle and old age. Wherever,
on the other hand, a public is medically educated, and typhoid, smallpox,
diphtheria, tuberculosis claim fewer victims, the proportion of those
dying of cancer, nephritis, heart diseases, increases. Such an increase
is noted everywhere, and goes hand in hand with a longer average life.
The alarm sometimes felt at the modern “increase” of cancer is therefore
unfounded, because it is perhaps mainly apparent. If a larger percentage
of the population each year died of old age, it would be a sign that
sanitation and medicine were increasingly effective: evidence that more
people lived to become old, not that age debility was spreading.
Consequently, a high degree of modern civilization must tend to raise
the cancer rate; and any group of people will seem relatively immune
from cancer in proportion as they remain removed from attaining to this
civilization. In Hungary, from 1901-04, the cancer deaths were 239 among
the owners of large farms, 41 among the owners of small farms; 108 among
employing blacksmiths, 25 among their employees; 114 among employing
tailors, 32 among employed tailors. Obviously these pairs of groups
differ chiefly in their economic and cultural status.
Here too lies the explanation of why the South African negro shows a rate
of only 14, the United States negro of 56; also why the Chinese rate is
as low as 5 in Hongkong, rises to 19 in Manila, and 26 in Hawaii, while
the closely allied Japanese average 62 for the whole of Japan—as compared
with 50 for Spain, which is pure Caucasian, but one of the most backward
countries in Europe. In Tokyo and Kyoto the rate soars to 73 and 90
respectively, just as in the United States it is about 10 higher for the
urban than for the rural population.
Within the United States, also, the rate rises and falls almost parallel
for whites and Negroes according to locality; as,
1906-10 _White_ _Negro_
Memphis 59 34
Charleston 73 37
Nashville 74 55
New Orleans 86 73
If allowance is made for the facts that the negro population of the
United States is poorer and less educated than the white; that it lives
mainly in lower latitudes; and that it tends to be rural rather than
urban, the comparative cancer death rates for the country of negro 56 and
white 77 would appear to be accounted for, without bringing race into
consideration.
In short, what at first glance, or to a partisan pleader, would seem
to be a notable race difference in cancer liability, turns out so
overwhelmingly due to environmental and social causes as to leave it
doubtful whether racial heredity enters as a factor at all. This is not
an assertion that race has nothing whatever to do with the disease; it
is an assertion that in the present state of knowledge an inherent or
permanent connection between race and cancer incidence has not been
demonstrated. If there is such a connection, it is evidently a slight
one, heavily overlaid by non-racial influences; and it may be wholly
lacking.
The case would be still less certain for most other diseases, in which
environmental factors are more directly and obviously influential. Racial
medical science is not impossible; in fact it should have an important
future as a study; but its foundations are not yet laid.
40. MENTAL ACHIEVEMENT AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
One point will have become clear in the course of the foregoing
discussion: namely, how far the difficulty of coming to positive
conclusions is due to the two sets of interacting causal factors, the
hereditary ones and the environmental ones that play upon heredity.
The environmental factors are themselves a composite of geographical
influences and of the economic, cultural, and other social influences
that human beings exert upon each other.
If this intermingling of distinct kinds of causes is true of races when
considered from the side of physiology and medicine, it is evident that
the intermingling will be even more intricate in the mental sphere. After
all, bodily functioning varies only within fairly definite limits. When
external influences press too strongly upon the innate nature of the
organism, the latter ceases to function and dies. The mind, on the other
hand, however much its structure may be given by heredity, depends for
its content wholly on experience, and this experience can be thoroughly
varied. Individuals of the same organic endowment may conceivably be
born either in the uppermost stratum of a highly refined civilization,
or among the most backward and remote savages. Whether this actually
happens, and to what degree, is of course precisely the problem which we
are trying to solve. But that it is theoretically and logically possible
cannot be denied; and here a vicious circle of reasoning begins. One
argument says: there have been no recognized geniuses among peoples
like the Hottentots, and the sum total of their group achievement is
ridiculously small; therefore it is clear that the Hottentot mind must be
inferior. The opposite argument runs: Hottentot cultural environment is
so poor and limited that the finest mind in the world reared under its
influence would grow up relatively sterile and atrophied; therefore it is
probable that the mind of the Hottentot is intrinsically identical with
our own, or at least of equivalent capacity, and that Hottentot geniuses
have actually been born but have been unable to flourish as geniuses.
Evidently the same facts are before those who advocate these opposite
views, but these facts are viewed from diametrically opposite sides. If
one starts to travel around the logical circle in one direction, one can
keep revolving indefinitely and find ever fresh supporting evidence. If,
however, one begins to revolve around the same circle of opinion in the
opposite direction, it is just as easy and just as compelling to continue
to think in this fashion and to find all testimony corroborative.
In such a situation it is possible to realize that from the point of view
of proof, or objective truth, one view is worth as much as the other:
which is nothing. It is an emotional bias that inclines one man toward
the conviction of race superiority and another to that of race equality.
The proofs in either case are for the most part a mere assembling of
ex parte testimony. It is easy enough to advocate impartiality. The
difficulty is in being impartial; because both the hereditary and the
environmental factors are in reality unknown quantities. What we have
objectively before us is such and such a race or group of people, with
such and such present traits and historical record. These phenomena
being the product of the interaction of the two sets of causes, we
could of course, if we knew the strength of one, compute the strength
of the other. But as we have isolated neither, we are dealing with two
indeterminate variables. Evidently the only way out of the dilemma, at
any rate the only scientific way, is to find situations in which one of
the factors is, for the time being, fixed. In that case the strength of
the other factor will of course be proportionate to the attainments of
the groups.
Actually, such instances are excessively difficult to find. There are
occasional individuals with identical heredity, namely, twins produced
from the division of a single ovum. In such twins, the strength of
environmental influences can be gauged by the difference in their
careers and achievements. Yet such twins are only individuals, and it
is illegitimate to make far-reaching inferences from them to larger
groups, such as the races. It is conceivable that heredity might on the
whole be a more powerful cause than environment, and racial groups still
average substantially alike in their heredity. Because a natively gifted
and a natively stunted individual within the group vary conspicuously
in achievement, even under similar environment, it does not follow that
races differ in germ-plasm because they differ in achievements.
If, on the other hand, one sets out to discover cases of identical
environment for distinct racial strains, the task quickly becomes even
more difficult. Very little analysis usually suffices to show that the
environment is identical only up to a certain point, and that beyond this
point important social divergences begin. Thus, so far as geographical
environment goes, the Negro and the white in the southern United States
are under the same conditions. There is also uniformity of some of the
gross externals of cultural environment. Both Negroes and whites speak
English; are Christians; plant corn; go to the circus; and so on. But,
just as obviously, there are aspects in which their social environment
differs profoundly. Educational opportunities are widely different. The
opportunity of attaining leadership or otherwise satisfying ambition
is wide open to the white, and practically closed to the Negro. The
“color-line” inevitably cuts across the social environment and makes of
it two different environments.
It might be said that the southern United States furnish an extreme case
of a sharply drawn color-line. This is true. But on the other hand there
is no place on earth where something corresponding to a color-line is
not drawn between two races occupying the same territory. It sometimes
happens that distinctions are diminished and faintly or subtly enforced,
as in modern Hawaii, where to outward appearances many races dwell
together without discrimination. Yet examination reveals that the absence
of discrimination is only legal and perhaps economic. As regards the
relations and associations of human beings, the welcome which they extend
or the aloofness which they show to one another, there is always a
color-line. This means not only difference in opportunity, but difference
in experience, habit formation, practices, and interests.
41. PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS ON THE SENSE FACULTIES
This factor of experience enters even into what appear to be the simplest
mental operations, the sensory ones. The scant data available from
experimental tests indicate that a variety of dark skinned or uncivilized
peoples, including Oceanic and African Negroids, Negritos, Ainus, and
American Indians, on the whole slightly surpass civilized whites in
keenness of vision and fineness of touch discrimination, whereas the
whites are somewhat superior in acuity of hearing and sensitiveness to
pain. Yet what do these results of measurements mean?
Vision is tested for its distance ability. The farther off one can
distinguish objects or marks, the higher one’s rating. Civilized man
reads—normally—at 14 inches. He works with sharp knives, with machines
that are exact; he is surrounded by things made with such exact machines;
he handles thin paper and filmy fabrics. His women sew and embroider with
the sharpest of needles, the finest of thread. Everything about us tends
toward close accuracy and away from the haziness of distant observation.
The savage, on the other hand, the half-civilized person even, inspects
the horizon, watches for game or its dim tracks, tries to peer to the
bottom of streams for fish. He does not read, his needles are blunt, his
thread is cord, his carving without precision even though decorative, the
lines he makes are free-hand and far-apart. He is trained, as it were,
for the usual vision tests. If the psychologist reversed his experiment
and sought the degree of power to see fine differences at close range, it
is possible that the savage might prove inferior because untrained by his
experience. Such tests seem not to have been made. Until they are, and
again show uncivilized man superior, there is no real proof that innate
racial differences of serious moment exist.
The whole act of vision in fact involves more than we ordinarily think.
After all, seeing is done with the mind as well as with the eye. There is
the retinal image, but there is also the interpretation of this image.
A sailor descries the distant shore, whereas the landsman sees only a
haze on the horizon. To the city dweller a horse and a cow a mile off
are indistinguishable. Not so to the rancher. There is something almost
imperceptible about the profile of the feeding end of the animal, about
its movement, that promptly and surely classes it. At still longer
ranges, where the individual animals have wholly faded from sight, a
herd of cattle may perhaps be told from one of horses, by the plainsman,
through the different clouds of dust which they kick up, or the rate of
motion of the cloud. An hour later when the herd is reached and proves
to be as said, the astonished traveler from the metropolis is likely to
credit his guide’s eyes with an intrinsic power greater than his field
glasses—forgetting the influence of experience and training.
In keenness of hearing, on the contrary, one should expect the
civilized white to come out ahead, as in fact he does; not because he
is Caucasian but because he is civilized and because the instruments
of experimentation, be they tuning forks or ticking watches or balls
dropped on metal plates, are implements of civilization. Make the test
the howl of a distant wolf, or the snapping of a twig as the boughs bend
in the wind, and the college student’s hearing might prove duller than
that of the Indian or Ainu. There is a story of a woodsman on a busy
thoroughfare, amid the roar of traffic and multifarious noise of a great
city, hearing a cricket chirp, which was actually discovered in a near-by
open cellar. Extolled for his miraculous keenness of audition, the man
in the fur cap dropped a small coin on the pavement: at the clink,
passers-by across the street stopped and looked around.
As to the pain sense, an introspective, interpretative element
necessarily enters into experiments. What constitutes pain? When the
trial becomes disagreeable? When it hurts? When it is excruciating? The
savage may physiologically feel with his nerve ends precisely as we do.
But being reared to a life of chronic slight discomforts, he is likely
to think nothing of the sensation until it hurts sharply; whereas we
signal as soon as we are sure that the experience is becoming perceptibly
unpleasant.
In short, until there shall have been more numerous, balanced, and
searching tests made, it must be considered that nothing positive has
been established as to the respective sensory faculties of the several
human races. The experiments performed are tests not so much of race as
of the average experience and habits of groups of different culture.
42. INTELLIGENCE TESTS
If this is true as regards the sense faculties, it might be expected
to hold to a greater degree of those higher mental faculties which we
call intelligence; and such is the case. Intelligence tests have been
gradually evolved and improved, the best known being the Binet-Simon
series. These are arranged to determine the mental age of the subject.
Their most important function accordingly has been the detection
of defective adults or backward children. During the World War,
psychological examinations were introduced on a scale unheard of before.
The purpose of these examinations was to assign men to the tasks best
commensurate with their true abilities; especially to prevent the unfit
from being entrusted with responsibility under which they would break
down and bring failure on larger undertakings. Men subject to dizziness
were to be kept from flying; those unable to understand orders, out of
active line service. The tests throughout were practical. They tried to
decide whether a given man was fit or unfit. They did not pretend to go
into the causes of his fitness or unfitness. This is an important point.
Whatever illumination the army intelligence tests shed on the problem of
race intelligence is therefore indirect. Different racial or national
groups represented in the examinations attain different capacity ratings,
but there is nothing in the results themselves to show whether they are
due to racial or environmental factors. Evidence on this point, if it can
be derived at all from the tests, has to be “analyzed out.”
In general, examinees in the United States were rated by being assigned,
on the basis of their scores, to grades which were lettered from A to E,
with plus and minus subgrades. The most comprehensive presentation of
results is to express the percentage of individuals in each group that
made the middle grade C, better than C, and worse than C. On this basis
we find:
_Group and Number of Individuals_ _Below C_ _C_ _Above C_
Englishmen, 411 9 71 20
White draft generally, 93,973 24 64 12
Italians, 4,007 63 36 1
Poles, 382 70 30 (.5)
Negroes generally, 18,891 79 20 1
These figures at face value seem to show deep group differences in
intelligence; and these face values have been widely accepted. The
reason is that they flatter national and race egotism. To be sure, the
Englishmen in the American draft make a better showing than the drafted
men at large; but this has been complacently explained by saying that
the English represent in comparative purity the Anglo-Saxon or Nordic
stock which is also the dominant strain among Americans, but which has
been somewhat contaminated in their case by the immigration of Latins
and Slavs, who rate much lower, as shown by the Italians and Poles
tested. Lowest of all, as might be expected, is the Negro. So runs the
superficial but satisfying interpretation of the figures—satisfying if
one happens to be of North European ancestry.
But there is one feature that raises suspicion. The Italians and the
Poles are too close to the Negroes. They stand much nearer to them in
intelligence, according to these figures, than they do to the white
Americans. Can this be so—at least, can it have racial significance? Are
these Mediterraneans, descendants of the Romans, and these Alpines, so
large a strain of whose blood flows in the veins of many white Americans,
only a shade superior to the Negro? Scarcely. “Something must be wrong”
with the figures: that is, they contain another factor besides race.
A little dissection of the lump results reveals this factor. The northern
Negro far surpasses the southern in his showing. He gets ten times as
high a proportion of individuals into the above-average grades, only
half as many into the below-average. Evidently the difference is due to
increased schooling, improved earning capacity, larger opportunity and
incentive: social environment, in short. So strong is the influence of
the environment that the northern Negro easily surpasses the Italian in
America.
Negroes, 5 northern states, 4,705 46 51 3
Italians, 4,007 63 36 1
Negroes, 4 southern states, 6,846 86 14 (.3)
Evidently the psychological tests are more a gauge of educational and
social opportunity than of race, since the Italian, although brunet, is
of course a pure Caucasian.
This conclusion is reinforced by another consideration. The type of test
first used in the army had been built up for reasonably literate people,
speaking English. Among such people it discriminated successfully between
the more and the less fit. But the illiterate and the foreigner knowing
no English failed completely—not because their intelligence was zero,
but because the test involved the use of non-congenital abilities which
they had not acquired. A second set of tests, known as Beta, was evolved
for those who were obviously ineligible, or proved themselves so, for
the old style of test, which was designated as Alpha. The illiteracy of
the subjects given the Beta test was in most cases not an absolute one.
Men who could not write an intelligible letter or read the newspaper or
who had had only half or less of the ordinary grammar school education,
together with aliens whose comprehension of English remained imperfect,
were put in the group of “illiterates” or badly educated. Separating now
the literates from the illiterates among a number of racial, national, or
sectional groups, we find:
ALPHA TEST: LITERATES
Englishmen, 374 5 74 21
White draft generally, 72,618 16 69 15
Alabama whites, 697 19 72 9
New York negroes, 1,021 21 72 7
Italians, 575 33 64 3
Negroes generally, 5,681 54 44 2
Alabama negroes, 262 56 44 (.4)
BETA TEST: ILLITERATES
White draft generally, 26,012 58 41 1
Italians, 2,888 64 35 1
New York negroes, 440 72 28 0
Poles, 263 76 24 (.4)
Alabama whites, 384 80 20 0
Negroes generally, 11,633 91 9 (.2)
Alabama Negroes, 1,043 97 3 (.1)
It must be borne in mind that the two groups were not set apart as the
result of tests, but that the two tests were devised to meet the problem
of treating the two groups with reasonable uniformity. The point was
to find the excellent man, and the unfit man, with the same degree of
accuracy whether he was literate or illiterate. When found, he was
assigned to the same grade, such as A, or D—, whether his examination had
been Alpha or Beta.
Now let us observe some of the figures. The New York negro is nearly on a
par with the Alabama white, among literates, and a bit ahead of him among
illiterates. Approximately the two groups come out the same; which means
that bringing up in a certain part of the country has as much to do with
intelligence, even in the rough, as has Caucasian or colored parentage.
The literate negroes of the draft, irrespective of section, slightly
surpass the illiterate whites.
In every case the literate members of a race or nationality make a far
better showing than the illiterate.
It is now clear also that the important factor of education enters
so heavily into the first figures cited that they can mean little if
anything as to inherent capacity. Of the Englishmen tested, nine-tenths
fell in the literate group; of the Poles, a fifth; of the Italians, a
seventh. In the draft generally, nearly three-fourths of the whites were
literate; of the negroes, less than a third.
In short, in spite of the fact that the Beta test was intended to
equalize conditions for the illiterate and semi-illiterate, the
outstanding conclusion of the army examinations seems to be that
education—cultural advantage—enormously develops faculty.
Is there anything left that can positively be assigned to race causation?
It may be alleged that within the same section the white recruits
regularly surpass the colored. Alabama whites may rate disappointingly,
but they do better than Alabama negroes; New York negroes show
surprisingly well, but they are inferior to New York whites; illiterate
whites from the whole country definitely surpass illiterate negroes; and
still more so among literates. But is this residuum of difference surely
racial? As long as the color-line remains drawn, a differential factor
of cultural advantage is included; and how strong this is there is no
present means of knowing. It is possible that some of the difference
between sectionally and educationally equalized groups of whites and
negroes is really innate and racial. But it is also possible that most or
all of it is environmental. Neither possibility can be demonstrated from
the unrefined data at present available.
43. STATUS OF HYBRIDS
In nearly all tests of the American Negro, full bloods and mixed bloods
are not discriminated. Evidently if races have distinctive endowments,
the nature of these endowments is not cleared up so long as individuals
who biologically are seven-eighths Caucasian are included with pure
Negroes merely because in this country we have the social habitude of
reckoning them all as “colored.”
On the other hand, an excellent opportunity to probe deeper is being
lost through the failure to classify tested colored people according
to the approximate proportion of Negro blood. Suppose for instance that
on a given examination whites scored an average of 100 and Negroes of
60. Then, if this difference were really due to race, if it were wholly
a matter of superior or inferior blood, mulattos should average 80 and
quadroons 90; unless intelligence were due to simple Mendelian factors,
in which case its inheritance would tend to segregate, and of this there
is no evidence. Suppose, however, that instead of the theoretically
expectable 80 and 90, the mulattos and quadroons scored 65 and 68.
In that event it would be clear that the major part of the Negro’s
inferiority of record was due to environment; that the white man’s
points from about 70 up to 100 were clearly the result of his superior
social opportunities, whereas the range between 60 and 70 approximately
represented the innate difference between Negro and Caucasian. This is a
hypothetical example, but it may serve to illustrate a possible method of
attacking the problem.
There are however almost no data of this kind; and when they are
obtained, they will be subject to certain cautions upon interpretation.
For instance, in the army examinations one attempt was made to separate a
small group of colored recruits into a darker-skinned group, comprising
full blooded Negroes and those appearing to be preponderantly of Negro
blood; and a lighter complexioned group, estimated to contain the
mulattos and individuals in whom white ancestry was in excess. The light
group made the better scores. In the Alpha test for literates it attained
a median score of 50, the dark Negroes only 30; in the Beta tests for
illiterates, the respective figures were 36 and 29.
The caution is this. Is the mulatto subject to any more advantageous
environment than the full blooded Negro? So far as voting and
office-holding, riding in Pullman cars and occupying orchestra seats
in theatre are concerned, there is no difference: both are colored,
and therefore beyond the barrier. But the mulattos of slavery days
were likely to be house servants, brought up with the master’s family,
absorbing manners, information, perhaps education; their black
half-brothers and half-sisters stayed out in the plantation shacks.
Several generations have elapsed since those days, but it is possible,
even probable, that the descendants of mulattos have kept a step or two
ahead of the descendants of the blacks in literacy, range of experience,
and the like.
It is impossible to predict what the social effect of miscegenation will
be. The effect undoubtedly varies and must be examined in each case.
Thus, Indian half-breeds in one tribe may usually be the result of wholly
transient or mercenary unions between inferior whites and debauched
native women and may therefore grow up in an atmosphere of demoralization
to which the full blooded Indian is less exposed. This demoralization
would, to be sure, affect character and not intelligence as such; but
it might stand in the way of schooling, and otherwise indirectly react
on measurable traits of mind. In another tribe or section of a tribe,
to the contrary, the half-breed might normally grow up in the house
of a permanently settled white father, a squaw man, and in that event
would learn English better, go to school earlier, and in case of a test
therefore achieve a higher rating than the full blood.
44. EVIDENCE FROM THE CULTURAL RECORD OF RACES
An entirely different method of approach to the problem of race
capacity is that of examining the cultural record, the achievements in
civilization, of groups. While this approach is theoretically possible,
and while it is often attempted, it is subject to little control and
therefore unlikely to yield dependable conclusions.
First of all, the culture history record of a people must be known for
considerable periods before one may validly think of inferring therefrom
anything as to the faculties of that people. The reason is that active
civilization, as a productive process, is slow to grow up, slow to be
acquired. Mere momentum would normally keep the more advanced of two
peoples ahead of the other for a long time. In proportion as not nations
but groups of nations were involved, the momentum would continue for
still longer periods. Civilization flourished for some thousands of years
in the Near East, and then about the Mediterranean, before it became
established with equal vigor and success in northern Europe. Had Julius
Cæsar or one of his contemporaries been asked whether by any sane stretch
of phantasy he could imagine the Britons and Germans as inherently
the equals of Romans and Greeks, he would probably have replied that
if these northerners possessed the ability of the Mediterraneans they
would long since have given vent to it, instead of continuing to live in
disorganization, poverty, ignorance, rudeness, and without great men or
products of the spirit. And, within limits, Cæsar would have been right,
since it was more than a thousand years before northern Europe began to
draw abreast of Italy in degree and productivity of civilization. Two
thousand years before Christ, a well informed Egyptian might reasonably
have disposed in the same sweeping way of the possibility of Greeks and
Italians being the equals of his own people in capacity. What had these
barbarians ever done to lead one to think that they might yet do great
things? To-day we brush Negroes and Indians out of the reckoning with the
same offhandedness.
In general, arguing from performance to potentiality, from accomplishment
to achievement, is valid under conditions of set experiment—such as
are impossible for races—or in proportion as the number and variety of
observations is large. A single matched competition may decide pretty
reliably as between the respective speed capacities of two runners. But
it would be hazardous to form an opinion from a casual glimpse of them
in action, when one might happen to be hastening and the other dallying.
Least of all would it be sound to infer that essential superiority
rested with the one that was in advance at the moment of observation,
without knowledge of their starting points, the difficulty of their
routes, the motive or goal of their courses. It is only as the number of
circumstances grows, from which observations are available, that judgment
begins to have any weight. The runner who has led for a long time and
is increasing his lead, or who has repeatedly passed others, or who
carries a load and yet gains ground, may lay some claim to superiority.
In the same way, as between races, a long and intimate historical
record, objectively analyzed, gives some legitimate basis for tentative
conclusions as to their natural endowment. But how long the record must
be is suggested by the example already cited of Mediterranean versus
Nordic cultural preëminence.
The fallacy that is most commonly committed is to argue from what in
the history of great groups is only an instant: this instant being that
at which one’s own race or nationality is dominant. The Anglo-Saxon’s
moment is the present; the Greek’s, the age of Pericles. Usually, too,
the dominance holds only for certain aspects: military or economic or
æsthetic superiority, as the case may be; inferiorities on other sides
are merely overlooked. The Greek knew his venality, but looked down
on the barbarian nevertheless. Anglo-Saxon failure in the plastic and
musical arts is notorious, but does not deter most Anglo-Saxons from
believing that they are the elect in quality, and from buttressing this
conviction with the evidences of present industrial, economic, and
political achievements—and perhaps past literary ones.
45. EMOTIONAL BIAS
Inference from record to potentiality where the record of one’s own group
is favorable, and failure to draw such inference where the achievement
of other groups is superior, is a combination of mental operations that
is widely spread because it arises spontaneously in minds not critically
trained. Here is an instance:
One of the great achievements of science in the nineteenth century was
Galton’s demonstration, in a series of works beginning with “Hereditary
Genius,” that the laws of heredity apply to the mind in the same manner
and to the same degree as to the body. On the whole this proof has failed
to be recognized at its true importance, probably because it inclines
adversely to current presuppositions of the independence of the soul from
the body, and freedom of the will, propositions to which most men adhere
emotionally.
From this perfectly valid demonstration, which has been confirmed by
other methods, Galton went on to rate the hereditary worth of various
races, according to the number of their men of genius. Here a fallacy
enters: the assumption that all geniuses born are recognized as such.
A great work naturally requires a great man, but it presupposes also a
great culture. It may be that, historically speaking, a great genius
cannot arise in a primitive degree of civilization. That is, the kind
of concentrated accomplishment which alone we recognize as a work of
genius is culturally impossible below a certain level. Biologically the
individual of genius may be there; civilizationally he is not called
forth, and so does not get into the record. Consequently it is unsound
to argue from the historical record to biological worth. However, this
Galton did; and his method led him to the conclusion that the negro
rates two grades lower than the Englishman, on a total scale of fourteen
grades, and the Englishman two lower than the fifth century Athenian.
This conclusion has never been popular. Most people on becoming familiar
with Galton’s argument, resist it. Its fallacy is not easy to perceive—if
it were, Galton would not have committed it—and the average person is
habitually so vague-minded upon what is organic and what is social, that
the determination of the fallacy would be well beyond him. His opposition
to Galton’s conclusion is therefore emotionally and not rationally
founded, and his arguments against the conclusion are presumably also
called forth by emotional stimulus.
On the other hand, most individuals of this day and land do habitually
infer, like Galton, from cultural status to biological worth, so far
as the Negro is concerned. The same persons who eagerly accept the
demonstration of a flaw in the argument in favor of Athenian superiority,
generally become skeptical and resistive to the exposition of the same
flaw in the current belief as to Negro inferiority. It is remarkable how
frequently and how soon, in making this exposition, one becomes aware
of the hearer’s feeling that one’s attitude is sophistical, unreal,
insincere, or motivated by something concealed.
The drift of this discussion may seem to be an unavowed argument in favor
of race equality. It is not that (§ 271). As a matter of fact, the bodily
differences between races would appear to render it in the highest degree
likely that corresponding congenital mental differences do exist. These
differences might not be profound, compared with the sum total of common
human faculties, much as the physical variations of mankind fall within
the limits of a single species. Yet they would preclude identity. As for
the vexed question of superiority, lack of identity would involve at
least some degree of greater power in certain respects in some races.
These preëminences might be rather evenly distributed, so that no one
race would notably excel the others in the sum total or average of its
capacities; or they might show a tendency to cluster on one rather than
on another race. In either event, however, the fact of race difference,
qualitative if not quantitative, would remain.
But it is one thing to admit this theoretical probability and then stop
through ignorance of what the differences are, and another to construe
the admission as justification of mental attitudes which may be well
founded emotionally but are in considerable measure unfounded objectively.
In short, it is a difficult task to establish any race as either superior
or inferior to another, but relatively easy to prove that we entertain a
strong prejudice in favor of our own racial superiority.
46. SUMMARY
It would seem that the subject of race problems, that is, the natural
endowment of human races, can be summarized as follows:
The essential difficulty of these problems lies in the fact that the
performance of groups is the product of two sets of factors, biological
and cultural, both of which are variable and not always readily separable.
Progress in solution of the problems will be made gradually, and will be
hastened by recognition of how few positive determinations have been made.
Most of the alleged existing evidence on race endowment is likely to be
worthless.
The remainder probably has some value, but to what degree, and what it
demonstrates, cannot yet be asserted.
The most definite determinations promise to eventuate from experiment.
If fully controlled experiments in breeding and rearing human beings
could be carried out, the problems would soon begin to solve. Experiments
on animals would prove practically nothing because animals are
cultureless—uninfluenced by social environment of their own making.
Progress will be aided by increasing shift of attention from the crude
consideration of comparative lump rating of the races, that is, their
gross superiority or inferiority, to a consideration of such specific
qualitative differences as they may prove to show. The question of
finding the race in which the greatest number of qualitative excellences
are concentrated is subsequent and of much less scientific importance.
Scientific inquiries into race are for the present best kept apart
from so-called actual race problems. These problems inevitably involve
feeling, usually of considerable strength, which tends to vitiate
objective approach. On the other hand, the practical problems will no
doubt continue to be met practically, that is, morally and emotionally.
Whether the Japanese should be forbidden to hold land and the Negro be
legally disfranchised are problems of economics and of group ethics,
which probably will for a long time be disposed of emotionally as at
present, irrespective of the possible findings of science upon the innate
endowment of Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid strains.
CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE
47. Linguistic relationship: the speech family.—48. Criteria
of relationship.—49. Sound equivalences and phonetic laws.—50.
The principal speech families.—51. Classification of languages
by types.—52. Permanence of language and race.—53. The
biological and historical nature of language.—54. Problems
of the relation of language and culture.—55. Period of the
origin of language.—56. Culture, speech, and nationality.—57.
Relative worth of languages.—58. Size of vocabulary.—59.
Quality of speech sounds.—60. Diffusion and parallelism in
language and culture.—61. Convergent languages.—62. Unconscious
factors in language and culture.—63. Linguistic and cultural
standards.—64. Rapidity of linguistic change.
47. LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIP: THE SPEECH FAMILY
The question that the historian and anthropologist are likely to ask most
frequently of the philologist, is whether this and that language are or
are not related. Relationship in such connection means descent from a
common source, as two brothers are descended from the same father, or two
cousins from a common grandfather. If languages can be demonstrated to
possess such common source, it is clear that the peoples who spoke them
must at one time have been in close contact, or perhaps have constituted
a single people. If, on the other hand, the languages of two peoples
prove wholly dissimilar, though their racial types and cultures be
virtually identical, as indeed is sometimes found to be the case—witness
the Hungarians and their neighbors—it is evident that an element of
discontinuous development must somewhere be reckoned with. Perhaps one
part of an originally single racial group gradually modified its speech
beyond recognition, or under the shock of conquest, migration, or other
historical accident entirely discarded it in favor of a new and foreign
tongue. Or the opposite may be true: the two groups were originally
distinct in all respects, but, being brought in contact, their cultures
interpenetrated, intermarriage followed, and the two physical types
became assimilated into one while the languages remained dissimilar. In
short, if one wishes full understanding of a people, one must take its
language into consideration. This means that it must be classified. If a
historical classification is to be more than barrenly logical, it must
have reference to relationship, development, origin. In a word, it must
be a genetic classification.
The term used to indicate that two or more languages have a common source
but are unrelated to all others, or seem so in the present state of
knowledge, is “linguistic family.” “Linguistic stock” is frequently used
as a synonym. This is the fundamental concept in the classification of
languages. Without a clear idea of its meaning one involves himself in
confusion on attempting to use philology as an aid to other branches of
human history.
There is no abstract reason against referring to a group of unrelated
languages as a “family” because they are all spoken in one area, nor
against denominating as “families,” as has sometimes been done, the major
subdivisions of a group of languages admittedly of common origin. Again,
languages that show certain similarities of type or structure, such as
inflection, might conceivably be put into one “family.” But there is
this objection to all such usages: they do not commit themselves on the
point of genetic relationship, or they contradict it, or only partially
exhaust it. Yet commonness of origin is so important in many connections
that it is indispensable to have one term which denotes its ascertainable
presence. And for this quality there happens to be no generally
understood designation other than “linguistic family,” or its synonym,
“linguistic stock.” This phrase will therefore be used here strictly
in the sense of the whole of a group of languages sprung from a single
source, and only in that sense. Other groupings will be indicated by
phrases like “languages of such and such an area,” “subfamily,” “division
of a family,” or “languages of similar type.”
48. CRITERIA OF RELATIONSHIP
The question that first arises in regard to linguistic families is how
the relationship of their constituent idioms is determined. In brief, the
method is one of comparison. If a considerable proportion of the words
and grammatical forms of two languages are reasonably similar, similar
enough to indicate that the resemblances cannot be due to mere accident,
these similar words and forms must go back to a common source, and if
this source is not borrowing, the two tongues are related. If comparison
fails to bring out any such degree of resemblance, the languages are
classed in distinct families.
Of course it is possible that the reason two languages seem unrelated
is not that they are really so, but that they have in the lapse of ages
become so much differentiated that one cannot any longer find resemblance
between their forms. In that event true relationship would be obscured
by its remoteness. Theoretically there is high probability that many
families of languages, customarily regarded as totally distinct, do go
back in the far past to a common origin, and that ignorance of their
history, or inability to analyze them deeply, prevents recognition of
their relationship. From time to time it happens that groups of languages
which at first seemed unrelated are shown by more intensive study to
possess elements enough in common to compel the recognition of their
original unity. In that case what were supposed to be several “families”
become merged in one. The scope of a particular family may be thus
enlarged; but the scope of the generic concept of “family” is not altered.
Whether there is any hope that comparative philology may ultimately
be prosecuted with sufficient success to lead all the varied forms of
human speech back to a single origin, is an interesting speculation. A
fair statement is that such a possibility cannot be denied, but that
the science is still far from such a realization, and that progress
toward it is necessarily slow. Of more immediate concern is an ordering
and summarizing of the knowledge in hand with a view to such positive
inferences as can be drawn.
In an estimate of the similarity of languages, words that count as
evidence must meet two requirements: they must be alike or traceably
similar in sound; and they must be alike or similar in meaning. This
double requirement holds, whether full words or separable parts of words,
roots or grammatical forms, are compared. The English word _eel_ and
the French _île_, meaning island, are pronounced almost exactly alike,
yet their meaning is so different that no sane person would regard them
as sprung from the same origin. As a matter of fact _île_ is derived
from Latin _insula_, whereas _eel_ has a cognate in German _aal_. These
prototypes _insula_ and _aal_ being as different in sound as they are
in meaning, any possibility that _eel_ and _île_ might be related is
easily disposed of. Yet if the Latin and German equivalents were lost, if
nothing were known of the history of the English and French languages,
and if _île_ meant not _island_ but, say, _fish_ or _watersnake_, then it
might be reasonable to think of a connection.
Such doubtful cases, of which a certain proportion are likely to be
adjudged wrongly, are bound to come up in regard to the less investigated
languages, particularly those of nations without writing, the earlier
stages of whose speech have perished without trace. In proportion as more
is known of a language, or as careful analysis can reconstruct more of
its past stages, the number of such borderline cases obviously becomes
fewer.
Before genetic connection between two languages can be thought of, the
number of their words similar in sound and sense must be reasonably
large. An isolated handful of resemblances obviously are either
importations—loan words—or the result of coincidence. Thus in the native
Californian language known as Yuki, _ko_ means _go_, and _kom_ means
_come_. Yet examination of Yuki reveals no further instances of the same
kind. It would therefore be absurd to dream of a connection: one swallow
does not make a summer. This lone pair of resemblances means nothing
except that the mathematical law of probability has operated. Among the
thousands of words in one language, a number are likely to be similar
in sound to words of another language; and of this number again a small
fraction, perhaps one or two or five in all, will happen to bear some
resemblance in meaning also. In short, the similarities upon which a
verdict of genetic relationship is based must be sufficiently numerous
to fall well beyond possibility of mere coincidence; and it must also be
possible to prove with reasonable certainty that they are not the result
of one language borrowing words from another, as, for instance, English
borrowed from French and Latin.
At the same time it is not necessary that the similarities extend to the
point of identity. In fact, too close a resemblance between part of the
stock of two languages immediately raises a presumption of borrowing.
For every language is continually changing, and once a mother tongue
has split into several branches, each of these goes on modifying its
sounds, and gradually shifting the meaning of its words, generation after
generation. In short, where connection is real, it must be veiled by a
certain degree of distortion.
Take the English word _foot_ and the Latin word of the same meaning,
_pes_. To offhand inspection the sounds or forms of the two words do
not seem similar. The resemblance becomes more definite in other forms
of _pes_, for instance the genitive case _ped-is_ or the accusative
_ped-em_. Obviously the stem or elementary portion of the Latin word is
not _pes_ but _ped-_; and the _d_ is closer to the English _t_ of _foot_
than is the _s_ of _pes_. The probability of relationship is increased
by the Greek word for foot, _pous_, whose stem proves to be _pod-_,
with vowel closer to that of English. Meanwhile, it would be recognized
that there are English words beginning with _ped-_, such as _pedal_,
_pedestrian_, _pedestal_, all of which have a clear association with the
idea of foot. All these words however possess almost exact equivalents in
Latin. One would therefore be justified in concluding from these facts
what indeed the history of the languages proves, namely, that _pedal_,
_pedestrian_, and _pedestal_ are Latin words taken over into English;
whereas _foot_ and _pes_ and _pous_, and for that matter German _fuss_,
are derivatives from a common form which once existed in the now extinct
mother tongue from which Greek and Latin and English and German are
derived.
49. SOUND EQUIVALENCES AND PHONETIC LAWS
The question next arises whether it is possible to account for the
distortions which have modified the original word into _foot_, _ped-_,
etc. What has caused the initial sound of this ancient word to become _p_
in Latin and _f_ in English, and its last consonant to be _d_ in Latin
and Greek, _t_ in English, and _ss_ in German? To answer this seemingly
innocent question with accuracy for this one word alone would involve a
treatise on the whole group of languages in question, and even then the
causes, as causes, could scarcely be set down with certainty. But it
has proved possible to assemble a large number of instances of parallel
distortion in which Latin _p_ corresponds to English _f_, or _d_ to _t_.
Evidently philology has got hold of a generalized phenomenon here. Since
_father_ corresponds to _pater_, _full_ to _pl-enus_, _for_ to _pro_,
_fish_ to _piscis_, and so on in case after case, we are evidently face
to face with a happening that has occurred with regularity and to which
the name “law” is therefore applicable.
The _f_ of _foot_ and _p_ of _pes_ are both lip sounds. They differ
preëminently in that _f_ can be prolonged indefinitely, whereas _p_
is a momentary sound. It is produced by closure of the lips for a
fraction of a second during which there is an interruption of sound
production, followed by a somewhat explosive release of the breath which
has been impounded in the mouth cavity. This explosion is of necessity
instantaneous. Since it is preceded by occlusion, or stoppage of the
breath, it is customary to speak of sounds produced by a process like
_p_ as “stops.” _F_, on the other hand, is a “continuant,” or more
specifically a “fricative.”
The English word _three_ begins with a sound which, although
conventionally represented by the two letters _th_, is a simple sound
and in a class with _f_ in being fricative. _Th_ is formed by putting
the tongue lightly across the teeth, just as _f_ is made by placing the
lower lip against the edge of the upper teeth. In both cases the breath
is expelled with friction through a narrow passage. Now if the fricative
_f_ is represented in Latin by the stop _p_, then, if regularity holds
good, the English fricative _th_ ought to be represented in Latin by the
stop sound in the corresponding dental position, namely _t_. The Latin
word for _three_ is in fact _tres_; for _thin_, _ten-uis_; for _mother_,
_mater_; for _thou_, _tu_, and so on. The regularity therefore extends
beyond the limits of the single labial class of sounds, and applies with
equal force to the dentals; and, it may be added, to the palatals or
gutturals as well.
As one passes from English and Latin to German, one finds the initial
sound of the word meaning three, _drei_, to be somewhat different from
_th_ and _t_ but still clearly allied, since it also is made by the
tongue against the teeth. _D_ is a stop like _t_, but the vocal cords
vibrate while it is being pronounced, whereas in _t_ the vocal cords
are silent. _D_ is “voiced” or “sonant,” _t_ “unvoiced” or “surd.”
Hence the formulation: Latin, surd stop; German, sonant stop; English,
fricative. This triple equivalence can be substantiated in other words.
For instance, _ten-uis_, _dünn_, _thin_; _tu_, _du_, _thou_.
If it is the English word that contains a surd stop, what will be the
equivalent in Latin and German? Compare _ten_, Latin _decem_, German
_zehn_. Again the three classes of sounds run parallel; but the place of
their appearance in the three languages has shifted.
The third possible placing of the three sounds in the three languages is
when English has the sonant stop, _d_. By exclusion it might be predicted
that Latin should then show the fricative _th_ and German the surd stop
_t_. The word _daughter_ confirms. The German is _tochter_. Latin in this
case fails us, the original corresponding stem having gone out of use and
been replaced by the word _filia_. But Greek, whose sounds align with
those of Latin as opposed to English and German, provides the _th_ as
expected: _thygater_. Compare _death_, _tod_, _thanatos_.
Let us bring together these results so that the eye may grasp them:
Latin, Greek surd stop sonant stop fricative
German sonant stop fricative surd stop
English fricative surd stop sonant stop
Latin, Greek tres duo thygater
German drei zwei tochter
English three two daughter
These relations apply not only to the dentals _d_, _t_, _th_ (_z_), which
have been chosen for illustration, but also to the labials, _p_, _b_,
_f_, and to the palatals _k_, _g_, _h_ (_gh_, _ch_).
It is evident that most of the sounds occur in all three groups of
languages, but not in the same words. The sound _t_ is common to
English, Latin, and German, but when it appears in a particular word
in one of these languages it is replaced by _d_ and _th_ in the two
others. This replacing is known as a “sound shift.” The sound shifts
just enumerated constitute the famous Grimm’s Law. This was the first
discovered important phonetic law or system of sound substitutions. Yet
it is only one of a number of shifts that have been worked out for the
Indo-European group of languages to which English, German, and Latin
belong. So far, only stopped and fricative consonants have been reviewed
here, and no vowels have been considered. Other groups of languages also
show shifts, but often different ones, as between _l_ and _n_, or _s_ and
_k_, or _p_ and _k_.
The significance of a shift lies in the fact that its regularity cannot
be explained on any other ground than that the words in which the law
is operative must originally have been the same. That is, Latin _duo_,
German _zwei_, English _two_ are all only variants of a word which
meant “two” in the mother tongue from which these three languages are
descended. This example alone is of course insufficient evidence for the
existence of such a common mother tongue. But that each of the shifts
discussed is substantiated by hundreds or thousands of words in which
it holds true, puts the shift beyond the possibility of mere accident.
The explanation of coincidence is ruled out. The resemblances therefore
are both genuine and genetic. The conclusion becomes inevitable that the
languages thus linked are later modifications of a former single speech.
It is in this way that linguistic relationship is determined. Where an
ancient sound shift, a law of phonetic change, can be established by
a sufficient number of cases, argument ceases. It is true that when
most of a language has perished, or when an unwritten language has been
but fragmentarily recorded or its analysis not carried far, a strong
presumption of genetic unity may crowd in on the investigator who is not
yet in a position to present the evidence of laws. The indications may be
strong enough to warrant a tentative assumption of relationship. But the
final test is always the establishment of laws of sound equivalence that
hold good with predominating regularity.
50. THE PRINCIPAL SPEECH FAMILIES
The number of linguistic families is not a matter of much theoretical
import. From what has already been said it appears that the number
can perhaps never be determined with absolute accuracy. As knowledge
accumulates and dissection is carried to greater refinements, new
phonetic laws will uncover and serve to unite what now seem to be
separate stocks. Yet for the practical purpose of classification and
tracing relationship the linguistic family will remain a valuable tool. A
rapid survey of the principal families is therefore worth while.
[Illustration: FIG. 12. Linguistic Families of Asia and Europe. 1,
Basque. 2, Indo-European. 3, Caucasian (perhaps two families). 4,
Ural-Altaic (a, Finno-Ugric; b, Samoyed; c, Turkish; d, Mongol; e,
Tungus-Manchu). 5, Semitic. 6, Dravidian. 7, Kolarian. 8, Sinitic (a,
Chinese; b, Shan-Siamese; c, Tibeto-Burman). 9, Khasi. 10, Anamese. 11,
Mon-Khmer. 12, Sakai. 13, Semang. 14, Andaman. 15, Malayo-Polynesian.
16, Korean. 17, Japanese. 18, Ainu. 19, Yeniseian. 20, Yukaghir. 21,
Chukchi-Kamchadal. 22, Eskimo.]
In Asia and Europe, which must be considered a unit in this connection,
the number of stocks, according to conservative reckoning, does not
exceed twenty-five. The most important of these, in point of number
of speakers, is the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic or Aryan family,
whose territory for several thousand years has comprised southwestern
Asia and the greater part, but by no means all, of Europe. The most
populous branches of the Indo-European family are the Indic, Slavic,
Germanic, and Romance or Latin. Others are Persian or Iranic, Armenian,
Greek, Albanian, Baltic or Lithuanian, and Keltic. From Europe various
Indo-European languages, such as English, Spanish, French, Russian, have
in recent centuries been carried to other continents, until in some,
such as the Americas and Australia, the greater area is now inhabited by
peoples speaking Indo-European. As the accompanying maps are intended
to depict the historic or native distribution of languages they do
not show this diffusion. It will be noted that the distribution of
Indo-European has the form of a long belt stretching from western Europe
to northeastern India, with an interruption only in Asia Minor (Fig.
12). Turkish peoples displaced Indo-Europeans there about a thousand
years ago, thus breaking the territorial continuity. It is probable
that another link between the western and eastern Indo-Europeans once
stretched around the north of the Caspian sea. Here also there are Turks
now.
Almost equaling Indo-European in the number of its speakers is Sinitic,
which is generally held to include Chinese proper with its dialects; the
Tibeto-Burman branch; the T’ai or Shan-Siamese branch; and probably some
minor divisions like Lolo.
In extent of territory occupied the Altaic stock rivals the
Indo-European. Its three main divisions, Turkish, Mongolian, and
Tungus-Manchu, cover most of northern and central Asia and some tracts
in Europe. The Turks, as just noted, are the only stock that within the
period of history has gained appreciable territory at Indo-European
expense. The Uralic or Finno-Ugric family has eastern Europe and
northwestern Asia as its home, with the Finns and Hungarian Magyars as
its most civilized and best known representatives. This is a scattered
stock. Most scholars unite the three Altaic divisions, Finno-Ugric, and
Samoyed into a vast Ural-Altaic family.
Of the Semitic family, Arabic is the chief living representative, with
Abyssinian in Africa as a little known half-sister. Arabic is one of
the most widely diffused of all languages, and as the orthodox vehicle
of Mohammedanism has served an important function as a culture carrier.
Several great nations of ancient times also spoke Semitic tongues: the
Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Carthaginians, and Hebrews.
Southern India is Dravidian. While people of this family enter little
into our customary thoughts, they number over fifty millions. Japanese
and Korean also merit mention as important stock tongues. Anamese, by
some regarded as an offshoot from Chinese, may constitute a separate
stock. Several minor families will be found on the Asiatic map, most of
them consisting of uncivilized peoples or limited in their territory or
the number of their speakers. Yet, so far as can be judged from present
knowledge, they form units of the same order of independence as the great
Indo-European, Semitic, and Ural-Altaic stocks.
Language distributions in Africa are in the main simple (Fig. 13). The
whole of northern Africa beyond latitude 10°, and parts of east Africa
almost to the equator, were at one time Hamitic. This is the family to
which the language of ancient Egypt belonged. Hamitic and Semitic, named
after sons of Noah, probably derive from a common source, although the
separation of the common mother tongue into the African Hamitic and the
Asiatic Semitic divisions must have occurred very anciently. In the past
thousand years Hamitic has yielded ground before Semitic, due to the
spread of Arabic in Mohammedan Africa.
Africa south of the equator is the home of the great Bantu family, except
in the extreme southwest of the continent. There a tract of considerable
area, though of small populational density, was in the possession of the
backward Bushmen and Hottentots, distinctive in their physical type as
well as languages.
[Illustration: FIG. 13. Linguistic Families of Africa. 1, Hamitic.
2, Semitic (a, old; b, intrusive in former Hamitic territory since
Mohammed). 3, Bantu. 4, Hottentot. 5, Bushman. 6, Malayo-Polynesian. X,
the Sudan, not consistently classified.]
Between the equator and latitude ten north, in the belt known as the
Sudan, there is much greater speech diversity than elsewhere in
Africa. The languages of the Sudan fall into several families, perhaps
into a fairly large number. Opinion conflicts or is unsettled as to
their classification. They are, at least in the main, non-Hamitic and
non-Bantu; but this negative fact does not preclude their having had
either a single or a dozen origins. It has usually been easier to throw
them all into a vague group designated as non-Hamitic and non-Bantu than
to compare them in detail.
In Oceania conditions are similar to those of Africa, in that there
are a few great, widely branching stocks and one rather small area,
New Guinea, of astounding speech diversity. Indeed, superficially this
variety is the outstanding linguistic feature of New Guinea. The hundreds
of Papuan dialects of the island look as if they might require twenty or
more families to accommodate them. However, it is inconceivable that so
small a population should time and again have evolved totally new forms
of speech. It is much more likely that something in the mode of life
or habits of mind of the Papuans has favored the breaking up of their
speech into local dialects and an unusually rapid modification of these
into markedly differentiated languages. What the circumstances were that
favored this tendency to segregation and change can be only conjectured.
At any rate, New Guinea ranks with the Sudan, western North America, and
the Amazonian region of South America, as one of the areas of greatest
linguistic multiplicity.
All the remainder of Oceania is either Australian or Malayo-Polynesian in
speech. The Australian idioms have been imperfectly recorded. They were
numerous and locally much varied, but seem to derive from a single mother
tongue.
All the East Indies, including part of the Malay Peninsula, and
all of the island world of the Pacific—Polynesia, Micronesia, and
Melanesia—always excepting interior New Guinea—are the habitat of the
closely-knit Malayo-Polynesian family, whose unity was quickly recognized
by philologists. From Madagascar to Easter Island this speech stretches
more than half-way around our planet. Some authorities believe that the
Mon-Khmer languages of southern Indo-China and the Kolarian or Munda-Kol
tongues of India are related in origin to Malayo-Polynesian, and
denominate the larger whole, the Austronesian family.
[Illustration: FIG. 14. Some important linguistic families of North
America: 1, Eskimo; 2, Athabascan; 3, Algonkin; 4, Iroquoian; 5, Siouan;
6, Muskogean; 7, Uto-Aztecan; 8, Mayan. SA1, Arawak, No. 1 on South
American map (Fig. 15). SA8, Chibcha, No. 8 on South American map. The
white areas are occupied by nearly seventy smaller families, according to
the classification usually accepted.]
North and South America, according to the usual reckoning, contain
more native language families than all the remainder of the world. The
orthodox classification allots about seventy-five families to North
America (some fifty of them represented within the borders of the
United States) and another seventy-five to South America. They varied
greatly in size at the time of discovery, some being confined to a few
hundred souls, whereas others stretched through tribe after tribe over
enormous areas. Their distribution is so irregular and their areas so
disproportionate as to be impossible of vivid representation except on
a large-scale map in colors. The most important in extent of territory,
number of speakers, or the cultural importance of the nations adhering
to them, are, in North America, Eskimo, Athabascan, Algonkin, Iroquoian,
Muskogean, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan, Maya; and in South America, Chibcha,
Quechua, Aymara, Araucanian, Arawak, Carib, Tupi, Tapuya. It will be seen
on the maps (Figs. 14, 15) that these sixteen groups held the greater
part of the area of the double continent, the remaining smaller areas
being crowded with about ten times as many stocks. Obviously, as in New
Guinea, there cannot well have been such an original multiplicity; in
fact, recent studies are tending to consolidate the hundred and fifty
New World families into considerably fewer groups. But the evidence for
such reductions is necessarily difficult to bring and much of it is still
incomplete. The stocks mentioned above have been long determined and
generally accepted.
About a third of humanity to-day speaks some form of Indo-European.
A quarter talks some dialect of Sinitic stock. Semitic, Dravidian,
Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu have each from about
fifty to a hundred million speakers. The languages included in these
eight families form the speech of approximately ninety per cent of living
human beings.
51. CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES BY TYPES
A classification is widely prevalent which puts languages according
to their structure into three types: inflective, agglutinating, and
isolating. To this some add a fourth type, the polysynthetic or
incorporating. While the classification is largely misrepresentative, it
enters so abundantly into current thought about human speech that it is
worth presenting, analyzing, and, so far as it is invalid, refuting.
[Illustration: FIG. 15. Some important linguistic families of South
America: 1, Arawak; 2, Carib; 3, Tapuya; 4, Tupi; 5, Araucanian; 6,
Aymara; 7, Quechua (Inca); 8, Chibcha. The white areas are occupied
by about seventy smaller families, according to the usually accepted
classification. (Based on Chamberlain.)]
An inflecting language expresses relations or grammatical form by
adding prefixes or suffixes which cannot stand alone, or if they stood
alone would mean nothing; or that operates by internal modifications of
the stem, which also can have no independent existence. The _-ing_ of
_killing_ is such an inflection; so are the vowel changes and the ending
_-en_ in the conjugation _write_, _wrote_, _written_.
An isolating language expresses such relations or forms by separate words
or isolated particles. English _heart of man_ is isolating, where the
Latin equivalent _cor hominis_ is inflective, the per se meaningless
suffix _-is_ rendering the genitive or possessive force of the English
word _of_.
An agglutinative language glues together into solid words elements
for which a definite meaning of their own can be traced. English does
not use this mechanism for purposes that are ordinarily reckoned as
strictly grammatical, but does employ it for closely related purposes.
_Under-take_, _rest-less_, are examples; and in a form like _light-ly_,
which goes back to _light-like_, the force of the suffix which converts
the adjective into the adverb is of a kind that in descriptions of most
languages would be considered grammatical or formal.
Polysynthetic languages are agglutinative ones carried to a high
pitch, or those that can compound words into equivalents of fair sized
sentences. _Steam-boat-propeller-blade_ might be called a polysynthetic
form if we spoke or wrote it in one word as modern German and ancient
Greek would.
Incorporating languages embody the object noun, or the pronoun
representing it, into the word that contains the verb stem. This
construction is totally foreign to English.[7]
Each of these classes evidently defines one or more distinctive
linguistic processes. There are different mechanisms at work in
_kill-ing_, _of man_, _light-ly_. The distinction is therefore both valid
and valuable. Its abuse lies in trying to slap the label of one type on
a whole language. The instances given show that English employs most
of the several distinct processes. Obviously it would be arbitrary to
classify English as outright of one type. This is also the situation for
most other languages. There are a few languages that tend prevailingly
in one direction or the other: Sanskrit and Latin and Hebrew toward the
inflective structure, Turkish toward the agglutinative, Chinese toward
the isolating. But they form a small minority, and most of them contain
certain processes of types other than their predominating ones. Sanskrit,
for instance, has polysynthetic traits, Hebrew incorporating ones.
Therefore, so long as these concepts are used to picture a language in
detail, with balanced recognition of the different processes employed
by it, they are valuable tools to philological description. When on the
other hand the concepts are degraded into catchwords designating three
or four compartments into one of which every language is somehow to be
stuffed, they grossly misrepresent most of the facts. The concepts, in
short, apply usefully to types of linguistic processes, inadequately to
types of languages.
Why then has the classification of human languages into inflecting,
agglutinating, isolating, and polysynthetic or incorporating ones
been repeated so often? First of all, because languages vary almost
infinitely, and a true or natural classification, other than the genetic
one into families, is intricate. The mind craves simplicity and the three
or four supposedly all-embracing types are a temptation.
A second reason lies deeper. As philology grew up into a systematic body
of knowledge, it centered its first interests on Latin and Greek, then on
Sanskrit and the other older Indo-European languages. These happened to
have inflective processes unusually well developed. They also happened
to be the languages from which the native speech of the philologists was
derived. What is our own seems good to us; consequently Indo-European
was elevated into the highest or inflective class of languages. As a
sort of after-thought, Semitic, which includes Hebrew, the language of
part of our Scriptures, was included. Then Chinese, which follows an
unusually simple plan of structure that is the opposite in many ways of
the complex structure of old Indo-European, and which was the speech
of a civilized people, was set apart as a class of the second rank.
This left the majority of human languages to be dumped into a third
class, or a third and fourth class, with the pleasing implication that
they were less capable of abstraction, more materialistic, cruder, and
generally inferior. Philologists are customarily regarded as extreme
examples of passionless, dry, objective human beings. The history of this
philological classification indicates that they too are influenced by
emotional and self-complacent impulses.
52. PERMANENCE OF LANGUAGE AND RACE
It is sometimes thought because a new language is readily learned,
especially in youth, that language is a relatively unstable factor in
human history, less permanent than race. It is necessary to guard against
two fallacies in this connection. The first is to argue from individuals
to societies; the second, that because change is possible, it takes place.
As a matter of fact, languages often preserve their existence,
and even their territory, with surprising tenacity in the face of
conquest, new religions and culture, and the economic disadvantages of
unintelligibility. To-day, Breton, a Keltic dialect, maintains itself in
France as the every-day language of the people in the isolated province
of Brittany—a sort of philological fossil. It has withstood the influence
of two thousand years of contact, first with Latin, then with Frankish
German, at last with French. Its Welsh sister-tongue flourishes in spite
of the Anglo-Saxon speech of the remainder of Great Britain. The original
inhabitants of Spain were mostly of non-Aryan stock. Keltic, Roman, and
Gothic invasions have successively swept over them and finally left the
language of the country Romance, but the original speech also survives
the vicissitudes of thousands of years and is still spoken in the
western Pyrenees as Basque. Ancient Egypt was conquered by the Hyksos,
the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, but whatever
the official speech of the ruling class, the people continued to speak
Egyptian. Finally, the Arab came and brought with him a new religion,
which entailed use of the Arabic language. Egypt has at last become
Arabic-speaking, but until a century or two ago the Coptic language,
the daughter of the ancient Egyptian tongue of five thousand years
ago, was kept alive by the native Christians along the Nile, and even
to-day it survives in ritual. The boundary between French on the one
side and German, Dutch, and Flemish on the other, has been accurately
known for over six hundred years. With all the wars and conquests back
and forth across the speech line, endless political changes and cultural
influences, this line has scarcely anywhere shifted more than a few dozen
miles, and in places has not moved by a comfortable afternoon’s stroll.
While populations can learn and unlearn languages, they tend to do so
with reluctance and infinite slowness, especially while they remain
in their inherited territories. Speech tends to be one of the most
persistent ethnic characters.
In general, where two populations mingle, the speech of the more
numerous prevails, even if it be the subject nationality. A wide gap
in culture may overcome the influence of the majority, yet the speech
of a culturally more active and advanced population ordinarily wrests
permanent territory to itself slowly except where there is an actual
crowding out or numerical swamping of the natives. This explains the
numerous survivals and “islands” of speech: Keltic, Albanian, Basque,
Caucasian, in Europe; Dravidian and Kolarian in India; Nahuatl and Maya
and many others in modern Mexico; Quechua in Peru; Aymara in Bolivia;
Tupi in Brazil. There are cases to the contrary, like the rapid spread of
Latin in most of Gaul after Cæsar’s conquest, but they seem exceptional.
As to the relative permanence of race and speech, everything depends on
the side from which the question is approached. From the point of view
of hereditary strains, race must be the more conservative, because it
can change rapidly only through admixture with another race, whereas a
language may be completely exchanged in a short time. From the point
of view of history, however, which regards human actions within given
territories, speech is often more stable. Wars or trade or migration may
bring one racial element after another into an area until the type has
become altered or diluted, and yet the original language, or one directly
descended from it, remains. The introduction of the negro from Africa to
America illustrates this distinction. From the point of view of biology,
the negro has at least partially preserved his type, although he has
taken on a wholly new language. As a matter of history, the reverse is
true: English continues to be the speech of the southern United States,
whereas the population now consists of two races instead of one, and the
negro element has been altered by the infusion of white blood. It is a
fallacy to think, because one can learn French or become a Christian and
yet is powerless to change his eye color or head shape, that language and
culture are altogether less stable than race. Speech and culture have an
existence of their own, whose integrity does not depend on hereditary
integrity. The two may move together or separately.
53. THE BIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL NATURE OF LANGUAGE
It is a truism, but one important never to forget in the study of man,
that the faculty of speech is innate, but every language wholly acquired.
Moreover, the environment of which languages are the product is not a
natural one, that is, geographic or climatic, but social. All words and
speech forms that are learned—and they constitute almost the complete
mass of language—are imitated directly from other human beings. Those
new forms that from time to time come into use rest on existing speech
material, are shaped according to tendencies already operative although
perhaps more or less hidden, cannot generally be attributed, as regards
origin, or at least entire origin, to single individuals; in short,
present a history similar to that of inventions and new institutions.
Language thus is a superorganic product; which of course does not
contradict—in fact implies—that it rests on an organic basis.
The “speech” of the animals other than man has something in common with
human languages. It consists of sounds produced by the body, accompanied
by certain mental activities or conditions, and capable of arousing
certain definite responses in other individuals of the species. It
differs from human speech in several fundamental particulars. First of
all, the cries and calls and murmurs of the brutes appear to be wholly
instinctive. A fowl raised alone in an incubator will peep and crow or
cluck as it will scratch and peck. A dog reared by a foster cat will
bark, or growl, or whine, or yelp, when it has attained the requisite
age, and on application of the proper stimulus, as he will wag or crouch
or hunt or dig, and no differently from the dog brought up in association
with other dogs. By contrast, the Japanese infant turned over to American
foster parents never utters or knows a single Japanese word, learns only
English, and learns that as well as do his Caucasian step-brothers.
Evidently then, animal speech is to all intents wholly organic and not at
all “social” in the sense of being superorganic. If this summary is not
absolutely exact, it departs from the truth only infinitesimally.
Further, animal speech has no “meaning,” does not serve as a vehicle of
“communication.” The opposite is often assumed popularly, because we
anthropomorphize. If it is said that a dog’s growl “means” anger, and
that his bark “communicates” suspicion or excitement to his fellows, the
words are used in a sense different from their significance when we say
that the term _red_ “means” the color at one end of the spectrum, or that
a message of departure “communicates” information. The animal sounds
convey knowledge only of subjective states. They “impart” the fact that
the utterer feels anger, excitement, fear, pain, contentment, or some
other affect. They are immediate reflex responses to a feeling. They may
be “understood” in the sense that a sympathetic feeling is evoked or at
any rate mobilized; and thereby they may lead or tend to lead to action
by the hearers. In the same way, any man instinctively “understands”
the moan of a fellow human being. But the moan does not tell whether
the pain is of a second’s or a week’s duration, due to a blow or to gas
in the bowel, to an ulcerated tooth or to mental anguish. There is no
communication of anything objective, of ideas as distinct from feelings,
as when we say _red_ or _break_ or _up_ or _water_. Not one of these
simple concepts can be communicated as such by any brute speech.
One consequence is the “arbitrariness” of human speech. Why should the
sound-cluster _red_ denote that particular color rather than green? Why
does the same word often designate quite distinct ideas in different
languages—the approximate sound group _lay_ meaning “milk” in French;
_lass_ “a girl” in English, “tired” in French, “allow” in German? Such
facts are physiologically arbitrary; just as it is physiologically
arbitrary and organically meaningless that Americans live in a republic
and Britons under a monarchy, or that they turn respectively to the right
and left on the road. Phenomena like these have other social, cultural,
or superorganic phenomena as their immediate causes or antecedents. In
the light of such antecedents, viewed on the level of history, these
phenomena are intelligible: we know why the United States is a republic,
we can trace the development of words like _lay_ and _lass_. It is only
from the biological plane that such facts seem insignificant or arbitrary.
54. PROBLEMS OF THE RELATION OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
This association of language and civilization, or let us say the
linguistic and non-linguistic constituents of culture, brings up the
problem whether it would be possible for one to exist without the
other. Actually, of course, no such case is known. Speculatively,
different conclusions might be reached. It is difficult to imagine any
generalized thinking taking place without words or symbols derived from
words. Religious beliefs and certain phases of social organization also
seem dependent on speech: caste ranking, marriage regulations, kinship
recognition, law, and the like. On the other hand, it is conceivable that
a considerable series of inventions might be made, and the applied arts
might be developed in a fair measure by imitation, among a speechless
people. Finally there seems no reason why certain elements of culture,
such as music, should not flourish as successfully in a society without
as with language.
For the converse, a cultureless species of animal might conceivably
develop and use a form of true speech. Such communications as “The river
is rising,” “Bite it off,” “What do you find inside?” would be within
the range of thought of such a species. Why then have even the most
intelligent of the brutes failed to develop a language? Possibly because
such a language would lack a definite survival value for the species, in
the absence of accompanying culture.
On the whole, however, it would seem that language and culture rest, in
a way which is not yet fully understood, on the same set of faculties,
and that these, for some reason that is still more obscure, developed
in the ancestors of man, while remaining in abeyance in other species.
Even the anthropoid apes seem virtually devoid of the impulse to
communicate, in spite of freely expressing their affective states of
mind by voice, facial gesture, and bodily movement. The most responsive
to man of all species, the dog, learns to accept a considerable stock of
culture in the sense of fitting himself to it: he develops conscience
and manners, for example. Yet, however highly bred, he does not hand
on his accomplishments to his progeny, who again depend on their human
masters for what they acquire. A group of the best reared dogs left to
themselves for a few years would lose all their politeness and revert to
the predomestic habits of their species. In short, the culture impulse is
lacking in the dog except so far as it is instilled by man; and in most
animals it can notoriously be instilled only to a very limited degree.
In the same way, the impulse toward communication can be said to be
wanting. A dog may understand a hundred words of command and express in
his behavior fifty shades of emotion; only rarely does he seem to try to
communicate information of objective fact. Very likely we are attributing
to him even in these rare cases the impulse which we should feel. In the
event of a member of the family being injured or lost, it is certain that
a good dog expresses his agitation, uneasiness, disturbed attachment;
but much less certain is it that he intends to summon help, as we
spontaneously incline to believe because such summoning would be our own
reaction to the situation.
The history and causes of the development in incipient man of the group
of traits that may be called the faculties for speech and civilization
remain one of the darkest areas in the field of knowledge. It is plain
that these faculties lie essentially in the sphere of what is ordinarily
called the mind, rather than in the body, since men and the apes are
far more similar in their general physiques than they are in the degree
of their ability to use their physiques for non-physiological purposes.
Or, if this antithesis of physical and mental seem unfortunate, it might
be said that the growth of the faculties for speech and culture was
connected more with special developments of the central nervous system
than with those of the remainder of the body.
55. PERIOD OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
Is, then, human language as old as culture? It is difficult to be
positive, because words perish like beliefs and institutions, whereas
stone tools endure as direct evidence. On the whole, however, it would
appear that the first rudiments of what deserves to be called language
are about as ancient as the first culture manifestations, not only
because of the theoretically close association of the two phases, but
in the light of circumstantial testimony, namely the skull interiors of
fossil men. In Piltdown as well as Neandertal man, those brain cortex
areas in which the nervous activities connected with auditory and motor
speech are most centralized in modern man, are fairly well developed,
as shown by casts of the skull interiors, which conform closely to the
brain surface. The general frontal region, the largest area of the cortex
believed to be devoted to associative functions—in loose parlance, to
thought—is also greater than in any known ape. More than one authority
has therefore felt justified in attributing speech to the ancestors of
man that lived well back in the Pleistocene. The lower jaws of Piltdown
and in a measure of Heidelberg man, it is true, are narrow and chinless,
thus leaving somewhat less free play to the tongue than living human
races enjoy. But this factor is probably of less importance than the one
of mental facultative development. The parrot is lipless and yet can
reproduce the sounds of human speech. What he lacks is language faculty;
and this, it seems, fossil man already had in some measure.
56. CULTURE, SPEECH, AND NATIONALITY
This point of view raises the question whether one ought to speak of
language and culture or rather of language as a part of culture. So
far as the process of their transmission is concerned, and the type of
mechanism of their development, it is clear that language and culture
are one. For practical purposes it is generally convenient to keep
them distinct. There is no doubt that two peoples can share in what is
substantially the same culture and yet speak fundamentally different
idioms; for instance, the Finno-Ugric Magyars or Hungarians among the
adjacent Slavs, Germans, and Latins of central Europe, who are all
Indo-Europeans. The other way around, the northern Hindus and west
Europeans are certainly different culturally, yet their languages go back
to a common origin. In fact it has become a commonplace that the arguing
of connection between the three factors of race, language, and culture
(or nationality), the making of inferences from one to the other, is
logically unsound (§ 33). One can no more think correctly in terms of
Aryan heads or a Semitic race, for instance, than of blond linguistic
types, Catholic physiques, or inflecting social institutions.
At the same time, speech and culture tend to form something of a unit as
opposed to race. It is possible for a population to substitute a wholly
new language and type of civilization for the old ones, as the American
negro has done, and yet to remain relatively unmodified racially, or
at least to carry on its former physical type unchanged in a large
proportion of its members. On the other hand, a change of speech without
some change of culture seems impossible. Certainly wherever Greek,
Latin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Pali, Chinese have penetrated, there
have been established new phases of civilization. In a lower degree, the
same principle probably holds true of every gain of one language at the
expense of another, even when the spreading idiom is not associated with
a great or active culture.
The linkage of speech and culture is further perceptible in the degree to
which they both contribute, in most cases, to the idea of nationality.
What chiefly marks off the French nation from the Italian, the Dutch from
the German, the Swedish from the Norwegian—their respective customs and
ideals, or the language gap? It would be difficult to say. The cultural
differences tend to crystallize around language differences, and then
in turn are reinforced by language, so that the two factors interact
complexly. Nationality, especially in its modern developments, includes
another factor, that of social or political segregation, which may in
some degree run counter to both speech and culture. Switzerland with
its German, French, and Italian speaking population, or Belgium, almost
equally divided between Flemings and Walloons, are striking examples.
Yet however successfully Switzerland and Belgium maintain their national
unity, it is clear that this is a composite of subnational elements,
each of which possesses a certain cultural as well as linguistic
distinctness. Thus the Walloon speaks a French dialect, the Fleming a
Dutch one; and the point of view, temperament, historic antecedents, and
minor customs of the two groups are perceptibly different. Similarly,
both the history and the outlook and therefore the culture of the French
and German cantons of Switzerland are definitely distinguishable.
57. RELATIVE WORTH OF LANGUAGES
One respect in which languages differ from cultures is that they
cannot, like the latter, be rated as higher and lower. Of course, even
as regards culture, such rating is often a dubious procedure, meaning
little more than that the person making the comparison assumes his
own culture to be the highest and estimates other cultures low in
proportion as they vary. Although this is a subjective and uncritical
procedure, nevertheless certain objective comparisons are possible. Some
cultures surpass others in their quantitative content: they possess more
different arts, abilities, and items of knowledge. Also, some culture
traits may be considered intrinsically superior to others: metal tools
against stone ones, for instance, since metal is adopted by all stone
culture peoples who can secure it, whereas the reverse is not true.
Further, in most cases a new addition does not wholly obliterate an
older element, this retaining a subsidiary place, or perhaps serving
some more special function than before. In this way the culture becomes
more differentiated. The old art may even attain a higher degree of
perfection than it had previously; as the finest polish was given to
stone implements in northern Europe after bronze was known. In general,
accretion is the process typical of culture growth. Older elements come
to function in a more limited sphere as new ones are added, but are
not extirpated by them. Oars and sails remain as constituent parts of
the stock of civilization after it has added steam and motor boats. In
the senses then that a culture has a larger content of elements, that
these elements are more differentiated, and that a greater proportion of
these elements are of the kind that inherently tend to supersede related
elements, the culture may be considered superior.
As regards languages, there are also quantitative differences. Some
contain several times as many words as others. But vocabulary is largely
a cultural matter. A people that uses more materials, manufactures more
objects, possesses knowledge of a larger array of facts, and makes finer
discriminations in thought, must inevitably have more words. Yet even
notable increases in size of speech content appear not to be accompanied
by appreciable changes in form. A larger vocabulary does not mean a
different type of structure. Grammar seems to be little influenced
by culture status. No clear correspondence has yet been traceable
between type or degree of civilization and type of language. Neither
the presence nor the absence of particular features of tense, number,
case, reduplication, or the like seems ever to have been of demonstrable
advantage toward the attainment of higher culture. The speech of the
former and modern nations most active in the propagation of culture has
been of quite diverse type. The languages of the Egyptians (Hamitic);
Sumerians; Babylonians and Arabs (Semitic); Hindus and Greeks (ancient
Indo-European); Anglo-Saxons (modern Indo-European); Chinese; and Mayas,
are about as different as exist. The Sumerian type of civilization was
taken over bodily and successfully by the Semitic Babylonians. The bulk
of Japanese culture is Chinese; yet Japanese speech is built on wholly
different principles.
Then, it is impossible to rate one speech trait or type as inherently or
objectively superior to another on any basis like that which justifies
the placing of a metal culture above a stone culture. If wealth of
grammatical apparatus is a criterion of superiority, Latin is a higher
language than French, and Anglo-Saxon than English. But if lack of
declensions and conjugations is a virtue, then Chinese surpasses English
almost as much as English surpasses Latin. There is no reason favoring
one of these possible judgments rather than its opposite. _Amabo_ is no
better or worse than _I shall love_ as a means of expressing the same
idea. The one is more compact, the other more plastic. There are times
when compactness is a virtue, occasions when plasticity has advantages.
By the Latin or synthetic standard, the English expression is loose
jointed, lacking in structure; by the English or analytic standard, the
Latin form is over-condensed, adhering unnecessarily to form. One cannot
similarly balance the merits of a steel and a flint knife, of a medical
and a shamanistic phase of society. The one cuts or cures better than the
other.
So, from the point of view of civilization, language does not matter.
Language will always keep up with whatever pace culture sets it. If a
new object is invented or a new distinction of thought made, a word is
coined or imported or modified in meaning to express the new concept. If
a thousand or ten thousand new words are required, they are developed.
When it desires to express abstractions like futurity or plurality, any
language is capable of doing so, even if it does not habitually express
them. If a language is unprovided with formal means for the purpose,
such as a grammatical suffix, it falls back on content and uses a word
or circumlocution. If the life of a people changes and comes to be
conducted along lines that render it frequently important to express an
idea like futurity to which previously little attention has been paid,
the appropriate circumlocution soon becomes standardized, conveniently
brief, and unambiguous. In general, every language is capable of
indefinite modification and expansion and thereby is enabled to meet
cultural demands almost at once. This is shown by the fact that virtually
anything spoken or written can be translated into almost every other
language without serious impairment of substance. The æsthetic charm of
the original may be lost in the translation; the new forms coined in the
receiving language are likely at first to seem awkward; but the meaning,
the business of speech, gets expressed.
58. SIZE OF VOCABULARY
The tendency is so instinctive in us to presuppose and therefore to find
qualities of inferiority, poverty, or incompleteness in the speech of
populations of more backward culture than our own, that a widespread,
though unfounded, belief has grown up that the languages of savages and
barbarians are extremely limited quantitatively—in the range of their
vocabulary. Similar misconceptions are current as to the number of words
actually used by single individuals of civilized communities. It is
true that no one, not even the most learned and prolific writer, uses
all the words of the English language as they are found in an unabridged
dictionary. All of us understand many words which we habitually encounter
in reading and may even hear frequently spoken, but of which our
utterance faculties for some reason have not made us master. In short, a
language, being the property and product of a community, possesses more
words than can ever be used by a single individual, the sum total of
whose ideas is necessarily less than that of his group. Added to this are
a certain mental sluggishness, which restricts most of us to a greater
or less degree, and the force of habit. Having spoken a certain word a
number of times, our brain becomes accustomed to it and we are likely
to employ it to the exclusion of its synonyms or in place of words of
related but distinguishable meaning.
The degree to which all this affects the speech of the normal man has,
however, been greatly exaggerated. Because there are, all told, including
technical terms, a hundred thousand or more words in our dictionaries,
and because Shakespeare in his writings used 24,000 different words,
Milton in his poems 17,000, and the English Bible contains 7,200, it has
been concluded that the average man, whose range of thought and power of
expression are so much less, must use an enormously smaller vocabulary.
It has been stated that many a peasant goes through life without using
more than 300 or 400 words, that the vocabulary of Italian grand opera
is about 600, and that he is a person above the average who employs more
than 3,000 to 4,000 words. If such were the case it would be natural that
the uncivilized man, whose life is simpler, and whose knowledge more
confined, should be content with an exceedingly small vocabulary.
But it is certain that the figures just cited are erroneous. If any one
who considers himself an average person will take the trouble to make a
list of his speaking vocabulary, he will quickly discover that he knows,
and on occasion uses, the names of at least one to two thousand different
things. That is, his vocabulary contains so many concrete nouns. To
these must be added the abstract nouns, the verbs, adjectives, pronouns,
and the other parts of speech, the short and familiar words that are
indispensable to communication in any language. It may thus be safely
estimated that it is an exceptionally ignorant and stupid person in a
civilized country that has not at his command a vocabulary of several
thousand words.
Test counts based on dictionaries show, for people of bookish tastes, a
knowledge of about 30,000 to 35,000 words. Most of these would perhaps
never be spoken by the individuals tested, would not be at their actual
command, but it seems that at least 10,000 would be so controlled. The
carefully counted vocabulary of a five and a half year old American boy
comprised 1,528 understandingly used words, besides participles and other
inflected forms. Two boys between two and three years used 642 and 677
different words.
It is therefore likely that statements as to the paucity of the speech of
unlettered peoples are equally exaggerated. He who professes to declare
on the strength of his observation that a native language consists of
only a few hundred terms, displays chiefly his ignorance. He has either
not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary or has not known how to
do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can usually converse with
natives to the satisfaction of his own needs with two or three hundred
words. Even the missionary can do a great deal with this stock, if it is
properly chosen. But it does not follow that because a civilized person
has not learned more of a language, that there is no more. On this point
the testimony of the student is the evidence to be considered.
Dictionaries compiled by missionaries or philologists of languages
previously unwritten run to surprising figures. Thus, the number of words
recorded in Klamath, the speech of a culturally rude American Indian
tribe, is 7,000; in Navaho, 11,000; in Zulu, 17,000; in Dakota, 19,000;
in Maya, 20,000; in Nahuatl, 27,000. It may safely be said that every
existing language, no matter how backward its speakers are in their
general civilization, possesses a vocabulary of at least 5,000 words.
59. QUALITY OF SPEECH SOUNDS
Another mistaken assumption that is frequently made is that the speech
of non-literary peoples is harsh, its pronunciation more difficult than
ours. This belief is purely subjective. When one has heard and uttered
a language all his life, its sounds come to one’s mouth with a minimum
of effort; but unfamiliar vowels and consonants are formed awkwardly and
inaccurately. No adult reared in an Anglo-Saxon community finds _th_
difficult. Nor does a French or German child, whose speech habits are
still plastic, find long difficulty in mastering the particular tongue
control necessary to the production of the _th_ sound. But the adult
Frenchman or German, whose muscular habits have settled in other lines,
tries and tries and falls back on _s_ or _t_. A Spaniard, however, would
agree with the Anglo-Saxon as to the ease and “naturalness” of _th_.
Conversely, the “rough” _ch_ flows spontaneously out of the mouth of
a German or Scotchman, whereas English, French, and Italians have to
struggle long to master it, and are tempted to substitute _k_. German
_ö_ and French _u_ trouble us, our “short” _u_ is equally resistant to
Continental tongues.
Even a novel position can make a familiar sound strange and forbidding.
Most Anglo-Saxons fail on the first try to say _ngis_; many give up
and declare it beyond their capacity to learn. Yet it is only _sing_
pronounced backward. English uses _ng_ finally and medially in words,
not initially. Any English speaker can quickly acquire its use in the
new position if, to keep from being disconcerted, he follows some such
sequence as _sing_, _singing_, _stinging_, _ringing_, _inging_, _nging_,
_ngis_.
So with surd _l_—Welsh _ll_—which is ordinary _l_ minus the accompaniment
of vocal cord vibrations. A little practice makes possible the throwing
on or off of these vibrations, the “voicing” of speech, for any sound,
with as much ease as one would turn a faucet on or off. Surd _l_
thereupon flows with the same readiness as sonant _l_. As a matter
of fact we often pronounce it unconsciously at the end of words like
_little_. When it comes at the beginning, however, as in the tribal name
usually written _Tlingit_, Americans tend to substitute something more
habitual, such as _kl_, which is familiar from _clip_, _clean_, _clear_,
_close_, _clam_, and many other words. The simple surd _l_ has even been
repeatedly described quite inappropriately as a “click”; which is about
as far from picturing it with correctness as calling it a thump or a
sigh; all because it comes in an unaccustomed position.
Combinations of sounds, especially of consonants, are indeed of variable
difficulty for anatomical reasons. Some, like _nd_ and _ts_ and _pf_,
have their components telescope or join naturally through being formed
in the same part of the mouth. Others, like _kw_ (_qu_), have the two
elements articulated widely apart, but for that reason the elements can
easily be formed simultaneously. Still others, like _kt_ and _ths_,
are intrinsically difficult, because the elements differ in place
of production but are alike in method, and therefore come under the
operation of the generic rule that similar sounds require more effort to
join and yet discriminate than dissimilar ones; for much the same reason
that it is on the whole easier to acquire the pronunciation of a wholly
new type of sound than of one which differs subtly from one already
known. Yet in these matters too, habit rather than anatomical functioning
determines the reaction. German _pf_ comes hard to adult Anglo-Saxons,
English _kw_ and _ths_ to Germans. So far as degree of accumulation
of consonants is concerned, English is one of the extremest of all
languages. Monosyllables like _tract_, _stripped_ (_stripd_), _sixths_
(_siksths_), must seem irremediably hard to most speakers of other idioms.
Children’s speech in all languages shows that certain sounds are, as a
rule, learned earlier than others, and are therefore presumably somewhat
easier physiologically. Sounds like _p_ and _t_ which are formed with
the mobile lips and front of the tongue normally precede back tongue
sounds like _k_. _B_, _d_, _g_, which are voiced like vowels, tend to
precede voiceless _p_, _t_, _k_. Stops or momentary sounds, such as
_b_, _d_, _g_, _p_, _t_, _k_, generally come earlier than the fricative
continuants _f_, _v_, _th_, _s_, _z_, which require a delicate adjustment
of lip or tongue—close proximity without firm contact—whereas the stops
involve only a making and breaking of jerky contact. But so slight are
the differences of effort or skill in all these cases, that as a rule
only a few months separate the learning of the easier from that of the
more difficult sounds; and adults no longer feel the differences. The
only sound or class of sounds seriously harder than others seems to be
that denoted by the letter _r_. Not only do children usually acquire
_r_ late, but among all races there appears to be a certain percentage
of individuals who never learn to form the sound right, but substitute
one approaching _g_ or _w_ or _j_ or _l_. The reason is that _r_ stands
alone among speech sounds. It is the only one produced by blowing the
tongue into a few gross vibrations; which means that this organ must be
held in a special condition of laxness and yet elevated so that the flow
of breath may bear on it. However, even this inherent difficulty has been
insufficient to prevent many languages from changing easier sounds into
_r_.
60. DIFFUSION AND PARALLELISM IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
A phenomenon which language shows more conspicuously than culture, or
which is more readily demonstrated in it, is parallel or convergent
development, the repeated, independent growth of a trait (§ 89, 100).
Thus sex gender is an old part of Indo-European structure. In English,
by the way, it has wholly disappeared, so far as formal expression goes,
from noun, adjective, and demonstrative and interrogative pronoun. It
lingers only in the personal pronoun of the third person singular—_he_,
_she_, _it_. A grammar of living English that was genuinely practical
and unbound by tradition would never mention gender except in discussing
these three little words. That our grammars specify _man_ as a masculine
and _woman_ as a feminine noun is due merely to the fact that in Latin
the corresponding words _vir_ and _femina_ possess endings which are
recognized as generally masculine and feminine, and that an associated
adjective ends respectively in masculine _-us_ or feminine _-a_. These
are distinctions of form of which English possesses no equivalents. The
survival of distinction between _he_, _she_, and _it_, while _this_ and
_the_ and _which_ have become alike irrespective of the sex of the person
or thing they denote, is therefore historically significant. It points
back to the past and to surviving Indo-European languages.
Besides, Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic express sex by grammatical
forms, although like French and Spanish and Italian, they know only
two genders, the neuter being unrepresented. These three are the only
large language stocks in which sex gender finds expression. Ural-Altaic,
Chinese, Japanese, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu, and in general
the language families of Asia, Africa, and America do without,
although a number of languages make other gender classifications, as of
animate and inanimate, personal and impersonal, superior and inferior,
intelligent and unintelligent. Sex gender however reappears in Hottentot
of South Africa, and in the Chinook and Coast Salish and Pomo languages
of the Pacific coast of North America.
How is this distribution to be accounted for? Indo-European, Semitic, and
Hamitic occupy contiguous territory, in fact surround the Mediterranean
over a tract approximately co-extensive with the Caucasian area. Could
they in the remote past have influenced one another? That is, could
grammatical sex gender have been invented, so to speak, by one of them,
and borrowed by the others, as we know that cultural inventions are
constantly diffused? Few philologists would grant this as likely: there
are too few authenticated cases of formal elements or concepts having
been disseminated between unrelated languages. Is it then possible that
our three stocks are at bottom related? Sex gender in that case would
be part of their common inheritance. For Semitic and Hamitic a number
of specialists have accepted a common origin on other grounds. But for
Semitic and Indo-European, philologists, who are professionally exacting,
are in the main quite dubious. Positive evidence seems yet to be lacking.
Still, the territorial continuity of the three speech groups showing the
trait is difficult to accept as mere coincidence. In a parallel case in
the realm of culture history, a common source would be accepted as highly
probable. Even Hottentot has been considered a remote Semitic-Hamitic
offshoot, largely, it is true, because of the very fact that it expresses
gender. Philologists, accordingly, may consider the case still open; but
it is at least conceivable that the phenomenon goes back to a single
origin in these four Old World stocks.
Yet no stretch will account for sex gender in the three American
languages as due to contact influence or diffusion, nor relate these
tongues to the Old World ones. Clearly here is a case of independent
origin or parallel “invention.” Chinook and Coast Salish, indeed, are in
contiguity, and one may therefore have taken up the trait in imitation of
the other. But Pomo lies well to the south and its affiliations run still
farther south. Here sex gender is obviously an independent, secondary,
and rather recent growth in the grammar.
In short, it remains doubtful whether sex gender originated three or four
or five or six times among these seven language stocks; but it evidently
originated repeatedly.
Other traits crop out the world over in much the same manner. A dual,
for instance, is found in Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, Eskimo, and
a number of other American languages. The distinction between inclusive
and exclusive _we_—_you and I_ as opposed to _he and I_—is made in
Malayo-Polynesian, Hottentot, Iroquois, Uto-Aztecan.
A true nominative case-ending, such as Latin and the other varieties of
Indo-European evince, is an exceedingly specialized formation; yet is
found in the Maidu language of California. Articles, in regard to which
Indo-European varies, Latin for instance being without, while its Romance
daughter tongues have developed them, recur in Semitic, in Polynesian,
and in several groups of American languages, such as Siouan and Hokan.
The growth in Romance is significant because of its historicity, and
because it was surely not due to imitation of an unrelated language. That
is, French developed its articles independently and secondarily; a fact
that makes it probable that many languages in other parts of the world,
whose history we do not know, developed theirs in a parallel manner, as
a product of wholly internal causes—“invented” them, in short, although
wholly unconsciously.
A trait found in a large proportion of the American languages is the
so-called incorporation of the object pronoun (§ 51). The objective
pronoun, or an element representing it, is prefixed or suffixed to the
verb, made a part of it. The process is familiar enough to us from
Indo-European so far as the subject is concerned: in Latin _ama-s_,
_ama-t_, _ama-nt_, the suffixes express “you, he, they” and pronouns
comparable to the English ones—independent words—are usually omitted.
The _-s_ in _he love-s_ is the sole survival of the process in modern
English. None of the older Indo-European tongues however showed an
inclination to affix similar elements for the objects, although there
are some approaches in a few recent languages of the family: Spanish
_diga-me_, “tell me,” and _mata-le_, “kill him,” for instance. Semitic
on the other hand, and Basque, do “incorporate” objective elements,
whereas most Asiatic and some American languages do not. Many other
instances of parallel or convergent traits could be cited.
This greater frequency of parallel developments in language than in
culture is perhaps in part due to easier demonstrability in the field of
speech. But in the main the higher frequency seems real. Two reasons for
the difference suggest themselves.
First, the number of possibilities is small in language, so far as
structure is concerned. The categories or concepts used for classifying
and for the indication of relations are rigorously limited, and so are
the means of expression. The distinctions expressed by gender, for
instance, may refer to sex, animateness, personality, worth, shape,
position, or possibly one or two other qualities; but there they end.
If a language recognizes gender at all, it must have gender of one of
these few types. Consequently there is some probability of several
unconnected languages sooner or later happening upon the same type of
gender. Similarly, for the kinds of number, and of case, and so on, that
are denotable. These larger categories, like gender and number and case,
are not numerous. Then, the means of expressing such relational and
classificatory concepts are limited. There is position or relative order
of words; compounding of them; accretions of elements to stems, namely
prefixes, infixes, and suffixes; reduplication, the repetition of part or
the whole of words; internal changes by shift of vowel or accent within
words; and therewith the types of grammatical means are about exhausted.
The number of possible choices is so small that the law of accidental
probability must cause many languages to hit upon the same devices.
A second reason for the greater frequency of parallelism in language
is that structural traits appear to resist diffusion by imitation to
a considerable degree. Words are borrowed, sometimes freely, almost
always to some degree, between contiguous languages; sounds considerably
less; grammar least of all. That is, linguistic content lends itself to
diffusion readily, linguistic form with difficulty.
At bottom, the same holds of culture. Specific elements of culture or
groups of such elements diffuse very widely at times and may be said
to be always tending to diffuse: the wheel, for instance, smelting of
metals, the crown as a symbol of royalty, the swastika, Buddhism. The
relations of elements among themselves, on the other hand, change by
internal growth rather than external imitation. Of this sort are the
relations of the classes and members of societies, the fervor with which
religion is felt, the esteem accorded to learning or wealth or tradition,
the inclination toward this or that avenue of subsistence or economic
development. By conquest or peaceful pressure or penetration one people
may shatter the political structure or social fabric of another, may
undermine its conservatism, may swerve its economic habits. But it is
difficult to find cases of one people adopting such tendencies or schemes
of cultural organization in mere imitation of the example of another, as
it will adopt specific culture content—the wheel or crown or Buddhism,
for instance—from outside, often readily. The result is that culture
relations or forms develop spontaneously or from within rather than as
a result of direct taking over. Also, the types of culture forms being
limited in number, the same type is frequently evolved independently.
Thus monarchical and democratic societies, feudal or caste-divided ones,
priest-ridden and relatively irreligious ones, expansive and mercantile
or self-sufficient and agricultural nations, evolve over and over again.
On the whole, comparative culture history more often deals with the
specific contents of civilization, perhaps because events like the spread
of an invention can be traced more definitely and exactly than the rather
complex evolutions of say two feudal systems can be compared. The result
is that diffusions seem to outweigh parallels; as is set forth in several
of the chapters that follow this one (§ 105, 111, 127).
In comparative linguistics, on the other hand, interest inclines to the
side of form rather than content; hence the parallelisms or convergences
are conspicuous. If as much attention were generally given to words as to
grammar, and if they could be traced in their prehistoric or unrecorded
wanderings as reliably as many culture traits have been, it is probable
that diffusion would loom larger as a principle shaping human speech.
There are words that have traveled almost as far as the objects they
denote: _tobacco_ and _maize_, for example. And the absorption of words
of Latin origin into English was as extensive as the absorption for over
a thousand years of Latin, Christian, and Mediterranean culture by the
English people—went on as its accompaniment and result.
61. CONVERGENT LANGUAGES
Parallel development in speech form is not restricted to traits like sex
gender and object incorporation. It may affect whole languages. Chinese
a long time ago became an extremely analytical or “isolating” language.
That is, it lost all affixes and internal change. Each word became an
unalterable unit. Sentences are built up by putting together these atoms.
Grammatical relations are expressed by the order of words: the subject
precedes the predicate, for instance. Other ideas that in many languages
are treated formally, such as the plural or person, are expressed by
content elements, that is, by other words: _many_ for the plural,
separate pronouns instead of affixes for person, and so on. The uniformly
monosyllabic words of Chinese accentuate this isolating character,
which however does not depend intrinsically upon the monosyllabism. In
the Indo-European family, as already mentioned, there has been a drift
in the same direction during the last two thousand years. This drift
toward loss of formal mechanisms and toward the expression of grammar
by material elements or their position only, has been evident in all
branches of Indo-European, but has been most marked in English. The
chief remnants of the older inflectional processes in spoken English of
to-day are four verb endings, _-s_, _-ed_, _-ing_, _-en_; three noun
endings, the possessive _-’s_ and the plurals _-s_ and _-en_, the latter
rare; the case ending _-m_ in _whom_, _them_; a few vowel changes for
plurals, as in _man_—_men_, and _goose_—_geese_; and perhaps two hundred
vowel changes in verbs, like _sing_, _sang_, _sung_. Compared with
Latin, Sanskrit, or even primitive Germanic, this brief list represents
a survival of possibly a tenth of the original synthetic inflectional
apparatus. That is, English has gone approximately nine tenths of the
way towards attaining a grammar of the Chinese type. A third language of
independent origin, Polynesian, has traveled about the same distance in
the same direction. Superficially it is less like Chinese in that it
remains prevailingly polysyllabic, but more like it in having undergone
heavy phonetic attrition. This then is a clear case of entire languages
converging toward a similar type.
Another instance is found in the remarkable resemblances in plan of
structure of Indo-European, especially in its older forms, and of the
Penutian group of languages in native California. Common to these two
families are an apparatus of similar cases, including accusative,
genitive, locative, ablative, instrumental; plural by suffix; vowel
changes in the verb according to tense and mode; a passive and several
participles and modal forms expressed by suffixes; pronouns either
separate or expressed by endings fused with the tense-modal suffixes.
Thus, the processes which make English _sing_, _sang_, _sung_, _song_, or
_bind_, _bound_, _band_, _bond_, are substantially identical with those
which have produced in Penutian Yokuts such forms as _shokud_, pierce,
_shukid-ji_, pierced, _shokod_, perforation or hole, _shikid_, piercer or
arrow. In short, most of the traits generally cited as constituting the
Indo-European languages typically inflectional, reappear in Penutian, and
of course independently as regards their origin and history.
These would appear to be phenomena comparable to the growth of feudalism
in China more than a thousand years earlier than in Europe, or the
appearance of a great centrally governed empire in Peru similar to the
ancient monarchies of the Orient.
62. UNCONSCIOUS FACTORS IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
The unceasing processes of change in language are mainly unconscious.
The results of the change may rise to the recognition of the speakers;
the act of change, and especially its causes, happen without awareness
of those through whose minds and mouths they take place. This holds of
all departments of language: the phonetics, the structural form, largely
even the meaning of words. When a change has begun to creep in, it may
be observed and be consciously resisted on the ground of being incorrect
or vulgar or foreign. But the underlying motives of the objectors are
apparently as unknown to themselves as the impulses of the innovators.
If this view seem extreme, it can easily be shown that the great
bulk of any language as it is, apart from any question of change, is
employed unconsciously. An illiterate person will use such forms as
_child_, _child’s_, _children_, _children’s_ with the same “correctness”
as a philologist, yet without being able to give an explanation of
the grammatical ideas of singularity and plurality, absoluteness and
possession, or to lay down rules as to the manner of expression of these
ideas in English. Grammar, in short, exists before grammarians, whose
legitimate business is to uncover such rules as are already there. It is
an obviously hasty thought that because grammar happens to be taught in
schools, speech can be grammatical only through such formal teaching.
The Sanskrit and Greek and Latin languages had their declensions and
conjugations before Hindu and Greek and Roman scholars first analyzed
and described them. The languages of primitive peoples frequently abound
with complicated forms and mechanisms which are used consistently and
applied without suspicion of their existence. It is much as the blood
went round in our bodies quite healthily before Harvey’s discovery of its
circulation.
The quality of unconsciousness seems not to be a trait specifically
limited to linguistic causes and processes, but to hold in principle
of culture generally. It is only that the unconsciousness pervades
speech farther. A custom, a belief, an art, however deep down its
springs, sooner or later rises into social consciousness. It then seems
deliberate, planned, willed, and is construed as arising from conscious
motives and developing through conscious channels. But many social
phenomena can be led back only to non-rational and obscure motives: the
wearing of silk hats, for instance. The whole class of changes in dress
styles spring from unconscious causes. Sleeves and skirts lengthen or
shorten, trousers flare or tighten, and who can say why? It is perhaps
possible to trace a new fashion to Paris or London, and to a particular
stratum of society there. But what is it that in the winter of a
particular year makes every woman—or man—of a certain social group wear,
let us say, a high collared coat, or a shoe that does not come above
the ankle, and the next year, or the tenth after, the reverse? It is
insufficient to say that this is imitation of a leader of fashion, of a
professional creator of style. Why does the group follow him and think
the innovation attractive and correct? A year earlier the same innovation
would have appeared senseless or extravagant to the same group. A year
after, it appeals as belated and ridiculous, and every one wonders that
style was so tasteless so short a time ago.
Evidently the æsthetic emotions evoked by fashions are largely beyond the
control of both individuals and groups. It is difficult to say where the
creative and imitative impulses of fashion come from; which, inasmuch as
the impulses obviously reside somewhere in human minds, means that they
spring from the unconscious portions of the mind. Evidently then our
justification of the dress styles we happen at any time to be following,
our pronouncing them artistic or comfortable or sensible or what not, is
secondary. A low shoe may be more convenient than a high one, a brown
one more practical than a black one. That that is not the reason which
determines the wearing of low brown shoes when they are customarily
worn, is shown by the fact that at other times high black ones are put
on by every one. The reasons that can be and are given are so changeable
and inconsistent that they evidently are not the real reasons, but the
false secondary reasons that are best distinguished as rationalizations.
Excuses, we should call them with reference to individual conduct.
What applies to fashion holds also of manners, of morals, and of many
religious observances. Why we defer to women by rising in their presence
and passing through a door behind them; why we refrain from eating fish
with a knife or drinking soup out of a two handled cup, though drinking
it from a single handled one is legitimate; why we do not marry close
kin; why we remove our hats in the presence of the deity or his emblems
but would feel it impious to pull off our shoes; all the thousands
of prescriptions and taboos of which these are examples, possess an
unconscious motivation.
Such cases are also illustrations of what is known as the relativity of
morals. The Jew sets his hat on to worship, the Oriental punctiliously
slips out of his shoes. Some people forbid the marriage of the most
remote relatives, others encourage that of first cousins, still others
permit the union of uncle and niece. It would seem that all social
phenomena which can be brought under this principle of relativity of
standard are unconsciously grounded. This in turn implies the unconscious
causation of the mores, those products of the social environment in which
one is reared and which one accepts as the ultimate authority of conduct.
As mores are those folkways or customs to which an emotional coloring
has become attached, so that adherence to the custom or departure from
it arouses a feeling respectively of approval or disapproval, it is
evident that the origin of folkways generally is also unconscious, since
there seems no reason why the emotions or ethical affect enveloping a
customary action should incline more than the custom itself to spring up
unconsciously.
It has become recognized that the average man’s convictions on social
matters remote from him are not developed through examination of evidence
and exercise of reason, but are taken over, by means of what is sometimes
denominated the “herd instinct,” from the society or period in which
he happens to have been born and nurtured. His belief in democracy, in
monotheism, in his right to charge profit and his freedom to change
residence or occupation, have such origin. In many instances it is easy
to render striking proof of the proposition: as in the problems of high
tariff, or the Athanasian creed, or compulsory vaccination, which are so
technical or intricate as to be impossible of independent solution by
evidence and argument by the majority of men. Time alone would forbid:
we should starve while making the necessary research. And the difference
between the average man’s attitude on such difficult points and the
highly gifted individual’s attitude toward them or even toward simpler
problems, would seem to be one of degree only.
Even on the material sides of culture, unconscious motivation plays
a part. In the propulsion of ships, oars and sails fluctuated as the
prevalent means down almost to the period of steam vessels. It would be
impossible to say that one method was logically superior to the other,
that it was recognized as such and then rationally adhered to. The
history of warfare shows similar changes between throwing and thrusting
spears, stabbing and hewing swords, light and heavy armor. The Greeks
and Macedonians in the days of their military superiority lengthened
their lances and held them. It no doubt seemed for a time that a definite
superiority had been proved for this type of weapon over the shorter,
hurled javelin. Then the Romans, as part of their legionary tactics,
reverted to the javelin and broke the Macedonian phalanx with their
pilum. But the Middle Ages again fell back on the thrusting lance. The
Greeks successfully developed heavy armor, until Athenian light armed
troops overcame Spartan hoplites. The Macedonians reintroduced heavy
armament, which held sway in Europe until after the prevalence of
firearms. But the last few years have brought the rebirth of the helmet.
These fashions in tools and practical appliances do not alter as fast as
modern dress styles, and part of their causes can often be recognized.
Yet there seems no essential difference, as regards consciousness,
between the fluctuation of fashions in weapons—or navigation or cooking
or travel or house building—and, let us say, the fluctuation of mode
between soft and stiff hats or high and low shoes. It may be admitted to
have been the open array of the legion that led to the pilum; the bullet
that induced the abandonment of the breast plate, shrapnel that caused
the reintroduction of the helmet. But these initiating factors were not
deliberate as regards the effects that came in their train; and in their
turn they were the effects of more remote causes. The whole chain of
development in such cases is devious, unforeseen, mainly unforeseeable.
At most there is recognition of what is happening; in general the
recognition seems to become full only after the change in tool or weapon
or industrial process has become completed and is perhaps already being
undermined once more.
Of course purely stylistic alterations—and linguistic innovations—also
possess their causes. When the derby hat or the pronoun _thou_ becomes
obsolete, there is a reason, whether or not we know it or do not see it
clearly.
The common causal element in all these changes may be called a shift
in social values. Perhaps practical chemical experience has grown, and
gunpowder explodes more satisfactorily; or an economic readjustment has
made it possible to equip more soldiers with guns. The first result
is a greater frequency of bullet penetrations in battle; the next,
the abandonment of the breast plate. Increasing wealth or schooling or
city residence makes indiscriminate familiarity of manners seem less
desirable than at an earlier period: brusque _thou_ begins to yield to
indirect plural _you_. Or again, new verbs, all of regular conjugation
like _love_, _loved_, are formed in English or imported from French until
their number outweighs that of the ancient irregular ones like _sing_,
_sang_. A standardizing tendency is thereby set going—“analogizing” is
the technical term of the philologist—which begins to turn irregular
verbs into regular ones: _dived_ replaces _dove_, just as _lenger_
becomes _longer_, and _toon_ becomes _toes_. There is the same sort of
causality in one of these phenomena as in another. The individual or
community that leaves off the breast plate or stiff hat is more likely
to be aware that it is performing the act than the one that leaves
off saying _toon_ or _thou_. But it does not seem that there is an
essential difference of process. Linguistic and æsthetic changes are
most fully unconscious, social ones next, material and economic ones
perhaps least. But in all cases change or innovation is due to a shift of
values that are broader than the single phenomenon in question, and that
are held to impulsively instead of reasonably. That is why all social
creations—institutions, beliefs, codes, styles, speech forms—prove on
impartial analysis to be full of inconsistencies and irrationalities.
They have sprung not from weighed or reasoned choices but from impulsive
desires and emotionally colored habits.
The foregoing discussion may be summarized as follows. Linguistic
phenomena and processes are on the whole more deeply unconscious than
cultural ones, without however differing in principle. In both language
and culture, content is more readily imparted and assimilated than form
and enters farther into consciousness. Organization or structure in both
cases takes place according to unconscious patterns, such as grammatical
categories, social standards, political or economic points of view,
religious or intellectual assumptions. These patterns attain recognition
only in a late stage of sophistication, and even then continue to
alter and to be influential without conscious control. The number of
such linguistic and social patterns being limited, they tend to be
approximately repeated without historic connection. Partially similar
combinations of such patterns sometimes recur, producing languages or
cultures of similar type. But established patterns, and still more
their combinations, replace each other with difficulty. Their spread
therefore takes place through the integral substitution of one language
or culture for another, rather than by piecemeal absorption. This is
in contrast to the specific elements of which language and culture
consist—individual words, mechanical devices, institutional symbols,
particular religious ideas or actions, and the like. These elements
absorb and diffuse readily. They are therefore imitated more often than
they are reinvented. But linguistic and cultural patterns or structures
growing up spontaneously may possess more general resemblance than
historic connection.
63. LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL STANDARDS
It does not follow that because social usages lack a rational basis, they
are therefore unworthy of being followed, or that standards of conduct
need be renounced because they are relative, that is, unconsciously
founded and changing. The natural inclination of men being to regard
their standards of taste, behavior, and social arrangement as wholly
reasonable, perfect, and fixed, there follows a first inclination to
regard these standards as valueless as soon as their emotionality and
variability have been recognized. But such a tendency is only a negative
reaction against the previous illusion when this has disappointed by
crumbling. The reaction is therefore in a sense a further result of the
illusion. Once the fundamental and automatic assumption of fixity and
inherent value of social patterns has been given up, and it is recognized
that the motive power of behavior in man as in the other animals is
affective and unconscious, there is nothing in institutions and codes
to quarrel with. They are neither despicable nor glorious; no more
deserving in virtue of their existence to be uprooted and demolished than
to be defended as absolute and eternal. In some form or other, they are
inevitable; and the particular form which they take at this time or that
place is always tolerably well founded, in the sense of being adapted
with fair success, or having been but recently well adapted, to the
conditions of natural and social environment of the group which holds the
institution, code, or standard.
That this is a sane attitude is more easily shown in the field
of language than of culture, because, language being primarily a
mechanism or means, whereas in culture ends or purposes tend more to
obtrude, it is easier to view linguistic phenomena dispassionately.
Grammars and dictionaries, for instance, are evidently the result of
self-consciousness arising about speech which has previously been mainly
unconscious. They may be roughly compared to social formulations like
law codes or written constitutions or philosophic systems or religious
dogmas, which are also representations of usages or beliefs already in
existence. When grammarians stigmatize expressions like _ain’t_ or _them
cows_ or _he don’t_ as “wrong,” they are judging an innovation, or one
of several established conflicting usages, by a standard of correctness
that seems to them absolute and permanent. As a matter of actuality,
the condemned form may or may not succeed in becoming established. _He
don’t_, for example, might attain to correctness in time, although
_ain’t_ is perhaps less likely to become legitimized, and _them cows_
to have still smaller prospect of recognition. That a form departs from
the canon of to-day of course no more proves that it will be accepted
in future than that it will not. What is certain is that if it wins
sufficient usage, it will also win sanction, and will become part of the
standard of its time.
Linguistic instances like these differ little if at all in principle, in
their involved psychology, from the finding of the Supreme Court that a
certain legislative enactment is unconstitutional and therefore void;
or from the decision of a denomination that dancing or playing golf on
Sunday is wicked; or from the widespread sentiment that breaking an
unpopular law like that on liquor prohibition is morally justifiable. The
chief point of divergence would seem to be that a court is a constituted
body endowed with an authority which is not paralleled on the linguistic
side, at any rate in Anglo-Saxon countries; although the Latin nations
possess Academies whose dicta on correctness of speech enjoy a moral
authority approximating the verdicts of a high court.
It is also of interest to remember that the power of nullifying
legislation was not specifically granted the Supreme Court by the
Constitution of the United States, but that the practice grew up
gradually, quite like a speech innovation which becomes established.
Certain elements in the American population look upon this power
as undesirable and therefore take satisfaction in pointing out its
unsanctioned origin. The majority on the other hand feel that the
situation on the whole works out well, and that a Supreme Court with its
present powers is better than the risk of a Court without power. Still,
it remains curiously illogical that the preservation of the Constitution
should take place partly through the extra-constitutional functioning of
a constitutional body. In principle such a case is similar to that of
grammarians who at the same time lay down a rule and exceptions to the
rule, because the contradictory usages happen to be actually established.
Codes, dogmas, and grammars are thus normally reflections rather than
causes. Such influence as they have is mainly in outward crystallization.
They produce a superficial appearance of permanence. In the field of
speech, it is easy to recognize that it is not grammarians that make
languages, but languages that make grammarians. The analogous process
evidently holds for culture. Lawgivers, statesmen, religious leaders,
discoverers, inventors, therefore only seem to shape civilization.
The deep-seated, blind, and intricate forces that shape culture, also
mold the so-called creative leaders of society as essentially as they
mold the mass of humanity. Progress, so far as it can objectively be
considered to be such, is something that makes itself. We do not make it.
Our customary conviction to the contrary is probably the result of an
unconscious desire not to realize our individual impotence as regards the
culture we live in. Social influence of a sort we do have as individuals.
But it is a personal influence on the fortune and careers of other
individual members of society, and is concerned largely with aims of
personal security, relative dominance, or affection among ourselves. This
obviously is a different thing from the exertion of influence on the form
or content of civilization as such.
64. RAPIDITY OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE
The rate of change in language is circumscribed by the principles of
linguistic causality that have been discussed, but it remains an obscure
subject in detail. The opinion often held that unwritten languages
necessarily alter faster than written ones, or that those of savages
are less stable than the tongues of civilized men, is mainly a naïve
reflection of our sense of superiority. It contravenes the principles
just referred to and is not supported by evidence. Occasional stories
that a primitive tribe after a generation or two was found speaking
an almost made-over language are unconscious fabrications due to
preconception and supported by hasty acquaintance, faulty records,
misunderstanding, or perhaps change of inhabitants. Nahuatl, the language
of the Aztecs, has probably changed less in four hundred years than
Spanish; Quechua, that of the Incas, no more. English has apparently
altered more than any of the three in the same period. Dozens of native
tongues, some of them from wholly rude peoples, were written down in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Spanish and other priests, and in
most instances the grammars and dictionaries prove to be usable to-day.
Cultural alteration would appear to work toward speech change chiefly in
certain ways. New things need new names; new acts mean new thoughts and
new ideas require new words. These may be imported; or they may be made
out of elements already in the language; or old words may undergo a shift
of meaning. In any event, the change is mainly on the side of vocabulary.
The sounds of a language are generally much less affected; its plan of
structure least of all. The introduction of a new religion or development
of a new form of government among a people need not be accompanied by
changes in the grammar of their speech, and usually are not, as abundant
historical examples prove.
While the causes of grammatical innovation are far from clear, contact
with alien tongues is certainly a factor in some degree. An isolated
off-shoot of a linguistic group is generally more specialized, and
therefore presumably more altered, than the main body of dialects of the
family. The reason is that the latter, maintaining abundant reciprocal
contact, tend to steady one another, or if they swerve, to do so in
the same direction. The speakers of the branch that is geographically
detached, however, come to know quite different grammars so far as they
learn languages other than their native one, and such knowledge seems
to act as an unconscious stimulus toward the growth of new forms and
uses. It is not that grammatical concepts are often imitated outright or
grammatical elements borrowed. Acquaintance with a language of different
type seems rather to act as a ferment which sets new processes going.
It is in the nature of the case that direct specific evidence of changes
of this character is hard to secure. But comparison of related languages
or dialects with reference to their location frequently shows that the
dialects which are geographically situated among strange languages
are the most differentiated. This holds of Abyssinian in the Semitic
family, of Brahui in Dravidian, of Singhalese in the Indic branch of
Indo-European, of Hopi and Tübatulabal in Shoshonean, of Arapaho and
Blackfoot in Algonkin, of Huastec in Mayan.
But it is also likely that languages differ among each other in their
susceptibility to change, and that the same language differs in
successive periods of its history. It is rather to be anticipated that a
language may be in a phase now of rapid and then of retarded metabolism,
so to speak; that at one stage its tendency may be toward breaking down
and absorption, at another toward a more rigid setting of its forms.
Similarly, there is reason to believe that languages of certain types of
structure are inherently more plastic than others. At any rate, actual
differences in rate of change are known. The Indo-European languages,
for instance, have perhaps without exception altered more in the three
thousand years of historic record than the Semitic ones. And so in native
America, while contemporary documentary record is of course wanting, the
degree of differentiation within the two stocks suggests strongly that
Athabascan is more tenaciously conservative than Siouan.
There are also notable differences in the readiness to borrow words
ready-made. English is distinctly more hospitable in this regard than
German, which tends rather to express a new concept by a new formation of
old elements. The South American languages appear to have borrowed more
words from one another than those of North America. In this matter the
type of language is probably of some influence, yet on the whole cultural
factors perhaps predominate. The direction and degree of cultural
absorption seem to determine the absorption of words to a considerable
measure. Here writing is certainly potent. The Latin and French element
in English, the Sanskrit and Arabic element in the Malaysian languages,
were brought in to a large extent by writing, and would evidently have
remained much smaller if the historic contacts had been wholly oral. This
is perhaps the most important way in which writing exerts influence on
the development of spoken language; an influence which in other respects
is usually overestimated.
CHAPTER VI
THE BEGINNINGS OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION
65. Fossils of the body and of the mind.—66. Stone and
metals.—67. The Old and the New Stone Ages.—68. The Eolithic
Age.—69. The Palæolithic Age: duration, climate, animals.—70.
Subdivisions of the Palæolithic.—71. Human racial types
in the Palæolithic.—72. Palæolithic flint implements.—73.
Other materials: bone and horn.—74. Dress.—75. Harpoons and
weapons.—76. Wooden implements.—77. Fire.—78. Houses.—79.
Religion.—80. Palæolithic art.—81. Summary of advance in the
Palæolithic.
65. FOSSILS OF THE BODY AND OF THE MIND
The discovery of fossils has yielded some idea of the history of the
human body during the past million years. The evidence is far from
complete, but there is enough to prove a development much as might be
expected under the hypothesis of evolution. To some extent fossils also
afford an insight into the development of the human mind. The capacity of
a skull gives the size of the brain. The interior surface of the skull
corresponds to the outer surface of the brain. In this way some slight
knowledge has been gained of the development in ancient types of man
of the convolutions and centers of the brain surface with which mental
activity is associated. Even limb bones yield indirect indications. A
straight thigh means an erect posture of the body, with the arms no
longer used for locomotion. Released from this service, they are freed
for other purposes, such as grasping, handling, and various forms of what
we call work. But a hand adapted for work would be useless without an
intelligence to direct its operations. Thus the bones of our precursors
provide suggestions as to the degree of development of their minds. The
suggestions are sketchy and incomplete, but they are worth something.
A second line of evidence is fuller. When a human or pre-human hand
has made any article, one can judge from that article what its purpose
is likely to have been, how it was used, how much intelligence that
use involved, what degree of skill was necessary to manufacture the
article. All such artifacts—tools, weapons, or anything constructed—are
a reflection of the degree of “culture” or civilization, elementary or
advanced, possessed by the beings who made them.
On the whole the evidence to be got from artifacts as to the degree of
advancement of their makers or users is greater than the information
derivable from the structure of skeletons. A large brain does not
always imply high intelligence. Even a much convoluted brain surface
may accompany a mediocre mind. In other words, the correlation between
body and mind has not been worked out with accuracy. On the other hand
an advanced type of tool necessarily implies more skill in its use, and
therefore a decided development of the use of intelligence. Similarly, if
one finds nothing but simple tools occurring among any past or present
people, we may be sure that their civilization and the training of their
minds have remained backward.
It is true that one cannot always infer from a particular manufactured
object the mentality of the particular person who owned and used it.
An imbecile may come into possession of a good knife and even possess
some ability in using it. But he can acquire the knife only if there are
other individuals in his community or time who know how to smelt iron
and forge steel. In short, even a single jackknife is proof that human
ingenuity has progressed to the point of making important discoveries,
and that arts of relatively high order are being practised. In this way
a solitary implement, if its discovery is thoroughly authenticated, may
suffice to establish a relatively high or low degree of civilization for
a prehistoric period or a vanished race.
An implement manufactured by human hands of the past is of course
different from an actual fossil of a former human being, and it is always
necessary to distinguish between the two. The one is something made by
a human being and in some measure reflecting the development of his
intelligence; the other something left over or preserved from the human
body itself. Nevertheless, in a metaphorical sense, the implements of
the past may well be spoken of as the fossils of civilization. They are
only its fragments, but they allow us to reconstruct the mode of life of
prehistoric peoples and utterly forgotten nations, in much the same way
as the geologist and the palæontologist reconstruct from true fossils the
forms of life that existed on the earth or in the seas millions of years
ago.
There is even a further parallel. Just as the geologist knows that one
fossil is older or younger than another from its position in the earth’s
crust or the stratum in which it was laid down, so the student of the
beginnings of human civilization knows that the deposit at the bottom of
a cave must be more ancient than the refuse at the top. He calls in the
geologist to tell him the age of a glacial deposit or of a river terrace,
and thus he may learn that, of two types of implements found at different
places or levels, one is so many thousands of years or geological periods
older than the other. In the long run, too, the older implements prove
to be the simpler. Thus archæologists have succeeded in working out an
evolution of civilization which parallels rather neatly the evolution of
life forms. This evolution of human mental operations as it is reflected
in the artifacts preserved from the lowest and earliest strata of
civilization is the subject of the present chapter.
There is another way in which the evidence on the two lines of evolution
is similar: its incompleteness. The geological record has been compared
to a book from which whole chapters are missing; of others, but stray
leaves remain; and only now and then have consecutive pages been
preserved unmutilated. Humanity has always been so much less populous
than the remainder of the animal kingdom, especially in its earlier
stages, that the number of individuals whose bones have been preserved
as fossils is infinitely smaller. The result is that we account
ourselves fortunate in having been able to assemble six or seven not
quite complete skeletons, and fragmentary portions of two or three dozen
other individuals, of the Neandertal race which inhabited western Europe
for thousands of years. For still earlier races or species of man the
actual data are even scantier. Knowledge of so fundamental a form as
Pithecanthropus, the earliest of the antecedents of man yet known, rests
on two bones and two teeth, plus a third tooth discovered as the sole
result of a subsequent expedition. Heidelberg man has to be reconstructed
from a jaw.
The remains which illustrate the development of the human mind are not so
scarce. A single man might easily manufacture hundreds or even thousands
of implements in the course of a lifetime. When these are of stone
they are practically imperishable; whereas it is only the exceptional
skeleton, protected by favorable circumstances, of which the bones will
endure for thousands of years. For every ancient true fossil trace of
man that has been found, we have therefore thousands of the works of his
hands.
The inadequateness of the cultural record is not in the insufficient
number of the specimens, but in their onesidedness. Objects of stone,
even those of horn and of metal, last; clothing, fabrics, skins,
basketry, and wooden articles ordinarily decay so rapidly as to have
no chance of being preserved for tens of thousands of years. Tools of
the most ancient times have often been found in abundance; objects
manufactured with tools from softer and less enduring materials
are scarce even from moderately old periods. Now and then a piece
of an earthenware pot may show the imprint of a textile. Textiles
and foodstuffs are occasionally preserved by charring in fire or by
penetration of metallic salts. Charcoal or ashes found in pockets or beds
indicate that fire was maintained in one spot for considerable periods,
and must therefore have been controlled and used, possibly even produced,
by human agency. A bone needle with an eye proves that some one must have
sewn, and one may therefore assume that garments were worn at the time.
But for every point established in this way there are dozens about which
knowledge remains blank.
Understanding of the social and religious life of the earliest men is
naturally filled with the greatest gaps, and the farther back one goes in
time, the greater is the enveloping darkness. The problem is as difficult
as that of figuring accurately the degree of intelligence attained by the
mailed fishes of the Devonian age some thirty or forty million years ago,
or of estimating whether the complexion of Pithecanthropus was black,
brown, or white. One can guess on these matters. One may by careful
comparisons obtain some partial and indirect indication of an answer. But
it is clearly wisest not to try to stretch too far the conclusions which
can be drawn. Imagination has its value in science as in art and other
aspects of life, yet when it becomes disproportionate to the facts, it is
a danger instead of an aid.
Still, now and then something has been preserved from which one may draw
inferences with a reasonable prospect of certainty even concerning the
non-material side of life. If human bones are discovered charred and
split open, there is good reason for believing these bones to be the
remains of a cannibal feast. When prehistoric skeletons are found in the
position in which death might have taken place, the presumption is that
the people of that time abandoned their dead as animals would. If on the
other hand a skeleton lies intact with its arms carefully folded, there
is little room for doubt that the men of the time had progressed to the
point where the survivors put away their dead; in other words, that human
burial had been instituted, and that accordingly at least some rude form
of society was in existence. When, perhaps from a still later period, a
skeleton is found with red paint adhering to the bones, although these
lie in their natural places, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the
dead body was coated with pigment before being interred and that as the
soft tissues wasted away the red ocher came to adhere to the bones. In
this case the painting was evidently part of a rite performed over the
dead.
66. STONE AND METALS
The cultural record of man’s existence is divided into two great periods.
In the latter of these, in which we are still living, metals were used;
in the earlier, metals were unknown and tools made of stone. Hence the
terms “Age of Stone” and “Age of Metals.” The duration of these two main
periods is unequal. Metals were first used in Asia and Egypt about 4,000
B.C. and in Europe about 3,000 B.C.—say five to six thousand years ago.
The most conservative authorities, however, would allow forty or fifty
thousand years for the Stone Age; while others make it cover a quarter
million. The assumption, which is here followed, of the intermediate
figure of a hundred thousand years gives the Stone Age a duration twenty
times as long as the Age of Metals. When one remembers that hand in
hand with metals came the art of writing and an infinite variety of
inventions, it is clear that larger additions have been made to human
civilization in the comparatively brief period of metals than in the
tremendously longer time that preceded it. Progress in the Stone Age was
not only slow, but the farther back one peers into this age, the more
lagging does the evolution of human culture seem to have been. One can
definitely recognize a tendency toward the acceleration of evolution: the
farther advancement has got the faster it moves.
The Age of Metals is subdivided into the Iron Age, which begins some
three thousand years ago, say about 1,500-1,000 B.C.; and an earlier
Bronze Age. In the Bronze Age one must distinguish first a period in
which native copper was employed in some parts of the world; after which
comes an era in which it had been learned that copper melted with a
proportion of about one-tenth tin, thus producing bronze, was a superior
material. Within the past five thousand years or so, accordingly, there
are recognized successively the ages of copper, of bronze, and of iron.
Broadly speaking, these five thousand years are also the historic period.
Not that there exist historic records going back so far as this for every
people. But the earliest preserved documents that the historian uses, the
written monuments of Egypt and Babylonia, are about five thousand years
old. The Age of Metals thus corresponds approximately with the period of
History; the Stone Age, with Prehistory.
67. THE OLD AND THE NEW STONE AGES
The Stone Age, apart from a rather doubtful introductory era to be
mentioned presently, is customarily divided into two periods, the Old
Stone Age and the New Stone Age,—the Palæolithic and the Neolithic.
These words of Greek origin mean literally “old stone” and “new stone”
periods. The criterion by which these two grand divisions were originally
distinguished was that in the Palæolithic artifacts were made only by
chipping, that is, some process of fracturing stone, whereas Neolithic
stone objects were thought to have been pecked, ground, rubbed, and
polished. Indeed the two periods have sometimes been designated as the
epochs of rough stone and polished stone implements.
This distinction is now known to be inaccurate. It is true that the Old
Stone Age did not yet employ frictional processes in shaping stone and
confined itself to the older methods of fracturing by blows or pressure.
But the converse is not true, that the Neolithic worked stone only
by grinding, nor even that grinding was its characteristic process.
Stone grinding was invented only toward the middle of the New Stone
Age—in what is perhaps best designated the “Full Neolithic.” The Early
Neolithic, which lasted half the total Neolithic duration, continued to
work stone by fracture. What marked the beginning of the Neolithic was
certain inventions having nothing to do with stone: notably pottery and
the bow. With these available, human life took on a new color, and it
was not until some thousands of years later that shaping of stone by
grinding came into use. In other words, the prehistorians’ idea as to
what constitutes the Neolithic have changed, and they no longer put stone
processes in the first place in characterizing the period. They would do
well, therefore, to change its name also to one having reference to its
more specific traits. Such a change of designation will perhaps become
established in time. But at present the term Neolithic is so intrenched
in usage, that to replace it by “Pottery Age” or “Bow Age” would be
misleading: all the literature on the subject employs “Neolithic.” The
present chapter being concerned specifically with the Palæolithic, and
this being an age in which stone implements did loom large and were
consistently made by fracture only, the difficulties about the concept
of the Neolithic, and its subdivision into an Early and a Full period,
can be reserved for discussion later (Chapter XIV). But it is well to
bear in mind as the Palæolithic is examined in the pages immediately
following, that the Neolithic is neither its antithesis nor its logical
complement, but rather a period signalized by the appearance of totally
new directions of human culture.
Another point in connection with the two processes of working stone has
reference to the mental activities involved by them. A tolerable ground
ax or mortar can be made without much difficulty by any one willing
to take the trouble. A civilized person entirely inexperienced in
the working of stone would be likely to produce a fairly satisfactory
implement by the rubbing technique. If however he attempted to
manufacture a chipped stone tool, even of simple type, he would probably
fail repeatedly before learning to control the method well enough to turn
out an implement without first ruining a dozen. In short, the manual
dexterity required to produce the best forms of chipped stone tools
is greater than that needed for ground ones. Inasmuch as the chipping
process is, however, the earlier, we are confronted here with a paradox.
Yet the paradox is only on the surface. It is true that so far as skill
alone is concerned a good chipped tool is more difficult to make than
a ground one. But it can be made in a shorter time. A rough stone tool
can be manufactured in a few minutes. A good artifact may be preceded
by a number of unsuccessful attempts or “rejects,” and yet be produced
in an hour or less. The processes of pecking, grinding, and polishing,
on the other hand, are laborious. They are slow even when pursued with
steel tools, and when the shaping material is no better than another
stone or sand, as was of course always the case in prehistoric times,
the duration of the labor must have been discouraging. Weeks or at least
days would be required to manufacture a single implement. If the work was
done at odd times, one may imagine that many a stone ax was months in
being produced. Patience and forethought of a rather high order are thus
involved in the making of implements of the Neolithic type. Dexterity is
replaced by higher qualities of what might be called the moral order. By
comparison, the earliest men lacked these traits. They would not sit down
to-day to commence something that would not be available for use until
a month later. What they wanted they wanted quickly. To think ahead, to
sacrifice present convenience to future advantage, must have been foreign
to their way of life. Therefore they chipped; and although in the lapse
of thousands of years they learned to do some chipping of high quality,
they continued to operate with modifications of the same rough and rapid
process. The uses to which their implements could be put were also
correspondingly restricted. A first-class ax, a real chisel, or a mortar
in which grinding can be done, can scarcely be made by chipping alone.
It was not until men had learned to restrain their childish impulse
to work only for the immediate purpose, and had acquired an increased
self-control and discipline, that the grinding of stone came into use.
One principle must be clearly adhered to in the dating or proper
arrangement of the periods of prehistoric time: the principle that it
is always the highest types of implements which determine the age of
a deposit. Lower forms often persist from the earlier periods into
the later, alongside the newly invented higher types. The men of the
Full Neolithic time did not wholly give up making chipped implements
because they also ground stone. Just so we have not discarded the use
of stone because we use metals, and we still employ copper for a great
variety of purposes although we live in an age of which iron and steel
are characteristic. To reckon a people as Palæolithic because they had
chipped implements as well as ground ones, would be as misleading as to
assert that we still belong to the Stone Age because we build houses of
granite. In fact, stone masonry has had its principal development since
metals have been in use.
This caution seems elementary enough. But it has sometimes been
overlooked by scholars in the pursuit of a theory that made them try to
stamp some prehistoric or savage race as particularly primitive. If in
a stratum of ancient remains there are discovered a thousand chipped
artifacts and only ten that are ground or polished but the latter
unquestionably left there at the same time as the thousand chipped ones,
one is justified in reckoning the whole deposit as Full Neolithic in
period. For in such a case it is clear that the art of grinding must have
been already known, even though it may as yet have been practised only
occasionally.
It is found that all surviving peoples of primitive culture—American
Indians, Australian black-fellows, Polynesians, Hottentots, and the
like—except probably the Tasmanians, have attained the grinding stage of
development. It is true enough that many American Indian tribes chipped
arrow-points and knives more frequently than they would grind out axes.
Yet without exception they also knew the process of grinding stone and
applied it to some purpose. For this reason the endeavors that have been
made by certain authors, who compare particular modern savage peoples
to the races of prehistoric Europe on the basis of a similarity of their
chipped implements, are misleading. It is true that tools like those
produced in the Mousterian period of the Old Stone Age are made by the
modern Australian tribes, and that certain Magdalenian implements from
near the end of the Old Stone Age find parallels among those of the
Eskimo. But both the Australians and the Eskimo practise the art of
rubbing and polishing of stone, which was unknown in the Palæolithic.
They therefore belong clearly to a later stage of civilization. Too great
an insistence on such parallels would be likely to give rise to the
implication that the Australians were a species of belated Mousterian
Stone Age men, and the Eskimo only Magdalenians whom the Arctic
regions had somehow perpetuated for ten thousand years; whereas their
civilizations consist of Mousterian and Magdalenian ingredients plus many
subsequent elements. The stage of development of the art of chipping in
stone may be the same; the other arts and customs of modern Australian
black-fellows and of Eskimos, and their bodily types, differ from those
of the prehistoric Europeans.
With the distinction of the Palæolithic, Neolithic, and the Ages of
Copper, Bronze, and Iron in mind, it is in order to examine what may have
preceded them, and then to trace in outline the development which human
culture underwent during the Palæolithic in the continent in which its
records are best explored—Europe.
68. THE EOLITHIC AGE
The earliest of all periods of human handiwork, although a somewhat
doubtful one, is the Eolithic, or age of the “dawn of stone” implements.
On purely theoretical grounds it appears likely, indeed almost
inevitable, that the first definitely chipped implements did not develop
full-fledged, but were preceded by still cruder tools, made perhaps
without clear intent, and at any rate so rough and half-shaped that they
would be difficult to recognize.
After the evolution of Palæolithic implements had become pretty well
known, this conjecture began to be supported by evidence, or at least
by alleged evidence. Investigators, especially Rutot in Belgium, found
flints of which it was difficult to say whether or not they had been used
by human hands. These pieces occurred in extremely ancient deposits.
On the basis of these discoveries Rutot and his followers established
the Eolithic period. Some have consistently assailed this Eolithic age
as imaginary, asserting that the so-called eoliths were nothing but
accidental products of nature. Others have accepted the eoliths and
recognize the stage of embryonic or pre-human civilization which they
imply. Still other students remain in doubt; and their attitude is
perhaps still the safest to share.
The view now most prevalent is that the alleged Eolithic flints may have
been used by early human hands, but that they were almost certainly not
manufactured. This would make them tools only in the sense in which the
limb of a tree is a tool when a man in distress seizes it to defend
himself.
The eoliths are more or less irregular pieces of flint or similar stone,
some of them so blunt that they must have been very inefficient if used
for chopping or cutting or scraping. Small nocks or chips along the edge
are believed not to have been flaked off with the conscious intent of
producing an edge, but to have become chipped away through usage while
the stone was being manipulated as a naturally formed tool. This would
be much in line with our picking up a cobblestone in default of an ax
or hammer, and continuing to maul away with it until the rough handling
broke off several pieces and happened accidentally to produce an edge.
That the eoliths were such unintentionally made tools is the most that
can safely be claimed for them.
Even so some doubts remain. Stones similar to eoliths in every respect,
except that their fractures show a fresher appearance, have been taken by
dozens out of modern steel drums in which flint-bearing chalk was being
broken for industrial purposes.
Then, too, the first believers in the authenticity of the eoliths
reported them as occurring from the middle and earlier layers of the
Pleistocene, in which periods we know that nearly human or half-human
types like Heidelberg man and Pithecanthropus were already in existence.
These two species being more similar to modern man than to the apes or
other animals, we must imagine them to have been gifted with at least
some human intelligence. It would therefore have been entirely possible
for them to supplement the tools with which nature endowed them—their
hands and teeth—with flints which they picked up and manipulated in one
useful way or another without particularly troubling to shape the stones.
So far the argument is all in favor of the reality of the eolith. Before
long, however, it was discovered that eoliths were not especially more
abundant in the middle Pleistocene just previous to the opening of the
Palæolithic, when we should expect them to have been most numerous, than
they were in the early Pleistocene, when the human species must still
have been most rudimentary. Then it was found that eoliths occur in lower
strata than the earliest Pleistocene, namely, in the Pliocene, in the
Miocene, and perhaps even earlier, in the Oligocene. Yet these periods
are divisions of the Tertiary, or Age of Mammals—the age before man had
been evolved! In short, the argument cuts too far. Once one begins to
accept eoliths it is difficult to stop accepting them without carrying
them back into a period of geological history when evolution could
scarcely have produced a form sufficiently advanced in intelligence to
use them.[8]
Perhaps on the whole the strongest argument in favor of the authenticity
of the Pleistocene eoliths is the fact that the first implements known
positively to belong to the Old Stone Age are just a little too well
shaped and efficient to represent the products of the very beginnings of
human manual dexterity. One cannot help but look for something antecedent
that was simpler and ruder; and this need of the imagination the eoliths
do go a long way to satisfy.
69. THE PALÆOLITHIC AGE: DURATION, CLIMATE, ANIMALS
With the Eolithic period passed and the Palæolithic entered, our history
of incipient human culture is on a solid foundation, especially so far
as western Europe, the best explored region, is concerned. The general
relation of this Old Stone Age in geological time may be defined as
follows. The Quaternary, whose duration may be estimated to have been
about a million years, is subdivided into the Pleistocene and the Recent.
Of the two, the Recent is very much shorter than the Pleistocene. Broadly
speaking, from ninety-eight to ninety-nine per cent of the total duration
of the Quaternary was occupied by the Pleistocene. The small remainder
which the geologist calls “Recent,” corresponds to those periods which
the archæologist and the historian name the New Stone and Metal Ages; say
the past ten thousand years. The Old Stone Age therefore falls in the
Pleistocene. But it occupies only the later duration of the Pleistocene;
the earlier part of the Pleistocene is barren of tools or other records
of human culture, except so far as the eoliths may be so considered.
The proportion of the Pleistocene which is covered by the Old Stone Age
is variously estimated. Some geologists will not allow the undisputed
Palæolithic to have extended over more than the last tenth of the
Pleistocene: the rivers have not changed their beds enough to permit the
assumption of a longer period. This allowance would give the Palæolithic
a duration of perhaps a hundred thousand years, which is the figure here
followed. Those who place the beginning of the European Palæolithic in
the second instead of the third interglacial period, would have to admit
a considerably longer duration.
The geologist, because he deals with such enormous durations, has to
operate on a broad-gauge scale, and usually disdains to commit himself
to close estimates of years. To measure the lapse of time within the
Pleistocene, he has found it most useful to avail himself of the
evidences left by the great glaciers which repeatedly covered parts of
several continents during the Pleistocene, and he has therefore given
this period its popular name of “glacial epoch.” These glaciations must
be imagined as having occurred on a much larger scale than one might at
first infer from the shrunken remnants of the glaciers that persist in
the Alps and other mountains. The Pleistocene glaciers were vast sheets,
hundreds of feet in thickness, sliding uniformly over valleys, hills, and
mountains except for an occasional high peak. Modern Greenland, which
except at the edges is buried under a solid ice cap, evidently presents
a pretty fair picture of what the northern parts of Europe and North
America repeatedly looked like during the Pleistocene.
Four such glaciations, or periods of maximum extent of the continental
ice, have been distinguished, and more or less correlated, in Europe and
North America. In Europe they have been designated as the Günz, Mindel,
Riss, and Würm glaciations respectively (Fig. 5). Each of these is the
name of a locality in the Alps at which typical moraines or erosions
produced by the ice of that period have been carefully observed.
Between these four successive advances of the ice sheets there fell
more temperate eras, some of them rather arid, and others moist and
almost tropical even in the latitude of Europe. These mild intervals
are known as the interglacial periods. That Europe was free from ice
during these interglacial periods is shown not only by facts of a purely
geological nature but by the occurrence in these periods of fossils of a
semi-tropical fauna which included elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, and
the like.
Coming now to a consideration of the relation of man to these ice eras,
we find that the first, second, and probably the third glaciations passed
without leaving sure evidence of manufactured stone implements. In the
last interglacial period, that which falls between the Riss and the
Würm glaciations, the so-called “Chellean picks” appear; and from then
on the record of artifacts is a continuous one. Considerable parts of
Europe remained habitable all through the fourth and last glaciation,
the Würm period, as the implements discovered prove. Gradually, although
irregularly and with three minor advances and recessions, always
diminishing in rigor, however, this last predominance of the ice died
away; until, by the time its effects had wholly disappeared, and the
geologically “Recent” era was inaugurated, human civilization had evolved
to a point where it began to enter the New Stone Age.
The animals whose fossils are found in the same deposits with human
skeletons and artifacts have been of the greatest assistance in the
determination of the periods of such remains. The fossils are partly
of extinct species until toward the very end of the Pleistocene, when
exclusively living types of animals begin wholly to supersede the
earlier ones. While the identification of the various species, and
the fixation of the age of each, is the work of the specialist in
palæontology, the results of such studies are all-important to the
historian of man’s beginnings, because they help to determine chronology.
If artifacts are found in association with fossil remains of an extinct
animal such as the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, they are obviously
older than artifacts that are accompanied only by the bones of the
reindeer, the dog, or other living species. For this reason, although the
history of mammalian life in the past is a science in itself, it also has
close relations with human prehistory. Some of the most characteristic
animals of the later Pleistocene, and the successive stages of human
cultural development with which they were associated, are listed on the
following page.
70. SUBDIVISIONS OF THE PALÆOLITHIC
The places at which the men of the Stone Age lived and where their
debris accumulated are known as “stations.” The word was first employed
in this sense in French, but has been taken over into other languages.
A “station” then is simply a spot at which prehistoric remains of human
occupation are found. At least a thousand of these have been discovered
in western Europe. In general they divide into two classes. One kind
is in the open, mostly in the gravels laid down by streams. These are
therefore known as “River Drift” or simply “Drift” stations. The other
kind is found in caves or under sheltering rocks. The majority of Drift
stations have proved to be from the earlier or Lower Palæolithic, whereas
the Cave stations date mostly from the later or Upper Palæolithic. The
Drift and the Cave periods are therefore often distinguished within the
Old Stone Age, especially by English archæologists. French, German,
and American students generally use the terms “Lower Palæolithic”
and “Upper Palæolithic,” whose reference is to periods of cultural
development rather than type of locality inhabited, and which carry more
significance. French archæologists also speak of the Upper Palæolithic as
the Reindeer Age.
THE LATER GLACIAL FAUNA OF WESTERN EUROPE
(Read upward)
_Postglacial and Recent_:
Bison, _Bison priscus_.
Wild cattle, _Bos primigenius_.
Red deer or stag, _Cervus elaphus_.
Roe-deer, _Capreolus_.
Reindeer, _Rangifer tarandus_.
Wild boar, _Sus scrofa_.
_Fourth Glacial and Postglacial fauna_: typically Mousterian to
Magdalenian:
Woolly mammoth, _Elephas primigenius_.
Woolly or Siberian rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros antiquitatis_.
Cave lion, _Felis leo spelaea_.
Cave hyaena, _Hyaena crocuta spelaea_.
Cave bear, _Ursus spelaeus_.
Horse, _Equus caballus_.
Ibex.
Banded lemming, _Myodes torquatus_.
_Third Interglacial fauna_: typically Chellean and Acheulean:
Straight-tusked elephant, _Elephas antiquus_.
Broad-nosed rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros Merckii_.
Lion, _Felis leo antiqua_.
Spotted hyaena, _Hyaena crocuta_.
Brown bear, _Ursus arctos_.
Horses, probably several varieties.
_Second Interglacial Fauna_: typically Pre-Palæolithic, but in part
surviving into the Chellean in favored localities:
Southern mammoth, _Elephas meridionalis_.
Etruscan rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros etruscus_.
_Hippopotamus major_.
Saber-tooth tigers, _Machaerodus_.
Striped hyaena, _Hyaena striata_.
Steno’s horse, _Equus stenonis_.
_Bison antiquus_.
Mastodon, tapir, anthropoids, and all primates but man and the
macaque monkey already extinct in Western Europe.
The student who perhaps contributed most to the foundation of knowledge
of the Palæolithic period was Gabriel de Mortillet. He first recognized
four distinct sub-periods of the Palæolithic, each possessing its
distinctive kinds of implements. These four periods, each named after
one particular “station,” are the Chellean or earliest; the Mousterian;
the Solutrean; and the Magdalenian or latest. These derived their
designations from the four stations of Chelles in northern France, and of
Le Moustier, Solutré, and La Madeleine in southern France (Fig. 16). De
Mortillet did not endeavor to relate the culture of each of these four
periods wholly to the particular locality for which he named it. He chose
the stations as typical and included others as belonging to the same eras.
[Illustration: FIG. 16. Type stations of the Palæolithic periods. (After
Osborn.)]
As more implements were found and studied, it was recognized, in part by
de Mortillet himself, that while his original classification was sound,
it was also incomplete. Two other periods had to be admitted. One of
these, the Acheulean, falls before the Mousterian, and the second, the
Aurignacian, after it. This makes six periods within the Old Stone Age;
and these have been adopted by all students of the prehistory of man in
Europe. The first three, the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian, make
up the Lower Palæolithic; the last three, the Aurignacian, Solutrean,
and Magdalenian, constitute the Upper Palæolithic or Reindeer Age. These
six divisions of the Old Stone Age are so essential to an understanding
of the prehistory of man, that the serious student finds it necessary to
know their names and sequence automatically.
71. HUMAN RACIAL TYPES IN THE PALÆOLITHIC
When it comes to defining the types of fossil man in the Palæolithic,
a curious situation develops. Long before there was even a true Stone
Age, in the early and middle Pleistocene, there lived the half-human
Pithecanthropus and the primitively human Heidelberg race (§ 11, 12).
But for the whole first part of the Palæolithic, throughout the Chellean
and Acheulean, no undisputed find of any skeletal remains has yet been
made, although thousands of implements have been discovered which are
undoubtedly human products.[9]
In the present state of knowledge the strongest case is that for the
skull found at Piltdown in southern England. This is said to have been
associated with “Pre-Chellean” tools, which would seem to establish
the Piltdown type as the race that lived about the beginning of the
Palæolithic (§ 13). But the deposit at Piltdown had been more or less
rolled or shifted by natural agencies before its discovery, so that
its age is not so certain as it might be; and there is no unanimity of
opinion as to whether the highly developed skull and the excessively
ape-like jaw that were found in the deposit really belong together. With
this doubt about the fossil itself, it seems most reasonable not to press
too strongly its identification as the type of man that lived in Europe
at the commencement of the Old Stone Age.
For the end of the Lower Palæolithic, in the Mousterian, conditions
change, and skeletal remains become authentic and comparatively numerous.
From this period date the skeletons of the Neandertal species of man:
a short, thickset race, powerful in bones and musculature, slightly
stooping at the knee and at the shoulder, with a thick neck and a large
head (§ 14). The brain was about as large as that of modern man, but the
retreating aspect of the forehead was accentuated by heavy brow ridges.
In the Upper Palæolithic the Neandertal species has disappeared. The
first precursors of Homo sapiens, or modern man, have come on the
scene. A sort of transition from Neandertal man may be presented by the
Brünn type, but the prevailing race in western Europe during the Upper
Palæolithic period is that of Cro-Magnon, a tall, lithe, well-formed
people, as agile and swift as Neandertal man was stocky and strong. The
head and features were well proportioned, the skull and brain remarkably
large, the general type not inferior to modern man, and probably already
proto-Caucasian (§ 16).
Grimaldi man, so far known only from one spot on the Mediterranean shore
of Europe, was proto-Negroid, Aurignacian in period, and therefore partly
contemporaneous with the Cro-Magnon race (§ 18).
In summary, the types of man in Europe during the Old Stone Age have been
as follows:
Magdalenian Cro-Magnon
Solutrean Cro-Magnon; Brünn
Aurignacian Cro-Magnon (Caucasian); also, locally Grimaldi (Negroid)
Mousterian Neandertal (possibly without living descendants)
Acheulean Unknown
Chellean Unknown; Piltdown perhaps Pre-Chellean
The interrelations of geology, glaciation, human types, periods of the
Stone Age, and estimated time in years are brought together in the tables
“Antiquity of Man” and “Prehistory” (Figs. 5 and 17.)[10]
[Illustration: FIG. 17. Earliest Prehistory of Europe. This table is
an elaboration of the upper portion of Figure 5. Equal lapses of time
are indicated by equal vertical distances. The general acceleration of
development is evident.]
72. PALÆOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS
The most important line of evidence as to the gradual development of
civilization through the six periods of the Old Stone Age is the series
of flint tools. Hundreds of thousands of these tools have been discovered
in western, central, and southern Europe—perhaps millions. At St.
Acheul were found 20,000 Chellean coups-de-poing; at Solutré, below the
Solutrean layer, 35,000 Mousterian-Aurignacian worked flints besides the
remains of 100,000 horses; at Grimaldi in Italy, in the Grotte du Prince,
20,000 Mousterian pieces; at Schweizersbild in Switzerland, 14,000 late
Magdalenian implements, and at Kesslerloch, near by, 30,000 from the late
Solutrean and Magdalenian; at Hundsteig in Austria, 20,000 Aurignacian
flints; at Predmost in Czecho-Slovakia, 25,000 probably of Solutrean age.
Stations of such richness are not particularly rare, and the stations are
numerous. In France alone 500 Magdalenian stations have been determined.
Clear stratigraphic relations have also been observed again and again. A
few examples are:
Castillo Cave, Santander, Spain, implement bearing layers
separated by strata of sterile natural debris: 1, Acheulean; 2,
3, 4, early, middle, and late Mousterian; 5, early Aurignacian;
6, 7, 8, late Aurignacian; 9, Solutrean; 10, 11, early and late
Magdalenian; 12, Azilian; 13, Copper.
At St. Acheul: 1, limestone; 2, gravel, early Chellean; 3,
sand, late Chellean; 4, loam, early Acheulean; 5, flood sand;
6, loess; 7, late Acheulean; 8, pebbles, Mousterian; 9, loess;
10, Upper Palæolithic.
At Mas d’Azil, at the foot of the Pyrenees: 1, gravelly soil;
2, middle Magdalenian; 3, flood loam; 4, upper Magdalenian; 5,
flood loam; 6, Azilian; 7, early Neolithic; 8, full Neolithic
and Bronze; 9, Iron.
At Ofnet cave, Bavaria: 1, rocks; 2, sand, 65 cm. deep; 3, 4,
Aurignacian, 20 cm.; 5, Solutrean, 20 cm.; 6, Magdalenian,
15-20 cm.; 7, Azilian, with two nests of skulls, 5 cm.; 8,
Neolithic, 53 cm.; 9, Bronze and Iron, 32 cm.
At La Ferrassie cave: 1, rocks and sand, 40 cm. deep; 2,
Acheulean, 50 cm.; 3, Mousterian, with skeleton, 50 cm.; 4,
early Aurignacian, 20 cm.; 5, middle Aurignacian, 50 cm.; 6,
rock fragments, 35 cm.; 7, late Aurignacian, 35 cm.; rock and
soil, 120 cm.
At first inspection Palæolithic relics seem scarcely distinguishable.
They are all of flint, chert, or similar stone; are all chipped and
therefore more or less rough, and consist of forms meant for cutting,
scraping, and piercing. But a closer examination reveals differences
in their shapes and fundamental differences in the method of their
manufacture. The technique employed in the fashioning of artifacts is
more significant than their appearance, and it is by directing attention
to the process that one can classify these “fossils of civilization” with
accuracy.
_Chellean._—In the Chellean period there was made substantially one
type of implement, a sort of rude pick, almond or wedge shaped. It is
often somewhat pointed, although rarely very sharp. The butt end may be
rounded, some of the original surface of the cobble or nodule of flint
being left for convenience of the hand in grasping the implement (Fig.
18, _a_). This tool is known as the “Chellean pick.” The Germans often
call it _faust-keil_ or “fist wedge” and the French have coined the
expressive epithet _coup-de-poing_ or “blow of the fist.” The Chellean
pick averages from four to six inches in length, somewhat less in
breadth, and weighs perhaps from a quarter to a full pound. It would have
made an effective rude weapon. When firmly grasped and well directed,
it could easily crush a skull. It might serve to split wood, hack limbs
from trees, butcher large game, and perhaps roughly dress hides. It would
not do any one of these things with neatness and accuracy, but neatness
and accuracy were qualities to which early Palæolithic men paid little
attention. This universal Chellean tool may be described as a combined
knife, saw, ax, scraper, and pick, performing the various functions of
these implements with notable crudities but efficiently enough when
wielded with muscular strength.
The Chellean pick was made by striking a round or oval nodule of flint
with another stone and knocking off pieces. Most of the detached flakes
were large, as shown by the surfaces from which they came off; perhaps
most of the chips averaged a square inch. Anything like fine work or
evenness of outline was therefore out of question. One can imagine that
many tools were spoiled, or broken in two, by the knocks to which they
were subjected in their manufacture. The flakes struck off fell to the
ground and were discarded. If the workman was sufficiently skilful,
and luck stayed with him, he would before long be holding the sort of
implement that has been described. Not more than a few dozen strokes of
the hammer stone would be required to produce it.
[Illustration: FIG. 18. Stone implements illustrating the principal
types of Palæolithic chipping. _a_, Chellean pick, a roughly flaked core;
_b_, Mousterian scraper, a flake with retouched edge; _c_, Solutrean
blade, evened by retouching over its entire surface; _d_, Magdalenian
knife, a flake detached at one blow. For comparison, _e_, an obsidian
knife or razor from Mexico, made by the same process as _d_.]
Some attempt has been made to distinguish variant forms of Chellean
tools, such as scrapers, planers, and knives. But some of these
identifications of particular types are uncertain, and at best, the
differences between the types are slight. It may be said with approximate
accuracy that the long Chellean period possessed only the one tool; that
this is the first definitely shaped tool known to have been made by human
hands; and that it is therefore the concrete evidence of the first stage
of that long development which we call civilization.[11]
_Acheulean._—The Acheulean period brings to light a growing
specialization of forms and some new types. Rude scrapers, knives,
borers, can be distinguished. The flakes struck off are finer than in the
Chellean and the general workmanship averages higher; but through the
whole of the Acheulean there is no new process. The Chellean methods of
manufacture are improved without an invention being added to them.
_Mousterian._—In the Mousterian period a retrogression would at first
sight seem to have occurred. Tools become smaller, less regular in
outline, and are worked on one side only. The whole Mousterian period
scarcely presents a single new type of implement of such all-around
serviceability as the Chellean pick. Nevertheless the degeneration is
only in the appearance of the implements. Actually they are made by a
new process, which is more advanced than that followed in the Chellean
and Acheulean. In these earlier periods flakes were struck off until the
kernel of stone that remained was of the shape desired for the tool. The
Mousterian technique is distinguished by using the flake instead of the
core. This is the cause of Mousterian tools being generally smaller and
lighter.
Secondly, when the flake dulled by use, its edge was renewed by fine
chipping. The pieces detached in this secondary chipping are so small
that it would have been difficult to knock them off and maintain any
regularity of edge, for to detach a chip by a blow means violent contact.
If the blow is a bit feeble, the chip that comes off is too small. If
the artifact is struck too hard, too large a chip flies off and the
implement is ruined. Fine chips are better worked off by pressure than
by impact. A point is laid upon the surface near the edge. When this
point is pressed down at the proper angle and with proper firmness, a
scale flies off. With some practice the scales can be detached almost
equal in size. The point may be of softer material than the stone. It is
in the nature of flint, and of all stones that approach glass in their
structure, that they break easily under pressure in definite planes or
surfaces. Modern tribes that still work flint generally employ as a
pressing tool a piece of bone or horn which comes to a somewhat rounded
point. This is usually attached to the end of a stick, to enable a better
grip of the working tool, the butt end being clamped under the elbow.
A tool of the same sort may have been employed in the Palæolithic. The
process of detaching the scales or secondary flakes by pressure is known
as “retouching.” Retouching allows finer control than strokes delivered
with a stone. The result is that Mousterian implements, when at their
best, possess truer edges, and also greater variety of forms adapted to
particular uses, than those of preceding ages (Fig. 18, _b_).
In spite of their insignificant appearance, Mousterian tools accordingly
show advance in two points. First, the flake is used. Secondly, two
processes instead of one are followed; the knocking off of the flake
followed by its retouching.
_Aurignacian._—With the Mousterian the Lower Palæolithic has ended.
In several activities of life, such as art and religion, the Upper
Palæolithic represents a great advance over the Lower Palæolithic. Yet it
seems that the mental energies of the Aurignacian people must have been
pretty well absorbed by their new occupations and inventions, for their
tools are largely the same retouched flakes as those the Mousterian had
already employed. The Aurignacian carried on the stone technique of the
Mousterian much as the Acheulean previously had carried on that of the
Chellean.
_Solutrean._—The Solutrean seems to have been a relatively brief period,
and to have remained localized, for implements dating from it are the
scarcest of any from the six divisions of the Old Stone Age. There was
a distinct advance of interest in stone work during the Solutrean.
The process of retouching, without being fundamentally altered, was
evidently much better controlled than before. The best Solutrean workers
were retouching both sides of their tools instead of one side only, as
in the past, and working over not only the edge or point but the entire
surface of their artifacts. One of the characteristic implements of their
time was a laurel-leaf-shaped blade which has often been considered a
spear point, but would also have been an effective knife and may often
have been used as such. This has the surface of both sides, from tip
to butt, finished in even retouching, and is equaled in excellence of
workmanship only by the best of the spear points chipped by modern
savages (Fig. 18, _c_).
Of course this was not the only stone implement which the Solutrean
people knew. They made points with a single shoulder at the butt, as
if for mounting, and had crude forms which represented the types of
earlier periods. This partial conservatism is in accord with the general
observation already stated, that lower types tend to persist even after
higher ones have been invented; and that because a period is determined
by its best products it by no means follows that simpler ones are lacking.
_Magdalenian._—The sixth period of the Old Stone Age, the Magdalenian,
resembles the Mousterian in seeming at first glance to show a retrograde
development. The retouching process was carried out with less skill,
perhaps because the Magdalenians were devoting themselves with more
interest to bone than to stone. Magdalenian retouched implements are
less completely worked out and less beautifully regular than those of
Solutrean times. One reason for this decline was that another technique
was coming to prevail. This technique had begun to come into use earlier,
but its typical development was Magdalenian. It was a process which, on
account of its simplicity, once it was mastered, was tending to make
the art of retouching unnecessary. This new method was the trick of
detaching, from a suitable block of flint, long straight-edged flakes, by
a single blow, somewhat on the principle by which a cake of ice can be
split evenly by a well guided stroke of the pick. The typical Magdalenian
implement of stone is a thin flake several inches long, triangular or
polygonal in cross section; in other words, a long narrow prism (Fig. 18,
_d_).
To detach such a flake, flint of rather even grain is necessary, and
the blow that does the work must be delivered on a precise spot, at a
precise angle, and within rather narrow limits of force. This means that
the hammer or striking tool cannot well come in direct contact with the
flint. A short pointed piece, something like a nail or a carpenter’s
punch, and probably made in the prehistoric days of horn or bone, is
set on a suitable spot near the edge of the block of flint, and is then
tapped smartly with the hammer stone. A single stroke slices off the
desired flake. The sharp edges left on the block where the flake has
flown off can be used to start adjacent flakes, and thus all the way
round the block, the workman progressing farther and farther in, until
nearly the whole of his core has been split off into strips.
[Illustration: FIG. 19. Flakes struck from a core and reassembled. Modern
workmanship in Magdalenian technique.]
This Magdalenian process, which was in use ten, fifteen, and perhaps
twenty thousand years ago, survived, or was reinvented, in modern
times. It is only a few years ago that flints were being struck off
by English workmen for use on flintlock muskets exported to Africa.
The modern Englishman worked with a steel hammer instead of a bone rod
and cobblestone, but his technique was the same. Figure 19 shows the
complete lot of flakes into which a block has been split, and which were
subsequently laid together so as to reform the stone in its original
shape. Similar flakes made of obsidian, a volcanic glass similar to flint
in its properties, are still being produced in the Indian districts of
interior Mexico for use as razors (Fig. 18, _e_).
The Magdalenian method of flint working gives the smoothest and sharpest
edge. It is not adapted for making heavy instruments, but it yields an
admirable knife. The process is also expeditious.
_Summary._—The successive steps in the art of stone working in the
Palæolithic may be summarized thus:
Chellean: Coarse flakes detached by blows from the core, which
becomes the implement.
Acheulean: Same process applied to more varied forms.
Mousterian: Flake detached by a blow is sharpened into a tool
by retouching by pressure on one side only.
Aurignacian: Same with improved retouching applied.
Solutrean: Both surfaces of implement wholly retouched.
Magdalenian: Prismatic flake, detached by a blow transmitted
through a point.
73. OTHER MATERIALS: BONE AND HORN
Stone implements must perhaps always remain in the foreground of our
understanding of the Old Stone Age because they were made so much more
numerously than other objects, or at any rate have been preserved so much
more abundantly, that they will supply us with the bulk of our evidence.
At the same time it would be an error to believe that the life of these
men of long ago was filled with the making and using of stone tools to
the exclusion of everything else. Gradually during the last fifty years,
through unremittingly patient explorations and the piecing of one small
discovery to another, there has accumulated a fair body of knowledge of
other sides of the life of Palæolithic men. There is every reason to
believe that as time goes on we shall learn more and more about them, and
thus be able to reconstruct a reasonably complete and vivid picture of
their behavior.
Implements of bone and horn are next most abundant after those of stone,
but it is significant that the Lower Palæolithic still dispensed with
these materials. In the Chellean and Acheulean stations, although broken
bones of devoured animals occur, bone was not shaped. In the Mousterian
this material first came into use, but as yet only as so-called “anvils”
on which to chip flint or cut, and not as true tools.
One of the changes that most prominently mark the passage from the Lower
to the Upper Palæolithic is the sudden development in the use of bone
at the beginning of the Aurignacian, and then of reindeer horn. These
materials came more and more into favor as time went on. The Aurignacians
had bone awls or pins, polishers, paint tubes of hollowed reindeer leg
bone, and points with a grooved base for hafting, generally construed as
javelin heads. In the Solutrean, eyed needles were added. The greatest
development was attained in the Magdalenian. Bone javelin and spear
heads were now made in a variety of forms, with bases pointed, beveled,
or grooved. Hammers, chisels or wedges, and perforators were added to
the list of bone tools. Whistles and perhaps flutes were blown. Reindeer
antler was employed for carved and perforated lengths of horn, “rods of
command” or magic, they are usually called; as well as for harpoons and
throwers, to be discussed below.
By the close of the Palæolithic, objects of organic substances began to
approach in frequency those of flint. This may well have been a sort
of preparation for the grinding and polishing of stone which is the
distinctive technique of the New Stone Age. Bone cannot well be chipped
or retouched. It must be cut, ground, or rubbed into shape. The Neolithic
people therefore may be said to have extended to stone a process which
their predecessors of the Upper Palæolithic were familiar with but had
failed to apply to the harder substance.
74. DRESS
The slender bone needle provided with an eye which the Solutrean and
Magdalenian added to the primitive awl implies thread and sewing. It
may be concluded therefore that, at least from the middle of the Upper
Palæolithic on, the people of Europe went clothed in some sort of fitted
garments. It would be going too far to assert that the Neandertal men ran
about naked as the lower animals. Several inventions which they had made
compel us to attribute to them enough intelligence to lead them to cover
themselves with skins when they felt cold. But they may have been too
improvident, or habituated to discomfort, to trouble even to dress hides.
At any rate there is no positive indication that they regularly clothed
themselves. By contrast, the sewing of the Upper Palæolithic Cro-Magnons
marked a considerable advance.
Ornament may have been earlier than clothing. The paint of the
Aurignacians decorated their own bodies and those of their dead. About
their necks and waists they hung rows of perforated shells and teeth.
More of these have been found on the skeletons of males than of females.
By the Magdalenian, there was sophistication enough to lead to the
carving of artificial shells and teeth out of ivory; and amber was
beginning to be transported from the German coast to Southern France.
75. HARPOONS AND WEAPONS
Towards the end of the Upper Palæolithic, in the Magdalenian, the
harpoon came into extensive use. The shafts have of course long since
decayed, but many of the reindeer antler heads have remained intact. At
first these were notched with barbs along one edge only. In the later
Magdalenian the barbs were cut on both sides. The harpoon differs from
the simple spear or javelin in having its head detachable from the shaft.
The two are fitted together by a socket. If the prey, be it fish or
mammal, is not killed by the first throw, its struggles to escape shake
the shaft loose, while the barbs hold the head firmly imbedded in its
body. A line is attached to the head and tied to the shaft or held in
the hand of the hunter. The animal is thus kept from escaping. During
the Magdalenian the line was kept from slipping off the head by one or
two knobs near the butt. In the subsequent Azilian period the head was
perforated, as is the modern Eskimo practice. The harpoon is really a
rather complicated instrument: it consists of at least three pieces—head,
shaft, and line.
Another device which the Magdalenians shared with the Aztecs, the Eskimo,
and some other modern peoples, is the spear thrower or atlatl. This is a
sort of rod or handle, one end of which is grasped by the fingers while
the other engages the butt end of the harpoon or dart. The hand only
steers the shaft at the beginning of its flight: the propulsion comes
from the thrower. The instrument may therefore be described as a device
for artificially lengthening the human arm and thus imparting greater
velocity and length of flight to the weapon. There is without doubt
considerable ingenuity involved in this apparatus, both in its invention
and in its successful use. A person unskilled in bodily movements would
never hit upon the invention; nor could a race of high native dexterity
acquire proficiency in the art of hunting with the thrower until each
individual was willing to practise for a considerable period. It may
once more be concluded, accordingly, that by the end of the Palæolithic,
civilization had developed to a point where men were much readier to
undergo protracted training and forbearance than they had been at the
beginning of the period.
One instrument that we are wont to associate with the beginnings of
civilization, because of its almost universal employment by savages of
to-day, is the bow and arrow. So strong has the preconception been that
the Palæolithic peoples must have been like modern savages, that time and
time again it has been assumed that they possessed the bow. There is no
convincing evidence to show that this was so, and a good deal of negative
evidence to establish that they were unacquainted with the weapon. All
the Palæolithic remains of flint, bone, or horn, which at times have
been interpreted as arrow points, are more conservatively explained as
knives or heads of darts. The prevailing opinion is that the bow was not
invented until the Neolithic. This would make the weapon only about ten
thousand years old—a hoary antiquity, indeed, but recent as compared with
the knife, the spear, and even the harpoon. The reason for this lateness
in the invention of the bow and arrow is probably to be sought in the
delicacy of the instrument. It is not essentially more complex than the
harpoon, certainly not more complex than the harpoon impelled by the
spear thrower. But it involves much finer adjustments. A poorly made
harpoon is of course inferior to a well-made one, but may be measurably
effective. It may retrieve game half the time. But a bow which falls
below a certain standard will not shoot at all, or will shoot so feebly
as to have a zero efficiency. In fact, one of the things that students
of the beginnings of culture have long been puzzled about is how the bow
and arrow could have been invented. Most other inventions can be traced
through a series of steps, each of which, although incomplete, achieved a
certain utility of its own. But, other than toys or musical instruments,
no implement has yet been found, or even satisfactorily imagined, which
was not yet a bow, which would still serve a purpose, and which, by
addition or improvement, could give rise to the bow.
76. WOODEN IMPLEMENTS
Wood is likely to have been used by primitive men for one purpose or
another from the very earliest times. Even “half men” of the “missing
link” type, it may be believed, would in case of need pick up a stick or
wrench a limb from a tree to serve them as a club. But we do not know
when human beings first began to fashion wood into definite implements by
working it with their stone tools. Wood is too perishable a substance to
have stood any chance of being preserved from so long distant a past.
Our knowledge of the first employment of wood is indirect. Many of the
Mousterian chipped flakes are of such size and shape that they could have
been operated much more effectively had they been mounted on a handle.
Possibly therefore the process of hafting or handling had come to be
practised in the Mousterian, although there is no specific evidence to
this effect. In the Upper Palæolithic, wood was certainly used to a
considerable extent. The harpoon and dart heads, for instance, must have
had wooden shafts.
A true ax is not known from the Old Stone Age and seems to have been
invented in the Neolithic. The distinctive factor of the instrument, upon
which its utility largely depends, is the straightness and smoothness of
the edge; and such an edge is best attained by the grinding process. Even
the unground axes of the earliest Neolithic depended on a single stroke
to provide them with the required straight cutting edge. We may believe,
therefore, that the Palæolithic peoples worked wood in the manner
familiar to us from the practices of many modern savage races. They split
it, rubbed it, and burned it into shape, rather than trying to chop it.
77. FIRE
One of the most fundamental of human arts is the use of fire. It is
also one of the most ancient. Its occurrence is easily traced, at any
rate in deposits that have not been disturbed by nature, through the
presence of charred bones, lumps of charcoal, and layers of ash. Charcoal
crumbles easily, but its fragments are practically imperishable. Its
presence in considerable quantities in any station, particularly if the
coal is accumulated in pockets, is therefore sure proof that the people
who occupied the site burned fires for warmth, or cooking, or both
purposes. The use of fire has been established throughout the part of the
Palæolithic when men lived in caves and under rock shelters; that is,
during the Mousterian and Upper Palæolithic.
The Chellean and Acheulean deposits are so much older and more open, and
in many cases have been washed over so much by rainfall and by streams,
that, if the men of these periods did use fire, as they may well have
done, its evidences might have been pretty generally obliterated.
Whether early Palæolithic men knew how to make fire, or whether they only
found it and kept it alive, is more difficult to say. They could easily
have acquired it in the first place from trees struck by lightning or
from other occasional natural agencies. Then, recognizing its value,
they may well have nursed it along, lighting one hearth from another.
Yet at some time in the Palæolithic the art of producing fire at will,
by friction between two pieces of wood, is almost certain to have been
invented. One may infer this from the general similarity of level of
Magdalenian civilization to that of modern savages, all of whom practise
the art of ignition. But in the nature of things it would be difficult
to find evidence bearing on this point from more than ten thousand years
ago. It can be assumed that man is likely to have lived first for a long
period in a condition in which he knew and used and preserved fire, yet
was not able to produce it.
78. HOUSES
Although Palæolithic man worked so much in stone, he did not build in
it. Hence our knowledge of the kinds of shelters he made for himself
is almost _nil_. There are Upper Palæolithic “tectiform” paintings
which look as if they might be attempts to depict houses. It is clear,
moreover, that in this period the general development of the mechanical
arts was sufficiently advanced to allow of the construction of some sort
of rude edifices.
It is conceivable that as far back as the Lower Palæolithic simple
shelters of branches were constructed, or that skins may have been
hung over a few poles to keep off wind and rain. On account of the
perishable nature of the materials involved, it happens that there is
no proof either for or against such a supposition. It is possible that
in time, when patient excavations shall have revealed some particularly
well preserved site, the holes may yet be found in which the posts of a
Palæolithic hut were once set. In case of a fire, the carbonized stumps
might prove to have been preserved in place; or the butts of the posts
might have gradually rotted away and the space once occupied by them have
become filled with an earthy material of different color and consistency
from the surrounding soil. In this lucky event, even the size and shape
of the house might be reconstructed from the relative positions of the
post holes. From evidence of just this sort some interesting ideas have
actually been obtained as to the houses and village plan of Neolithic
European peoples. Of course, the chances are much less that remains of
this sort would be preserved from the Palæolithic. But the method would
be equally applicable if favorable conditions offered; and it is in some
such way that we may hope in the future to learn a little about the
earliest habitations that mankind constructed. In any event the example
serves to illustrate the indirect and delicate means of which the student
of prehistory must consistently avail himself in his reconstructions of
the past; and gives reason to believe that all that has been learned
about early man in the last fifty years is very little in comparison with
what the ensuing generation and century will bring to light.
79. RELIGION
It has already been said that knowledge of religion, a non-material
thing, can be preserved from the remote past only by the most roundabout
means. It is conceivable that the people of the Upper Palæolithic spent
at least as much time in ceremonial observances as in working flint.
Analogy with modern uncivilized tribes would make us think that this is
quite likely. But the stone tools have remained lying in the earth, while
the religious customs went out of use thousands of years ago and the
beliefs were forgotten. Yet this is known: As far back as the Mousterian,
thirty thousand years ago, certain practices were being observed by
the Neandertal race of western Europe which modern savages observe in
obedience to the dictates of their religion. When these people of the
Mousterian laid away their dead, they put some of their belongings with
them. When existing nations do this, it is invariably in connection
with a belief in the continued existence of the soul after death. We
may reasonably conclude therefore that even in this long distant period
human beings had arrived at a crude recognition of the difference between
flesh and spirit; in short, religion had come into being. Even to say
that Neandertal man did not know whether his dead were dead, implies
his recognition of something different from life in the body, for he
recognized of course that the body had become different. Whether the
Neandertal race already held to the existence of spirits distinct from
man or superior to him, it is impossible to say.
The Upper Palæolithic Cro-Magnon peoples laid out the bodies of their
dead and sometimes folded them. They also sometimes painted the bodies,
and buried flint implements and food in the graves. That is, funerary
practices were becoming established. We may assume that hand in hand with
this development of observances there went a growth of ritual and belief.
80. PALÆOLITHIC ART
The highest achievement of the men of the Old Stone Age is their art.
The perfection to which they carried this art is simply astounding in
view of the comparative meagerness of their civilization otherwise. It is
also remarkable how full-fledged this achievement sprang into existence.
The Lower Palæolithic seems to have been without a trace of art. With
the Aurignacian, simple carving and painting appear; and while the acme
of accomplishment was not reached until the Magdalenian, the essential
foundations of a graphic art of high order were laid in the late
Aurignacian.
The Upper Palæolithic people carved in ivory, bone, and horn; they
incised or engraved on flattened and rounded surfaces of the same
material; and they carved and painted the walls of caves. They modeled
at times in clay and perhaps in other soft materials, and may have drawn
or painted pictures on skins and on exposed rock surfaces, for all we
know; we can judge only by the remains that have actually come down to
us. This art is not a child-like, struggling attempt to represent objects
in the rough, nor is it a mere decorative playing with geometric figures.
These first human artists set boldly to work to depict; and while their
technique was simple, it was carried to a remarkably high degree of
perfection. A few bold strokes gave the outlines of an animal, but they
gave it with such fidelity that the species can often be recognized at a
glance. The Cro-Magnon people must have developed a high power of mental
concentration to be able to observe and reproduce so closely. The most
gifted individuals perhaps practised assiduously to attain their facility.
Palæolithic art is very different from that of most modern savages.
The latter often work out decorative patterns of some complexity,
richness, and æsthetic value, but when they attempt to depict nature,
they usually fail conspicuously. The lines are crude and wavering. Any
head, body, and tail with four legs stands for almost any animal. It is a
reasonable representation of an abstraction that they accomplish, not the
delineation of what is characteristic in the visible form. Both observer
and painter, among most living savages, are supposed to know beforehand
that the drawing represents a fox and not a bear. At most, some symbols
are added, such as a bushy tail for a fox or a fin for a whale. It is
only in rare cases that any but advanced nations break away from these
primitive tendencies and learn to draw things as they really appear. The
ancient Egyptians developed such a faculty, and among savages the Bushmen
are remarkably gifted, but, on the whole, successful realistic art is
an accomplishment of high civilization. It is therefore something of a
mystery how the Cro-Magnon men of the Aurignacian brought themselves to
do so well.
[Illustration: FIG. 20. Limestone statuette from Willendorf, Austria.
Characteristic of Aurignacian treatment of the female figure: the face
and limbs are abbreviated or only indicated; the parts concerned with
reproduction are exaggerated.]
In sculpture their first efforts were directed upon figurines. These
mostly represent the human female. The head, hands, and feet are either
absent or much abbreviated. In the body, those parts having to do with
reproduction and fecundity are usually heavily exaggerated, but at
the same time given with considerable skill (Fig. 20). It is likely
that these statuettes served some religious cult. At any rate, the
carvings in three dimensions often represent the human figure, whereas
two-dimensional drawings, etchings, and paintings mostly represent
animals and are much more successful than the human outlines. In the
Magdalenian, miniature sculpture of animals was added to that of the
human figure (Fig. 21).
Success in seizing the salient outline was the earliest characteristic
of the paintings and drawings. The first Aurignacian engravings are
invariably in profile and usually show only the two legs on the
immediately visible side. In time the artists also learned to suggest
typical positions and movements—the motion of a reindeer lowering its
head to browse, the way an angry bull switches his tail or paws the
ground, the curl of the end of an elephant’s trunk (Figs. 22, 24). In
the Magdalenian, all four legs are usually depicted, and the profile,
although remaining most frequent, as it is most characteristic, is no
longer the only aspect. There are occasional pictures of animals from
before or behind, or of a reindeer with its head turned backward.
[Illustration: FIG. 21. Horse carved in mammoth ivory. From Lourdes,
France. The spirited portrayal of the neck, ears, eyes, and mouth parts
is characteristic of Magdalenian sculpture.]
There are also some devices which look like the beginnings of attempts
at composition. The effect of a row of reindeer is produced by drawing
out the first few in some detail, and then suggesting the others by
sketching in their horns (Fig. 23). Artists were no longer content, in
the Magdalenian, always to do each animal as a solitary, static unit.
They were trying, with some measure of success, to represent the animals
as they moved in life and perhaps to combine several of them into one
coherent picture or to suggest a setting.
By this time they had also acquired considerable ability in handling
colors. The Aurignacian and Solutrean artists restricted themselves to
monochrome effects. They engraved or painted outlines and sometimes
accentuated these by filling them in with pigment. But the best of the
later painters in the Magdalenian—those, for instance, who left their
frescoes on the walls of the famous cave of Altamira in Spain—used three
or four colors at once and blended these into transition tones.
[Illustration: FIG. 22. Engraving of a charging mammoth. On a fragment of
ivory tusk found at La Madeleine, France. While the artist’s strokes were
crude, he was able to depict the animal’s action with remarkable vigor.
Note the roll of the eye, the flapping ears, the raised tail expressive
of anger.]
While animals constitute the subjects of probably four-fifths of the
specimens of Palæolithic art, and human beings most of the remainder,
representations of plants and unrealistic decorative designs are
known. The latter seem to have begun to be specially prevalent in the
latest Magdalenian, as if in preparation of the conventionalized,
non-naturalistic art of the transitional Azilian and Neolithic.
81. SUMMARY OF ADVANCE IN THE PALÆOLITHIC
The history of civilization has herewith been outlined from its first dim
beginnings to about twelve thousand years ago—say to the neighborhood
of 10,000 B.C., as the historian would put it. Progress is immensely
slow at the outset, but gradually speeds up. The tabulation in Figure 25
summarizes some of the principal features of this evolution. This diagram
does not pretend to be complete; it does try to include some of the most
important and representative inventions, arts, and accomplishments of the
Old Stone Age.
[Illustration: FIG. 23. Magdalenian engraving of a herd of reindeer,
found in the grotto of La Mairie, France. The impressionistic manner
enabled the artist to suggest rather effectively a large herd while
drawing out only four animals.]
Thus it appears that the Chellean and Acheulean periods are characterized
essentially by a single art, that of chipping implements on a core of
flint, plus perhaps the use of fire. The Mousterian evinces progress:
stone tools are now made from the flake as well as the core, possibly are
sometimes hafted, bone is occasionally utilized, and there are the first
indications of budding religion; four or five entries are required to
represent these culture traits.
The greatest advance comes from the Mousterian to the Aurignacian; in
other words, between the Lower and the Upper Palæolithic. Three times
as many accomplishments are listed as in the Mousterian, and whole
series of new inventions are now first met with: body ornaments, bone
implements, æsthetic products. This sudden leap in the figures goes
far to signalize the importance of the division between the Upper and
the Lower Palæolithic. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian still further
inventions or refinements appear, until, when the Old Stone Age comes to
a close,[12] the stock of human civilization may be described as perhaps
twenty times as rich as at the beginning. These figures are not to be
taken too literally. The tabulation could easily have been compiled on a
more elaborate basis. But even then the relative proportion of culture
features in each period would remain approximately as here given. And as
regards the general fact of accumulation of civilization, and its range
and nature, the diagram may be accepted as substantially representative
of what happened.
[Illustration: FIG. 24. Magdalenian engraving, perhaps a composition:
browsing reindeer among grass, reeds, and water. Note the naturalistic
movement suggested by the legs and position of the head. Engraved so as
to encircle a piece of antler. Found at Kesslerloch, Switzerland.]
[Illustration: FIG. 25. Growth of civilization during the Palæolithic.]
The end of the Palæolithic thus sees man in possession of a number of
mechanical arts which enable him to produce a considerable variety
of tools in several materials: sees him controlling fire; cooking
food; wearing clothes, and living in definite habitations; probably
possessing some sort of social grouping, order, and ideas of law and
justice; clearly under the influence of some kind of religion; highly
advanced in the plastic arts; and presumably already narrating legends
and singing songs. In short, many fundamental elements of civilization
were established. It is true that the sum total of knowledge and
accomplishments was still pitifully small. The most advanced of the Old
Stone Age men perhaps knew and could do about one thing for every hundred
that we know and can do. A whole array of fundamental inventions—the bow
and arrow, pottery, domestication of animals and plants—had not yet been
attempted, and they do not appear on the scene until the Neolithic. But
in spite of the enormous gaps remaining to be filled in the Neolithic
and in the historic period, it does seem fair to say that many of the
outlines of what civilization was ultimately to be had been substantially
blocked out during the Upper Palæolithic. Most of the framework was
there, even though but a small fraction of its content had yet been
entered.
CHAPTER VII
HEREDITY, CLIMATE, AND CIVILIZATION
82. Heredity.—83. Geographical environment.—84. Diet.—85.
Agriculture.—86. Cultural factors.—87. Cultural
distribution.—88. Historical induction.
82. HEREDITY
The first of the several factors through which it is logically possible
to explain the life and conduct and customs of any people is race or
heredity: in other words, the inborn tendencies, bodily and mental, of
the people that carry these customs. At first sight it may seem that
this element of race might be quite influential. Since peoples differ in
inherited characteristics of body—complexion, features, hair, eye color,
head form, and the like—these bodily inherited peculiarities ought to
be accompanied by mentally inherited traits, such as greater or less
inclination to courage, energy, power of abstract thought, mechanical
ingenuity, musical or æsthetic proclivities, swift reactions, ability to
concentrate, gift of expression. Such racial mental traits, again, might
conceivably be expressed in the conduct and culture of each people. Races
born to a greater activity of the mechanical faculties would achieve more
or higher inventions, those innately gifted in the direction of music
would develop more subtly melodious songs, and so on.
Yet in every particular case it is difficult or impossible to establish
by incontrovertible evidence that heredity is the specific cause of this
accomplishment, of this point of view, or of this mode of life; that
it is the determining factor to such and such degree of such and such
customs. This is not a denial of the probability that inborn racial
differences exist. It is an affirmation of the difficulty, discussed in
Chapters I, IV, and V, of knowing what is inborn; and more specifically,
of the difficulty of tracing particular customary activities back
to particular racial qualities. The problem of connecting specific
race traits with specific phenomena of culture or group conduct, such
as settled life, architecture in stone, religious symbolism, and
the like,—of determining how much of this type of architecture or
symbolism is instinctive in the race and how much of it is the result of
traditional or social influences,—remains unsolved.
For example, should one try to apply to the explanation of the mode
of life or culture of the Indians of the Southwestern United States
biological facts, such as their head form, one would be confronted
by the difficulty that long heads are characteristic of some of the
town-building tribes, or Pueblos, and also of some of the tribes living
in brush huts. Broad heads are also found among both the settled and
nomadic tribes. The Pueblo Taos and non-Pueblo Pima are narrow-headed,
the Pueblo Zuñi and non-Pueblo Apache broad-headed. So with the pulse
rate, which has been already mentioned (§ 70) as unusually slow among the
Southwestern Indians. It is the same for the nomadic Apache who lived by
fighting, and for the Hopi and Zuñi who are famous for their timidity and
gentleness. Similar cases might be cited almost endlessly. It is evident
that they are of a kind with the lack of correspondence between race and
speech, or race and nationality, among the European peoples.
83. GEOGRAPHICAL ENVIRONMENT
When it comes to the second factor by which culture might theoretically
be explained—physical environment or geography—similar difficulties are
encountered.
It is of course plain that a primitive tribe under the equator would
never invent the ice box, and that the Eskimo will not keep their food
and water in buckets of bamboo, although it is possible that if the
Eskimo had had bamboo carried to them by ocean currents, they would
have been both glad and able to use it. The materials and opportunities
provided by nature may be made use of by each people, while other
materials not being provided, other arts or customs can therefore not
be developed. But evidently this correspondence is mainly negative.
Not performing an act because one lacks the opportunity by no means
proves that the opportunity will necessarily lead to the performance.
Two nations will live where there is ice to store and one will invent
and the other fail to invent the ice chest. Whole series of peoples
possess bamboo and clay, and yet some of them draw water in bamboo joints
and others in pots. Obviously, natural environment does impose certain
_limiting conditions_ on human life; but equally obviously, it does not
_cause_ inventions or institutions.
The native Australians have wood and cord and flint but do not make bows
and arrows. Their civilization had not advanced to the point where they
were able to devise an efficient bow, and the requisite idea failed to be
carried to them from elsewhere as it was to other peoples who also did
not invent the weapon. The Polynesians, on the other hand, seem once to
have had the weapon, as evidenced by their retaining it as a toy, but to
have disused it, perhaps because they specialized on fighting with spears
and clubs. Modern civilized people fight at long range, but have let bows
go out of use, except for sport, because their knowledge of metallurgy
and chemistry centuries ago progressed to the point where they could
produce firearms. Development or lack of development or specialization
of other cultural activities—social causes—thus determine more directly
than other factors whether or not a people employ the bow and arrow. Of
those mentioned, the Australians are the only ones with whom a factor of
natural environment might be alleged to enter: namely, their isolation,
which cut them off from communications and the opportunity to learn
from other races. Yet such isolation is as much a matter of inability
to traverse space as it is a matter of physical distance. A developed
art of navigation would have abolished the Australian isolation. Thus,
this seemingly environmental cause of a cultural fact depends for its
effectiveness on a co-existing cultural cause. It is the latter which is
the most immediate or specific cause.
In general, then, it may be concluded that the directly determining
factors of cultural phenomena are not nature which gives or withholds
materials, but the general state of knowledge and technology and
advancement of the group; in short, historical or cultural influences.
84. DIET
The greater part of the Southwest is arid. Fish are scarce. The result
is that most of the tribes get little opportunity to fish. Most of these
Southwestern Indians will not eat fish; in fact, think them poisonous.
This circumstance might lead to the following inference: nature does
not furnish fish in abundance; therefore the Indians got out of the
habit of eating them, and finally came to believe them poisonous. At
first blush this may seem a sufficient explanation. But it is well to
note that the explanation has two parts and that only one of them has
to do with nature: the habit of not eating fish because they are too
scarce to make it worth while. As soon as one proceeds to the second
step, that the disuse led to aversion and then to a false belief of
poisonousness, one has gone on to a different matter. Disuse, aversion,
and belief lie wholly within the field of human conduct. To derive a
psychological phenomenon, such as a belief, from another psychological
phenomenon such as a particular disuse, because this disuse is founded
on a geographical factor, would of course be a logical fallacy. It can
also be shown not to hold, since we prize caviar and oysters and venison
in proportion to their rarity. Scarcity in this case thus leads to the
contrary psychological attitude, and either fails to establish beliefs or
establishes favorable ones.
Again, either through a change in climate or through the improvement
of trade, a food that was scarce may become plentiful. Or a people may
remove to a new habitat, different from that in which their customs of
eating were formed. If environment alone were the dominating cause of
their customs, these customs should then immediately alter. As a fact, a
group sometimes adheres to its old customs. The immediate cause of such
conservatism is habit or inertia or inclination toward superstition or
fear of taboo, all of which are mental reactions expressed in folkways or
social customs. Thus environment remains at most a partial and indirectly
operating cause.
A case in point is that of the Jews. It is often said that the Jew’s
prohibition against eating pork and oysters and lobsters originated in
hygienic considerations; that these were climatically unsafe foods for
him in Palestine. This explanation is more simple than true. Ancient
Palestine was an arid country in which hogs could not be raised with
economic profit, and so they were not raised; and the Philistine and
Phœnician kept the Jew from the coast along which he might have obtained
shellfish. Eating neither food, he happened to acquire a distrust of
them; having the distrust, he rationalized it by saying that it was
foreign and wicked and irreligious to act counter to his habits—just like
the Pueblo Indian; and in the end had the Lord issue the prohibition for
him. Yet this outcome is a long way from the starting point of natural
environment. The environment may indeed be said to have furnished the
first occasion, but the determining causes of the taboos in the Mosaic
law are of an entirely different kind—distrust, custom, rationalization,
psychological or cultural factors. If doubt remains, it is dispelled
by the orthodox Jew of to-day, whose environment thrusts some of his
forbidden foods at him as economically and hygienically satisfactory,
whereas he still shudders at the thought of tasting them.
If this sort of cultural crystallizing of custom and subsequent
rationalizing or ritual sanctioning takes place among civilized and
intelligent people, the like must occur among uncivilized tribes.
85. AGRICULTURE
Attempts have been made to derive the invention of agriculture from
climatic factors. The first theory was that farming took its rise in the
tropics, where agriculture came naturally, almost without effort, under
a bounteous sky. Only after people had acquired the habit of farming and
had moved into other less favorably endowed countries, did they take
their agriculture seriously in order to survive. But a second, equally
plausible, and quite contradictory theory has been advanced, which looks
toward the duress rather than the easy favors of nature. On the basis of
conditions among the modern Papago Indians and the ancient inhabitants
of the Southwest, it has been argued that it must have been the peoples
of arid countries who invented agriculture, necessity driving them to it
through shortage of wild supplies.
Between such flat opposites, the choice is merely one of unscientific
guessing. In this particular case of the Southwest it is certain that
both guesses are wrong. Agriculture did not come to the natives of this
area because nature was favorable or because it was unfavorable. It came
because through increase of knowledge and change of attitude, some people
in the region of Southern Mexico or Guatemala or beyond first turned
agriculturists, and from them the art was gradually carried, through
nation after nation, to the Southwestern tribes, and finally even to the
Indians of the North Atlantic coast.
The reasons for acceptance of this explanation are several. First is the
distribution of native agriculture, whose practice was about equally
spread in the two American continents with its middle in or near Central
America. If a geographical diffusion of the art from a center took place,
its radiation or extension would probably be about equal to the north
and south. Then, the middle portions of the new world held the greatest
concentration of native population, such as would have tended to produce
a pressure in the direction of the establishment of agriculture and would
also normally be a consequence of the continued custom of farming, as
opposed to unsettled life. Again, the Southwestern tribes planted only
maize, beans, and squashes; the Mexicans grew in addition tomatoes, chili
peppers, cacao, and sweet potatoes. It looks as if they had carried their
agriculture farther through having been at it longer. Then, pottery has
evidently spread out from the same center, and the two arts seem to go
hand in hand. Other evidence might be adduced, such as archæological
excavations and the botanical fact that the home of the nearest wild
relatives of the plants cultivated in the Southwest is the central or
middle American area (§ 183).
In short, the Southwestern Indians did not farm because nature induced
them to make the invention. They did not make the invention at all. A far
away people made it, and from them it was transmitted to the Southwest
through a series of successive tribal contacts. These contacts, which
then are the specific cause of Southwestern agriculture, constitute a
human social factor; a cultural or civilizational factor. Climatic or
physical environment did not enter into the matter at all, except to
render agriculture somewhat difficult in the arid Southwest, though not
difficult enough to prevent it. Had the Southwest been thoroughly desert,
agriculture could not have got a foot-hold there. But this would be only
a limiting condition; the active or positive causes that brought about
the Southwestern agriculture are its invention farther South, the spread
of the invention to the North, and its acceptance there.
Of course this conclusion sheds no light on the causes of the first
invention in the middle American region. The ultimate origin of the
phenomenon has not been penetrated. But the prevalence of agriculture in
the aboriginal Southwest for several thousand years past has been pretty
certainly accounted for, and by an explanation in terms of culture or
civilization, or the activity of societies of human beings.
86. CULTURAL FACTORS
Such cultural causes constitute the third set or kind of factors by
which civilization is explainable. If the example just discussed is
representative, it is clear that cultural factors ordinarily interpret
more phenomena of civilization, and interpret them more fully, than
factors either of racial heredity or physical environment.
It is different in zoölogy and botany. The forms and behavior of
animals and plants are explainable in terms of heredity and environment
because animals and plants have no culture. It is true that the forms
and behavior are determined also by other animals and plants, their
characteristics, habits, and abundance, but these factors are in a
larger sense part of the environment. They are at any rate sub-cultural.
But since anthropology deals with beings whose distinctive trait in
social relations is the possession of the thing that we call culture,
the factors which biology employs are insufficient. It is not that
heredity and natural environment fail to apply to man, but that they
apply only indirectly and remotely to his civilization. This fundamental
fact has often been overlooked, especially in modern times, because the
biological sciences having achieved successful increases of knowledge
and understanding, the temptation was great to borrow their method
outright and apply it without serious modification to the human material
of anthropology. This procedure simplified the situation, but yielded
inadequate and illusory results. For a very long time the idea that man
possessed and animals lacked a soul influenced people’s thought to such a
degree that they scarcely thought of human beings in terms of biological
causality, of heredity and environment. Then when a reaction began to set
in, less than two centuries ago, and it became more generally recognized
that man was an animal, the pendulum swung to the other extreme and
the tendency grew of seeing in him only the animal, the cultureless
being, and of either ignoring his culture or thinking that it could be
explained away by resolving it into the factors familiar from biology.
The just and wise course lies between. The biological aspects of man must
be interpreted in terms of biological causation, his cultural aspects
in terms first of all of cultural causation. After they have been thus
resolved, the cultural causes may reduce to ultimate factors of heredity
and natural environment.
87. CULTURAL DISTRIBUTION
The Southwest also provides an example of how cultural phenomena can be
seen to be arranged geographically so as to yield a meaning or to outline
their history, without reference to climate or natural influences. Near
the center of the area, in northern New Mexico and Arizona, live four
groups of Pueblo or town building Indians—the Hopi, Zuñi, Keres, and Tewa
or Tano—who represent a sort of élite of the native culture. They farm,
make pottery, accumulate wealth in turquoise, are governed by priests,
worship under a remarkably complex set of rituals, which involve altars,
masks, symbols of all sorts, and a rude sort of philosophy.
As one goes from the Pueblo center to the less settled tribes, one
encounters first the Navaho, who are earth hut builders and farm but
little, yet share much of the Pueblo elaborateness of ritual, including
altars, masks, and symbols. A little farther out, among the Apache and
Pima, the cults have perceptibly diminished in intricacy and symbolic
value: altars and masks are lacking.
The simplification increases among the more remote Mohave, whose cults
are based on dreams instead of priestly tradition. Still farther, on
the shores of the Pacific among the Luiseño and Gabrielino, some Pueblo
traits can still be found; cult altars and pottery, for instance. But
agriculture, homes of stone, turquoise, priests, and the majority of
Pueblo institutions are unknown. Finally, still farther away in central
California, the Yokuts now and then show a culture trait reminiscent of
the Pueblos: grooved arrow straighteners, perhaps, or occasional rudely
made pottery vessels. These are suggestive bits; fragments that have been
whittled away or toned down. Pueblo culture as a whole has vanished at
this distance. In its place the Yokuts possess quite different arts and
institutions and beliefs.
What is the significance of this gradual fading away of one type of
civilization and its replacement by others? Evidently that certain
influences have radiated out from the higher Pueblo center, and that the
effect of these has diminished in proportion to the number of tribes
they have passed through. The Pueblos have succeeded in handing over the
largest share of their civilization to the adjacent Navaho—and no doubt
also received most from them. The Apache being more remote, were less
affected; and so on to the farthest limits of the influences.
It is also clear that a time element is involved. A people receiving an
art from another obviously acquires this later than the inventors. Most
traits which the central Pueblos share with peripheral tribes may be
assumed to have existed longer among the Pueblos, simply because they
possess more traits in their culture and the flow has prevailingly been
out from them. Thus they make uncolored, two-colored, and three-colored
pottery; the tribes on the margin of the Southwest, uncolored pottery
only; those beyond the range of immediate Southwestern influence,
no pottery at all. Unless therefore there should be special reasons
suggestive of a degenerative loss of the art among the marginal
tribes—and no such reasons are known—the conclusion is forced that
Southwestern pottery was first made by the ancestors of the Pueblos
or their predecessors in the central part of the area, presumably as
plain ware, and that thence knowledge of the art was gradually carried
outward. However while simple pottery making was thus being taken up by
the tribes nearest to the Pueblo district, the Pueblos were going ahead
and learning to ornament vessels with painted designs. In time this
added art also spread to the neighbors, but meanwhile these had passed
knowledge of the first stage on to the tribes still farther out than
themselves; and meanwhile also the Pueblos had perhaps gone on to a third
stage, that of combining colors in their decoration.
In this way, if nothing interrupted the even regularity of the process,
the focal people, with their lead in creating or inventing or improving,
might pass through half a dozen successive stages of the art, or of many
arts, while the outermost peoples were just beginning to receive the
rudiments. The intermediate tribes would show attainment of a less or
greater number of stages in proportion to their distance from the center.
In this event the main facts concerning the pottery art of the Southwest
could be represented by a diagram of a step pyramid, each level or step
picturing a new increment to the basic art. The Pueblos would be at the
peak of the pyramid, five or six steps high, the near-by tribes a step
or two lower; and so on to the outermost, who remain at, or have only
recently attained to, the first or lowest level; while beyond these would
be the non-pottery-making tribes wholly outside the Pueblo sphere of
influence.
Of course on the actual map the distribution of the various forms or
stages of pottery made does not work out with the perfect regularity
of our schematic diagram. Here and there a tribe has migrated from its
habitat and disturbed the symmetry of arrangement; or the population of
a district has been so thin that it could live on wild products without
resorting to agriculture, so that it remained more or less nomadic and
had no use for fragile pottery; or a third group of tribes developed
basket making to a pitch which yielded excellent vessels, with the result
that they were satisfied and failed to take up pottery, or took it up
half-heartedly, so that the art remained stunted among them—a stage or
two more backward than their position would lead one to expect. But on
the whole pottery distribution in the Southwest does follow the schematic
arrangement with sufficient closeness to warrant the assumption that
the history of its development has been, at least in outline, as just
reconstructed.
The facts conform still more closely to the step pyramid arrangement
when consideration is given not to pottery alone but to the whole
culture—agriculture, other arts, social forms, ritual, religious
organization, and the like. In that case Pueblo culture is seen to
comprise easily the greatest number of traits or component parts, and
these to grow fewer and fewer towards the edges of the Southwest.[13]
88. HISTORICAL INDUCTION
The sort of conclusion here outlined is really a historical induction
drawn from the facts of culture distribution among living but historyless
tribes. Where documents are available, the development, the growth of
the pyramid itself, as it were, can often be seen as it happened. Thus,
about the year 100 A.D., Rome, Italy, France, England, Scotland, stood
on successive descending culture levels related to one another much like
Pueblo, Navaho, Pima, Mohave, Gabrielino; and also in the same placement
of ever more outward geographic situation.
Where written records fail, archæological remains sometimes take their
place. This is true of the Southwest, whose ancient pottery, stone
edifices and implements, and evidences of agriculture remain as records
of the past, telling a story only a little less complete and direct than
that of the Roman historians. One of the archæologists of the Southwest
has drawn up a pair of diagrams to outline the culture history of the
area as he has reconstructed it from comparison of the prehistoric
remains (Fig. 26).
[Illustration: FIG. 26. Diagrammatic representation by Nelson of the
geography and history of the culture of the Indians of the southwestern
United States: above, in space; below, in time, on _A-B_ diameter of
circle.]
In all this story, what has become of natural environment and heredity?
They have dropped from sight. We have been able to build up a reasonable
and probably reliable reconstruction of the course of development of
civilization in an area without reference to these two sets of factors.
The reconstruction is in terms of culture. Evidently environment and
heredity are in the main superfluous. They need not be brought in; are
likely to be confusing, to diminish the internal consistency of the
findings attained, if they are brought in. This is true in general, not
only of the instance chosen. By using environment or heredity, one can
often seem to explain certain selected features of a culture, but the
appearance is illusory, because one need only be impartial to realize
that one can never explain in this way the whole of any culture. When,
however, the explanation can be made in terms of culture—always of course
on the basis of a sufficient knowledge and digestion of facts—it applies
increasingly to the whole of a civilization, and each portion explained
helps to explain better all other portions. The cultural interpretation
of culture is therefore progressive, and ever more productive, whereas
the environmental and the biological-hereditary interpretation fail in
proportion as they are pushed farther; in fact can be kept going only by
ignoring larger and larger masses of fact to which they do not apply.
Historians, who may be described as anthropologists whose work is made
easy for them by the possession of written and dated records, have
tacitly recognized this situation. They may now and then attribute some
event or condition of civilization to an inherent quality of a race,
or to an influence of climate or soil or sea. But this is mostly in
their introductory chapters. When they really get to grips with their
subject, they explain in terms of human thought and action, in other
words, of culture. It is true that they dwell more on personalities
than anthropologists do. But that is because the materials left them by
former historians are full of personalities and anecdotes. And on the
other hand, anthropological data are usually unduly deficient in the
personal element; they consist of descriptions of customs, tools used by
long forgotten individuals, and the like. If anthropologists were able
to recover knowledge of the particular Pueblo woman who first painted a
third color or a glaze on a bowl, or of the priest who first instituted a
masked dance in order to make rain, we may be confident that they would
discuss these individuals. And such knowledge would throw more light on
the history of Southwestern pottery and religion and culture generally
than any amount of emphasis on the number of inches of rainfall per year,
or the pulse rate or similar hypothetical and remote causes.
CHAPTER VIII
DIFFUSION
89. The couvade.—90. Proverbs.—91. Geographic distribution.—92.
The magic flight.—93. Flood legends.—94. The double-headed
eagle.—95. The Zodiac.—96. Measures.—97. Divination.—98.
Tobacco.—99. Migrations.
89. THE COUVADE
The couvade is a custom to which the peasants of the Pyrenees adhered
until a century or two ago. When a couple had a child, the wife got up
and went about her daily work as well as she might, while the husband
went to bed to lie-in in state and receive the visits of the neighbors.
This was thought to be for the good of the baby.
The same custom is found among the Indians of Brazil. They believe that a
violation of the custom would bring sickness or ill luck upon the child.
They look upon the child as something new and delicate, a being requiring
not only physical nurture but the superadded protection of this religious
or magical practice.
The Basques of the Pyrenees and the Indians of Brazil are of different
race, separate origins, and without any known historical contacts. The
substantial identity of the custom among them therefore long ago led to
its being explained as the result of the cropping out of an instinctive
impulse of the human mind. Tylor, for instance, held that whenever a
branch of humanity reached a certain hypothetical stage of development,
namely, that phase in which the reckoning of descent from the mother
began to transform into reckoning of descent from the father, the couvade
tended to appear spontaneously as a natural accompaniment. The Basque
peasants, of course, are a more advanced people than the cannibalistic
Brazilian natives. But they are an old and a conservative people who
have long lived in comparative isolation in their mountainous district;
and thus, it might be argued, they retained the custom of the couvade as
a survival from the earlier transitional condition.
According to this method of explanation, the occurrence of almost any
custom, art, or belief among widely separated and unrelated peoples is
likely to be the result of the similar working of the human mind under
similar conditions. The cause of cultural identities and resemblances,
especially among primitive or “nature” peoples, is not to be sought
primarily in historical factors, such as common origin, migrations, the
propaganda of religion, or the gradual diffusion of an idea, but is
to be looked for in something inherent in humanity itself, in inborn
psychological tendencies. This explanation is that of “Independent
Evolution.” It is also known as the doctrine of “Elementary Ideas.”
Contrasting with this principle is that of borrowing—one people learning
an institution or belief from another, or taking over a custom or
invention. That borrowing has been considerably instrumental in shaping
the cultures of the more advanced nations, is an obvious fact. People are
Christians not through the spontaneous unfolding of the whole dogma and
ritual of Christianity in each of them, nor even within their nation,
but because of the historically documented spread of Christianity which
is still going on. As a heathen people is converted by missionaries
to-day, so our North European ancestors were converted by Romans, and the
Romans by the Apostles and their followers. When historical records are
available, cultural borrowing of this sort is generally easy to establish.
Borrowing can sometimes be shown as very likely even where direct
evidence is lacking. If two peoples that possess an institution in common
are known off-shoots one from the other, or if they have had numerous
trade relations, it is hardly necessary to demonstrate the specific time
and manner of transmission between them. Supposing that a religion,
an alphabet, and perhaps a number of arts have passed from one nation
to another, one would normally ask for little further evidence that a
custom, such as the couvade, which they shared, had also been originated
by one and borrowed by the other.
90. PROVERBS
Even where contacts are more remote, the geographical setting of two
peoples often makes borrowing seem likely. The custom of uttering
proverbs, for instance, has a significant distribution. It seems
astonishing that barbarous West African tribes should possess a stock of
proverbs as abundant and pithy as those current in Europe. Not that the
proverbs are identical. The negro lacks too many articles, and too many
of our manners, to allude as we do. But he does share with us the habit
of expressing himself on certain situations with brief current sayings
of homely and instantly intelligible nature, that put a generality into
specific and concrete form. Thus: “One tree does not make a forest”; “Run
from the sword and hide in the scabbard”; “If the stomach is weak, do not
eat cockroaches”; “Distant firewood is good firewood.”
The proverb tendency is a sufficiently general one to suggest its
independent origin in Africa and Europe. One’s first reaction to the
parallel is likely to be something like this: The negro and we have
formulated proverbs because we are both human beings; the coining of
proverbs is instinctive in humanity. So it might be maintained. However,
as soon as the distribution of proverbs the world over is reviewed, it
becomes evident that their coining cannot be spontaneous, since the
native American race appears never to have devised a single true proverb.
On the other side are the Europeans, Africans, Asiatics, and Oceanians
who are addicted to the custom. Degree of civilization evidently has
nothing to do with the matter, because in the Old World primitive and
advanced peoples alike use proverbs; whereas in the New World wild
hunting tribes as well as the most progressive nations like the Mayas
have no proverbs. The only inference which the facts allow is that
there must have been a time when proverbs were unknown anywhere—still
“uninvented” by mankind. Then, somewhere in the Old World, they came
into use. Perhaps it was a genius that struck off the first sayings to
be repeated by his associates and then by his more remote environment.
At any rate, the custom spread from people to people until it extended
over almost all the eastern hemisphere. Some cause, however, such as
geographical isolation, prevented the extension of the movement to the
western hemisphere. The American Indians therefore remained proverbless
because the invention was never transmitted to them. Here, accordingly,
is a case of the very incompleteness of a distribution going far to
illuminate the history of a culture trait. The lack of parallelism
between the hemispheres disproves the explanation by instinctive
independent origin. This negative conclusion in turn tends strongly to
establish the probability that the custom was borrowed, perhaps from a
single source, in the four eastern continents.
91. GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION
Thus it appears that it is not always easy to settle the origin and
history of the phenomena of culture. Evidently, many facts must be taken
into consideration: above all, geographic distribution. Because a habit
is so well ingrained in our life as to seem absolutely natural and almost
congenital, it does not follow that it really is so. The vast majority
of culture elements have been learned by each nation from other peoples,
past and present. At the same time there are unexpected limits to the
principle of borrowing. Transmission often operates over vast areas and
for long periods but at other times ceases.
Two reflections arise. The first is the discouraging but salutary one
that the history of civilization and its parts is an intricate matter,
not to be validly determined by off-hand guesses. A second conclusion is
that the geographic distribution of any culture element is always likely
to be a fact of prime importance about it. It is because the Basques and
the Brazilian Indians are geographically separate that there is fair
prima facie probability of the couvade being the result of independent
origin. It is because of another geographic fact, that proverbs are known
throughout one hemisphere and lacking from the other, that it must be
inferred that they represent a borrowed culture trait.
In the following pages a number of culture elements will be examined from
the point of view of their distribution with the aim of determining how
far each of the two principles of parallel invention and of borrowing
may be inferred to have been operative in regard to them. In place of
“independent origin” the terms “parallelism” or “convergence” will
be generally used. As an equivalent of “borrowing” the somewhat less
metaphorical word “diffusion” will be applied. Well known historic cases
of diffusion, such as those of Christianity and Mohammedanism, of Roman
law, of the printing press and steam engine and of the great modern
mechanical inventions, will not be considered. It is however well to
keep these numerous cases in the background of one’s mind as a constant
suggestion that the principle of diffusion is an extremely powerful one
and still active. In fact, the chief reason why early anthropologists
did not make more use of this principle seems to have been their extreme
familiarity with it. It was going on all about them, so that in dealing
with prehistoric times or with remote peoples, they tended to overlook
it. This was perhaps a natural error, since the communications of savages
and their methods of transmission are so much more restricted than our
own. Yet of course even savages shift their habitations and acquire new
neighbors. At times they capture women and children from one another.
Again they intermarry; and they almost invariably maintain some sort
of trade relations with at least some of the adjacent peoples. Slow as
diffusion might therefore be among them, it would nevertheless go on, and
its lack of rapidity would be compensated by the immense durations of
time in the prehistoric period. It is certain that the simpler inventions
of primitive man generally did not travel with the rapidity of the
printing press and telegraph and camera. But on the other hand, instead
of a generation or a century, there would often be periods of a thousand
or five thousand years for an invention or a custom to spread from one
continent to another. There is thus every a priori reason why diffusion
could be expected to have had a very large part in the formation of
primitive and barbarous as well as advanced culture.
92. THE MAGIC FLIGHT
There is one folk-lore plot with a distribution that leaves little doubt
as to its diffusion from a single source. This is the incident known
as the Magic Flight or Obstacle Pursuit. It recounts how the hero,
when pursued, throws behind him successively a whetstone, a comb, and
a vessel of oil or other liquid. The stone turns into a mountain or
precipice; the comb into a forest or thicket; the liquid into a lake or
river. Each of these obstacles impedes the pursuer and contributes to the
hero’s final escape. This incident has been found in stories told by the
inhabitants of every continent except South America. Its distribution and
probable spread are shown in Fig. 27.
While no two of the tales or myths containing the episode of the Magic
Flight are identical, there can be no serious doubt as to a common
source of the incident because of the co-existence of the three separate
items that make it up. If a people in Asia and one in America each
knew a story of a person who to impede a pursuer spilt water on the
ground which magically grew into a vast lake, it would be dogmatic to
insist on this as proof of a historical connection between the two far
separated stories. Belief in the virtue of magic is world-wide, and it
is entirely conceivable that from this common soil of magical beliefs
the same episode might repeatedly have sprouted quite independently. The
same reasoning would apply to the incident of the transformation of the
stone and of the comb, as long as they occurred separately. The linking
of the three items, however, enormously decreases the possibility of
any two peoples having hit upon them separately. It would be stretching
coincidence pretty far to believe that each people independently invented
the triple complex. It is also significant that the number of impeding
obstacles is almost always three. In the region of western Asia and
Europe where the tale presumably originated, three is the number most
frequently employed in magic, ritual, and folk-lore. Among the American
Indians, however, three is scarcely ever thus used, either four or five
replacing it according to the custom pattern of the particular tribe.
Nevertheless, several American tribes depart from their usual pattern and
mention only three obstacles in telling this story.
This instance introduces a consideration that is of growing importance
in culture history determinations. If a trait is composed of several
elements which stand in no necessary relation to each other, and these
several elements recur among distinct or remote peoples in the same
combination, whereas on the basis of mere accident it could be expected
that the several elements would at times combine and at other times
crop out separately, one can be reasonably sure of the real identity
and common origin of the complex trait. When a trait is simple, it is
more difficult to be positive that the apparent resemblance amounts to
identity. Such doubt applies for instance to isolated magical practices.
A custom found among separate nations, such as sprinkling water to
produce rain, may be the result of an importation of the idea from one
people to another. Or again it may represent nothing more than a specific
application of the assumed principle that an act similar to a desired
effect will produce that effect. This magical belief is so broad, and so
ramifying in its exemplifications, as to become almost impossible to use
as a criterion. The essential basis of magic may conceivably have been
developed at a single culture center in the far distant past and have
been disseminated thence over the whole world. Or again, for all that it
is possible to prove, magic beliefs may really be rooted instinctively in
the human mind and grow thence over and over again with inevitability.
There seems no present way of determining which interpretation is correct.
93. FLOOD LEGENDS
This situation applies to many widely spread concepts in folk-lore. Flood
myths of some sort, for instance, are told by probably the majority of
human nations. In the early days of the science, this wide distribution
of flood myths was held to prove the actuality of a flood, or to be
evidence of the descent of all mankind from a single nation which had
once really experienced it. Such explanations are too obviously naïve
to require refutation to-day. Yet it is difficult to interpret the wide
prevalence of flood myths, either as spontaneous growth from out the
human mind, or as diffusion from a single devising of the idea. Much
of the difficulty is caused by the fact that one cannot be sure that
the various flood myths are identical. Some peoples have the flood come
after the earth is formed and inhabited, and have it almost destroy the
human race. Other nations begin their cosmology with a flood. For them,
water was in existence before there was an earth, and the problem for
the gods or creative animals was to make the world. This, according to
some American Indian versions, they finally accomplished by having one of
their number dive to the bottom and bring up a few grains of sand which
were then expanded to constitute terra firma. The first type of story is
evidently a true “flood” myth; the second might better be described as
a concept of “primeval water.” The difficulty is enhanced by the fact
that the two types are sometimes found amalgamated in a single mythology.
Thus the Hebrew account begins with the primeval waters but subsequent to
the formation of the earth the deluge covers it. So, according to some
American tribes, the flood came after the earth, but the waters remained
until after the diving. It is clear that flood stories are more shifting
than the Magic Flight episode. They may conceivably all be variations
of a single theme which has gradually come to differentiate greatly.
But again, several distinct concepts—primeval water, flood, the diving
animals, the ark—may have been evolved in different parts of the world,
each developing in its own way, and traveling so far, in some cases, as
to meet and blend with others. This last interpretation is favored by
some of the facts of distribution: the prevalence of the diving concept
in America, for instance, and the absence of flood myths from much of
Africa.
[Illustration: FIG. 27. The Magic Flight tale, an example of
inter-continental and inter-hemispheric diffusion. After Stucken, with
additions.]
There is a vast amount of folk-lore recorded, and much of it has lent
itself admirably to the working out of its historical origins, so far
as limited regions are concerned. Folk-lorists are often able to prove
that one tale originated in India and was carried into mediæval Europe,
or that another was probably first devised on the coast of British
Columbia and then disseminated across the Rocky mountains to the interior
tribes of Indians. When it comes to intercontinental and world-wide
distribution, however, difficulties of the sort just set forth in regard
to flood myths become stronger and stronger. While the most interesting
mythical ideas are those which are world-wide, it is in these that
uncertainty between origin by diffusion or parallelism is greatest. The
Magic Flight therefore constitutes a grateful exception. It opens the
door to a hope that more assiduous analysis and comparison may lead to
the accurate determination of the source and history of other common and
fundamental myths.
94. THE DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE
An unexpected story of wandering attaches to the figure or symbol of the
double-headed eagle. Like many other elements of civilization, this goes
back to an Egyptian beginning. One of the great gods of Egypt was the
sun. The hawk and vulture were also divine animals. A combination was
made showing the disk of the sun with a long narrow wing on each side.
Or the bird itself was depicted with outstretched wings but its body
consisting of the sun disk. These were striking figures of considerable
æsthetic and imaginative appeal. From Egypt the design was carried in the
second millenium B.C. to the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and to the Hittites
of Asia Minor. A second head was added, perhaps to complete the symmetry
of the figure. Just as a wing and a foot went out from each side of the
body or disk, so now there was a head facing each way. This double-headed
bird symbol was carved on cliffs in Asia Minor. Here the pictures
remained, no doubt wondered at but uncopied, for two thousand years. In
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries after Christ, the Turkish princes,
feeling the symbol to be a fit emblem of sovereignty, began stamping it
on their coins. The later Crusaders brought these coins, or the idea of
the pattern, back with them to Europe, where the mediæval art of heraldry
was flourishing. The double-headed eagle was a welcome addition to the
lions and griffins with which artists were emblazoning the coats of arms
of the feudal nobility. The meaning of sovereignty remaining attached
to the figure, the device before long became indicative of the imperial
idea. This is the origin of its use as a symbol in the late empires of
Austro-Hungary and Russia.
Four hundred years ago Charles V was king of Spain and Austria and Holy
Roman emperor of Germany. It was in his reign that Cortez and Pizarro
conquered Mexico and Peru. Thus the symbol of the double-headed eagle
was carried into the New World and the Indians became conversant with
it. Even some of the wilder tribes learned the figure, although they
were perhaps more impressed with it as a decorative motive than as
an emblem. At any rate, they introduced it into their textiles and
embroideries. The Huichol in the remote mountains of Mexico, who use
the design thus, seem to believe that their ancestors had always been
conversant with the figure. But such a belief of course proves no more
than did the ignorance of European heraldists of the fact that their
double-headed eagle came to them from Asia Minor and ultimately from
Egypt. No pre-Columbian representation of the two-headed eagle is known
from Mexico. The conclusion can therefore hardly be escaped that this
apparently indigenous textile pattern of the modern Huichol is also to be
derived from its far source in ancient Egypt of whose existence they have
never heard.
95. THE ZODIAC
The foregoing example should not establish the impression that the main
source of all culture is to be sought in Egypt. Many other ancient and
modern countries have made their contribution. It is to the Chinese,
for instance, that we owe silk, porcelain, and gun powder. The ancient
Sumerians and Babylonians, on the lower course of the Tigris and
Euphrates, moved toward definite cultural progress about as early as
the Egyptians, and have perhaps contributed as many elements to the
civilization of to-day.
One of these is the zodiac. This is the concept of dividing the path of
the sun, moon, and planets around the heavens into twelve equal parts,
each named after a constellation. The series runs: ram, bull, twins,
crab, lion, virgin, scales, scorpion, archer, goat, water-carrier,
fishes. Constellations, indeed, had begun to be named at a very early
time, as is clear from the practice being common to all mankind. But the
specific arrangement of these twelve constellations as a measure of the
movement of the heavenly bodies seems to have made its first appearance
among the Chaldæan Babylonians about a thousand years before Christ. From
them the Persians, and then the Greeks, learned the zodiac; and with its
introduction to the Roman Empire it became part of the fund of knowledge
common to the whole of western civilization. It does not appear to have
been accepted by the Egyptians until Roman imperial times. Knowledge of
the zodiac also spread eastward to India. It seems to have been carried
as far as China by Buddhist missionaries, but failed to be seriously
adopted in that country until its reintroduction by Jesuit missionaries
in the seventeenth century.
The Chinese long before had invented a series of twelve signs which has
sometimes been called a zodiac, and gradually transmitted it to the
adjacent natives of Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Turkistan, and Tibet. This
seems to be of independent origin from the western or Babylonian zodiac.
It appears to have been devised to designate the hours, then applied to
other periods of time, and finally to the heavens. Its path through the
sky is the reverse of the western zodiac; and its signs are specifically
different: rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, sheep, monkey,
hen, dog, and pig. At most, therefore, it would seem that there might
have penetrated to China from the west the idea of dividing time or space
into twelve units and assigning to each of these the name of an animal.
The working out and utilization of the idea were native Chinese.
Already in ancient times the pictures of the twelve constellations of
the western zodiac began to be abbreviated and reduced to symbols. These
gradually become more and more conventional, although evidences of
their origin are still visible. The sign of the ram, for instance, as we
employ it in almanacs, shows the downward curling horns of this animal;
that for the ox, his rising horns; for the archer, his arrow, and so on.
These cursive symbols, once they became fixed, underwent some travels of
their own which carried them to unexpected places. The Negroes of the
west coast of Africa make gold finger rings ornamented with the twelve
zodiacal symbols in their proper sequence. They seem ignorant of the
meaning, in fact do not possess sufficient astronomical knowledge to
be able to understand the use of the signs. It also remains uncertain
whether they learned the set of symbols from European navigators or from
the Arabs that have penetrated the northern half of Africa. Nevertheless
it is the true zodiac which they portray, even though only as a
decorative pattern.
There has been some assertion that the zodiac was known to the more
advanced Middle American Indians between Arizona and Peru, but the
claim has also been denied. There does appear to have been at least one
series of animal signs used by the Mayas of Yucatan in an astronomical
connection. It is not known that this series served the true zodiacal
function of noting the positions of the heavenly bodies. Further, the
Maya series consists of thirteen instead of twelve symbols, and the
figures present only distant resemblances to the Old World zodiac. There
is only one that is the same as in the Old World zodiac: the scorpion.
The relationship of the Maya and Old World series is therefore unproved,
and probably fictitious. The case however possesses theoretical interest
in that it illustrates the criteria of the determination of culture
relationships.
The Mexican zodiac would unquestionably be interpreted as a derivative
from the Asiatic one, even though its symbols departed somewhat from
those of the latter, provided that the similar symbols came in the same
order. The Asiatic ram might well be replaced by a Mexican deer, the lion
by a wildcat, and the virgin by a maize goddess. And if the deer, the
wildcat, and the maize goddess came in first, fifth, and sixth place, it
would be almost compulsory to look upon them as superficially altered
equivalents of the Old World ram, lion, and virgin. It is conceivable
enough that similar individual symbols might independently come into
use in remote parts of the world. But it is practically impossible that
a series of symbols should be put into the same arbitrary sequence
independently. As a mere matter of mathematical probability there would
be no more than an infinitesimal chance of such a complex coincidence.
If therefore the sequential identity of the American series and the Old
World zodiac should ever be proved,[14] it would be necessary to believe
that this culture element was somehow carried into the Middle American
regions from Asia, either across northern America or across the Pacific.
Identity of sequence failing, there might still remain an instance
of partial convergence. It is within the range of possibility that
the Mayas, who were painstaking astronomers and calculators, and who
like ourselves named the stars and constellations after animals,
arranged a series of these as a mnemonic or figurative aid in their
calendrical reckoning. This, however, would be a case of only incomplete
parallelism. The general concept would in that event have been developed
independently, its specific working out remaining distinctive.
On accurate analysis of culture phenomena, this sort of result proves to
be fairly frequent. When independent developments have occurred, there is
a basic or psychological similarity, but concrete details are markedly
different. On the other hand if a differentiation from a common source
has taken place, so that true historical connection exists, some specific
identity of detail almost always remains as evidence. It therefore
follows that if only it is possible to get the facts fully enough, there
is no theoretical reason why ultimately all cultural phenomena that are
still hovering doubtfully between the parallelistic and the diffusionary
interpretations should not be positively explainable one way or the
other. This of course is not an assertion that such proof has been
brought. In fact there are far more traits of civilization whose history
remains to be elucidated than have yet been solved. But the attainments
already achieved, and an understanding of the principles by which they
have been made, encourage hope for an indefinite increase of knowledge
regarding the origin and growth of the whole of human culture.
96. MEASURES
Another increment of civilization due to the Babylonians is a series of
metric standardizations. These include the division of the circle into
three hundred and sixty degrees, of the day into twenty-four (originally
twelve) hours, of the hour into sixty minutes, of the foot into twelve
inches, and the pound—as it survives in our troy weight—into twelve
ounces. It is apparent that the system involved in these measures is
based on the number twelve and its multiple sixty. The weights current
in the ancient Near East also increased by sixties. On these weights
were based the ancient money values. The Greek mina, Hebrew maneh,
approximately a pound, comprised sixty shekels (or a hundred Athenian
drachmas), and sixty minas made a talent. A talent of silver and one of
gold possessed different values, but the weight was the same. This system
the Greeks derived from Asia Minor and Phœnicia. Their borrowing of the
names, as well as the close correspondence of the actual weight of the
units, evidences their origin in Babylonia or adjacent Aramæa.
The duodecimal method of reckoning was carried west, became deeply
ingrained during the Roman Empire, and has carried down through the
Middle Ages to modern times. It would be going too far to say that every
division of units of measure into twelve parts can be traced directly
to Babylonia. Now and then new standards were arbitrarily fixed and new
names given them. But even when this occurred, the old habit of reckoning
by twelves for which the Babylonians were responsible, was likely to
reassert itself in competition with the decimal system. Modern coinage
systems have become prevailingly decimal, but it is only a short time
ago that in south Germany 60 kreuzer still made a gulden; and the twelve
pence of the English shilling obviously suggest themselves.
Certain of these metric units became fixed more than two thousand years
ago and have descended to us by an unbroken tradition. The Babylonian
degrees, minutes, and seconds, for instance, became an integral part
of the ancient astronomy, were taken up by the Greeks, incorporated
by them in their development of the system of astronomy known as the
Ptolemaic, and thus became a part of Roman, Arab, and mediæval European
science. When a few centuries ago, beginning with the introduction of
the Copernican point of view, astronomy launched forward into a new
period of progress, the old system of reckoning was so deeply rooted
that it was continued without protest. Had the first truly scientific
beginnings of astronomy taken place as late as those of chemistry, it is
extremely doubtful whether we should now be reckoning 360 degrees in the
circumference of the circle. The decimal system would almost certainly
have been applied.
The last few examples may give the impression that cultural diffusion
takes place largely in regard to names and numbers. They may arouse the
suspicion that the intrinsic elements of inventions and accomplishments
are less readily spread. This is not the case. In fact it has happened
time and again in the history of civilization that the substance of
an art or a knowledge has passed from one people to another, while an
entirely new designation for the acquisition has been coined by the
receiving people. The English names of the seven days of the week (§ 125)
are a case in point. If stress seems to have been laid here on names and
numbers, it is not because they are more inclined to diffusion, or most
important, but because their diffusion is more easily traced. They often
provide an infallible index of historical connection when a deficiency of
historical records would make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove
that the common possession of the thing itself went back to a single
source. If historical records are silent, as they are only too often, on
the origin of a device among a people, the occurrence of the same device
at an earlier time among another people may strongly suggest that it was
transmitted from these. But the indication is far from constituting a
proof because of the theoretical possibility that the later nation might
have made the invention independently. It is chiefly when the device is
complex and the relation of its parts identical that the probability of
diffusion approaches surety. If however not only the thing but its name
also are shared by distinct nations, doubt is removed. It is obvious
that peoples speaking unrelated languages will not coincide one time in
a thousand in using the same name for the same idea independently of
each other. The play of accident is thus precluded in such cases and a
connection by transmission is established. In fact the name is the better
touchstone. An invention may be borrowed and be given a home-made name.
But a foreign name would scarcely be adopted without the object being
also accepted.
97. DIVINATION
One other Babylonian invention may be cited on account of its curious
history. This is the pseudo-science of predicting the outcome of
events by examination of the liver of animals sacrificed to the gods.
A system of such divination, known as hepatoscopy, was worked out by
the Babylonian priests perhaps by 2,000 B.C. Their rules are known from
the discovery of ancient clay models of the liver with its several
lobes, each part being inscribed with its significance according as
it might bear such and such appearance. In some way which is not yet
wholly understood, this system was carried, like the true arch, from the
Babylonians to the Etruscans. As there are definite ancient traditions
which brought the Etruscans into Italy from Asia, the gap is however
lessened. The Etruscans, who were evidently addicted to priestly
magic, carried on this liver divination alongside another method,
that of haruspicy or foretelling from the flight or actions of birds.
Both systems were learned from them by the Romans, according to Roman
tradition itself.
With the spread of Christianity, hepatoscopy and haruspicy died out in
the west. But meanwhile they had been carried in the opposite direction
from their Babylonian source of origin, and became established in eastern
Asia and finally, in somewhat modified form, among remote uncivilized
peoples. The pagan priests of Borneo and the Philippines even to-day are
foretelling the future by observing the flight of birds and examining
the gall bladder—an organ intimately associated with the liver—of
sacrificial animals. If these primitive Malaysian peoples had always
remained uninfluenced by higher cultures, their divinatory customs might
be imputed to independent invention. They live, however, at no great
distance from the Asiatic mainland, and are known to have been subjected
to heavy cultural influences from China, Arabia, and especially India.
Four centuries ago, to cite only a few specific instances, the Philippine
chieftains went under the title of rajah, the Hindu word for king. In
the southern Philippine islands there are “sultans” to-day. In all parts
of the Philippines as well as Borneo, even among the rude tribes of the
interior mountains, Chinese jars imported centuries ago are treasured as
precious heirlooms. With these streams of higher culture flowing into the
Malaysian islands, the only reasonable conclusion is that the arts of
liver and bird divination were also imported. In fact, it seems probable
that the broader custom of sacrificing animals to the gods and spirits, a
custom to which the pagan Malaysians still adhere, is a part of the same
wave of influence from the Orient which has so deeply stamped the Homeric
poems and the Old Testament. Although theoretically it is not surprising
that hepatoscopy and haruspicy still flourish among some backward and
marginally situated peoples, yet, in the concrete and at first blush, it
is striking to find that an institution which was active in Babylonia
three or four thousand years ago should still maintain an unbroken life
in Borneo. Evidently the diffusion principle reaches far and long.
Another method of foretelling, which has spread equally far, although its
flow has been mainly from the east westward, is scapulimancy, divination
from the cracks that develop in scorched shoulder blades. This seems to
have originated in ancient China with the heating of tortoise shells; had
spread by the third century after Christ to Japan, where deer shoulder
blades were employed; and is found to-day among the Koryak and Chukchi
of northeasternmost Siberia, who utilize the same bones from seals and
reindeer respectively. Elsewhere domestic animals, above all the sheep,
furnish the proper shoulder blade. All the central Asiatic nations as far
south as the Tibetans and Lolos are addicted to the custom, which had
official status with the Mongol rulers in the thirteenth century, but
must have been older, since it was in vogue among the Byzantine Greeks
two hundred years earlier. The practice spread over practically all
Europe, where it flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and
still lingers among belated rural populations; to Morocco and perhaps
other parts of north Africa; and in Asia to South Arabia, Afghanistan,
and westernmost India. Scapulimancy was not known to the ancient
Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans; it seems
not to have penetrated far into India and not at all into the countries
and islands to the east of India, which are sheepless regions; and it
did not obtain a foothold in North America, where sheep and other tame
animals were also not kept. It appears therefore that the custom, after
a period of somewhat wavering formation in eastern Asia, crystallized
into an association with the domesticated sheep, forming a true culture
“complex,” and was then diffused almost as far as this animal.
98. _Tobacco_
The speed with which inventions sometimes diffuse over large areas is
in marked contrast to the slowness with which they travel on other
occasions. The art or habit of smoking originated in tropical America
where the tobacco plant is indigenous. From this middle region the custom
spread, like agriculture, pottery, and weaving, in both directions over
most of north and south America. Originally, it would seem, a tobacco
leaf was either rolled on itself to form a rude cigar, or was stuffed,
cigarette fashion, into a reed or piece of cane. Columbus found the
West Indians puffing at cigars. In the Southwestern United States, the
natives smoked from hollow reeds. Farther into the United States, both
to the east and west, the reed had become a manufactured tube of wood or
stone or pottery. This tubular pipe, something like a magnified cigarette
holder, has the bowl enlarged at one end to receive the tobacco. It has
to be held more or less vertically. This form has survived to the present
day among the California Indians. As the tubular pipe spread into the
central and eastern United States, it was elaborated. The bowl was made
to rise from the top of the pipe, instead of merely forming its end.
This proved a convenience, for the pipe had now no longer to be pointed
skyward to be smoked. Here then was a pipe with a definite bowl; but
its derivation from the straight tubular pipe is shown by the fact that
the bowl was most frequently set not at the end of the stem, as we
“automatically” think a pipe should be, but near its middle. The bowl
evidently represented a secondary addition which there seemed no more
reason to place at the end than in the middle of the pipe; and the latter
happened to become the fashion.
All this evolution took place at least a thousand years ago, probably
much longer. Elaborate stone pipes have been discovered in the earthworks
left by the Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley, a people whose very
existence had been forgotten when the whites first came. Californian
stone pipes occur well down toward the bottom of shell mounds estimated
to have required three or four thousand years to accumulate.
Here and there this slow diffusion suffered checks. In the Andean region
of South America tobacco came into competition with coca, a plant whose
leaf was chewed. The effect of the contained alkaloid is to prevent
fatigue and hunger. Of the two, coca triumphed over tobacco, possibly
because its action is more drug-like. In North America, on the other
hand, tribes that had not adopted maize and bean agriculture, sometimes
tilled tobacco patches. With them, tobacco cultivation had outstripped
the spread of so important an institution as food agriculture. In the
extreme parts of North America, climatic factors checked the growth of
tobacco, either wild or cultivated. Where the supply was scarce, it
was either diluted with pulverized tree bark, as by many tribes of the
central United States, or it was eaten, as by a number of groups on the
Pacific coast. To these latter, tobacco seemed too precious to set fire
to and lightly puff away. They mixed it with lime from burnt shells and
swallowed it. Taken in this form, a small quantity produces a powerful
effect. In the farthest north of the continent, even this device had not
obtained a foothold. The development of intertribal trade was too slender
and intermittent for anything but valuables, let alone an article of
daily consumption, to be transported over long distances. The result was
that the Eskimo, when first discovered, knew nothing of tobacco or pipes.
The use of tobacco was quickly carried to the Old World by the Spaniards,
and before long all Europe was smoking. Throughout that continent,
irrespective of language, the plant is known by modifications of the
Spanish name _tabaco_, which in turn seems based on a native American
name for cigar. By the Spaniards and Portuguese, and later also by the
Arabs, the habit of smoking was carried to various points on the shores
of Africa, Asia, and the East Indies. Thence it spread inland. Native
African tribes, and others in New Guinea, who had never seen a white
man, have been found not only growing and smoking tobacco, but firmly
believing that their ancestors from time immemorial had done so. This is
a characteristic illustration of the short-livedness of group memory and
the unreliability of oral tradition.
In northeastern Siberia, where the Russians introduced tobacco, a special
form of pipe came into use. It has a narrow bowl flaring at the top.
Seen from above, this bowl looks like a disk with a rather small hole in
the center. In profile it is almost like a capital T. It is set on the
end of the pipe-stem. This stem may be straight or flattened and curved.
This form of pipe, along with tobacco as a trade article, crossed Behring
Strait and was taken up by the Alaska Eskimo. That this pipe is not of
Eskimo origin is shown by its close resemblance to the Chukchi pipe of
Siberia. The fact that it is impossible for the Eskimo to grow tobacco
corroborates the late introduction, as does the Alaska Eskimo name:
tawak. In short, smoking reached the Eskimo only after having made the
round of the globe. Originating in Middle America, the custom spread very
anciently to its farthest native limits without being able to penetrate
to the Eskimo. As soon as the Spaniards appeared on the scene, the custom
started on a fresh career of travel and rolled rapidly eastward about the
globe until it reëntered America in the hitherto non-smoking region of
Alaska.
A second invasion of America by a non-American form of pipe occurred
in the eastern United States. The old pipe of this region, as already
stated, had its bowl set well back from the end of the stem. The whole
object thus had nearly the shape of an inverted capital T, whereas the
European pipe might be compared to an L laid on its back. After the
English settlers had become established on the Atlantic coast, a tomahawk
pipe was introduced by them for trade purposes. This was a metal hatchet
with the butt of the blade hollowed out into a bowl which connected
with a bore running through the handle. One end of the blade served to
chop, the other to smoke. The hatchet handle was also the pipe stem. The
combination implement could be used as a weapon in war and as a symbol of
peace in council. This doubleness of purpose caused it to appeal to the
Indian. The heads of these iron tomahawk pipes were made in England for
the Indian trade. They became so popular that those natives who were out
of reach of established traders, or who were too poor to buy the metal
hatchet-pipes, began to imitate them in the stone which their forefathers
had used. In the Missouri valley, a generation ago, among tribes like the
Sioux and the Blackfeet, imitation tomahawk pipes, which would never have
withstood usage as hatchets, were being made of red catlinite together
with the standard, native, inverted-T pipes. One of the two coexisting
forms represented a form indigenous to the region since a thousand years
or more, the other an innovation developed in Europe as the result of
the discovery of America and then reintroduced among the aborigines.
Diffusion sometimes follows unexpectedly winding routes.
99. MIGRATIONS
It may seem strange that with all the reference to diffusion in the
foregoing pages, there has been so little mention of migration. The
reason is that migrations of peoples are a special and not the normal
means of culture spread. They form the crass instances of the process,
easily conceived by a simple mind. That a custom travels as a people
travels with it, is something that a child can understand. The danger is
in stopping thought there and invoking a national migration for every
important culture diffusion, whereas it is plain that most culture
changes have occurred through subtler and more gradual operations. The
Mongols overran vast areas of Asia and Europe without seriously modifying
the civilization of those tracts. The accretions that most influenced
them, such as writing and Buddhism, came to them by the quieter and more
pervasive process of peaceful penetration, in which but few individuals
were active. We are all aware that printing and the steam engine, the
doctrine of evolution and the habit of riming verses, have spread through
western civilization without conquests or migrations, and that each
year’s fashions flow out from Paris in the same way. When however it is
a question of something remote, like the origin of Chinese civilization,
it is only necessary for it to be pointed out that the early forms
of Chinese culture bear certain resemblances to the early culture of
Mesopotamia, and we are sure to have some one producing a theory that
marches the Chinese out of the west with their culture packed away in
little bundles on their backs. That is far more picturesque, of course,
more appealing to the emotions, than to conceive of a slow, gradual
transfusion stretching over a thousand years. In proportion as the known
facts are few, imagination soars unchecked. It is not because migrations
of large bodies of men are rare or wholly negligible in their influence
on civilization that they have been touched so lightly here, but because
we all tend, through the romantic and sensationalistic streak in us, to
think more largely in terms of them than the sober truth warrants. It is
in culture-history as in geology: the occasional eruptions, quakings,
and other cataclysms stir the mind, but the work of change is mainly
accomplished by quieter processes, going on unceasingly, and often almost
imperceptible until their results accumulate.
CHAPTER IX
PARALLELS
100. General observations.—101. Cultural context.—102.
Universal elements.—103. Secondary parallelism in the
Indo-European languages.—104. Textile patterns and
processes.—105. Primary parallelism: the beginnings of
writing.—106. Time reckoning.—107. Scale and pitch of Pan’s
pipes.—108. Bronze.—109. Zero.—110. Exogamic institutions.—111.
Parallels and psychology.—112. Limitations on the parallelistic
principle.
100. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
The principle of truly independent or convergent invention is more
difficult to establish by positive examples than imitative diffusion. It
has often been assumed as operative, more rarely proved; and even in the
latter cases has perhaps never been found to lead to complete identity.
In fact, the first observation to be made is that resemblance must not be
too close if independent development is to be the explanation. A complex
device used in two or more parts of the world suggests a connection
between them in very proportion to its complexity. A combination
of two or even three elements might conceivably have been repeated
independently. A combination of five or ten parts serving an identical
purpose in an identical manner must necessarily appeal as impossible of
having been hit upon more than once. One thinks almost under compulsion,
in such a case, of historical connection, of a transference of the idea
or machine from one people to the other.
If the resemblance includes any inessential or arbitrary parts, such as
an ornament, a proportion that so far as utility is concerned might be
considerably varied but is not, a randomly chosen number, or a name,
the possibility of independent development is wholly ruled out. Such
extrinsic features would not recur together once in a million times.
Their association forces a presumption of common origin, even though
it be difficult to account for the historical connection involved. The
significance of names in this situation has already been commented on.
There is nothing arbitrary about this limitation on the parallelistic
principle. We all apply similar checks in practical life. If in a
court of law several witnesses testify to the same facts in the same
language, without one of them adding or diminishing an item, if they
follow the identical order of events, if even details such as the
precise minute of an occurrence are stated without variation, judge and
jury will infallibly suspect that the several testimonies go back to a
single source of inspiration. Eyewitnesses will differ. They have seen
from different angles; have followed events with attention that varied
according to their participation and their previous habits and training;
have reacted with individually colored emotion. So with nations. Their
customs, interests, faculties are never wholly alike. Their independent
inventions and innovations, always springing out of a distinctive soil,
therefore necessarily take on a distinctive aspect even when they embody
the same idea. In the degree that the form as well as the substance of
culture traits coincide, does the probability of independent evolution
diminish in favor of some sort of connection.
101. CULTURAL CONTEXT
The presence or absence of other connections is also a factor of greatest
importance. In other words, no fact relating to human civilization may be
judged wholly without reference to its context or background. If there
are known connections, either in space or in time, between two nations,
the likelihood of their having separately evolved a common trait is much
less than as between two peoples in different continents or separated
by thousands of years. It is not known precisely how knowledge of the
true arch and of liver divination were carried from ancient western
Asia to the Etruscans of Italy. Yet the fact that Babylonia and Etruria
shared two such specific culture traits as these, greatly increases the
probability for each one having been borrowed from the Asiatic by the
European people. When the consideration is added that the ancients had
traditions of the Etruscans having come to Italy out of Asia Minor,
the likelihood of diffusion is strengthened to the point of practical
certainty.
Connection in space is a particularly cogent argument in favor of
diffusion, because of its powerful presumption of accompanying
communication. When several hundred Indian tribes without a break in
their ranks between Quebec and Argentina cultivate maize, it would be
absurd to dream of each of them having originated the domestication of
the plant for itself. To be sure, it is logically conceivable that maize
agriculture was independently developed by two or three of the most
advanced tribes of the hundreds and then became diffused until the two
or three areas of dispersion met and coalesced into one greater area.
Yet the principle that economy of explanation is the best would militate
even against this interpretation as compared with diffusion from a single
center, unless there were definite indications in favor of the multiple
origin explanation. Such indications might be radically distinct types
of the plant or of agricultural implements in several parts of the maize
area.
So, when the tribes on the Alaskan and Siberian sides of Behring Sea
relate similar Raven legends, the geographical proximity is so close
that it would be pedantic to let the fact that two continents are
involved stand in the way of an explanation by diffusion. Even where the
distribution of a trait penetrates much farther into both America and
Asia, as is true of the composite bow (§ 210), the continuity of area
leaves little doubt as to diffusion from a single center, especially
since it is reinforced by other traits showing the same intercontinental
distribution: the Magic Flight story, for instance. It is only when the
areas are discrete as well as remote, when other similarities between
them are few or absent, when their cultural backgrounds are radically
dissimilar, as in the case of the couvade, that parallelism begins to
knock at the door of interpretation with serious hope of admittance.
102. UNIVERSAL ELEMENTS
When a culture trait is very ancient and of practically world-wide
occurrence, it becomes difficult to estimate between diffusion and
independent invention. The fire-drill, flint chipping, the bow and arrow,
the doctrine of animism or belief in souls and spirits, sympathetic
magic, are in this class. The very universality of these elements tends
to obliterate tangible evidence as to their histories. A generation or
two ago it was generally taken for granted that such devices and beliefs
as these sprang more or less spontaneously out of the human mind as soon
as man had traversed a certain short distance of the evolutionary road
that led him away from the brutes. At present, anthropological opinion is
more cautious about such assumptions. It is perhaps spontaneous enough
for people in the habit of using tools to try to fashion them from
stone if other materials be lacking, and easy for a nation accustomed
to projectile weapons to invent the bow without ever having learned of
it. But this is far from proving what a people without these habits
might do. Intelligent as an ape is, and gifted with manual dexterity,
it rarely enters his mind to throw a stone as a missile and never to
split it into a knife or weapon. For all we know, it may have cost our
ancestors untold mental energy to bring themselves to the point of
fashioning their first stone implements; so much, indeed, that it is
possible all of them did without until one more gifted or fortunate group
made the difficult invention which was then imitated by the others. It is
temptingly but fatally easy to project our habits of mind into primitive
man—much easier to imagine ourselves in his position than to imagine
him, without reference to ourselves, as he was. Animal psychologists
have learned not to anthropomorphize, that is, endow the lower animals
with specifically human mind processes. Anthropologists have learned to
guard against the similar pitfall of interpreting low cultures by the
standards of our own, of assuming that because a thing seems “natural”
to us it must have seemed natural and therefore have been done by any
savage. It is clear that what did not happen was for every tribe or race
to originate for itself its fire-making, flint-chipping, bows, animism,
and magic. It is conceivable that each of these culture products traces
back to a single source in human history. There are authorities who have
held this very opinion; some expressedly, others by implication. It is
not necessary to go so far; in fact, wiser not to, because none of these
matters is yet susceptible of real proof. But it does seem profitable to
recognize the possibility of the truth of such views, and that the drift
of accumulating knowledge and experienced interpretation is in their
direction.
A simple consideration which has too often been neglected is that
diffusion and imitation undisputedly do take place in culture on a
vast scale. So far as independent developments occur, be that rarely
or frequently, they are therefore sure to be more or less intertwined
with disseminations. Even one particular device may be partly borrowed
and partly modified or further developed by original effort. Still more
intimate must be the combination of native and diffused elements in the
whole culture of any people. To wage an abstract battle as between two
opposite principles is sterile, when their manifestations are admittedly
frequent for one and at least certain for the other. It is clearly more
profitable to examine the associations and relations of diffusion and
convergence, the conditions under which they supplement each other.
Besides parallels springing up wholly independently, there are two ways
in which their relations to diffusion may be conceived. An original
single growth or wave of diffusion may differentiate into local or
temporal modifications, which even after separation continue to develop
along parallel lines or reconverge. Or, on the other hand, independent
starts in similar direction may become merged in, or assimilated by, a
subsequent diffusion.
103. SECONDARY PARALLELISM IN THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
Parallel growth secondary to a former unity and differentiation is
illustrated by the Indo-European languages. All the known ancient forms
of this speech family, Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, Gothic, were
highly inflecting and compounding. Their tendency was synthetic (§ 51,
57).
Grammatical ideas such as voice, tense, number, case, were expressed by
elements affixed to the word stem and incapable of a separate existence.
For _they will have loved_ Latin says _ama-v-eru-nt_. The _-v-_ has the
force of _have_, the _-eru-_ of _will_, _-nt_ of _they_; but none of
these parts can be used alone, as their equivalents in English can be, or
as in French _ils auront aimé_. The two latter languages are analytical.
They break an idea into parts which they express by separate words that
change form but little. They retain only fragments of conjugations and
declensions. Sanskrit had eight noun cases, Latin six; English has only
two, the subjective-objective and the possessive, and French only one, or
rather no case-form at all.[15]
This development toward a more analytical form is not only traceable
in several non-Indo-European speech families, such as Chinese and
Malayo-Polynesian (§ 61), but has gone on in all the branches of
Indo-European. It is visible in the growth of English from Anglo-Saxon;
of French, Spanish, and Italian from Latin; of modern from ancient
Persian; of Hindi and Bengali from Sanskrit. True, some of these have
been in contact, like the Germanic and Latin languages, and might
therefore be imagined to have set one another an example, although there
is little evidence that languages seriously influence each other’s
forms. But many of the Indo-European idioms have not been in contact at
all for thousands of years. The Germanic and the Indo-Iranic branches,
for instance, must have separated at least four thousand years ago.
For the greater part of this period, accordingly, the related but no
longer communicating languages that have resulted in modern English and
Bengali, to take only one instance, have independently driven toward the
same goal of more and more analytical structure. It may well be that the
hidden germ of this impulse lay implanted in the common Indo-European
mother-tongue at the time of its differentiation five or more thousand
years ago. But the movement of its daughters has certainly been an
astoundingly parallel one.
104. TEXTILE PATTERNS AND PROCESSES
An analogous situation is provided by the similarity of diamond shaped
patterns woven in twilled baskets in parts of North and South America,
Asia and the East Indies, and Africa. This looks like parallelism and
is parallelism. But it is clearly a secondary result of the twilling
process, as this, in turn, flourishes most vigorously where woody
monocotyledonous plants—cane, bamboo, palms—are available to furnish
hard, durable, flat, pliable splints. The technique of the weave is such
that if materials of two colors are used, the characteristic patterns
evolve themselves almost of necessity. The twilling process may have
been invented independently in several of the regions addicted to it,
or have been devised only once in the world’s history. It is too simple
and too ancient a technique for modern knowledge to choose between the
alternatives with positiveness. Brazilian and East Indian patterns are
much more likely to have been each developed on the spot, as derivatives
from the more fundamental and possibly transmitted twilling process.
The coiling technique for making baskets looks from its distribution
in Africa and about the Mediterranean, in northeast Asia and northwest
America, in the southern extremity of South America, in Malaysia and
Australia, as if it had originated independently several times, and there
is partial confirmation in the fact that different varieties of coiling
are typical of most of the areas. If however further knowledge should
connect the now separate areas of coiling, the art would then have to be
regarded as probably due to diffusion from a single invention. In that
case, however, special varieties, such as half-hitch coiling in Tierra
del Fuego and Tasmania, and single-rod coiling in the East Indies and
California, would remain as instances of secondary parallelism affecting
particular aspects or parts of the generic process.
A blending of diffusion and parallelism is apparent also in other textile
processes. The fundamentals, as embodied in simple woven basketry, mats,
and wiers, were probably carried into America by the first immigrants.
Weaving from suspended warps and in an incomplete loom frame may possibly
have been similarly transmitted by diffusion or have been developed
locally. Thread spinning, however, the complete loom, and the heddle
were clearly devised in the middle region of America independently of
their invention in the Old World, as is evident from their absence in
the connecting areas of North America and Siberia (§ 187, 188). But the
treadle shed, the next step in the Eastern hemisphere, was never invented
in the Western, so that at this point the parallelism ends.
Again, diffusion and convergence both enter into the history of what is
known as resist dyeing, that is, the covering of portions of textile
patterns before immersion into the dye. Batik, when wax is used as the
protecting medium, is one form of resist dyeing. Another method is “to
tie little bunches of cloth with a cord either soaked in clay or wax
or spun from fiber which has no affinity for the colors and then dip
the tied web into the pot.” In the Old World, tie dyeing is of Asiatic,
probably of Indian origin, and was in use by the seventh century, perhaps
earlier. The Mohammedan conquests carried the art to Malaysia on the one
hand, to western Africa and Spain on the other, whence it was transmitted
to the Indians of Guatemala after their subjugation by the Spaniards—like
the double-headed eagle. The Peruvians, however, had long before hit upon
the same art, as attested by textile remains in pre-Columbian graves.
Here then, we have a wide and long enduring diffusion of the general
resist dyeing process, and a locally limited instance of independent
parallelism for one phase of it.
105. PRIMARY PARALLELISM: THE BEGINNINGS OF WRITING
Primary parallelism can be established fairly frequently, but usually
only with reference to a general principle, the applications of which
invariably retain evidence of their original separateness.
An illustration is furnished by the history of writing, as sketched in
the introductory paragraphs of the chapter on the Alphabet (§ 130-133).
Many nations have entered the simple stage of pictography. Only a few are
known to have gone on to the stage of rebus or transitional writing—mixed
pictograms or ideograms and phonograms. Of these, certainly two and
possibly as many as four, five, or six devised their own rebus systems:
the Egyptians, Sumerians, Chinese, Hittites, Cretans, and Mayas, in four
continents. But here the parallel ceases. The content of the systems,
the signs themselves and their sound values, are wholly different. The
similarity applies only to the principle of reading pictures or symbols
for their pictureless homonyms. The concrete application of this method
has nothing in common in the several parallel cases. Finally, complete
phonetic writing was invented but once, all alphabets, however diverse,
being historical descendants of the primitive Semitic alphabet, which
served as the sole source of a tremendous diffusion (§ 134-149).
It is worth noting, however, that the first or pictographic stage of
writing is by no means a thing that flows instinctively from all men.
There are peoples, like some of the Indians of Brazil and California,
deficient in the ability or habit, according as one may wish to term
it, of expressing themselves in linear representations. They do not
draw rude outlines to depict objects. Asked to do so, they profess
inability, though set an example, or make a pathetically crude attempt.
Their failure or refusal does not argue inherent lack of faculty, since
the children of the same races, when put to school, draw figures with
interest and often with success. The attitude of the adults is rather
that of a person who had never heard even a snatch of music of any kind
or seen an instrument, being taken to a concert and then asked to compose
a simple little song. He would look upon this task as transcendently
beyond his powers. There are no songless nations, but there are
pictureless ones. Consequently picture-writing is not the spontaneous
product which we, who as children are reared in an environment of
pictures, might imagine it to be. If pictography were due to a primary
parallelism, to a spontaneous outflow of the human mind, its absences
would be in need of explanation. If, on the other hand, it is the result
of a single diffusing development, this must have an antiquity of more
than fifteen thousand years, as attested by the Old Stone Age paintings,
and the failure of certain peoples to be affected is also in need of
explanation.
Another case of parallelism is the recurring tendency to write
syllabically instead of alphabetically. The Hindu inclination in this
direction is discussed below (§ 146). That the phonetic symbols of rebus
systems should be largely syllabic is small wonder, for they are pictures
of things named with whole words. But the Hindu script was derived
from a Semitic letter alphabet, and its essentially syllabic nature
thus represents a reversion. The Japanese in adding 47 purely phonetic
characters to the Chinese ideograms in order to express grammatical
elements, proper names, and the like in their speech, denoted a syllable
by each character. A third as many consonant and vowel signs would have
answered the same purpose. When Sequoya the Cherokee devised an alphabet
for his people in order to equate them with the whites, he incorporated
the forms of a number of the English letters, but the values of all his
signs were syllabic. The same holds of the West African Vei writing
invented in the nineteenth century by a native. He had had enough mission
schooling to be stimulated by the idea of writing, but “instinctively”
fell back on syllable signs even though this necessitated two hundred
different characters.
There is an evident psychological reason for the uniformity of these
endeavors: we image words, in fact produce them, in syllables, not in
sounds. Any one, in slow speech, tends to syllabify, whereas few wholly
illiterate people can be induced without patient training to utter
the separate consonants and vowels of a word, even for the purpose of
teaching a foreigner.
This case of parallelism rests, therefore, on a psychological fact
of apperception. But it was the “accidents” of culture, not innate
psychology, that determined the particular symbols, and their values,
chosen by the Hindus, Japanese, Cherokee, and Vei, with the result that
in these symbols there is no specific similarity.
106. TIME RECKONING
Still another case of primary parallelism is provided by the Maya-Aztec
system of time denotation by coupling two series of symbols in an
overlapping system of permutations, as described below (§ 197). This is
as if we denoted the successive days of the year 1 January, 2 February,
3 March, and so on, until, having come to 12 December we went on 13
January, 14 February, and so once more around until 31 July was reached,
when the next days would be 1 August and 2 September instead of February
1 and 2. Cumbersome and strange as this system appears, an exact parallel
to it in principle was devised by the Hellenistic philosophers when they
coupled the twenty-four hours of the day with the seven planets in a
168-hour cycle which gave the order and names to the days of the week (§
124). A third case occurs in China where ten “celestial stems” and twelve
“terrestrial branches” were permutated to form a sixty year chronological
cycle.[16] All three of these devices are based on the same mathematical
principle and serve the same end of time reckoning. But their content and
result is different. The Greeks combined 24 with 7, the Chinese 12 with
10, the Mayas 13 with 20 and 260 with 365; and the periods treated ranged
from hours to years.
These cases of primary parallelism allow the inference that there are
certain inherent tendencies of the human mind in certain directions,
such as operation in rebus reading, syllabic writing, reckoning by least
common multiples. Here, then, is a seeming approach for a definite
psychological interpretation of the history of civilization. Yet the
results of such a method of attack must not be overestimated. The
generic manner of culture in these several instances is indeed uniform
enough to permit the conclusion that it springs from a uniform impulse
or bent of the mind. But all the particular, concrete content of these
cultural manifestations is as diverse as their historical origins are
separate; which means that psychology may explain what is psychological
in the cases, but that a larger cultural constituent remains over before
which the generically valid principles of psychology are ineffective as
explanations. As in the case of the influence of physical environment it
might be said that psychological factors provide the limiting conditions
of cultural phenomena.
107. SCALE AND PITCH OF PAN’S PIPES
A startling parallelism has been demonstrated between the Pan’s pipes of
the Solomon islands in Melanesia and those of the northwest Brazilian
Indians. The odd pipes differ, each from the next, by the interval of a
fourth. The even pipes give notes half-way in pitch between the adjacent
odd ones, and thus form another “circle of fourths.” But the similarity
does not end here. The absolute pitch of the examined instruments from
Melanesia and Brazil is the same. Thus, the vibration rates in successive
pipes are 557 and 560.5; 651 and 651; 759 and 749; 880 and 879! This
is so close a coincidence as to seem at first sight beyond the bounds
of accidental convergence. The data have in fact been offered, and in
some quarters accepted, as evidence of a historical connection between
the western Pacific and South America. Yet the connection would have
had to be ancient, since no memory of it remains nor is it supported
by resemblances in race, speech, nor anything obvious in culture. The
instruments are perishable. Primitive people, working by rule of thumb,
would be unable to produce an instrument of given absolute pitch except
by matching it against another, and perhaps not then. Moreover, it is
not known that absolute pitch is of the least concern to them. It is
therefore incredible that this correspondence rests on any ancient
diffusion: there must be an error in the record somewhere, or the one
accident in a million has happened in the particular instruments examined.
The identity of scale or intervals however remains, and may be a true
case of parallelism. Only, as usual, it boils down to a rather simple
matter. The circles of fourths evidently originate in the practice,
in both regions, of overblowing the pipes. This produces over-tones;
of which the second, the “third partial tone,” is the fifth above the
octave of the fundamental, so that successive notes in either the odd
or even series of pipes, would, on the octave being disallowed, differ
by fourths. The basis of the resemblance, then, is a physical law of
sound. The cultural similarity shrinks to the facts of pipes in series,
the use of overblown tones, and the intercalating odd-even series. Even
these resemblances are striking, and more specific than many cited cases
of parallelism. In fact, were they supported by enough resemblances in
other aspects of culture, they would go far to compel belief in actual
connections between Melanesia and Brazil.
108. BRONZE
A striking case of independent development is offered by the history of
bronze. Bronze is copper alloyed with five to twenty per cent of tin.
The metals form a compound with properties different from those of the
two constituents. Tin is a soft metal, yet bronze is harder than copper,
and therefore superior for tools. Also, it melts at a lower temperature
and expands in solidifying from the molten condition, and thus is better
material for castings.
In the eastern hemisphere bronze was discovered early and used widely.
For nearly two thousand years it was the metal par excellence of the more
advanced nations. A Bronze Age, beginning about 4,000 B.C., more or less
simultaneously with the first phonetic writing, is recognized as one of
the great divisions of cultural time (§ 66, 225).
In the western hemisphere bronze was apparently invented later than in
the eastern and spread less extensively. It was discovered in or near
the Bolivian highland, which is rich in tin (§ 196). From there its use
diffused to the Peruvian highland, then to the coast, then north to about
Ecuador, and finally, perhaps by maritime contacts, to Mexico, where
local deposits of tin were probably made use of after their value was
realized.
Theoretically, it might be queried whether knowledge of bronze had
possibly been carried to the Andes from the eastern hemisphere by
some now forgotten migration or culture transmission. Against such a
supposition there stands out first of all the isolated and restricted
distribution of the South American bronze art. It is ten thousand miles
by land from the metal-working nations of Asia to the middle Andes. A
people or culture wave that had traveled so far could not but have left
traces of its course by the way. The utilitarian superiority of bronze
over stone tools is so great that no people that had once learned the art
would be likely to give it up. Even if here and there a group of tribes
had retrograded, it cannot be imagined that all the nations between China
and Peru could have slipped back so decisively. Certainly peoples like
the Mayas and Chibchas, expert metallurgists, would never have abandoned
bronze-making.
The theory of a Chinese junk swept out of its course and washed on a
South American shore might be invoked. But the original South American
bronze culture occupies an inland mountain area. Further, while Asiatic
ships have repeatedly been wrecked on the Pacific coast of North America
and probably at times also on that of South America, there is everything
to indicate that the civilizational effects of such accidents were
practically nil. The highest cultures of Mexico and South America
were evolved in interior mountain valleys or plateaus. Not one of the
great accomplishments of the American race—architecture, sculpture,
mathematics, metallurgy—shows any specific localization on the shore of
the Pacific.
Further, it is hard to understand how the arrival of a handful of
helpless strangers could initiate an enduring culture growth. It is easy
enough for us, looking backward through the vista of history, to fancy
the lonely Indians standing on the shore to welcome the strangers from
the west, and then going with docility to school to learn their superior
accomplishments. Actually, however, people normally do not feel or act in
this way. Nations are instinctively imbued with a feeling of superiority.
They look down upon the foreigner. Even where they admit his skill in
this matter or that, they envy rather than admire him. Thus, there is
historic record of Oriental and European vessels being wrecked on the
Pacific coast of North America, during the last century and a half, among
tribes that were still almost wholly aboriginal. In no case did the
natives make any attempt to absorb the higher culture of the strangers.
Generally these were enslaved or killed, their property rifled; sometimes
the wreck was set on fire. The greed for immediate gain of the treasures
in sight proved stronger than any dim impulses toward self-improvement by
learning.
As one conservative author has put it, occasional visits of Asiatics or
Pacific islanders to the shores of America would be, from the point of
view of the growth of the vast mass of culture in that continent, “mere
incidents.” From the review given below, in Chapter XIII, it is clear
that the main determinants of American culture accumulation, after the
first primitive start, were internal; and the case seems as clear for
metal working as for any phase.
109. ZERO
One of the milestones of civilization is the number symbol zero. This
renders possible the unambiguous designation of numbers of any size
with a small stock of figures. It is the zero that enables the symbol 1
to have the varying values of one, ten, hundred, or thousand. In our
arithmetical notation, the symbol itself and its position both count:
1,234 and 4,321 have different values although they contain the identical
symbols. Such a system is impossible without a sign for nothingness: 123
and 1,023 would be indistinguishable. Our zero, along with the other nine
digits, appears to be an invention of the Hindus approximately twelve or
fifteen hundred years ago. We call the notation “Arabic” because it was
transmitted from India to Europe by the Arabs.
[Illustration: FIG. 28. Maya symbols for zero: _a_, monumental; _b_, _c_,
cursive. (From Bowditch.)]
Without a zero sign and position values, two methods are open for the
representation of higher numerical values. More and more signs can be
added for the high values. This was done by the Greeks and Romans. MV
means 1,005, and only that. This is simple enough; but 1,888 requires
so cumbersome a denotation as MDCCCLXXXVIII—thirteen figures of six
different kinds. A simple system of multiplying numbers expressed like
this one is impossible. The unwieldiness is due to the fact that the
Romans, not having hit upon the device of representing nothingness,
employed the separate signs I, X, C, M for the quantities which we
represent by the single symbol 1 with from no to three zeroes added.
The other method is that followed by the Chinese. Besides signs
corresponding to our digits from 1 to 9, they developed symbols
corresponding to “ten times,” “hundred times,” and so on. This was much
as if we should use the asterisk, *, to denote tens, the dagger, †,
for hundreds, the paragraph, ¶, for thousands. We could then represent
1,888 by 1 ¶ 8 † 8 * 8, and 1,005 by 1 ¶ 5, without any risk of being
misunderstood. But the writing of the numbers would in most cases require
more figures, and mathematical operations would be more awkward.
The only nation besides the Hindus to invent a zero sign and the
representation of number values by position of the basic symbols, were
the Mayas of Yucatan. Some forms of their zero are shown in Figure 28.
This Maya development constitutes an indubitable parallel with the
Hindu one. So far as the involved logical principle is concerned, the
two inventions are identical. But again the concrete expressions of the
principle are dissimilar. The Maya zero does not in the least have the
form of our or the Hindus’ zero. Also, the Maya notation was vigesimal
where ours is decimal. They worked with twenty fundamental digits instead
of ten. Their “100” therefore stood for 400, their “1,000” for 8,000.[17]
Accordingly, when they wrote, in their corresponding digits, 1,234, the
value was not 1,234 but 8,864. Obviously there can be no question of a
common origin for such a system and ours. They share an idea or a method,
nothing more. As a matter of fact, these two notational systems, like
all others, were preceded by numeral word counts. Our decimal word count
is based on operations with the fingers, that of the Maya on operations
with the fingers and toes. Twenty became their first higher unit because
twenty finished a person.
It is interesting that of the two inventions of zero, the Maya one was
the earlier. The arithmetical and calendrical system of which it formed
part was developed and in use by the time of the birth of Christ. It may
be older; it certainly required time to develop. The Hindus may have
possessed the prototypes of our numerals as early as the second century
after Christ, but as yet without the zero, which was added during the
sixth or according to some authorities not until the ninth century. This
priority of the Maya must weaken the arguments sometimes advanced that
the ancient Americans derived their religion, zodiac, art, or writing
from Asia. If the zero was their own product, why not the remainder of
their progress also? The only recourse left the naïve migrationist would
be to turn the tables and explain Egyptian and Babylonian civilization as
due to a Maya invasion from Yucatan.
110. EXOGAMIC INSTITUTIONS
In many parts of the world nations live under institutions by which
they are divided into hereditary social units that are exogamous to one
another. That is, all persons born in a unit must take spouses born in
some other unit, fellow members of one’s unit being regarded as kinsmen.
The units are generally described as clans, gentes, or sibs; or, where
there are only two, as moieties. In many cases the sibs or moieties are
totemic; named after, or in some way associated with, an animal, plant,
or other distinctive object that serves as a badge or symbol of the
group. Often the association finds expression in magic or myth. Since
under this system one is born into his social unit, cannot change it,
and can belong to one only, it follows that descent is unilateral. It
is impossible for a man to be a member of both his father’s and his
mother’s sib or totem; custom has established everywhere a rigid choice
between them. Some tribes follow descent from the mother or matrilinear
reckoning, others are patrilinear.[18]
Institutions of this type have a wide and irregular distribution. They
are frequent in Australia, New Guinea, and Melanesia; found in parts
of the East Indies and southeastern Asia; quite rare or stunted in the
remainder of Asia and Polynesia; fairly common in Africa, though they
occur in scattered areas; characteristic again of a large part of North
America, but confined to a few districts of South America. At a rough
guess, it might be said that about as many savage peoples, the world
over, possess totemic-exogamous clans or moieties as lack them. The
patchiness on the map of exogamic institutions argues against their being
all the result of a wave of culture transmission emanating from a single
source. Had such a diffusion occurred, it should have left its marks
among the numerous intervening tribes that are sibless. Further, both
in the eastern and western hemispheres, the most primitive and backward
tribes are, with fair regularity, sibless and non-totemic. If therefore
a hypothetical totem-sib movement had encircled the planet, it could not
have been at an extremely ancient date, else the primitive tribes would
have been affected by it; and since records go back five thousand years
in parts of the Mediterranean area, the movement, if relatively late,
should have left some echo in history, which it has not.
[Illustration: FIG. 29. Distribution of types of exogamic institutions
in Australia: _2M_, two classes, matrilinear; _4M_, four classes,
matrilinear; _4P_, four classes, patrilinear; _8P_, eight classes,
patrilinear; black areas, no classes, patrilinear exogamic totems; _X_,
totems independent of classes; _Y_, totems replace sub-classes; _Z_, no
organization; _?_, uninhabited or unknown. (After Thomas and Graebner.)]
It is therefore probable that totem-sib institutions did not all emanate
from one origin, but developed independently several times. The question
then becomes, how often, and where?
The evidence for America has been reviewed in another connection (§ 185).
It can be summarized in the statement that at least two of the three
sib areas[19] of North America, and probably the two principal ones of
South America, seem to have resulted from a single culture growth which
perhaps centered at one time, although subsequently superseded, in the
middle sector of the double continent. This movement may have had first
a patrilinear and then a matrilinear phase, though at no great interval
of time. The third North American area may have got its patrilinear sib
institutions from the same source but probably developed its matrilinear
ones locally as a subsequent growth. If so, this would be an instance of
convergence on the same continent—a rather rare phenomenon.
For Australia, New Guinea, and Melanesia, the geographical proximity is
so close as to suggest a single origin for the whole area. Patrilinear
and matrilinear descent are both found in Australia as well as Melanesia.
This fact has been interpreted as the result of an earlier patrilineal
and a later matrilineal phase of diffusion. It is interesting that this
conclusion parallels the tentative one independently arrived at for
America, although in both hemispheres further analysis and distributional
study must precede a positive verdict.
In the principal other sib area, Africa, the reckoning is so prevailingly
patrilineal, that the few cases of matrilineate can scarcely be looked
upon as anything but secondary local modifications. As to whether the
totemism and exogamy of Africa can be genetically connected with those
of Australia-Melanesia, it is difficult to decide. The more conservative
attitude would be to regard them as separate growths, although so many
cultural similarities have been noted between western Africa and the
area that stretches from Indo-China to Melanesia, as to have raised
suspicions of an actual connection (§ 270). Yet even if these indications
were to be confirmed, thus sweeping most or all the Old World sib
institutions into a single civilizational movement, the distinctness of
this from the parallel development of the New World would remain.
It is significant that in the three successive continents of America,
Oceania, and Africa the patrilinear and matrilinear phases of the sib
type of society exist side by side, and that the same duality even
holds for each of the separate areas in America. That is, the Northwest
American sib area includes matrilinear as well as patrilinear tribes; the
Southwest area includes both; and so on.
A similar tendency toward geographical association is found in other
phases of social structure: the clan and moiety, and again totemism and
exogamy.
The clan or multiple form of sib organization is logically distinct from
the moiety or dual form. Under the plural system, a person, being of
clan A, may marry at will into clans B, C, D, E, F. Three of his four
grandparents would normally be of other clans than his own, but of which
they were members, would vary in each individual case. In a patrilineal
society, one member of clan A would have his maternal uncles of clan B;
the next, of clan C; a third, perhaps of clan F; according to the choices
which their fathers had made of wives.
Under the dual system, however, a member of moiety A may just as well be
regarded as having a wife of moiety B prescribed or predestined for him
as being forbidden an A wife. Two of his grandparents, say his father’s
father and his mother’s mother, are inevitably of his own moiety, the two
others of the opposite one. Every possible kinsman—his maternal uncle,
his cross cousin, his father-in-law, his wife’s brother-in-law, his
daughter’s son—has his moiety affiliation foreordained. Where descent is
paternal, for instance, everybody knows that his future mother-in-law
must be of his own moiety. Evidently the effect of this dual system on
the relations between kinsfolk, on social usages, on the individual’s
attitude of mind toward other individuals, should normally tend to be
profoundly different from the influence of a multiple clan system. On
theoretical grounds it might seem likely that the dual and multiple
schemes had nothing to do with each other, that they sprang from
distinct psychological impulses.
Yet such a belief would be ungrounded, as the facts of distribution
promptly make clear. In every multiple sib area of any moment, moieties
also occur, and vice versa. In the California-Southwest region, for
instance, tribes like the Miwok are divided into moieties only, the
Mohave and Hopi into clans only, the Tewa and Cahuilla into moieties
subdivided into clans. So in the Eastern, the Plains, and the Northwest
areas of North America, clan tribes and moiety tribes live side by
side; whereas as soon as these regions are left behind, there are vast
districts—much of Mexico, Texas, the Great Basin and Plateau, northern
Canada and the Arctic coast—whose inhabitants get along without either
clans or moieties. So again in Melanesia and in Australia (Fig. 29), the
two types of organization exist side by side, while most of Polynesia,
Asia, and Europe are void of both. Only Africa shows some development of
multiple clan institutions but no moieties. In short, as soon as areas
of some size are considered, they prove in the main to be of two kinds.
Either they contain both clan tribes and moiety tribes, or they contain
neither. That is, the clan institution and the moiety institution are
correlated or associated in geography, as patrilinear and matrilinear
descent are correlated, which indicates a community of origin for them.
A similar relation exists between exogamic units, be they moieties or
clans, and totemism. The first constitutes a scheme of society, a method
of organization; the second, a system of symbolism. Sibs are social
facts, totems a naming device with magico-religious implications. There
is no positive reason why they should be associated. They are not always
associated. There are American tribes like the Navaho and Gros Ventre
that live under unilateral and exogamic institutions without totems.
Placenames or nicknames distinguish the groups. In Australia, the Arunta
possess unilaterally reckoning exogamic groups as well as totems, but
the two are dissociated; a person takes his group by descent, his totem
wholly irrespective of this according to place of birth or conception.
In Africa there are no less than six tribes or series of tribes in which
exogamy and totemism are thus dissociated; a person takes his totem
from his father, his exogamic unit from his mother, so that the two
ordinarily do not coincide for parent and child. Exogamy and totemism,
then, are theoretically separate factors.
Yet since they are distinct, it is remarkable that in probably seven
or eight tenths of all cases they coincide, and that in each of the
continents or areas containing them they are found associated. If exogamy
and totemism had grown out of separate roots, one could expect at least
one considerable area somewhere in which one of them appeared without the
other. But there is no such area. Wherever social exogamy appears among a
larger group of nations, social totemism also crops out; and vice versa.
It must then be concluded that exogamy and totemism, matrilineate and
patrilineate, multiple and dual sibs, all show a strong tendency toward
association with one another. In other words, their correlation is
positive and strong. Even where they seem mutually exclusive in their
very nature, like matrilinear and patrilinear reckoning, ways have been
found by unconscious human ingenuity to make them coexist among one
people, as when one reckoning is attached to the exogamy, the other to
the totemism; and still more often they occur among adjacent tribes.
111. PARALLELS AND PSYCHOLOGY
Such associations as these are common enough in the history of
civilization. A number are touched upon elsewhere in this volume under
the name of culture trait associations or complexes (§ 97, 149).
But usually such a complex or nexus consists of culture elements
that have no necessary connection: Christianity and trousers, for
instance. It is accident that first throws them together; association
ties them one to the other; once the cluster is established by usage,
its coherence tends to persist. But there is something arbitrary
about this cohesion, generally. There is no inherent reason why a
hundred American tribes that grow maize should also grow beans and
squashes and nothing else; but they do limit themselves to the three.
The distinctive feature of the sib-complex is that it has an almost
reasonable quality. Its elements, however separate or even opposite
logically, do have a certain psychological affinity to one another.
Also, the arbitrary maize-beans-squash complex and other complexes
are generally not duplicated. But the intricate and psychologically
founded totemism-exogamy-descent complex looks as if it might have been
triplicated or quadruplicated. This parallelism, if the facts prove to
substantiate it, is parallelism raised to a higher power than any yet
considered. Heretofore the discussion has been of the parallelism of
single culture traits. Here it is a case of parallelism of a complex of
culture traits. Such complex convergence might suggest something peculiar
to or inherent in the human mind, leading it, once it is stimulated to
commence the development of one of the factors of the complex, to follow
with the production of the other factors.[20]
Similar instances would be the tendency of agriculture to be followed by
town life, if it could be demonstrated, though this seems doubtful; of
settled living to be accompanied by migration legends; of religions with
personal founders to become propagandizing and international but in time
to die out among the nations in which they were originated.
In regard to all such cases it may be said first of all that an
exhaustive analysis is necessary to ascertain whether the seeming
association or correlation is borne out by the facts. Second, the
possibility of diffusion must be eliminated. If Melanesian and African
totem-exogamy are both products of one culture growth, they cannot
be counted as two examples of the same association. If they should
ultimately both prove to be linked with the American system by a wave
of migration or culture contact, as has, indeed been maintained in
two separate hypotheses recently advanced, parallelism is of course
disproved altogether. But such views are as yet undemonstrated and seem
extreme; and if, after continued search of the evidence, two or more
such associations or complex parallels as the exogamic-totemic scheme
of society stand as independent growths, it is evident that they will
be something in the nature of cultural manifestations of psychological
forces. In short, we should then be beginning to grasp specific
psychological determinants for the phenomena or events of civilization.
But as yet such a causal explanation of the data of anthropology by the
mechanism of psychology has not been achieved.
112. LIMITATIONS ON THE PRINCIPLE
From the evidences reviewed in this and the last chapter, the conclusion
is confirmed which social philosophers had long since reached, that
imitation is the normal process by which men live, and that invention is
rare, a thing which societies and individuals oppose with more resistance
than they are ever aware of, and which probably occurs only as the
result of the pressure of special circumstances, although these are as
yet little understood. Not only are a hundred instances of diffusion
historically traceable for every one of parallelism, but the latter is
regularly limited in scope. Something tends to make us see phenomena
more parallel than they actually are. They merely spring from the same
impulse, they inhere in the properties of objects or nature, they bear
resemblance at one point only—and differ at all other points. Yet they
tend to impress us, in some mysterious way, as almost identical. The
history of civilization has no more produced two like cultures, or two
separately developed identical culture traits, than has the evolution
of organic life ever duplicated a species by convergently modifying
two distinct forms. A whale may look fishlike, he is a mammal. The
Hindu and the Maya zero are logically the same; actually they have in
common nothing but their abstract value: their shapes, their place in
their systems, are different. The most frequent process of culture
history therefore is one of tradition or diffusion in time and space,
corresponding roughly to hereditary transmission in the field of organic
life. Inventions may be thought of as similar to organic mutations, those
“spontaneous” variations that from time to time arise and establish
themselves. The particular causes of both inventions and mutations remain
as good as unknown. Now and then a mutant or an invention heads in the
same direction as another previously arisen one. But, since they spring
from different antecedents, such convergences never attain identity. They
remain on the level of analogous resemblance. Substantial identity, a
part for part correspondence, is invariably a sign of common origin, in
cultural as well as organic history.
CHAPTER X
THE ARCH AND THE WEEK
113. House building and architecture.—114. The problem of
spanning.—115. The column and beam.—116. The corbelled
arch.—117. The true arch.—118. Babylonian and Etruscan
beginnings.—119. The Roman arch and dome.—120. Mediæval
cathedrals.—121. The Arabs: India: modern architecture.—122.
The week: holy numbers.—123. Babylonian discovery of
the planets.—124. Greek and Egyptian contributions: the
astrological combination.—125. The names of the days and the
Sabbath.—126. The week in Christianity, Islam, and eastern
Asia.—127. Summary of the diffusion.—128. Month-thirds and
market weeks.—129. Leap days as parallels.
In exemplification of the principles discussed in the last two chapters,
the next two are given over to a more detailed consideration of several
typical ramifying growths whose history happens to be known with
satisfactory fullness. These are the arch, the week, and the alphabet.
113. HOUSE BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE
The history of human building makes a first impression of an endless
tangle. Every people rears some sort of habitations, and however rude
these are, structural principles are involved. Obviously, too, geography
and climate are bound to have at least a delimiting influence. The Eskimo
of the Arctic cannot build houses of wood; the inhabitants of a coral
reef in the Pacific could not, however much they might wish, develop
a style in brick. In structures not used as dwellings, their purpose
necessarily affects their form. A temple is likely to be made on a
different plan from a court of law. Temples themselves may vary according
to the motives and rituals of the religions which they serve.
Bewilderment begins to abate as soon as one ceases trying to contemplate
all buildings reared by human hands. Obviously a dwelling erected by
a small family group for the utilitarian purpose of shelter is likely
to be more subject to immediate adaptations to climate than a large
communal structure serving some purpose such as the service of a deity.
If consideration be restricted still further, to religious or public
buildings set up with the idea of permanence, another class of causes
making for variability begins to be eliminated. A structure intended
as an enduring monument is reared with consideration to the impression
that it will create in the minds of future generations. Its emotional
potentialities, be these evoked by its mere size, by the æsthetic nature
of its design, or by a combination of the two, come into the forefront.
Such permanent buildings being in stone or brick, techniques which
flourish in wood or other temporary materials are eliminated. Finally,
a monumental structure is possible only at the hands of a community of
some size. An unstable group of nomads, a thinly scattered agricultural
population, cannot assemble in sufficient numbers even for periods
each year, to carry out the long-continued labors that are necessary.
The aggregation of numbers of men in one spot is always accompanied by
specialization in advancement of the arts. Consequently the very fact
that a structure is monumental involves the probability that its builders
are able to rise above the limitations of mere necessity, and can in some
degree execute products of their imagination.
114. THE PROBLEM OF SPANNING
If now our attention be confined to large buildings of the more massive
and permanent sort, it becomes clear that one of the chief problems which
all their constructors have had to grapple with, is that of roofing large
spaces and spanning wide openings in walls. A pyramid can be heaped up,
or a wall reared to a great height, without much other than quantitative
difficulties being encountered. A four hundred foot pyramid does not
differ in principle from the waist-high one that a child might pile up.
The problems which it involves are essentially the economic and political
ones of providing and controlling the needed multitudes of workers.
Architecture as such is in abeyance and the engineering problems involved
are mainly those of transporting and raising large blocks of stone. Much
the same holds of walls. The Incas, for instance, reared masonry of
astounding massiveness and exactness without ever seriously attempting to
solve architectural problems.
Once, however, a structure is planned to cover a wide space, it becomes
architecturally ambitious. The roof of a large dwelling can be made
easily of poles and thatch by such collaborators as a family might
muster. But to span a clear space of some size in stone requires more
than numbers of workers. The accomplishment also yields definite sense of
achievement which is strong in proportion as the extent of the ceiling
is great. The difficulties are diminished in proportion as the mass of
the structure is large and the clear space is small, but the satisfying
effect is correspondingly decreased. A vault whose walls are thicker
than its interior is wide, produces as chief impression an effect of
massiveness. One feels the solidity of the structure, the amount of labor
that has gone into it; but one is left without the sense of a worth-while
difficulty having been self-imposed and mastered. Sooner or later,
therefore, after men began to hold themselves available for co-operative
enterprises in numbers, adventurous minds must have been fired with
a desire to grapple with problems of æsthetic construction, and to
leave behind them monuments of triumphant solution. The story of these
voluntary and imaginative endeavors is the history of monumental art.
Two principal methods have been followed in the solution of the problem
of covering large free spaces. The first is the method of the column and
the lintel; the second that of the arch or vault. The column and lintel
do not differ fundamentally from the idea of the wall with superimposed
roof beams. The elements of both are vertical support and horizontal
beam. In the arch, however, this simple scheme is departed from, and the
covering elements take on a curved or sloping form. The apparently free
float of the span is stimulatingly impressive, especially when executed
in a heavy and thoroughly rigid material. The beam is subject to bending
stress. Timber makes a good material because of its strength against
breakage by bending. Stone is unreliable or outrightly weak against a
bending stress, besides adding to the stress by its own weight. There
are therefore inherent limitations on the space that can be covered by a
horizontal stone beam.
115. THE COLUMN AND BEAM
Most early architecture developed the column. Even so superb an
architecture as that of the Greeks never rose above it. The æsthetic
value of the Parthenon lies in the balance and feeling with which a
fundamentally simple plan has been elaborated, not in the daring way in
which an inherently ambitious problem has been met.
On account of its essential simplicity, columnar architecture grew up
among several historically unconnected nations. In the case of most of
them, there can be distinguished an early stage of building in wood,
when the column was the trunk of a tree, and a later stage in which the
post was replaced by a monolith, or by superimposed drums of stone.
This change appears to have taken place somewhat independently in Egypt
and in Greece, and wholly so in Mexico. It has been thought that Greek
architecture was derived from Egypt, but there was probably little more
than a transmission of stimulus, since Greek temples were wooden pillared
several thousand years after the Egyptians were rearing huge stone
columns. Furthermore, if the Greeks had borrowed their column outright
from Egypt, they would probably have copied it slavishly at the outset.
Yet their early capitals are without the lotus flower head in which the
Egyptian column terminated. Here, then, and still more in Mexico, there
was parallel development.
The failure of the Greeks to pass beyond column and lintel architecture
may seem strange for a people that showed so unusual an artistic faculty
and so bold and enterprising a spirit as they manifested in most
departments of civilization. The cause appears to lie not in any internal
arrest of their artistic evolution, but in the conditions that prevailed
in another field of their culture: their political particularity. The
Greek state remained a city. All attempts to establish larger political
aggregates, whether on the basis of confederation or conquest, failed
miserably and speedily. The Greek was ingrainedly addicted to an outlook
that was not merely provincial but literally municipal. The result was
that really large coöperative enterprises were beyond him. Paved roads,
aqueducts, sewers, and works of a like character were scarcely attempted
on any scale of magnitude. With the rather small numbers of individuals
which at best the Greeks assembled in one spot, such works were not
necessary, and undertaken in mere ambition, they would have encountered
public antagonism. Consequently Greek public buildings were, by the
standards of many other nations, mediocre in size of ground plan, low
in height, without endeavor to impress by sweep of clear space. This
fact illustrates the almost organic interconnection existing between
the several sides of the culture of any people; it illustrates also
the importance of knowing the whole of a civilization before trying to
provide an explanation for any one of its manifestations.
116. THE CORBELLED ARCH
The arch brings in an inherently new principle of architecture. It is a
device for carrying construction over an empty space without horizontal
beams. But it may take two principal forms: the corbelled or “false”
arch, and the “true” arch. Both are arches in form, but the blocks that
form the curvature of one are not self-supporting; in the other they are.
The corbelled arch achieves its span through a successive projection
of the stones or bricks that abut on each side of the open space. The
stone at the end of the second course of masonry extends part of its
length beyond the end stone of the first course. At the opposite side,
the second course hangs similarly out above the first. In the third
course, the end blocks again project beyond those of the second. The
arrangement thus is that of two series of brackets, or two staircases
turned upside down. The higher the masonry rises, the more do the clear
space narrow and the two lines of hanging steps approach until they meet
and the arch is complete. What keeps the projecting stones from toppling
into the clear space? Nothing, obviously, but such weight as is put on
their inner or embedded ends. Suppose a stone projects a third of its
length beyond the one below, so that its center of gravity is still
above the lower stone. It will then lie as placed. Suppose still another
stone again projects a third of its length beyond the second. Its center
of gravity now falling outside the lowest block, it will topple both
itself and the second one. Only if other blocks are inserted behind
will their counterweight hold up the projecting blocks. Obviously, there
will be more such counterweights needed the higher the side of the
arch rises. In general, the area of wall needed as counterweight is at
least as great as the area of overhanging. If the arch is to clear ten
feet horizontally—hanging over five feet from each side—there must be
five feet or more of masonry built up on each side of the clear space.
A corbelled arch forming a relatively small doorway in the face of a
wall presents no difficulty, but a corbelled arch that stands free is
impossible.
The same principle holds for the vault, which is a three-dimensional
extension of the virtually two-dimensional arch. The hollow or
half-barrel of the corbelled vault has to be flanked by a volume of
building material exceeding its own content. This need eliminates
corbelling as a possible method of rearing structures that rise free
and with lightness. Hence the clumsy massiveness of, for instance, Maya
architecture, which, so far as it employs the vault, often contains more
building material than spanned space.
Another difficulty, beyond that of counterweighting, which besets the
user of the corbelled arch, is that the projecting stones of each course
are subjected to the same bending strain as a beam. The weight above
strives to snap them in two.
The corbelled arch and vault have been independently devised and have
also diffused. They were employed in gigantic Bronze age tombs at Mycenæ
in Greece—the so-called treasure house of Atreus,—in Portugal, and in
Ireland (Fig. 41). These developments seem historically connected. On the
other hand the Mayas of Yucatan also built corbelled arches, which must
constitute a separate invention. This parallel development differs from
that of the true arch, which seems everywhere to be derived from a single
original source.
117. THE TRUE ARCH
The true arch differs from the corbelled in needing no counterweight.
The blocks that form the under surface or soffit of its span are
self-sustaining. The true arch thus yields an æsthetic satisfaction which
can be attained in no other way, especially when it soars in magnitude.
The fundamental principle of the true arch is the integration of its
elements. Such an arch is nothing until completed; but from that moment
its constituents fuse their strength. Each block has a shape which is
predetermined by the design of the whole, and each is useless, in fact,
not even self-supporting, until all the others have been fitted with
it. Hence the figure of speech as well as the reality of the keystone:
the last block slipped into place, locking itself and all the others.
The features of the blocks or “voussoirs” which makes possible this
integration, is the taper of their sides. Each is a gently sloping piece
of wedge instead of a rectangular block. When bricks replace dressed
stone, the mortar takes the place of this shaping, being thinner toward
the inner face of the vault and thicker toward the interior of the
construction.
A true arch in process of erection would instantly collapse if not held
up. It can be built only over a scaffold or “centering.” Once however the
keystone has wedged its parts together, it not only stands by itself but
will support an enormous weight. The greater the pressure from above, the
more tightly are the blocks forced together. Instability in a true arch
is not due to the bending stress coming from the superimposed mass, as
in the corbelled arch or a horizontal roofing. The blocks are subjected
only to crushing pressure, which stone and brick are specially adapted
to withstand. The weakness of the arch is that it turns vertical into
horizontal thrust. With more weight piled on top, the sidewise thrust,
the inclination to spread apart, becomes greater, and must be resisted by
buttressing. This is what the Hindus mean when they say that “the arch
never sleeps.”
118. BABYLONIAN AND ETRUSCAN BEGINNINGS
While the exact circumstances attending the invention of the true arch
are not clear, the earliest specimens preserved are from the ancient
brick-building peoples of Babylonia, especially at Nippur about 3,000
B.C. Thence the principle of the arch was carried to adjacent Assyria.
Both these Mesopotamian peoples employed the arch chiefly on a small
scale in roofing doors and in tunnels. It remained humble and utilitarian
in their hands; its architectural possibilities were scarcely conceived.
They continued to rear their monumental structures mainly with an eye to
quantity: high and thick walls, ramps, towers ascending vertically or by
steps, prevailed.
The true arch and vault are next found in Italy, among a prosperous
city-dwelling people, the Etruscans, some seven or more centuries before
Christ. All through the civilization of this nation runs a trait of
successful but never really distinctive accomplishment. The Etruscans
were receptive to new ideas and applied them with energy, usually only
to degenerate them in the end. Whether they discovered the arch for
themselves or whether knowledge of it was carried to Italy from Asia is
not wholly clear, since history knows little about the Etruscans, and
archæology, though yielding numerous remains, leaves the problem of their
origin dark. The Etruscans, or Tyrrhenians as the Greeks knew them, were
however active traders, and a number of features in their civilization,
such as liver divination (§ 97), as well as ancient tradition, connect
them with Asia. It is therefore probable that the principle of arch
construction was transmitted to them from its earlier Babylonian
source. The Etruscans also failed to carry the use of the arch far into
monumental architecture. They employed it in tombs, gates, and drains
rather than as a conspicuous feature of public buildings.
119. THE ROMAN ARCH AND DOME
From the Etruscans their neighbors, the Romans, learned the arch. They
too adopted it at first for utilitarian purposes. The great sewer of
Rome, for instance, the Cloaca Maxima, is an arched vault of brick.
Gradually, however, as the Romans grew in numbers and wealth and acquired
a taste for public undertakings, they transferred the construction to
stone and introduced it into their buildings. By the time their polity
changed from the republican to the imperial form, the arch was the most
characteristic feature of their architecture. The Greeks had built
porticos of columns; the Romans erected frontages of rows of arches. The
exterior of their circus, the Coliseum, is a series of stories of arches.
Much of the mass of the structure also rests upon arches, thus making
possible the building of the huge edifice with a minimum of material.
On the practical side, this is one of the chief values of the arch. The
skill which evolved it eliminates a large percentage of brute labor.
Earlier peoples would have felt it necessary to fill the space between
the interior tiers of seats and the outer wall of the Coliseum.
Once the fever of architecture had infected them, the Romans went beyond
the simple arch and vault. They invented the dome. As the simplest arch,
such as a doorway or window, a perforation in a wall, is essentially
two dimensional, and a vault is the projecting of this plane area into
the three dimensions of a half cylinder, so the dome can be conceived
as the extension of the arch into another three-dimensional form, the
half sphere. Their relations are those of a hoop, a barrel, and a hollow
ball. Imagine a vault revolved on a central vertical pivot, and it will
describe the surface of a dome. Two intersecting arches can be served by
a single keystone. Theoretically, more and more arches can be introduced
to intersect at the same point, until they form a continuous spheroid
surface. Neither construction nor the evolution of the dome did actually
take place by this method of compounding arches, which however serves to
illustrate the logical relation of the two structures.
The Roman engineers put domes on their Pantheon, the tomb of Hadrian, and
other buildings. In the centuries in which the Mediterranean countries
were Romanized, the dome and the arch, the vault and the row of arches
set on pillars, became familiar to all the inhabitants of the civilized
western world. After Roman power crumbled, the architectural traditions
survived. Even when there was decadence of execution and little
monumental construction, the principles once gained were never lost.
120. MEDIÆVAL CATHEDRALS
With the emergence from the Dark to the Middle Ages, architecture revived
with an application to churches instead of temples, circuses, and baths.
In southern Europe adherence to the old Roman model remained close, and
the style is known as Romanesque. In northern Europe the Roman principles
found themselves on newer soil, tradition bound less rigorously, and
the style underwent more modification. The arch became pointed at the
top. Vertical building lines were elongated at the expense of horizontal
ones, which in the lower and less brilliant sun of the north are less
effective in catching light and shade and giving plastic effect than
on the Mediterranean. The dominant effect became one of aspiration
toward height. This is the so-called Gothic architecture, developed
from the twelfth century on, most notably in northern France, with much
originality also in England, and undergoing provincial modification in
the various north European countries. In fact, the style was finally
carried back into Italy, to compete there with the Romanesque order, as
in the famous cathedral of Milan.
As an artistic design a Gothic cathedral is as different from an imperial
Roman building as the latter from a Greek temple. Yet it represents
nothing but a surface modification of Roman methods. Its essential
engineering problems had been solved more than a thousand years earlier.
The effect of a hemispherical arch associated with low round columns,
and of a high pointed one soaring from tall clusters of buttresses, is
as diverse as can be obtained in architecture. But so far as plan or
invention are concerned, there is no decisive distinction between the two
orders.
121. THE ARABS: INDIA: MODERN ARCHITECTURE
In the east, Roman architectural tradition was sustained without rupture
and even carried forward in the Byzantine empire. The great church of
St. Sophia at Constantinople is a sixth century example of a splendid
dome set on four great arches and intersecting with smaller domes at its
corners. From the Byzantine Greeks—or Romans as they long continued to
call themselves—and perhaps from the neighboring Sassanian Persians, the
principle of arch and dome came to the Arabs when these underwent their
sudden expansion after the death of Mohammed. In nearly all the countries
overrun by the Arabs, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily,
and Spain, they encountered innumerable old public buildings or ruins.
It was not long before they were emulating these. During the centuries
superficial fashion does not stand still in architecture any more than in
dress. The trousers of 1850 would seem out of place if worn in 1920, and
yet the two garments are identical in basic plan. So with Roman and Arab
or Saracenic architecture. The Arab sometimes twisted his columns and
bulged his arch to horseshoe shape. He added no essential element.
Among the countries in which the Arabs built is Spain. Hence their
architecture, in the form known as Moorish, influenced that of the
Spaniards. They in turn carried the style to Mexico; from there it
was transported to New Mexico and California, where converted Indians
made and laid the adobe bricks of their mission churches according to
the plans of the padres. Since the American occupation, the buildings
and ruins of the Spanish period have stood out as landmarks, fired the
imagination of visitors, and set the model for a type of architecture.
Railroad stations and the like are now done in “Mission” style, which in
essentials is nothing but Spanish Moorish architecture, as this again is
only the Arab modification of the Roman original.
Along with Mohammedanism, the Roman-Saracenic architecture spread
eastward also to India. In the sixteenth century Mohammedan conquerors of
Mongol origin, known therefore as the Moguls, carved out a great empire
in northern India. Prosperity resulted for several generations, and its
memory was embellished by the erection of notable buildings. Perhaps
the most famous of these is the tomb near Agra known as the Taj Mahal.
Set in its sunlit environment, built of white marble, and its surface a
maze of inlay in polished stone, this structure seems utterly unrelated
to the grim, narrow, upward-stretching cathedrals of northern Europe
with stained glass filling the spaces between their buttresses. Yet the
central feature of the Taj Mahal is a great dome done on the identical
plan as that of St. Sophia or the Pantheon and derived from them. What
then one is wont to regard as the triumph of Indian architecture is not
Indian at all; no more than Gothic architecture had any connection with
the Goths. The one is Mohammedan, the other French. Both represent little
else than the working out in new countries and in later centuries of an
invention which the Romans had borrowed from the Etruscans and they from
the Babylonians. The device diffused from Asia into Europe and Africa
and returned after several thousand years, to flourish once more near
its source of origin, enormously modified æsthetically and enriched with
infinite refinement, but still without radical change.
It is an interesting commentary on the sluggishness of invention that
whereas we to-day build in concrete and steel as well as in wood and
brick and stone, and erect buildings of greater size as well as for a
larger variety of purposes than ever before in history, yet we have
so far been unable to add any new type of æsthetic design. Our public
buildings, those intended to serve as monuments and therefore summoning
the utmost abilities of the architect, still make use of the arch, vault,
and dome, or fall back frankly on modifications of the Greek temple with
its rows of columns. So far as the outside appearance of modern buildings
goes, all our fine architecture is essentially a burrowing in the past
to recombine in slightly new proportions, and for new uses, elements
taken from the most diverse countries and ages, but forming part of only
two lines of development. It may be, when we have built much longer in
steel and concrete, and perhaps still newer materials, that the inherent
properties of these may gradually force on a future generation of
architects and engineers possibilities which indeed are now lying before
us, but to which the resistance of the human mind to novelty blinds us.
122. THE WEEK: HOLY NUMBERS
The history of the week is also a meandering one. Its origins go back
to a number cult. Many nations have a habit of looking upon some one
number as specially lucky, desirable, holy, or perhaps unfortunate; at
any rate endowed with peculiar virtue or power. Three and seven at once
rise to mind, with thirteen as unfortunate. But the particular numbers
considered mystic are very diverse. Few American Indian tribes, for
instance, had any feeling about seven,[21] and still fewer about three.
The latter, in fact, would have seemed to almost all of them imperfect
and insignificant. Nearly all the Americans who were conscious of any
preferential custom exalted four; and the remaining tribes, those of the
North Pacific Coast, were addicted to five. The Africans were without
any feeling for seven, except where they had come under Islamic or other
foreign influences. The Australians and Pacific islanders also have not
concerned themselves with seven, and the same seems to be true of those
remoter peoples of northern Asia which remained until recently beyond the
range of the irradiation of higher civilization.
This reduces the area in which seven is thought to have sacred power to
a single continuous tract comprising Europe, the culturally advanced
portions of Asia and the East Indies, and such parts of Africa as have
come under Eur-Asiatic influence. It is significant that seven was
devoid of special significance in ancient Egypt. This circumscribed
distribution suggests diffusion from a single originating center. Where
this may have been, there is no direct evidence to show, but there are
indications that it lay in Babylonia. Here mathematics, astrology, and
divination flourished at an early time. Since the art of foretelling
the issue of events from examination of a victim’s liver spread from
Babylonia to Italy on one side and to Borneo on the other, it is the more
likely that the equally ancient attribution of mystic virtue to seven may
have undergone the same diffusion. In fact, the two practices may have
traveled as part of a “complex.” The Greeks and Hebrews are virtually out
of question as originators because they were already thinking in terms
of seven at a time when they were only receiving culture elements from
Babylonia without giving anything in return.
123. BABYLONIAN DISCOVERY OF THE PLANETS
The Babylonians, together with the Egyptians, were also the first
astronomers. The Egyptians turned their interest to the sun and the
year, and devised the earliest accurate solar calendar. The Babylonians
lagged behind in this respect, adhering to a cumbersome lunar-solar
calendar. But they acquired more information as to other heavenly
phenomena: the phases of the moon, eclipses, the courses of the planets.
They devised the zodiac and learned to half predict eclipses. It is true
that their interest in these realms was not scientific in the modern
sense, but sacerdotal and magical. An eclipse was a misfortune, an
expected eclipse that did not “come off,” a cause for rejoicing. Yet this
superstitious interest did lead the Babylonians to genuine astronomical
discoveries.
Among these was the observation that five luminaries besides the sun
and moon move regularly across the heavens, visible to the naked eye
and independent of the host of fixed stars: the planets that we call
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This impressive fact must have
significance, they felt, and from anthropocentric reasons they found the
significance in the influence of these bodies on the fortunes of men.
This was the beginning of astrology, which charlatans and dupes still
practise among ourselves, but which in its youth represented one of the
triumphs of civilized knowledge. The planets were identified with gods by
the Babylonians, at any rate named after gods.
It is even probable that the ancient priest-astronomer-magicians were
driven to distinguish the full set of observable planets by their desire
to attain the full number seven. It is not an obvious thing by any
means that the all-illuminating sun should be set on a par with moving
stars that at times are no more conspicuous than some fixed ones. No
people unaffected by the Babylonian precedent has ever hit upon the
strange device of reckoning sun and moon as stars. Then, too, Mercury is
perceptible with difficulty, on account of its proximity to the sun. It
is said that great astronomers of a few centuries ago sometimes never in
their lives saw this innermost of the planets with naked eye, at least
in northern latitudes. It seems possible therefore that its Babylonian
discovery may have been hastened by an eagerness to attain the perfect
seven for the number of the traveling bodies.
124. GREEK AND EGYPTIAN CONTRIBUTIONS: THE ASTROLOGICAL COMBINATION
After the conquest of western Asia by Alexander, the Hellenistic Greeks
took over the undifferentiated Babylonian astrology-astronomy and
developed it into a science. They for the first time determined the
distance or order of the seven luminaries from the earth, and determined
it as correctly as was possible as long as it was assumed that our earth
formed the center of the universe. Ptolemy—the astronomer, not the
king—placed Saturn as the most outward, next Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus,
Mercury, Moon.
This scientific advance, the west Asiatic astrologers again took hold of
and brought into connection with the hours of the day. For this purpose
they employed not the old Babylonian division of the day and night into
twelve hours—which had long since passed over to the Greeks—but the
Egyptian reckoning of twenty-four. This was possible because the Greek
discoveries were made in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.
Each of the twenty-four hours in turn was assigned by the astrologers to
a planet in the Ptolemaic order, beginning with Saturn. As there were
only the seven, the cycle began over again on the eighth hour, and in
the same way the fifteenth and twenty-second were “dominated” by Saturn.
This gave the twenty-third to Jupiter, the twenty-fourth to Mars, and the
twenty-fifth—the first of the next day, to the Sun. This second day was
thought to be specially under the influence of the planet of its initial
hour, the Sun, as the first was under the influence of its initial hour,
that of Saturn. With the continuance of the count, the Moon would become
dominant of the first hour of the third day, and so on through the
repeated series, the remaining planets emerging in the sequence Mars,
Mercury, Jupiter, Venus; whereupon, the cycle having been exhausted, it
would begin all over again with Saturn’s day—Saturday, as we still call
it—and its successors Sun’s day and Moon’s day.
This was the week as we know it, evolved perhaps somewhat more than a
century before Christ, soon carried back into Alexandria, and there
imparted to Greeks, Romans, and other nationalities. By the time Jesus
was preaching, knowledge of the planetary week had reached Rome. Less
than a century later, its days were being written in Pompeii. In another
hundred years it was spoken of by contemporaries as internationally
familiar.
125. THE NAMES OF THE DAYS AND THE SABBATH
As yet, however, the week was more of a plaything of the superstitious
than a civil or religious institution; and it was pagan, not Christian.
The names of the days were those of the gods which the Babylonians had
assigned to the planets a thousand or more years earlier, or, in the
Western world, “translations” of the Babylonian god names. The Greeks
had long before, in naming the stars which we know as Mercury, Jupiter,
Venus, substituted their Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite for the Babylonian
Nabu, Marduk, Ishtar, on the basis of some resemblance of attributes.
Thus, Nabu had to do with learning or cunning like Hermes; Marduk, like
Zeus, wielded thunder; Ishtar and Aphrodite were both goddesses of love.
The Romans, in turn, “translated” the Greek names into those of their
divinities Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, which survive for instance in French
Mercre-di, Jeu-di, Vendre-di.
In the passing on of the week to the Germanic barbarians, still
another “translation” was made, to Woden, Thor, Frija, whence English
Wedn-es-day, Thur-s-day, Fri-day. It is true that these northern gods
were not equivalents of the Roman ones, but that mattered little.
The reckoning of the week was growing in frequency, and some sort of
familiar and pronounceable names for its days had to be found for the
new peoples to whom it spread. So a minimum of resemblance between two
deities answered for an identification. Moreover, the ancients, because
they believed in the reality of their gods but not in the infinity of
their number, were in the habit of assuming that the deities of foreign
nations must be at bottom the same as their own. Therefore a considerable
discrepancy of attribute or worship troubled them no more than the
difference in name.
For the days of the week, then, which the public came more and more to
deal with, these translations were made. Astronomy, however, was in the
hands of the learned, who knew Latin; and hence scientists still denote
the planets as Mercury, Venus, and so on, instead of Woden and Frija.
Jesus observed the Sabbath, not Sunday, which he was either ignorant of
or would have denounced as polytheistic. The Sabbath was an old Hebrew
institution, a day of abstention and cessation from labor, evidently
connected with and perhaps derived from the Babylonian Shabattum. These
shabattum were the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, twenty-eighth,
and also nineteenth days of the month, the first four probably having
reference to the phases of the moon, and all five being “days of rest
of the heart,” inauspicious for undertakings, and therefore unfavorable
for work. They were thus tabooed, supramundane days, and while their
recurrence chiefly at seven day intervals, like that of the Jewish
Sabbath, provided a sort of frame for a week, this week was never filled
in. The influence of the Babylonian-Hebrew Sabbath on the development
of the week was chiefly this: it provided the early Christians with a
ready-made habit of religiously observing one day in seven. This period
coinciding with the seven day scheme of the week that was coming into use
among pagans, ultimately reinforced the week with the authority of the
church.
126. THE WEEK IN CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM, AND EASTERN ASIA
Christianity however felt and long resisted the essential paganism of the
week. The Roman Catholic church in its calendar recognizes the Lord’s
day, the second to sixth days, and the Sabbath, but none named after a
heathen god. In Greece the influence of the Orthodox church has been
strong enough to establish a similar numbering in civil life; and the
Slavic nations, also mostly Orthodox, follow the same system except that
our Monday is their “first” day and they close the week with Sunday.
Sunday, instead of Sabbath-Saturday, became the religious day of the week
in Christianity because of the early tradition that it was on this day
that Jesus rose from the dead. An unconscious motive of perhaps greater
influence was the desire to differentiate the new religion from its
Sabbath-observing mother religion, both in the minds of converts from
Judaism and in the opinion of the pagans. The Romans for about a century
confused Jews and Christians, no doubt to the irritation of both.
Meanwhile, the pagans themselves, perhaps under the influence of the
popular sun-worshiping Mithraic religion of the second and third
centuries, had come to look upon the Sun’s day instead of Saturn’s as
the first of the week. At any rate, in 321 A.D. Constantine ordained
“the venerable day of the Sun” as a legal holiday from governmental,
civic, and industrial activity. Constantine perhaps issued this decree
as high priest of the state religion of the Roman empire, but he was
also the first Christian emperor, and his action must have been wholly
acceptable to the church. Before long, church and state were in accord
to discountenance work on Sunday; and thus Christianity had adopted
the heathen planetary week in all respects but the names of its days.
Protestantism finally withdrew even this barrier and accepted the
planet-god names that had so long been popularly and civilly established.
The Mohammedan week is that of Judaism and Eastern Christianity, and was
taken over bodily from one or the other of these religions. Sunday is
the “first” day, and so in order to Thursday. Friday is “the meeting,”
when one prays at the mosque, but labors before and after, if one wishes.
And Saturday is “the Sabbath,” though of course without its Jewish
prescriptions and restrictions. The Arabs have spread this form of the
week far into Africa.
But the planetary week of Babylonian-Greek-Egyptian-Syrian origin spread
east as well as west and north and south. It never became so charged with
religious meaning nor so definitely established as a civil and economic
institution in Asia as in Europe, but it was used astronomically,
calendrically, and in divination. By the fifth century, it had been
introduced into India. For a time after the tenth century, it was more
used in dating than among European nations. Again “translations” of
the god names of the planets were made: Brihaspati was Jupiter, and
Brihaspati-vara Thursday.
From India, the week spread north into Tibet, east to the Indo-Chinese
countries, and southeast to the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java. In
the former lands, it was employed calendrically; among the Malaysians,
rather astrologically, and has been largely superseded by the Mohammedan
form. Even China acquired some slight acquaintance with the week as a
period of seven days allotted to the planetary bodies and initiated
by the day of Mit, that is, Mithra, the Persian sun god, although the
average Chinaman knows nothing of the days of the week nor any periodic
rest from labor.
127. SUMMARY OF THE DIFFUSION
This history of the week is one of the striking instances of
institutional diffusion. An ancient west Asiatic mystic valuation or
magical cult of the number seven led on the one hand to an observance of
taboo days, on the other to an association with the earliest astronomical
knowledge, polytheistic worship, and divination. A European people
learned the combination and built on it for further scientific progress,
only to have this gain utilized for new playing by the astrologers.
The planetary week, the creation of these mathematical diviners, was
reintroduced into Europe and became connected with the calendar and civil
life. Christianity recontributed the old idea of regularly recurring
holy or taboo days. Mohammedanism took over this concept along with the
period, but without the polytheistic and astrological elements. Eastern
Asia, on the other hand, was chiefly interested in the latter. With us,
the significance is becoming increasingly economic. Names have changed
again and again, but their very variations evidence their equivalence.
In about three thousand years from its first beginnings and half as many
from its definitive establishment, the institution of the week by 1492
had spread over all the earth except the peripheral tracts of Asia and
Africa and the peripheral continents of Oceania and America.
128. MONTH-THIRDS AND MARKET WEEKS
Contrasting with this single diffusion of the seven-day week is the
independent development in several parts of the world of other periods,
marked either by sacred or secularly unlucky days or by markets or by
divisions of the lunar month.
For instance, a ten-day week, having reference to the beginning, middle,
and end of the lunation, was more or less reckoned with in ancient
Egypt; ancient Greece; parts of modern central Africa; China, Japan, and
Indo-China; and Polynesia. No historic connections are known between the
custom in these regions; its official and religious associations are
everywhere slender, and intervening nations either employ other periods
or none at all. It looks, therefore, as if these might be cases of true
parallelism, although in that event an American occurrence might also be
expected and its absence seems in need of explanation. Moreover there
is nothing very important about this reckoning; it is essentially a
description of a natural event, and the only thing distinctive is its
being threefold. If an institution as precise and artificial as our
planetary week had been independently originated more than once, the fact
would be more significant.
Regular market days among agricultural peoples have frequently led
to a reckoning of time superficially resembling the week. Thus, in
central Africa, south of the sphere of Islamic influences, markets are
observed by a considerable number of tribes. Most frequently these come
at four day intervals. Some tribes shorten the period to three days or
lengthen it to five. Six, eight, and ten day periods appear to be merely
doublings. The fairly compact distribution of this African market week
points to a single origin.
The early Romans observed a regular eighth day market and semi-holiday.
This might be connected with the African institution, but as yet cannot
be historically linked with it.
In the less advanced states of Indo-China and many of the East Indian
islands, even as far as New Guinea, five-day markets are the rule. This
entire tract has many internal culture connections, so that within its
limits diffusion has evidently again been active.
In ancient America, markets were customary every fifth day in Mexico,
third day in Colombia, tenth day in Peru. These were also days of
assembly and cessation from labor.
The American instances establish beyond cavil that some of these market
weeks are truly independent evolutions. Moreover, they nearly all occur
among peoples of about the same degree of advancement, at any rate on the
economic side of their cultures. But it is only the idea, the outline
of the institution, that is similar; its concrete cultural execution, as
expressed in the length of the period, differs in Asia and Africa, and in
the three American regions. That the Mexican and Southeast Asiatic weeks
were both of five days, means nothing but the sort of coincidence to be
expected when the choice of duration is limited to a small range, such as
between three and ten days.
129. LEAP DAYS AS PARALLELS
Finally, there is a correspondence between the Egyptians and Mexicans in
recognizing the solar year as composed of 360 + 5 days. The Egyptians
counted the 360 in twelve months of thirty days, the Mayas and Aztecs in
eighteen groups of twenty days; both agreed in regarding the five leap
days as supplementary and unlucky. This last fact looks like a close
correspondence, but analysis dissolves much of the likeness. The solar
year consists of 365 days and a fraction. There is nothing cultural about
that phenomenon except its recognition. Careful observation continued for
a long enough period inevitably yields the result. But 365 is indivisible
except by 5 and 73; 360 is much “rounder,” that is, divisible by many
numbers, and these “simple” like 6, 10, 12, 18, 20, 30, and therefore
easier to operate with. This again is a mathematical, not a cultural
fact. The five supplementary days thus scarcely represent any distinctive
achievement. As to their being considered unlucky and evil, that is
unquestionably a true cultural parallel.
At the same time, this parallel cannot be enacted into any generally
valid law. The ancient Hindu calendar, being directly lunar, had about
twelve days left over each solar year end at the winter solstice. These
twelve days were looked upon as prophetic and portentous, but not as
specifically evil. The Persian and Armenian calendars, seemingly derived
from the Egyptian, had the same five supplementary days. But in the
former the first of its five is reckoned as lucky, only the third as
unlucky; and in the latter, none of the five has any special value or
observance. Our own twenty-ninth of February is supplementary and we hold
a half serious belief or superstition in regard to it and its year, but
this has nothing to do with luck.
In short, the human mind does tend to attach an unusual value to any
day in the calendar that is in any way outstanding. This observation is
a psychological one, and could be predicted from what is known of the
principle of association in individual psychology. When it comes to the
social expression of this tendency, regularity ceases. Sometimes the
value of the special day is virtually identical among unconnected social
groups, such as the Mayas and Egyptians; sometimes it is diverse, as
between them and ourselves; and sometimes the value wholly disappears, as
in Armenia. Parallelism in any matter of civilization is never complete
and perfect, just as culture elements rarely spread far or long without
modification.
CHAPTER XI
THE SPREAD OF THE ALPHABET
130. Kinds of writing: pictographic and mixed phonetic.—131.
Deficiencies of transitional systems.—132. Abbreviation
and conventionalization.—133. Presumptive origins of
transitional systems.—134. Phonetic writing: the primitive
Semitic alphabet.—135. The Greek alphabet: invention of
the vowels.—136. Slowness of the invention.—137. The Roman
alphabet.—138. Letters as numeral signs.—139. Reform in
institutions.—140. The sixth and seventh letters.—141. The
tail of the alphabet.—142. Capitals and minuscules.—143.
Conservatism and rationalization.—144. Gothic.—145. Hebrew and
Arabic.—146. The spread eastward: the writing of India.—147.
Syllabic tendencies.—148. The East Indies: Philippine
alphabets.—149. Northern Asia: the conflict of systems in Korea.
130. KINDS OF WRITING: PICTOGRAPHIC AND MIXED PHONETIC
Three stages are logically distinguishable in the development of writing.
The first is the use of pictures of things and symbols of ideas: the
pictographic method. In the second stage the representation of sounds
begins, but is made through pictures or abbreviations of pictures: and
pictures or ideographs as such continue to be used alongside the pictures
whose value is phonetic. This may be called the mixed or transitional
or rebus stage. Third is the phonetic phase. In this, the symbols used,
whatever their origin may have been, no longer denote objects or ideas
but are merely signs for sounds—words, syllables, or the elemental
letter-sounds.
The first of these stages, the pictographic, and the degree to which it
flows, or rather fails to flow spontaneously out of the human mind, have
already been discussed (§ 105). The second or transitional stage makes
use of the principle that pictures may either be interpreted directly as
pictures or can be named. A picture or suggestive sketch of the organ
of sight may stand for the thing itself, the eye. Or, the emphasis may
be on the word eye, its sound; then the picture can be made with the
purpose of representing that sound when it has a different meaning, as in
the pronoun “I.” The method is familiar to us in the form of the game
which we call “rebus,” that is, a method of writing “with things” or
pictures of objects. The insect bee stands for the abstract verb “be,”
two strokes or the figure 2 for the preposition “to,” a picture of a
house with the sign of a tavern, that is an inn, for the prefix “in-,”
and so on. This charade-like method is cumbersome and indirect enough to
provide the difficulty of interpretation that makes it fit for a game or
puzzle. But what to us, who have a system of writing, is a mere sport or
occasional toy, is also the method by which peoples without writing other
than pure pictography made their first steps toward the writing of words
and sounds. The principle of reading the name instead of the idea of the
thing pictured is therefore a most important invention. It made possible
the writing of pronouns, prepositions, prefixes and suffixes, grammatical
endings, articles, and the like, which are incapable of representation by
pictography alone. There is no difficulty drawing a recognizable picture
of a man, and two or three such pictures might give the idea of men. But
no picture system can express the difference between “a man” and “the
man.” Nor can relational or abstract ideas like those of “here,” “that,”
“by,” “of,” “you,” “why,” be expressed by pictures.
131. DEFICIENCIES OF TRANSITIONAL SYSTEMS
Important as the invention of the designation of words or sounds
therefore was, it was at first hesitant, cumbersome, and incomplete
as compared with modern alphabets. For one thing, many symbols were
required. They had to be pictured with some accuracy to be recognizable.
A picture of a bee must be made with some detail and care to be
distinguishable with certainty from that of a fly or wasp or beetle. An
inn must be drawn with its sign or shield or some clear identifying mark,
else it is likely to be read as house or barn or hut or shop. The figure
of the human eye is a more elaborate character than the letter I. Then,
too, the old pictures did not go out of use. When the writing referred to
bees and inns and eyes, pictures of these things were written and read as
pictures. The result was that a picture of an eye would in one passage
stand for the organ and in another for the personal pronoun. Which its
meaning was, had to be guessed from the context. If the interpretation
as pronoun fitted best—for instance, if the next characters meant “tell
you”—that interpretation was chosen; but if the next word were recognized
to be “brow,” or “wink,” the character would be interpreted as denoting
the sense organ. That is, the same characters were sometimes read by
their sense and sometimes by their sound, once pictographically and once
phonetically. Hence the system was really transitional or mixed, whereas
a true alphabet, which represents sounds only, is unmixed or pure in
principle. Owing to the paucity of sound signs at first, the object or
idea signs had to be retained; after they were once well established,
they continued to be kept alongside the sound signs even after these had
grown numerous. The tenacity of most mixed systems is remarkable. The
Egyptians early added word signs and then syllable and pure letter signs
to their object signs. After they had evolved a set of letter signs for
the principal sounds of their language, they might perfectly well have
discarded all the rest of their hundreds of characters. But for three
thousand years they clung to these, and wrote pictographic and phonetic
characters jumbled together. They would even duplicate to make sure: as
if we should write e-y-e and then follow with a picture of an eye, for
fear, as it were, that the spelling out was not sufficiently clear. From
our modern point of view it seems at first quite extraordinary that they
should have continued to follow this plan a thousand years after nations
with whom they were in contact, Phœnicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans,
were using simple, brief, accurate, pure alphabets. Yet of course they
were only following the grooves of crystallized habit, as when we write
“weight” or “piece” with unnecessary letters, or employ a combination of
two simple letters each having its own value, like T and H, to represent
a third simple sound, that of TH. With us, as it was with the Egyptians,
it would be more of a wrench and effort for the adult generation to
change to new and simpler characters or methods than to continue in the
old cumbersome habits. So the advantage of the next generation is stifled
and the established awkward system goes on indefinitely.
132. ABBREVIATION AND CONVENTIONALIZATION
This mixture of pictographic and ideographic with phonetic characters,
and its long retention, were substantially as characteristic of Sumerian
or Babylonian Cuneiform, of Chinese, and of Maya and Aztec writing, as
of Egyptian. In all of these systems there was more or less tendency to
abbreviate the pictures, to contract them to a few strokes, to reduce
the original representations to conventional characters. Cuneiform and
presumably Chinese underwent this process early and profoundly. In
Egyptian it also set in and led to Hieratic and later to Demotic cursive
script, which consist of signs that are meaningless to the eye, although
they resolve into standardized reductions of the pictures which during
the same period continued to be made in the monumental and religious
Hieroglyphic. Such conventional abbreviations made possible a certain
speed of production, rendered writing of use in business and daily
life, and thereby contributed to the spread of literacy. In themselves,
however, they introduced no new principle.
In addition to this conventionality of form of characters, there is to be
distinguished also a conventionalization of meaning which is inherent in
the nature of writing. Conventionalization of form accompanies frequency
or rapidity of writing, conventionalization of meaning must occur if
there is to be any writing at all. It develops in pure non-phonetic
pictography if this is to be able to express any considerable range
of meaning. An outstretched hand may well be used with the sense of
“give.” But the beholder of the picture-writing is likely to interpret
it as “take.” Here is where conventionalization is necessary: it must be
understood by writers and readers alike that such a hand means “give” and
not “take,” or perhaps the reverse, or perhaps that if the palm is up
and the fingers flat the meaning is “give” whereas the palm below or the
fingers half closed means “take.” Whatever the choice, it must be adhered
to; the standardized, conventional element has entered. That is why one
customarily speaks of “systems” of writing. Without the system, there can
be not even picture-writing, but only pictures, whose range of power of
communication is far more limited.
When the phonetic phase begins to be entered, conventionalization of
meaning is even more important. An inn must be distinguished from a house
by its shield, a house from a barn by its chimney, and so on. The shield
will perhaps have to be exaggerated to be visible at all, be heart-shaped
or circular to distinguish it from windows; and so forth. So with the
phonetic values. A syllable like English “per” might be represented by
one scribe by means of a cat with a wavy line issuing from its mouth to
denote its _purr_; by another by a _pear_; by a third, by something that
habitually came as a _pair_, such as earrings. Any of these combined
with a “sieve” symbol would approximately render the work “per-ceive.”
But some one else might hit upon the combination of a _purse_ and the
setting sun at _eve_. Obviously there has got to be a concordance of
method if any one but the writer is to read his inscription readily. This
correspondence of representation and interpretation is precisely what
constitutes a set of figures into a system of writing instead of a puzzle.
133. PRESUMPTIVE ORIGINS OF MIXED SYSTEMS
For such a set concordance to grow up among all the diverse classes
of one large nation would be very difficult. In fact, it seems that
transitional systems of writing have originated among small groups with
common business or purpose, whose members were in touch with one another,
and perhaps sufficiently provided with leisure to experiment: colleges of
priests, government archivists, possibly merchants with accounts. It is
also clear that any system must reflect the culture of the people among
whom it originates. The ancient Egyptians had no inns nor purses, but did
have horned serpents and owls. Still more determining is the influence
of the language itself, as soon as writing attempts to be phonetic. The
words expressing pair and sieve are obviously something else in Egyptian
than in English, so that if these signs were used, their sound value
would be quite otherwise. Yet once a system has crystallized, there
is nothing to prevent a new nationality from taking it over bodily.
The picture values of the signs can be wholly disregarded and their
sounds read for words of a different meaning; or the sounds could be
disregarded, or the original proper forms of the characters be pretty
well obliterated, but their idea value carried over into the other
tongue. Thus the Semitic Babylonians took the Cuneiform writing from the
Sumerians, whose speech was distinct.
It is also well to distinguish between such cases of the whole or most
of a system being taken over bodily, and other instances in which one
people may have derived the generic idea of the method of writing from
another and then worked out a system of its own. Thus it is hard not
to believe in some sort of connection of stimulus between Egyptian and
Cuneiform writing because they originated in the same part of the world
almost simultaneously. Yet both the forms of the characters and their
meaning and sound values differ so thoroughly in Egyptian and Cuneiform
that no specific connection between them has been demonstrated, and it
seems unlikely that one is a modified derivative form of the other.
So with the hieroglyphs of the Hittites and Cretans. They appeared in
near-by regions somewhat later. Consequently, although their forms are
distinctive and, so far as can be judged without our being able to read
these systems, their values also, it would be dogmatic to assert that
the development of these two writings took place without any stimulation
from Egyptian or Cuneiform. Something of a similar argument would perhaps
apply even to Chinese (§ 251), though on this point extreme caution is
necessary. Accordingly if one thinks of the invention of the first idea
of part-phonetic writing, it is conceivable that all the ancient systems
of the Old World derive from a single such invention; although even
in that event the Maya-Aztec system would remain as a wholly separate
growth. If on the other hand one has in mind the content and specific
manner of systems of the transitional type, Egyptian, Cuneiform, and
Chinese, perhaps also Cretan and Hittite, are certainly distinct and
constitute so many instances of parallelism. Even greater is the number
of independent starts if one considers pure pictographic systems, since
tolerable beginnings of this type were made by the Indians of the United
States, who never even attempted sound representations.
134. PHONETIC WRITING: THE PRIMITIVE SEMITIC ALPHABET
The last basic invention was that of purely phonetic writing—the
expressing only of sounds, without admixture of pictures or symbols.
Perhaps the most significant fact about this method as distinguished from
earlier forms of writing is that it was invented only once in history.
All the alphabetic systems which now prevail in nearly every part of
the earth—Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, as well as many that
have become extinct—can be traced back to a single source. The story
in this case is therefore one of diffusion and modification instead of
parallelism.
What circumstance it was that caused this all-important invention to be
made, is not known, unfortunately, though time may yet bring knowledge.
There is even division of opinion as to the particular system of mixed
writing that was drawn upon by the first devisers of the alphabet, or
that served as jumping off place for the invention. Some have looked to
the Egyptian system, others to a Cuneiform or Cretan or Hittite source
of inspiration. Nor is it wholly clear who were the precise people
responsible for the invention. It is only certain that about 1,000
B.C., or a little earlier, some Semitic people of western Asia, in the
region of the Hebrews and Phœnicians, probably the latter themselves,
began to use a set of twenty-two non-pictorial characters that stood for
nothing but sounds. Moreover, they represented the sounds of Semitic with
sufficient accuracy for anything in the language to be written and read
without trouble. These twenty-two letters look simple and insignificant
alongside the numerous, beautiful, and interesting Egyptian hieroglyphs.
But on them is based every form of alphabet ever used by humanity.
The earliest extant example of the primitive Semitic alphabet[22] is on
the famous Moabite Stone of King Mesha, who in the ninth century before
Christ erected and inscribed this monument to commemorate the successful
defense of Moab against the invading Hebrews. Now Moab was a little and
rude country, somewhat off the roads of commerce and civilization. It
is hardly likely, therefore, that the Moabites were the inventors of
the alphabet. It is much more probable that the system was perfected,
perhaps several centuries earlier, by a wealthier and more important
people, one more in contact with foreign nations, such as the Phœnicians,
and that from them it spread to their neighbors, the Hebrews, Moabites,
and Aramæans of Syria. This spread must have been facilitated by the
close kinship of the speech of these nations, enabling any of them to
adopt the alphabet of another without material modification.
The Phœnicians founded Carthage, and consequently the Carthaginian or
Punic writing until after the extinction of the great trading city was
also Phœnician.
135. THE GREEK ALPHABET: INVENTION OF THE VOWELS
More important was the spread of the Phœnician letters to an entirely
foreign people, the Greeks, whose language was largely composed of
different sounds and possessed a genius distinct from that of the
Semitic tongues. The Greeks’ own traditions attest that they took
over their alphabet from the Phœnicians. The fact of the transmission
is corroborated by the form of the letters and by their order in the
alphabet. It is also proved very prettily by the names of the letters.
As we speak of the ABC, the Greeks spoke of the Alpha Beta—whence our
word “alphabet.” Now “alpha” and “beta” mean nothing in Greek. They are
obviously foreign names. In the Semitic languages, however, similar
names, Aleph and Beth, were used for the same letters A and B, and meant
respectively “ox” and “house.” Evidently these names were applied by the
Semites because they employed the picture of an ox head to represent
the first sound in the word Aleph, and the representation of a house to
represent the sound of B in Beth. Or possibly the letters originated in
some other way, and then, names for them being felt to be desirable, and
the shape of the first rudely suggesting the outline of an ox’s head and
the second a house, these names were applied to the characters already in
use.
The third letter of the alphabet, corresponding in place to our C and
in sound to our G, the Greeks called Gamma, which is as meaningless as
their Alpha and Beta. It is their corruption of Semitic Gimel, which
means “camel” and may bear this name because of its resemblance to the
head and neck of a camel. The same sort of correspondence can be traced
through most of the remaining letters. From these names alone, then,
even if nothing else were known about the early alphabets, it would be
possible to prove the correctness of the Greek legend that they derived
their letters from the Phœnicians. A people who themselves invented
an alphabet would obviously name the letters with words in their own
language, and not with meaningless syllables taken from a foreign speech.
The Greeks however did more than take over the alphabet from the
Phœnicians. They improved it. An outstanding peculiarity of Semitic
writing was that it dispensed with vowels. It represented the consonants
fully and accurately, in fact had carefully devised letters for a number
of breath and guttural sounds which European languages either do not
contain or generally neglect to recognize. But, as if to compensate, the
Semitic languages possess the distinctive trait of a great variability of
vowels. When a verb is conjugated, when it is converted into a noun, and
in other circumstances, the vowels change, only the consonants remaining
the same, much as in English “sing” becomes “sang” in the past and
“goose” changes to “geese” in the plural. Only, in English such changes
are comparatively few, whereas in Semitic they are the overwhelming rule
and quite intricate. The result of this fluidity of the vowels was that
when the Semites invented their letters they renounced the attempt to
write the vowels. Apparently they felt the consonants, the only permanent
portions of their words, as a sort of skeleton, sufficient for an
unmistakable outline. So, with their ordinary consonants, plus letters
for J and V which at need could be made to stand for I and U, and the
consistent employment of breaths and stops to indicate the presence or
absence of vowels at the beginning and end of words, they managed to make
their writing readily legible. It was as if we should write: _’n Gd w’
trst_ or _Ths wy ’t_. Even to-day the Bible is written and read in the
Jewish synagogue by this vowelless system of three thousand years ago.
In the Greek language more confusion would have been caused by this
system. Moreover, the alphabet came to the Greeks as something
extraneous, so that they were not under the same temptation as the
Phœnicians to follow wholly in the footsteps of the first generation of
inventors. As a result, the Greeks took the novel step of adding vowel
letters.
It is significant that what the Greeks did was not to make the new vowel
signs out of whole cloth, as it were, out of nothing, but that they
followed the method which is characteristic of invention in general.
They took over the existing system, twisted and stretched it as far as
they could, and created outright only when they were forced to. While
the Phœnician alphabet lacked vowel signs, the Greeks felt that it had
a superfluity of signs for breaths and stops. So they transformed the
Semitic breaths and stops into vowels. Thus they satisfied the needs of
their language; and incidentally added the capstone to the alphabet.
It was the first time that a system of writing had been brought on the
complete basis of a letter for every sound. All subsequent European
alphabets are merely modifications of the Greek one.
The first of the Semitic letters, the Aleph, stood for the glottal stop,
a check or closure of the glottis in which the vocal cords are situated;
a sound that occurs, although feebly, between the two o’s in “coördinate”
when one articulates distinctly. In the Semitic languages this glottal
stop is frequent, vigorous, and etymologically important, wherefore the
Semites treated it like any other consonant. The Greeks gave it a new
value, that of the vowel A. Similarly they transformed the value of the
symbols for two breath sounds, a mild and a harsh H, into short and long
E, which they called Epsilon and Eta. Their O is made over from a Semitic
guttural letter, while for I the Semitic ambiguous J-I was ready to hand.
U, written Y by the Greeks, is a dissimilated variant of F, both being
derived from Semitic Vau or the sixth letter with the value of V or U.
The vocalic form was now put at the end of the alphabet, which previously
had ended with T. Its consonantal double, F, later went out of use in
Greek speech and was dropped from the alphabet.
136. SLOWNESS OF THE INVENTION
The Greeks did not make these alterations of value all at once. The
value of several of the letters fluctuated in the different parts of
Greece for two or three centuries. In one city a certain value or form
of a letter would come into usage; in another, the same letter would be
shaped differently, or stand for a consonant instead of a vowel. Thus the
character H was long read by some of the Greeks as H, by others as long
E. This fact illustrates the principle that the Greek alphabet was not
an invention which leaped, complete and perfect, out of the brain of an
individual genius, as inventions do in film plays and romantic novels,
and as the popular mind, with its instinct for the dramatic, likes to
believe. One might imagine that with the basic plan of the alphabet, and
the majority of its symbols, provided ready-made by the Phœnicians, it
would have been a simple matter for a single Greek to add the finishing
touches and so shape his national system of writing as it has come down
to us. In fact, however, these little finishing touches were several
centuries in the making; the final result was a compromise between
all sorts of experiments and beginnings. One can picture an entire
nationality literally groping for generation after generation, and only
slowly settling on the ultimate system. There must have been dozens of
innovators who tried their hand at a modification of the value or form of
a letter.
Nor can it be denied that what was new in the Greek alphabet was a
true invention. The step of introducing full vowel characters was as
definitely original and almost as important as any new progress in
the history of civilization. Yet it is not even known who the first
individual was that tried to apply this idea. Tradition is silent on the
point. It is quite conceivable that the first writing of vowels may have
been independently attempted by a number of individuals in different
parts of Greece.
137. THE ROMAN ALPHABET
The Roman alphabet was derived from the Greek. But it is clear that it
was not taken from the Greek alphabet after this had reached its final or
classic form. If such had been the case, the Roman letters, such as we
still use them, would undoubtedly be more similar to the Greek ones than
they are, and certain discrepancies in the values of the letters, as well
as in their order, would not have occurred. In the old days of writing,
when a number of competing forms of the alphabet still flourished in the
several Greek cities, one of these forms, developed at Chalcis on Eubœa
and allied on the whole to those of the Western Hellenic world, was
carried to Italy. There, after a further course of local diversification,
one of its subvarieties became fixed in the usage of the inhabitants of
the city of Rome. Now the Romans at this period still pronounced the
sound H, which later became feeble in the Latin tongue and finally died
out. On the other hand the distinction between short and long (or close
and open) E, which the Greeks after many experiments came to recognize as
important in their speech, was of no great moment in Latin. The result
was that whereas classic Greek turned both the Semitic H’s into E’s,
Latin accepted only the first of these modifications, that one affecting
the fifth letter of the alphabet, whereas the other H, occupying the
eighth place in the alphabetic series, continued to be used by the
Romans with approximately its original Semitic value. This retention,
however, was possible because Greek writing was still in a transitional,
vacillating stage when it reached the Romans. The Western Greek form
of the alphabet that was carried to Italy was still using the eighth
letter as an H; so that the Romans were merely following their teachers.
Had they based their letters on the “classic” Greek alphabet which was
standardized a few hundred years later, the eighth as well as the fifth
letter would have come to them with its vowel value crystallized. In that
case the Romans would either have dispensed altogether with writing H, or
would have invented a totally new sign for it and probably tacked it on
to the end of the alphabet, as both they and the Greeks did in the case
of several other letters.
The net result is the curious one that whereas the Roman alphabet is
derived from the Greek, and therefore subsequent, it remains, in this
particular matter of the eighth letter, nearer to the original Semitic
alphabet.
There are other letters in the Roman alphabet which corroborate the fact
of its being modeled on a system of the period when Greek writing still
remained under the direct influence of Phœnician. The Semitic languages
possessed two K sounds, usually called Kaph and Koph, or K and Q, of
which the former was pronounced much like our K and the latter farther
back toward the throat. The Greeks not having both these sounds kept the
letter Kaph, which they called Kappa, and gradually discarded Koph or
Koppa. Yet before its meaning had become entirely lost, they had carried
it to Italy. There the Romans seized upon it to designate a variety of K
which the Greek dialects did not possess, namely KW; which is of course
the phonetic value which the symbol Q still has in English. The Romans
were reasonable in this procedure, for in early Latin the Q was produced
with the extreme rear of the tongue, much like the original Koph.
138. LETTERS AS NUMERAL SIGNS
In later Greek, Koph remained only as a curious survival. Although not
used as a letter, it was a number symbol. None of the ancients possessed
pure numeral symbols of the type of our “Arabic” ones. The Semites and
the Greeks employed the letters of the alphabet for this purpose, each
letter having a numeral value dependent on its place in the alphabet.
Thus A stood for 1, B for 2, C or Gamma for 3, F for 6, I for 10, K for
20 and so on. As this series became established, Q as a numeral denoted
90; the Greeks, long after they had ceased writing Q as a letter, used
it with this arithmetical value. Once it had acquired a place in the
series, it would have been far too confusing to drop. With Q omitted, R
would have had to be shifted in its value from 100 to 90. One man would
have continued to use R with its old value, while his more new-fashioned
neighbor or son would have written it to denote ten less. Arithmetic
would have been as thoroughly wrecked as if we should decide to drop out
the figure 5 and write 6 whenever we meant 5, 7 to express 6, and so on.
Habit in such cases is insuperable. No matter how awkward an established
system becomes, it normally remains more practical to retain with its
deficiencies than to replace by a better scheme. The wrench and cost of
reformation are greater, or are felt to be greater by each generation,
than the advantages to be gained.
139. REFORM IN INSTITUTIONS
This is one reason why radical changes are so difficult to bring about
in institutions. These are social and therefore in a sense arbitrary.
In mechanical or “practical” matters people adjust themselves to the
pressure of new conditions more quickly. If a nation has been in the
habit of wearing clothing of wool, and this material becomes scarce and
expensive, some attempt will indeed be made to increase the supply of
wool, but if production fails to keep pace with the deficiency, cotton
is substituted with little reluctance. If, on the other hand, a calendar
becomes antiquated, which could be changed by a simple act of will,
by the mere exercise of community reason, a tremendous resistance is
encountered. Time and again nations have gone on with an antiquated or
cumbersome calendar long after any mediocre mathematician or astronomer
could have devised a better one. It is usually reserved for an autocratic
potentate of undisputed authority, a Cæsar or a Pope, or for a cataclysm
like the French and Russian revolutions, to institute the needed reform.
As long as men are concerned with their bodily wants, those which they
share with the lower animals, they appear sensible and adaptable. In
proportion however as the alleged products of their intellects are
involved, when one might most expect foresight and reason and cool
calculation to be influential, societies seem swayed by a conservatism
and stubbornness the strength of which looms greater as we examine
history more deeply.
Of course, each nation and generation regards itself as the one
exception. But irrationality is as easy to discern in modern institutions
as in ancient alphabets, if one has a mind to see it. Daylight saving
is an example very near home. For centuries the peoples of western
civilization have gradually got out of bed, breakfasted, worked, dined,
and gone to sleep later and later, until the middle of their waking
day came at about two or three o’clock instead of noon. The beginning
of the natural day was being spent in sleep, most relaxation taken at
night. This was not from deliberate preference, but from a species of
procrastination of which the majority were unintentionally guilty.
Finally the wastefulness of the condition became evident. Every one
was actually paying money for illumination which enabled him to sit in
a room while he might have been amusing himself gratis outdoors. Really
rational beings would have changed their habits—blown the factory whistle
at seven instead of eight, opened the office at eight instead of nine,
gone to the theater at seven and to bed at ten. But the herd impulse was
too strong. The individual that departed from the custom of the mass
would have been made to suffer. The first theater opening at seven would
have played to empty chairs. The office closing at four would have lost
the business of the last hour of the day without compensation from the
empty hour prefixed at the beginning. The only way out was for every one
to agree to a self-imposed fiction. So the nations that prided themselves
most on their intelligence solemnly enacted that all clocks be set ahead.
Next morning, every one had cheated himself into an hour of additional
daylight, and the illuminating plant out of an hour of revenue, without
any one having had to depart from established custom; which last was
evidently the course actually to be avoided at all hazards.
Of course, most individual men and women are neither idiotic nor
insane. The only conclusion is that as soon and as long as people live
in relations and act in groups, something wholly irrational is imposed
on them, something that is inherent in the very nature of society and
civilization. There appears to be little or nothing that the individual
can do in regard to this force except to refrain from adding to its
irrationality the delusion that it is rational.
140. THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH LETTERS
The letters, such as Q, in which the Roman alphabet is in agreement
with the original Semitic one and differs from classic Greek writing,
might lead, if taken by themselves, to the conjecture that the ancient
Italians had perhaps not derived their alphabet via the Greeks at all,
but directly from the Phœnicians. But this conclusion is untenable:
first, because the forms of the earliest Latin and Greek letters are on
the whole more similar to each other than to the contemporaneous Semitic
forms; and second because of the deviations from the Semitic prototype
which the Latin and Greek systems share with each other, as in the vowels.
The sixth letter of the Roman alphabet, F, the Semitic Waw or Vau,
is wanting in classic Greek, although retained in certain early and
provincial dialects. One of the brilliant discoveries of classical
philology was that the speech in which the Homeric poems were originally
composed still possessed this sound, numerous irregularities of scansion
being explainable only on the basis of its original presence. The letter
for it looked like two Greek G’s, one set on top of the other. Hence,
later when it had long gone out of use except as a numeral, it was called
Di-gamma or “double-G.”
The seventh Semitic letter, which in Greek finally became the sixth on
account of the loss of the Vau or Digamma, was Zayin, Greek Zeta, our
Z. This, in turn, the Romans omitted, because their language lacked
the sound. They filled its place with G, which in Phœnician and Greek
came in third position. The shift came about thus. The earliest Italic
writing followed the Semitic and Greek original and had C, pronounced
G, as its third letter. But in Etruscan the sounds K and G were hardly
distinguished. K therefore went out of use; and the early Romans followed
the precedent of their cultured and influential Etruscan neighbors.
For a time, therefore, the single character C was employed for both
G and K in Latin. Finally, about the third century before Christ, a
differentiation being found desirable, the C was written as C when it
stood for the “hard” or voiceless sound K, but with a small stroke, as
G, when it represented the soft or voiced sound; and, the seventh place
in the alphabet, that of Z, being vacant, this modified character was
inserted. Thus original C, pronounced G, was split by the Latins into two
similar letters, one retaining the shape and place in the alphabet of
Gimel-Gamma, the other retaining the sound of Gamma but displacing Zeta.
But the letter Z did not remain permanently eliminated from western
writing. As long as the Romans continued rude and self-sufficient, they
had no need of a character for a sound which they did not speak. When
they became powerful, expanded, touched Greek civilization, and borrowed
from this its literature, philosophy, and arts, they took over also
many Greek names and words. As Z occurred in these, they adopted the
character. Yet to have put it in its original seventh place which was
now occupied by G, would have disturbed the position of the following
letters. It was obviously more convenient to hang this once rejected and
now reinstated character on at the end of the alphabet; and there it is
now.
141. THE TAIL OF THE ALPHABET
In fact, the last six letters of our alphabet are additions of this sort.
The original Semitic alphabet ended with T. U was differentiated by the
Greeks from F to provide for one of their vowel sounds. This addition was
made at an early enough period to be communicated to the Romans. This
nation wrote U both for the vowel U and the consonantal or semi-vowel
sound of our W. To be exact, they did not write U at all, but what we
should call V, pronouncing it sometimes U and sometimes W. They spelled
_cvm_, not _cum_.
Later, they added X. An old Semitic S-sound, in fifteenth place in the
alphabet and distinct from the S in twenty-first position which is the
original of our S, was used for both SS and KS. In classic Greek, one
form, with KS value, maintained itself in its original place. In other
early Græco-Italic alphabets, the second form, with SS value, kept
fifteenth place and the X or KS variant was put at the end, after U.
The SS letter later dropped out because it was not distinguished in
pronunciation from S.
The Y that follows X is intrinsically nothing but the U which the Romans
already had—a sort of double of it. The Greek U however was pronounced
differently from the Latin one—like French U or German ü. The literary
Roman felt that he could not adequately represent it in Greek words by
his own U. He therefore took over the U as the Greeks wrote it—that is, a
reduced V on top of a vertical stroke. This character naturally came to
be known as Greek U; and in modern French Y is not simply called “Y,” as
in English, but “Y-grec,” that is, “Greek Y.”
With Z added to U (V), X, and Y, the ancient Roman alphabet was completed.
Our modern Roman alphabet is however still fuller. The two values which
V had in Latin, that of the vowel U and the semi-vowel W, are so similar
that no particular hardship was caused through their representation by
the one character. But in the development of Latin from the classic
period to mediæval times, the semi-vowel sound W came to be pronounced
as the consonant V as we speak it in English. This change occurred both
in Latin in its survival as a religious and literary tongue, and in the
popularly spoken Romance languages, like French and Italian, that sprang
out of Latin. Finally it was felt that the full vowel U and the pure
consonant V were so different that separate letters for them would be
convenient. The two forms with rounded and pointed bottom were already
actually in use as mere calligraphic variants, although not distinguished
in sound, V being usually written at the beginning of words, U in the
middle. Not until after the tenth century did the custom slowly and
undesignedly take root of using the pointed letter exclusively for the
consonant, which happened to come most frequently at the head of words,
and the rounded letter for the vowel which was commoner medially.
In the same way I and J were originally one letter. In the original
Semitic this stood for the semi-vowel J (or “Y” as in yet); in Greek
for the vowel I; in Latin indifferently for vowel or semi-vowel, as in
Ianuarius. Later, however, in English, French, and Spanish speech, the
semi-vowel became a consonant just as V had become. When differentiation
between I as vowel and as consonant seemed necessary, it was effected
by seizing upon a distinction in form which had originated merely as a
calligraphic flourish. About the fifteenth century, I was given a round
turn to the left, when at the beginning of words, as an ornamental
initial. The distinction in sound value came still later. The forms
I and J were kept together in the alphabet, as U and V had been, the
juxtaposition serving as a memento of their recency of distinction—like
the useless dot over small j. Had the people of the Middle Ages still
been using the letters of the alphabet for numerical figures as did the
Greeks, they would undoubtedly have found it more convenient to keep
the order of the old letters intact. J and U would in that case almost
certainly have been put at the end of the alphabet instead of adjacent to
I and V.
J presents a survival—a significant anachronism. Although now recognized
in the alphabet, the letter is not always accorded its full place in the
series; now and then it is treated like an adopted child whose position
in the family is somewhat subsidiary. When a continental European uses
letters to designate rows of chairs in a theater, paragraph headings in a
book, a series of shipping marks, or any other listing, he often omits J,
passing directly from I to K as a Roman of two thousand years ago would
have done. Americans occasionally do the same: in Washington, K street
follows directly on I street. If asked the reason, we perhaps rationalize
the omission on the ground that I and J look so much alike that they run
risk of being confused. Yet it scarcely occurs to us that I and L, or I
and T, can also be easily confused. The true cause of the habit seems to
be the unconscious one that our ancestors, in using the letters seriatim,
followed I by K because they had no J.
The origin of W is accounted for by its name, “Double-U,” and by its
form, which is that of two V’s. The old Latin pronunciation of V
gradually changed from W to V, and many of the later European languages
either contained no W-sound or indicated it by the device of writing U
or some combination into which U entered. Thus the French write OU and
the Spanish HU for the sound of W. In English, however, and in a few
other European languages, the semi-vowel sound was important enough to
make a less circumstantial representation advisable. Since the sound of
the semi-vowel was felt to be fuller than that of the consonant, a new
letter was coined for the former by coupling together two of the latter.
This innovation did not begin to creep into English until the eleventh
century. Being an outgrowth of U and V, W was inserted after them as J
was after I. It is a slight but interesting instance of convergence that
its name is exactly parallel to the name “Double Gamma” which the Greek
grammarians coined for F long before.
142. CAPITALS AND MINUSCULES
The distinction between capitals and “small” letters is one which
we learn so early in life that we are wont to take it as something
self-evident and natural. Yet it is a late addition in the history of
the alphabet. Greeks and Romans knew nothing of it. They wrote wholly in
what we should call capital letters. If they wanted a title or heading to
stand out, they made the letters larger, but not different in form. The
same is done to-day in Hebrew and Arabic, and in fact in all alphabets
except those of Europe.
Our own two kinds or fonts of letters, the capital and “lower case” or
“minuscule,” are more different than we ordinarily realize. We have seen
them both so often in the same words that we are likely to forget that
the “A” differs even more in form than in size from “a,” and that “b” has
wholly lost the upper of the two loops which mark “B.” In late Imperial
Roman times the original “capital” forms of the letters were retained
for inscriptional purposes, but in ordinary writing changes began to
creep in. These modifications increased in the Middle Ages, giving rise
first to the “Uncial” and then to the “Minuscule” forms of the letters.
Both represent a cursive rather than a formal script. The minuscules are
essentially the modern “small” letters. But when they first developed,
people wrote wholly in them, reserving the older formal capitals for
chapter initials. Later, the capitals crept out of their temporary rarity
and came to head paragraphs, sentences, proper names, and in fact all
words that seemed important. Even as late as a few centuries ago, every
English noun was written and printed with a capital letter, as it still
is in German. Of course little or nothing was gained by this procedure.
In many sentences the significant word must be a verb or adjective; and
yet, according to the arbitrary old rule, it was the noun that was made
to stand out.
To-day we still feel it necessary in English to retain capitals for
proper names. It is certain that a suggestion to commence these also with
small letters would be met with the objection that a loss of clearness
would be entailed. As a matter of fact, the cases in which ambiguity
between a common and proper noun might ensue would be exceedingly few;
the occasional inconvenience so caused would be more than compensated
for by increased simplicity of writing and printing. Every child would
learn its letters in little more than half the time that it requires
now. The printer would be able to operate with half as many characters,
and typewriting machines could dispense with a shift key. French and
Spanish designate proper adjectives without capitals and encounter no
misunderstanding, and all English telegrams are sent in a code that makes
no distinction. When we read the newspaper in the morning and think
that the mixture of capital and small letters is necessary for our easy
comprehension of the page, we forget that this same news came over the
wire without capitals.
143. CONSERVATISM AND RATIONALIZATION
The fact is that we have become so habituated to the existing method
that a departure from it might temporarily be a bit disconcerting.
Consequently we rationalize our cumbersome habit, taking for granted or
explaining that this custom is intrinsically and logically best; although
a moments objective reflection suffices to show that the system we are so
addicted to costs each of us, and will cost the next generation, time,
energy, and money without bringing substantial compensation.
It is true that this waste is distributed through our lives in small
driblets, and therefore is something that can be borne without seeming
inconvenience. Civilization undoubtedly can continue to thrive even
while it adheres to the antiquated and jumbling method of mixing two
kinds of letters where one is sufficient. Yet the practice illustrates
the principle that the most civilized as the most savage nations assert
and believe that they adhere to their institutions after an impartial
consideration of all alternatives and in full exercise of wisdom, whereas
analysis regularly reveals them as astonishingly resistive to alteration
whether for better or worse.
If our capital letters had been purposely superadded to the small ones
as a means of distinguishing certain kinds of words, a modern claim
that they were needed for this purpose could perhaps be accepted. But
since the history of the alphabet shows that the capital letters are
the earlier ones, that the small letters were for centuries used alone,
and that systems of writing have operated and operate without the
distinction, it is clear that utility cannot be the true motive. The
employment of capital letters as initials originated in a desire for
ornamentation. It is an embroidery, the result of a play of the æsthetic
sense. It is the use of capitals that has caused the false sense of their
need, not necessity that has led to their use.
144. GOTHIC
Another exemplification of how tenaciously men cling to the accustomed
at the expense of efficiency, is provided by the “Black-Letter” or
“Gothic” alphabet used in Germany and Scandinavia. This is nothing but
the Roman letters as elaborated by the manuscript-copying monks of
northern Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages, when a book was as
much a work of art as a volume of reading matter. The sharp angles,
double connecting strokes, goose-quill flourishes, and other increments
of the Gothic letters undoubtedly possess a decorative effect, although
an over-elaborate one. They were evolved in a period when a copyist
cheerfully lettered for a year in producing a volume, and the lord or
bishop into whose hands it passed was as likely to turn the leaves in
admiration of the black and red characters as to spend time in reading
them.
When printing was introduced, the first types were the intricate and
angular Gothic ones customary in Germany. The Italians, who had always
been half-hearted about the Gothic forms, soon revolted. Under the
influence of the Renaissance and its renewed inspiration from classical
antiquity, they reverted as far as possible to the ancient shapes of
the characters. Even the mediæval small letters were simplified and
rounded as much as possible to bring them into accord with the old
Roman style. From Italy these types spread to France and most other
European countries, including England, which for the first fifty years
had printed in Black-Letter. Only in north central Europe did the Gothic
forms continue to prevail, although even there all scientific books have
for some time been printed in the Roman alphabet. Yet Germans sometimes
complain of the “difficulty” of the Roman letters, and books intended for
popular sale, and newspapers, go into Gothic. There can be little doubt
that in time the Roman letters will dispossess the Gothic ones in Germany
and Scandinavia except for ornamental display heads. But the established
ways die hard; Gothic letters may linger on as the “old-style” calendar
with its eleven-day belatedness held out in England until 1752 and in
Russia until 1917.
[Illustration: FIG. 30. The spread of alphabetic writing. Course of
Occidental alphabets in dotted lines; West Asiatic, continuous lines;
Indic, broken lines. The numbers stand for centuries: with hollow
circles, before Christ; with solid circles, after Christ. Crossed circle,
point of origin, Phœnicia, 11th century B.C. _Abbreviations_: Aram,
Aramæan; Bl L, Black Letter (Gothic); Cyr, Cyrillic; Est, Estrangelo;
Etr, Etruscan; Go, Gothic (Runes); Gr Min, Unc, Greek Minuscule, Uncial;
In Ba, Indo-Bactrian (Kharoshthi); I, Israelite; R Min, Unc, Roman
Minuscule, Uncial; Sc, Scandinavian (Rune). The flow was often back and
forth; compare the 2,000 year development from Phœnician to Ionian to
Athens to Alexandria (Uncial) to Constantinople (Minuscule) to Russian;
or from Phœnician northward to Aramæan, thence south to Nabathean and
Arabic, east to Pehlevi and back west to Armenian.]
145. HEBREW AND ARABIC
Only a small part of the history of the alphabet was unfolded in Europe,
where the seemingly so different forms of writing that have been
discussed are after all only fairly close variants of the early Greek
letters. In Asia the alphabet underwent more profound changes.
The chief modern Semitic alphabets, Hebrew and Arabic, are considerably
more altered from the primitive Semitic or Phœnician than is our own
alphabet. The Hebrew letters were slowly evolved, during the first ten
centuries after Christ, under influences which have turned most of
them as nearly as possible into parts of squarish boxes. B and K, M
and S, G and N, H and CH and T, D and V and Z and R are shaped as if
with intent to look alike rather than different. Arabic, on the other
hand, runs wholly to curves: circles, segments of circles, and round
flourishes; and several of its letters have become identical except for
diacritical marks. If we put side by side the corresponding primitive
Semitic, the modern English, the Hebrew, and the Arabic letters, it is
at once apparent that in most cases English observes most faithfully the
3,000-years old forms. The cause of these changes in Hebrew and Arabic is
in the main their derivation from alphabets descended from the Aramæan
alphabet, a form of script that grew up during the seventh century
B.C. in Aram to the northeast of Phœnicia. The Aramæans were Semites
and therefore kept to the original value of the Phœnician letters more
closely than the Greeks and Romans. On the other hand, they employed the
alphabet primarily for business purposes and rapidly altered it to a
cursive form, in which the looped or enclosing letters like A, B, D were
opened and the way was cleared for a series of increasing modifications.
Greek and Roman writing, on the other hand, were at first used largely in
monumental, dedicatory, legal, and religious connections, and preserved
clarity of form at the expense of rapidity of production.
One feature of primitive Semitic, most Asiatic alphabets retained for a
long time: the lack of vowel signs. In the end, however, representation
of the vowels proved to be so advantageous that it was introduced.
Yet the later Semites did not follow the Greek example of converting
dispensable consonantal signs into vocalic ones. They continued to
recognize consonant signs as the only real letters, and then added
smaller marks, or “points” as they are called, for the vowels. These
points correspond more or less to the grave, acute, and circumflex
accents which French uses to distinguish vowel shades or qualities, é, è,
ê, and e, for instance; and to the double dot or diæresis which German
puts upon its “umlaut” vowels, as to distinguish ä (= e) from a. There is
this difference, however: whereas European points are reserved for minor
modifications, Hebrew and Arabic have no other means of representing
vowels than these points. The vowels therefore remain definitely
subsidiary to the consonants; to the extent of this deficiency Hebrew has
adhered more closely to the primitive Semitic system than have we.
The reason for this difference lies probably in the fact that Hebrew and
Arabic have retained virtually all the consonants of ancient Semitic.
Hence the breaths and stops could not be dispensed with, or at least such
was the feeling of their speakers. In the Indo-European languages, these
sounds being wanting, the transformation of the superfluous signs into
the letters needed for the vowels was suggested to the Greeks. The step
perfecting the alphabet was therefore taken by them not so much because
they possessed originality or specially fertile imagination, as because
of the accident that their speech consisted of sounds considerably
different from those of Semitic. Perhaps the Greeks once complained
of the unfitness of the Phœnician alphabet, and adjusted it to their
language with grumblings. Had they been able to take it over unmodified,
as the Hebrews and Arabs were able, it is probable that they would
cheerfully have done so with all its imperfection. In that case they, and
after them the Romans, and perhaps we too, would very likely have gone on
writing only consonants as full letters and representing vowels by the
Semitic method of subsidiary points. In short, even so enterprising and
innovating a people as the Greeks are generally reputed to have been,
made their important contribution to the alphabet less because they
wished to improve it than because an accident of phonetics led them to
find the means. Such are the marvels of human invention when divested of
their romantic halo and examined objectively.
146. THE SPREAD EASTWARD: THE WRITING OF INDIA
The diffusion of the alphabet eastward from its point of origin was even
greater than its spread through Europe. Most of this extension in Asia is
comprised in two great streams. One of these followed the southern edge
of the continent. This was a movement that began some centuries before
Christ, and often followed water routes. The second flow was mainly
post-Christian and affected chiefly the inland peoples of central Asia.
India is the country of most importance in the development of the south
Asiatic alphabets. The forms of the Sanskrit letters show that they and
the subsequent Hindu alphabets are derivatives, though much altered
ones, from the primitive Semitic writing. Exactly how the alphabet was
carried from the shore of the Mediterranean to India has not been fully
determined. By some the prototype of the principal earliest Indian form
of writing is thought to have been the alphabet of the south Arabian
Sabæans or Himyarites of five or six hundred years B.C. As the Arabs were
Semites, and as there was a certain amount of commerce up and down the
Red Sea, it is not surprising that even these rather remote and backward
people had taken up writing. Between south Arabia and India there was
also some intercourse, so that a further transmission by sea seems
possible enough. Another view is that Hindu traders learned and imported
a north Semitic alphabet perhaps as early as during the seventh century,
from which the Brahmi was made over, from which in turn all living Indian
alphabets are derived. Besides this main importation, there was another,
from Aramæan sources, which gave rise to a different form of Hindu
writing, the Kharoshthi or Indo-Bactrian of the Punjab, which spread for
a time into Turkistan but soon died out in India.
147. SYLLABIC TENDENCIES
One trait of Indian alphabets leads back to their direct Semitic origin:
they did not recognize the vowels. The Hindus speaking Indo-European
were confronted with the same difficulty as the Greeks when they took
over the vowelless Semitic alphabet. But they solved the difficulty
in their own way. They assumed that a consonantal letter stood for a
consonant plus a vowel. Thus, each letter was really the sign for a
syllable. The most common vowel in Sanskrit being A, this was assumed as
being inherent in the consonant. For instance, their letter for K was not
read K, but KA. This meant that when K was to be read merely as K, it had
to be specially designated: something had to be done to take away the
vowel A. A diacritical sign was added, known as the virama. This negative
sign is a “point” just as much as the positive vowel points of Hebrew;
but was used to denote exactly the opposite.
There are of course other vowels than A in Sanskrit. These were
represented by diacritical marks analogous to the virama. Thus while this
is a diagonal stroke below the consonant, U is represented by a small
curve below, E by a backward curve above, AI by two such, and so on.
If a syllable had two consonants before the vowel, these were condensed
into one, the essential parts of each being combined into a more complex
character. This was much as if we were to write “try” by forcing t and r
into a special character showing the cross stroke of the t and the roll
or hook of the r, and superposing a diæresis for the vowel. This process
reduced every syllable to a single though often compound letter. If the
syllable ended in a consonant, this carried over as the beginning of the
next syllable. Even the end consonant of a word was written as the first
letter of the next. According to the Sanskrit plan, “the dog is mad”
would be rendered “the do gi sma d-.”
Obviously, there is something unnaturally regular, a systematic
artificiality, about such a scheme. Love of system cropped out otherwise.
The Hindus devised a new symbol—mainly by differentiation of old ones—for
every sound that they had and Semitic lacked. Thus they doubled the
number of their letters. Then they rearranged their order on a phonetic
and logical basis. All sounds made against the back palate were brought
into one group; those formed against the fore-palate, gums, and teeth
came after; the lip sounds last. Within each of the groups the letters
followed one another in a fixed order according to their method of
production—voiceless stops always first, nasals always last.
The result of these innovations was that the Hindu alphabets diverged
much more from the Semitic original than did ours. This perhaps was
really to be expected, since writing entered India by long leaps between
peoples that were not in intimate relations. Also, by the time the
alphabet first reached them, the Hindus, in the isolation of their
remote peninsula, had already worked out an advanced and unique type
of civilization. This fact must have predisposed them to make over any
imported invention in conformity with their established habits.
148. THE EAST INDIES: PHILIPPINE ALPHABETS
The spread of the Hindu alphabet within India, over southeastern Asia,
and into the East Indian archipelago, cannot be followed here because
it is an intricate story, interwoven with the history of Brahmanism and
Buddhism. It may be said that in general, with the chief exception of
China, Hindu writing followed where Hindu religion penetrated. But it may
be illuminating to touch briefly on one of the extensions.
In the early centuries after Christ, Hindus began to reach the East
Indies, especially Sumatra and Java. Here they established principalities
or kingdoms and their religion. Many arts were also imported by them,
such as iron working, batik dyeing, sculpture, drama, and writing. From
perhaps the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, the Malaysian population of
Java lived under a heavy layer of Hindu culture (§ 104, 126, 262), and
literacy evidently became fairly widespread. Greater or less portions of
this culture were transported to the other East Indian islands and with
them went writing. In the Philippines, the Spaniards of the sixteenth
century found several related alphabets, one to each of the principal
nationalities, which seem derived from Bengal some eight hundred years
before.
The Malayan languages are unusually simple in their array of sounds.
Hence the greater part of the elaborate Sanskrit alphabet was discarded
by them. But the salient characteristics of Sanskrit writing were
retained. A consonant was read as consonant plus A. Points were provided
if the consonant was to be read with other vowels. Of such points, the
Philippine alphabets employed only two. One, put above the consonant,
served indiscriminately for I and E, the other, below, for U and O. The
position of the points connects them with the Sanskrit vowel signs. In
this way the Philippine languages were adequately rendered with a set of
about twelve consonantal letters, three for the independent vowels, and
two vowel points.
At the time of the Spanish discovery, the native Philippine alphabets
were already meeting Arabic writing, which had shortly before been
introduced in the southern islands with Mohammedanism. The Spaniards of
course brought the Roman alphabet. Under this double competition the
use of native writing soon began to decay. The most advanced of the
Filipino nationalities, such as the Tagalog and Bisaya, have long since
given up their old letters. Yet it has recently been discovered that two
varieties of the native writing still survive—both of them among backward
tribes: the Tagbanua of Palawan and the Mangyan of Mindoro. Here in the
jungle, among half clothed savages living under rude thatches and without
firearms or government, the remotest descendants of the ancient Sanskrit
alphabet linger.
Three widely different descendants of the primitive Semitic alphabet
have therefore met in this archipelago. One, beginning its journey
some twenty-five hundred years ago, traveled via Arabia and northern
India, probably reaching the Philippines by 800 A.D. The second evolved
in the Semitic homeland, finally poured out of northern Arabia with
Mohammedanism, was carried across India to the Malay Peninsula, and
thence leaped across the sea to Borneo and the Philippines about 1,400
A.D. The third followed the longest journey: from the Phœnicians to the
Greeks, to southern Italy, to Rome, to Spain, and, after Columbus, to
Mexico, and then across the Pacific ocean to Manila shortly before A.D.
1,600.
149. NORTHERN ASIA: THE CONFLICT OF SYSTEMS IN KOREA
The history of the central and north Asiatic alphabets is complex. It may
be summed up in the statement that Aramæan derivatives of the primitive
Semitic writing, evolving in and near Syria, in the six or seven
centuries before the birth of Christ, were carried east and northeast
from one people to another. One of the modifications of Aramæan, the
Estrangelo Syriac, was transported by a sect of heretical Christians,
the Nestorians, to the Uigurs and Mongols, from whom the Manchus derived
their system.
The farthest extension of the alphabet in Asia was to the shores of the
Pacific ocean, in Korea. Korean writing however seems to be derived from
an Indian source, through Tibetan or perhaps Pali, the sacred language
and script of the Southern branch of Buddhism; hence to be only a remote
collateral relative of the neighboring Manchu. In Korea, the spread of
the alphabet was checked, not through any inherent flaws or weakness of
age, but by the competition of a totally different system of writing:
that of the Chinese.
Chinese writing is not alphabetic at all. To some extent it does
represent sounds. But it represents syllables or words, not letters; and
it represents them by the rebus method. The basis of Chinese writing is
ideographic. It is therefore a modified form of picture writing, and
theoretically pertains to an early stage, almost comparable in principle
to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
In a conflict between such a primitive system and a truly alphabetic
one, the latter should of course prevail on account of its much greater
efficiency and simplicity. Actually, however, the Korean alphabet did not
triumph but barely managed to maintain an existence alongside Chinese.
The cause was a familiar one: the tremendous social conservatism of the
human mind.
When the native alphabet obtained its hold in Korea, it was confronted
by an overwhelming Chinese influence. The court, the government, the
institutions, official religion, all activities of people of fashion and
importance, were modeled after Chinese examples. The man who could not
write and read Chinese characters was eliminated from polite society
and advancement. This was only natural. The civilization of China is
one of the most ancient and greatest in the world, and the Koreans
were a smaller people and close neighbors. Western civilization was
thousands of miles away, and it was only now and then that a driblet
from it penetrated to the eastern edge of Asia. On one side then stood
the undoubted practical advantage of the alphabet from the West; on the
other, the momentum of the whole mass of Chinese culture. The outcome
was that the nationally Korean and true alphabet became something that
shopkeepers and low people made use of; a thing easy to learn and more or
less contemptible. But laws and documents and books of higher learning
were written in Chinese characters, which innumerable Koreans for
generation after generation spent years of their lives in mastering.
If the human mind were really rational, if it operated rationally
only a tenth as much as it fondly believes, it would not do awkward
and difficult things after a simpler and more effective means to the
same end had been put within its reach, as was the case in this Korean
situation. Another principle beyond mere outright inertia is operative
here. This is the tendency of culture elements which have for some
time been associated, often only by accident, to form an interlocked
aggregation or “complex.” Once such a complex or cluster has acquired
a certain coherence, it survives with a tenacity independent of the
degree of inherent or logical connection between its elements. The fact
that ideographs were associated with Chinese religion, literature, and
institutions, constituted them part of what may be called the Chinese
complex. The mass of this Chinese complex far overbalanced the slight
and scattering Western influences. The alphabet drifted into Korea as
an isolated fragment, and was promptly borne down by the weight of the
elaborate and closely knit culture aggregate of Chinese origin. This
brute fact, and not any superior reasonableness or intrinsic merit of one
system or the other, determined the issue between them.
In the same way the “complex” that we know as Western
civilization—Christianity and collars, science and picture films, factory
labor and democracy, fine and base all tangled together—is to-day
crushing the breath out of ancient and exotic cultures. We like to call
the process “Progress” because that is more comforting than to view it as
the rolling of a fate beyond our control.
CHAPTER XII
THE GROWTH OF A PRIMITIVE RELIGION
150. Regional variation of culture.—151. Plains, Southwest,
Northwest areas.—152. California and its sub-areas.—153. The
shaping of a problem.—154. Girls’ Adolescence Rite.—155. The
First Period.—156. The Second Period: Mourning Anniversary and
First-salmon rite.—157. Era of regional differentiation.—158.
Third and Fourth Periods in Central California: Kuksu and
Hesi.—159. Third and Fourth Periods in Southern California:
Jimsonweed and Chungichnish.—160. Third and Fourth Periods
on the Lower Colorado: Dream Singing.—161. Northwestern
California: world-renewal and wealth display.—162. Summary
of religious development.—163. Other phases of culture.—164.
Outline of the culture history of California.—165. The question
of dating.—166. The evidence of archæology.—167. Age of the
shellmounds.—168. General serviceability of the method.
150. REGIONAL VARIATION OF CULTURE
As one first becomes acquainted with a totally strange people spread over
a large area, such as the Indians of North America, they are likely to
seem rather uniform. The distinctions between individual and individual,
and even the greater distinctions between one group and another, become
buried under the overwhelming mass-effect of their difference from
ourselves. Growing familiarity, however, renders individual, local, and
tribal peculiarities plainer. The specialist, finally, comes to concern
himself with particular traits until the peculiarities occupy more of
his attention than the uniformities. His danger always is to let himself
get into the habit of taking sweeping similarities so much for granted
that he ends by underemphasizing or forgetting them. At the same time
his business is to add something new to human understanding—facts at any
rate, interpretation if possible. Generalities are likely to be pretty
widely known, and progress, new formulations, therefore depend ultimately
on mastery of detail. This means that if a scientist is to contribute
anything to the world’s comprehension, is to add a new mental tool to its
chest, he must devote himself to specific traits, to discriminations of
fine detail. It is only by finding new trees that he helps to make the
woods larger.
If then we approach a race like the American Indians with the scientist’s
or student’s purpose of discovering something more than we already know,
we quickly find that institutions, customs, and utensils, in other words
the cultures, vary from tribe to tribe. When one compares tribes living
so far apart as to be no longer united in intercourse, nor even by
communication with common intermediaries, there is scarcely a trait in
which their cultures are wholly identical. Within a limited district a
fair degree of uniformity is found to prevail. Yet when the boundaries of
such an area are crossed, a new type of culture begins to be encountered,
which again holds with local variations until a third district is entered.
151. PLAINS, SOUTHWEST, NORTHWEST AREAS
For instance, the Indians of the Plains between the Rocky mountains and
the Mississippi river form a comparative unit. They are all warlike,
the great aim in life of every man in these tribes being attainment of
military glory. All the Plains tribes subsisted to a large extent on
buffalo, lived in tipis—tents made of buffalo skins—and boiled their food
with hot stones in buffalo rawhide. Nearly all of them performed a four
days’ religious ceremony known as the Sun Dance, of which one of the
outstanding acts was fasting and sometimes self-torture inflicted with
skewers drawn through the skin and torn out. These customs were common to
the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Omaha, Kiowa,
Comanche, and other tribes.
As one passes from this region to the mountainous plateau which
constitutes the present New Mexico and Arizona—the Southwest of the
United States—one encounters a series of tribes often inhabiting stone
houses, subsisting by agriculture, cooking in earthenware pots, little
given to fighting, according authority to priests rather than warriors,
erecting altars, and performing masked dances representing divinities.
This Southwestern culture, its internal relations, and the tribes
participating in it, have already been discussed in another connection (§
87).
If, however, on leaving the Plains one turns northwest to the shores
of British Columbia and southern Alaska, a third distinctive type of
native civilization appears. Among these Northwestern or North Pacific
Coast tribes, such as the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nutka, and
Salish, the priest as well as the warrior bowed before the rich man, an
elaborate set of rules and honors separating the wealthy high-born from
the poor and lowly. Aristocracy, commoners, and slaves made up distinct
strata of society in this region. Public rituals were occasions for the
ostentation of wealth. Houses were carpentered of wood. Cooking was done
in boxes. The prevalent food was fish.
The significant thing is that these are not three tribes, but three
groups each consisting of a number of politically independent tribes
spread over a considerable territory and evincing a fairly fundamental
similarity of customs and institutions. We are confronting three kinds
of culture, each super-tribal in range and attached to a certain area.
These areas have sometimes been called “ethnographic provinces”; they
are generally known as “culture-areas.” Of such areas ten are generally
recognized on the North American continent. These are the Plains,
Southwest, North Pacific Coast, Mackenzie-Yukon, Arctic, Plateau,
California, Northeast, Southeast, and Mexico.[23]
Obviously we have here a classification comparable to that which the
naturalist makes of animals. As the zoölogist divides the vertebrate
animals into mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, so the
anthropologist divides the generic North American Indian culture into
the cultures of these ten areas. The naturalist however cannot stop with
a group as inclusive as the mammals, and goes on to subdivide them into
orders, such as the rodents, carnivores, ungulates, and the like. Each
of these again he goes on splitting into families, genera, and finally
species. The species correspond to the smallest groups in human society,
namely the tribes or nations. Parallel to the family or order which
the naturalist finds between a particular species and the great class
of mammals, one may therefore expect to discover groups intermediate
between particular tribes and the large culture-areas. Such intermediate
groups would consist of clusters of tribes constituting fractions of a
culture-area: clearly pertaining to this area, but yet somewhat set off
from other clusters within the same area—like the Pueblos and Navaho
within the Southwest, as already described (§ 87). We may call such
clusters or fractions sub-culture-areas, and must concern ourselves with
them if we desire to deepen our understanding of aboriginal American
civilization.
For the sake of simplicity, it will be well to select a limited portion
of North America, instead of wrestling with the intricacies of the
continent as a whole, in an endeavor to see how its culture-areas and
sub-culture-areas reveal themselves in detail and help to throw light on
native history. California will serve as a type example.
152. CALIFORNIA AND ITS SUB-AREAS
Modern state boundaries frequently do not coincide with either ethnic
lines of division or with natural physiographic areas, especially when
political units are created by legislative enactment, as has been the
case with most of the United States. This partial discrepancy holds for
California. The native culture most distinctive of California covered
only the middle two-thirds of the present state, but took in Nevada and
much of the Great Basin (Fig. 31).
Northernmost California, especially along the ocean, was inhabited by
Indians that affiliated with the tribes of the North Pacific coast. One
after another their customs and arts prove on examination to be related
to the customs and arts of the coast of British Columbia, and to differ
more or less from the corresponding practices of the Central California
Indians. Here then we have a second cultural type, that of Northwestern
California, which constitutes a subdivision of the North Pacific Coast
culture-area.
The southern California Indians link with the Indians of the adjoining
states of Arizona and New Mexico. In short, this part of California forms
part of the Southwest culture-area. The southern California tribes are
however not wholly uniform among themselves, but constitute two groups:
those of the islands, coast, and mountains, and those of the Colorado
river. These are distinguished primarily by the fact that only the river
tribes practised agriculture. We may designate these two divisions as
“Southern California” proper and “Lower Colorado River.”
[Illustration: FIG. 31. Sub-culture-areas of native California, as
part of the major culture-areas of western North America. _A_, culture
of Northwestern California; _B_, Central California; _C_, Southern
California; _D_, Lower Colorado River.]
The table on the opposite page gives a brief characterization of these
four sub-culture-areas.
153. THE SHAPING OF A PROBLEM
So far we have been discriminating, that is, looking for characteristic
differences. On the other hand, there has always existed a consensus of
impression, among experienced as well as hasty observers, that a certain
likeness runs through the culture of most the tribes of California,
northern, central, and southern. With scarcely an exception they
were unwarlike; nearly all of them made excellent baskets, but were
deficient in wood-working. Obviously it is necessary to reconcile these
uniformities with the peculiarities that distinguish the four regional
types or sub-culture-areas, as well as to account for the peculiarities.
Let us simplify the problem by considering only one aspect of the four
native cultures instead of the whole cultures. In this way there will be
more likelihood of making a substantial beginning; any results obtained
from the example can be subsequently checked from other aspects of the
cultures to see if the findings are broadly representative. Further, let
us arrange the items of information that are available on this one aspect
of culture, not haphazardly, nor mechanically as under an alphabetic
classification, nor in the sequence in which authors have published their
observations, but naturally, or according to some principle that is
likely to work out into an interpretation. Since part of the problem is
the relation of the uniform features to the peculiar ones, a promising
order will be to put at one end of the line or series of data the most
universal features, and at the other the most particular or localized
ones.
Let us select religion as that part of native culture to be examined, and
limit this still farther by eliminating from consideration, for the time
being, all forms of religion except public rituals, which among Indians
are frequently accompanied or signalized by sacred dances. We may forget,
for the moment, private rites, individual sacrifices, superstitions and
taboos, medicine men, myths, and the like, and direct attention to dances
made by groups of people, or the obvious equivalents of such dances, and
ritual acts definitely associated with the dances or the common weal.
_Northwestern _Central California
California (California-Great
(North Pacific Coast)_ Basin)_
Houses Planks Earth or thatch
Sweat-houses Planks Earth
Head-gear Women’s caps Men’s head-nets
Foot-wear Moccasins None
Women’s skirts Deer-skin Deer-skin or fibers
Basketry Twined Twined and coiled
Pottery None None
Boats Dug-out canoes Rush rafts
Paddles Single-bladed Single-bladed
Staple food Salmon Acorns
Ring-and-pin game Salmon vertebræ Deer vertebræ
Shell money Dentalia Clam disks
Bows Sinew-backed Sinew-backed
War clubs Edged stone None
Social divisions None Dual
Shamans Women Men
Origin legend Previous race Creator
Religious society None Kuksu
Dances Wealth displays Spirit impersonations
_Southern California _Lower Colorado
(Southwest)_ River (Southwest)_
Houses Earth or thatch Earth
Sweat-houses Earth None
Head-gear Women’s caps None
Foot-wear Sandals or moccasins Sandals
Women’s skirts Fibers Fibers
Basketry Mostly coiled Almost absent
Pottery Undecorated Decorated
Boats Joined planks Rush rafts
Paddles Double-bladed Poles
Staple food Acorns and fish Maize
Ring-and-pin game Acorn cups Pumpkin rind
Shell money Clam disks Almost none
Bows Plain Plain
War clubs Knobbed wood Knobbed wood
Social divisions Dual and multiple Multiple
Shamans Men Men
Origin legend Birth from Earth Birth from Earth
Religious society Jimsonweed None
Dances Simple dances Dream singings
Choice of this phase of native culture is not quite random; ritual
ordinarily is rather freer from the complications caused by natural
environment than most other institutions and customs. Had industrial
arts, for instance, been selected as the point of attack, it might be
imagined that certain tribes made pottery, and others did not, because of
the presence or absence of suitable clay in their respective habitats; or
perhaps that a particular weave of basketry occurred universally because
this weave followed more or less directly from the physical properties of
some plant material that abounded everywhere in the state. On the other
hand, when tribes do or do not make dances in honor of their divinities,
or when they do or do not practise an elaborate mourning for their dead,
these are customs into which the influence of natural environment can
scarcely enter, since all peoples believe in spirits and suffer the loss
of relatives.
154. GIRLS’ ADOLESCENCE RITE
When, then, we review the religious dances of the California tribes
en masse, we find that there are only two which come near to being
universal. One of these is the Victory Dance held over the head or scalp
of a slain enemy; the other is an Adolescence Rite performed for girls at
puberty. The latter is the more profitable to consider. It is the more
widely spread, having been performed in every district of California,
and by almost every tribe. The Victory Dance was not made by the Indians
of northern California, who substituted for it a war incitement dance of
different character. Further, a tribe having the tradition of the Victory
Dance might often be at peace and go for a generation or two without the
celebration. But a ceremony which it was thought necessary to make for
each girl at puberty was obviously due to be performed every few years
even among a small group.
There are many local variations in the Californian Adolescence Rite, but
certain of its features emerge with constancy. These traits are based
on the belief that the girl who is at this moment passing from childhood
to maturity must be undergoing a critical transition. The occasion was
considered critical not only for her but for the community, and, since
the Indians’ outlook was limited, for the whole of their little world.
A girl who at this period did not show fortitude to hardship would be
forever weak and complaining: therefore she fasted. If she carried wood
and water industriously, she would remain a good worker all her life,
whereas if she defaulted, she would grow up a lazy woman. So crucial,
in fact, was this moment, that she was thought extremely potent upon
her surroundings, as constituting a latent danger. If she looked abroad
upon the world, oak trees might become barren and next year’s crop of
acorns fail, or the salmon refuse to ascend the river. Among many tribes,
therefore, the maturing girl was covered with a blanket, set under a
large basket, or made to wear a visor of feathers over her eyes. Others
had her throw her hair forward and keep her head bowed. She was given
the benefit of having ancient religious songs sung over her, and dances
revolved around her night after night. Certain additional developments
of the ceremony were locally restricted. Thus it was only in the south
that the girl was put into a pit and baked in hot sand. But a number of
specific features occur from the north to the south end of the state.
Among these are the following rules. The girl must not eat meat, fat, or
salt. She must not scratch her head with her fingers, but use a stick or
bone implement made for the purpose. She must not look at people; and she
should be sung over.
It should be added that most of these traits of the Girls’ Rite recur
among the tribes of a much larger area than California, including those
of Nevada and the Great Basin and the Pacific coast for a long distance
north. This institution, then, is remarkably widespread and has preserved
nearly the same fundamental features wherever it is found.
155. THE FIRST PERIOD
What can be inferred from this uniformity and broad diffusion? It seems
fair to try the presumptive conclusion of antiquity. A continent is
likely to be older than an island. A family of animals has probably
existed longer than a single species. A world-wide custom normally is
more ancient than one that is confined to a narrow locality. If it
spread from one people to another, this diffusion over the whole earth
would usually require a long time. If on the other hand such a custom
had originated separately among each people, its very universality would
indicate it as the response to a deep and primary need, and such a need
would presumably manifest itself early in the history of the race.
It is true that one may not place too positive a reliance on evidence of
this sort. The history of civilization furnishes some contrary examples.
Thus the Persian fire-worshiping religion is older than Christianity, yet
is now confined to the Parsees of Bombay and to one or two small groups
in Persia. The use of tobacco has spread over the eastern hemisphere in
four centuries. Still, such cases are exceptional; and in the absence of
specific contrary considerations, heavy weight must be given to wideness
of occurrence in rating antiquity.
If the Girls’ Rite were identical among all the tribes that practise it,
there might be warrant for the conclusion that it had originated only a
few centuries ago but had for some reason been carried from one tribe to
another with such unusual rapidity as not to have been subjected to the
alterations of time. Yet the fact that the essential uniformity of the
rite is overlaid by so much local diversity—as for instance the baking
custom restricted to southern California—indicates the unlikelihood of
such a rapid and late diffusion. The ceremony is much in the status of
Christianity, which, in the course of its long history, has also become
broken into national varieties or sects, all of which however remain
Christian.
The facts then warrant this tentative conclusion: that the Girls’ Rite is
representative of the oldest stratum of religion that can be traced among
the Indians of California—their “First Period.” The Victory Dance would
presumably be of nearly but not quite the same antiquity.
156. THE SECOND PERIOD: MOURNING ANNIVERSARY AND FIRST-SALMON RITE
Pursuing the same method farther, let us look for rituals that are less
widely spread than these but yet not confined to small districts. The
outstanding one in this class is the Mourning Anniversary. This is a
custom of bewailing each year, or at intervals of a few years, those
members of the tribe who have died since the last performance, and the
burning of large quantities of wealth—shell money, baskets, and the
like—in their memory. Each family offers for its own dead, but people
of special consideration are honored by having images made of them and
consumed with the property. Until the anniversary has been performed, the
relatives of the dead remain mourners. After it, they are free to resume
normal enjoyment of life; and the name of the deceased, which until then
has been strictly taboo, may now be bestowed on a baby in the family.
The Mourning Anniversary as here outlined is practised with little
variation, less than the Girls’ Rite shows, throughout southern
California and a great part of central California, especially the Sierra
Nevada district. Its distribution thus covers more than half of the
state. But it has not spread elsewhere except to a small area in southern
Nevada and western Arizona.
In northern California the Mourning Anniversary is lacking. It is not
that the Indians here fail to mourn their dead. In fact they frequently
bewail them for a longer time than most civilized peoples think
necessary. They may bury or burn some property with the corpse. But they
do not practise the regular public commemoration of the southerly tribes.
They do not assiduously accumulate wealth for months or years in order to
throw it into a communal fire at the end. And they do not make images of
their dead. In fact, they would be shocked at the idea as indelicate, if
not impious. Is there anything in this northern part of California that
takes the place of the anniversary?
Not as a psychological equivalent; but as regards distribution, there
is. This is the custom, established in northern California and parts of
Oregon, for a leading shaman or medicine-man to conduct a ceremony at
the beginning of each year’s salmon run. Until he had done this, no one
fished for salmon or ate them. If any got caught, they were carefully
returned to the river. When the medicine-man had gone through his secret
rites, he caught and ate the first fish of the year. After this, the
season was open. To eat salmon no longer brought illness and disaster,
as it was thought it would a few days earlier. Moreover, the prayers or
formulas recited by the shaman propitiated the salmon and caused them to
run abundantly, so that every one had plenty. There is clearly a communal
motive in the rite, even though its performance was entrusted to an
individual.
The one specific element common to the Mourning Anniversary and this
First-salmon Rite is their connection with the natural year, the cycle
of the seasons, a trait necessarily lacking in the Girls’ Rite with
its intimately personal character. Because of this common feature;
because, also, neither of these two rituals is as widespread as the
Girls’ Rite and yet between them they cover the whole of California with
substantially mutual exclusiveness, it seems fair to assume that they
both originated at a later time than the Girls’ Rite, but still in fairly
remote antiquity. They may therefore be provisionally assigned to a
Second Period of the prehistory of California.
157. ERA OF REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION
It is now necessary to return to the four regional divisions or
sub-culture-areas of the modern tribes of California. Since the
Northwestern one affiliated with the extensive North Pacific culture,
and those of Southern California and the Colorado River with the great
culture of the Southwest, many of their customs must have originated in
those parts of these two culture-areas which lie outside of California.
Even if the northern and southern Californians “lent” as well as
“borrowed” inventions and institutions, they must on the whole have
received or learned or imitated more in the interchange than they
imparted. This is clear from the fact that the Indians of British
Columbia are more advanced in their manufacturing ability, richer in
variety of tools and utensils, and more elaborate in their organization
of society, than those of Northwestern California; and a similar
relation of superiority and priority exists between the Pueblos of New
Mexico and Arizona and the Southern California tribes (§ 87). In other
words, a stream of civilizational influences has evidently run from
southern Alaska and British Columbia southward along the coast as far as
Northwestern California, and another from the town-dwelling Pueblos to
the village-inhabiting tribes of Southern California, in much the same
way that civilization flowed from ancient Babylonia into Palestine, from
Egypt into Crete, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Gaul and Britain,
from western Europe to the Americas after their discovery, and from
the Christian to the non-Christian nations of to-day. Somewhere in the
unraveling of the prehistory of California the first indications of these
streams from the outside should be encountered.
They are not manifest in the two periods which have so far been
established. The distribution of the Girls’ Rite of the First Period and
of the Mourning Anniversary and First-salmon Rite of the Second, does not
coincide with the major culture-areas of the continent. The Southwest,
for instance, from which the modern southern Californians have received
so much, does not possess any of these ceremonies. The Southwest culture
therefore evidently originated, or began to take on its recent aspect,
or at least to influence Southern California, chiefly after the two
periods had passed by in which these ceremonies became established in
California. The Girls’ Rite, to be sure, extends up the Pacific coast
into Alaska. Yet it is more widespread than the North Pacific Coast
culture, since this has its southerly limit in Northwestern California,
whereas the ceremony is universal as far as to the southern end of the
state, besides occurring inland throughout the Great Basin and Plateau
regions. Being more widely spread than the Coast culture, the Girls’ Rite
is presumptively more ancient.
The beginnings of the four modern types of California native culture
must thus evidently be looked for at about the point now reached in our
reconstruction. At first there was a single very widespread ceremony;
then two less widely diffused ones; the next logical step in development
would have been the growth of a still larger number of ceremonies or
ritual systems. These, on account of their greater recency, and perhaps
on account of conflicting with one another, would have spread only over
comparatively small areas. Let us therefore assume that to this Third
Period belonged the beginnings of the Wealth-display dances of the
Northwestern Indians which are coupled with the idea of world renovation
(table, p. 299); the so-called Kuksu dances made among the Central
Californians by members of a secret society disguised as divinities; the
Jimsonweed rites of the Southern tribes who use this narcotic plant as a
mystical means of initiating the young into their religious society; and
the series of long singings that the Colorado River tribes are addicted
to and believe they have miraculously dreamed.
Of course, the idea could scarcely be entertained that these four local
systems sprang into existence full-fledged. They are complicated sets
of rituals, quite different from the simple Girls’ Rite and Mourning
Anniversary. They must have grown up gradually from more meager
beginnings and have been a considerable time reaching their present
elaboration. It would thus seem justifiable to add not only one but
two further periods of religious growth, in the earlier of which—the
Third—these ceremonial systems of the historic Indians began their
development, whereas in the later or Fourth they achieved it.
158. THIRD AND FOURTH PERIODS IN CENTRAL CALIFORNIA: KUKSU AND HESI
For instance, in the Central California sub-culture-area a series of
tribes possess a society to which young men are admitted only after
a double initiation with formal teaching by their elders, the first
initiation coming in boyhood, the second soon after puberty. The society
holds great four-day dances in large earth-covered houses. Time is beaten
to the dance and song with rattles of split sticks, and stamped with the
feet on a great log drum. The dancers wear showy feather costumes which
disguise them to the uninitiated women, children, and strangers, who take
them to be spirits of old that have come to exhibit themselves for the
good of the people. There may be as many as twelve divinities represented
in this way, each with his distinctive name and dress. One of the most
prominent of these is the god or “first-man” Kuksu, the founder of the
sacred rites, after whom the entire system has been named the “Kuksu
Cult.”
The tribes participating in the Kuksu Cult are the Patwin, nearer Maidu,
Porno, Yuki, Miwok, and several others. They occupy an area which may be
described as the heart of California: namely, the districts adjoining
the lower Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and the Bay of San Francisco
into which the two streams pour the drainage of the great interior valley
(Fig. 32).
Beyond the Kuksu-dancing tribes there are others, like the farther
Maidu, the Wailaki, and some of the Yokuts, among whom the medicine-men
are wont to gather for public demonstration of their magical prowess.
Thus, they assemble for a competition of “throwing” sickness into one
another, or to charm the rattlesnakes so that they can be handled and
that no one in the tribe may be bitten during the ensuing year. In these
gatherings there is the idea of an association of people endowed with
particular powers and operating more or less jointly for the benefit
of the community. In short, this fringe of Central tribes beyond the
border of the Kuksu Cult evince some of the psychology and motives of
the Cult, but without the definite organization of the latter, and also
without some of its specific practices, such as god-impersonation. These
gatherings of the medicine men thus look as if they might have been the
simple and generalized substratum out of which the Kuksu Cult grew by
a process of gradual formalization and ritualistic elaboration. This
conclusion is corroborated by the distribution. It is the tribes at the
ends of the great interior valley, or in the hills above it, whose rites
are of this loose type, while in the center are the true Kuksu-dancing
groups. There is a periphery of low organization and a core of high
organization. According to our previous rule (§ 87, 97), recency in
acquisition but antiquity of stage pertain to the marginal as the more
widely distributed; the geographically more compact nucleus representing
an earlier beginning but a later stage of present development. That is,
it is reasonable to believe that the Kuksu Cult grew out of semi-formal
gatherings of medicine-men such as still survive in the outlying
districts—the “backwoods” of the Central area.
[Illustration: FIG. 32. Native ritual growths in the Californian
area, the range of each narrowing in proportion to its recency and
specialization. First period, _stippling_: Girls’ Rite. Second period,
_shading_: _horizontal_, _MA_, Mourning Anniversary; _vertical_, _FS_,
First-Salmon Rite. Third and fourth periods, _outlines_: _A3_, Wealth
Display, _A4_, Deerskin Dance; _B3_, Kuksu Society, _B4_, Hesi Dance;
_C3_, Jimsonweed Cult, _C4_, Chungichnish Cult; _D3-4_, Dream Singing.]
Evidently if a still later religious movement developed as an elaboration
or addition of the Kuksu Cult, it should be less widely diffused than
this system, forming a sort of nucleus within the core. Actually there is
such a later growth. This is the Hesi Dance, confined to the Patwin and
Maidu of the lower Sacramento valley (Fig. 32), and regarded by them as
the most sacred portion of the Kuksu system. It is the one of all their
rituals into which the largest number of differently garbed performers
enter, and is made twice a year as the spectacular beginning and finale
of the series of lesser Kuksu dances.
The history of native ritual in Central California thus is fairly plain.
Early in the Third Period, perhaps already during the Second, the
specialists in religion, the medicine-men, had acquired the habit of
giving public demonstrations. This resulted in a bond of fellowship among
themselves and a sense of exclusiveness toward the community as a whole.
Out of this sense there was elaborated during the Third Period, somewhere
about the lower Sacramento Valley, the idea of an organized secret
society with initiated members. The performances became more and more
elaborate, and the production of proof of supernatural power gradually
crystallized into impersonations of deities. By the beginning of the
Fourth Period, the Kuksu Cult had been established. During this period,
it was carried from the center of origin to its farthest limits, whereas
at the center the Hesi Dance was evolved as a characteristic addition.
If native development had been able to proceed undisturbed, if, for
instance, the coming of the white race had been deferred a few centuries
longer, the Hesi might have followed the diffusion of the earlier Kuksu
Cult; and while this new spread was in progress, the Patwin who form the
central nucleus of the whole Kuksu-Hesi movement might have been devising
a still newer increment to the system.
159. THIRD AND FOURTH PERIODS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: JIMSONWEED AND
CHUNGICHNISH
The Southern California Jimsonweed Rites are quite distinct from the
Kuksu Cult in their regalia, dances, and teachings, but are also based
on initiation. It may therefore be concluded, first, that they grew up
contemporaneously in the Third Period; and next, that they sprang out of
the same soil, a growing tendency of the medicine-men toward professional
association. The selection of the jimsonweed as the distinctive element
in the south seems to have been due to influences from Mexico and
the Southwest. The tribes of Arizona and New Mexico use the plant in
religion, the Aztecs ascribed supernatural powers to it, and the modern
Tepecano of Mexico pray to it like a god. The Spanish-American name for
the plant, toloache, is an Aztec word. Because Mexican civilization was
so much the more advanced, it seems likely that the use of jimsonweed
originated in Mexico, was carried into the Southwest, and from there
spread into Southern California—perhaps at the receptive moment when
the medicine-men’s associations were drawing more closely together and
feeling the need of some powerful emotional element to lend an impetus to
their cults.
While the Jimsonweed religion was followed by Californian tribes from
the Yokuts on the north to the Diegueño on the south, its most elaborate
forms occur among groups near the center of Southern California,
especially the Gabrielino of Los Angeles and Catalina Island. This group
associates the greatest number of rituals and dances with the Jimsonweed
Society, and is therefore likely to have had the leading share in the
working out of the religion.
By the opening of the Fourth Period the Gabrielino must have had the
Jimsonweed Rites pretty fully developed, while the peripheral tribes like
the Yokuts and Diegueño were perhaps only learning the religious use of
the drug. The Gabrielino however did not stand still during this Fourth
Period, and while the original rather simple Jimsonweed Rites spread
north and south, they were adding a new element. This is the Chungichnish
Cult, based on belief in a great, wise, powerful god of this name, to
whom are due the final ordaining of the world and the institution of the
Jimsonweed Rites and their correct performance. Associated with this
belief is the use of the “ground painting.” This is a large picture,
usually of the world, drawn in colored earths, sands, seeds, or paints,
on the floor of the sacred enclosure in which the Jimsonweed rituals were
practised. This ground painting served both as an altar for the rites
and as a means of instructing the initiates (§ 192, 193). The custom of
this sacred painting became firmly established among the Gabrielino, and
is known to have spread from them to other tribes, such as the Luiseño.
From these it has been carried, in part during the last century, after
the white man was in the land, to still more remote tribes like the
Diegueño, who recognize the Gabrielino island of Catalina as the source
of the Chungichnish Cult and sing its songs to Gabrielino words (Fig. 32).
160. THIRD AND FOURTH PERIODS ON THE LOWER COLORADO: DREAM SINGING
In Southeastern California, among the tribes of the Lower Colorado
River, the Third and Fourth Periods are less easily distinguished. The
reason for this seems to be the fact that religion developed among these
tribes less through the invention or establishment of new elements, than
by the lopping away of older ones, with the result of a rather narrow
specialization on the few elements that were retained. Tribes like the
Yuma and Mohave scarcely danced for religious purposes. The special
costumes, showy feather headdresses, disguises, musical instruments,
sand-paintings, altars, and ritualistic processions that mark the Kuksu
and Jimsonweed cults, were lacking among them. They did adhere to the
widespread and ancient idea that dreams are a source and evidence of
supernatural power. In short, their religion turned inward, not outward.
Instead of their medicine-men forming a society based on initiation,
the Colorado River tribes came to feel that every one might be a
medicine-man according to his dreams. They put emphasis on these internal
experiences. The result has been that they believe that a legend can
be true and sacred only if it has been dreamed, and that a man’s songs
should be acquired in the same way. Religion, therefore, is an intensely
individualistic affair among them. Since no two men can dream quite
alike, no two Yumas or Mohaves tell their myths or sing their song cycles
identically. This cast to their religion is so strong that it looks to
be fairly ancient. The beginnings of this local type of religion may
therefore be set in the Third Period. As for the Fourth Period, it may
be inferred that this chiefly accentuated the tendencies developed in the
Third, the dream basis augmenting as ceremonialism dropped away.
161. NORTHWESTERN CALIFORNIA: WORLD-RENEWAL AND WEALTH DISPLAY
The Third and Fourth periods are also not readily distinguishable in
Northwestern California. Yet here the rooting of these two eras in the
Second is clearer. We have seen that all through northern California
there exists the First-salmon Rite conducted by a prominent medicine-man
of each locality; and we have referred the probable origin of this rite
to the Second period. The modern Indians of Northwestern California
consider their great dances of ten or twelve days’ duration as being
essentially the showy public accompaniment of an extremely sacred and
secret act performed by a single priest who recites a magical formula.
His purpose in some instances is to open the salmon season, in others
to inaugurate the acorn crop, in still others to make new fire for the
community. But whatever the particular object, it is always believed that
he renews something important to the world. He “makes the world,” as
the Indians call it, for another year. These New-year or World-renewing
functions of the rites of the modern Indians of Northwestern California
thus appear to lead back by a natural transition to the First-salmon Rite
which is so widely spread in northern California. Evidently this specific
rite that originated in the Second Period was developed in the Northwest
during the Third and Fourth eras by being broadened in its objective and
having attached to it certain characteristic dances.
These dances are the Deerskin and Jumping Dances. They differ from those
of the Central and Southern tribes in that every one may participate
in them. There is no idea of a society with membership, and hence no
exclusion of the uninitiated. In fact the dances are primarily occasions
for displays of wealth, which are regarded as successful in proportion to
the size of the audience. The albino deerskins, ornaments of woodpecker
scalps, furs, and great blades of flint and obsidian which are carried in
these dances, constitute the treasures of these tribes. The dances are
the best opportunity of the rich men to produce their heirlooms before
the public and in that way signalize the honor of ownership—which is one
of the things dearest in life to the Northwest Californian.
Another feature of these Northwestern dances which marks them off from
the Central and Southern ones is the fact that they can only be held in
certain spots. A Kuksu dance is rightly made indoors, but any properly
built dance house will answer for its performance. A Yurok or Hupa
however would consider it fundamentally wrong to make a Deerskin Dance
other than on the accepted spot where his great-grandfather had always
seen it. The reason for this attachment to the spot seems to be his
conviction that the most essential part of the dance is a secret, magical
rite enacted only in the specified place because the formula recited as
its nucleus mentions that spot.
In the Northwest we again seem to be able to recognize, as in the
Central and Southern regions, an increasing contraction of area for each
successively developed ritual. Whereas the First-salmon Rite of the
Second Period covers the whole northern third of California and parts of
Oregon, the Wealth-display dances and World-renewing rites of the Third
and Fourth Periods occur only in Northwestern California. The Jumping
Dance was performed at a dozen or more villages, the slightly more
splendid Deerskin Dance only in eight (Fig. 32). This suggests that the
Jumping Dance is the earlier, possibly going back to the Third Period,
whereas the Deerskin Dance more probably originated during the Fourth.
162. SUMMARY OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT
The history of religious cults among the Indians of California seems
thus to be reconstructible, with some probability of correctness in
its essential outlines, as a progressive differentiation during four
fairly distinct periods. During these four eras, the most typical cults
gradually changed from a personal to a communal aim, ceremonies grew more
numerous as well as more elaborate, influences from the outside affected
the tribes within California, and local differences increased until the
original rather close uniformity had been replaced by four quite distinct
systems of cults, separated in most cases by transitional areas in
which the less specialized developments of the earlier stages have been
preserved. This history may be expressed in visual form, as on page 314.
[Illustration: Periods of Religious Development in and about Native
California.]
[Illustration: Periods of Culture Development in Native California.]
163. OTHER PHASES OF CULTURE
A natural question arises here. Does this reconstructed history apply
only to ritual cults, or can a parallel development be traced for
other elements of religion, for industries, inventions, and economic
relations, for social institutions, for knowledge and art? The findings
are that this history holds for all phases of native culture. Material
and social development progressed much as did religion. Each succeeding
stage brought in new implements and customs, these became on the whole
more specialized as well as more numerous, and differed more and more
locally in the four sub-culture-areas. Thus the plain or self bow belongs
demonstrably to an earlier stratum than the sinew-backed one, basketry
precedes pottery, twined basketry is earlier than coiled, the stone
mortar antedates the slab with basketry mortar as the oval metate does
the squared one, earth-covered sweat houses are older than plank roofed
ones, and totemism may have become established before the division of
society into exogamic moieties. It would be a long story to adduce the
evidence for each of these determinations and all others that could
be made. It will perhaps suffice to say that the principles by which
they are arrived at are the same as those which have guided us in the
inquiry into religion. It may therefore be enough to indicate results in
a scheme, as on page 315. It will be seen that this is nothing but an
amplification of the preceding table. The framework there constructed to
represent the history of native rituals has here been further filled with
elements of material and social culture.
164. OUTLINE OF THE CULTURE HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA
In general terms, the net results of our inquiry can be stated thus.
First Period: a simple, meager culture, nearly uniform throughout
California, similar to the cultures of adjacent regions, and only
slightly influenced by these.
Second Period: definite influences from the North Pacific Coast and the
Southwest, affecting respectively the northern third and the southern
two thirds of California, and thus leading to a first differentiation of
consequence.
Third Period: more specific influences from outside, resulting in the
formation of four local types: the Northwestern, under North Pacific
influences; the Southern and Lower Colorado under stimulus of the
Southwest; and the Central, farthest remote from both and thus developing
most slowly but also most independently.
Fourth Period: consummation of the four local types. Influences
from outside continue operative, but in the main the lines of local
development entered upon in the previous era are followed out, reaching
their highest specialization in limited tracts central to each area.
This summary not only outlines the course of culture history in native
California: it also explains why there are both widely uniform and
narrowly localized culture elements in the region. It thus answers the
question why from one aspect the tribes of the state seem so much alike
and from another angle they appear endlessly different. They are alike
largely insofar as they have retained certain old common traits. They are
different to the degree that they have severally added traits of later
and localized development.
165. THE QUESTION OF DATING
A natural question is how long these periods lasted. As regards accurate
dating, there is only one possible answer: we do not know nearly enough.
Moreover modern historians, who possess infinitely fuller records on
chronology than anthropologists can ever hope to have on primitive
peoples, tend more and more to lay little weight on specific dates.
They may set 476 A.D., the so-called fall of Rome, as the point of
demarcation between ancient and mediæval history because it is sometimes
useful, especially in elementary presentation, to speak definitely.
But no historian believes that any profound change took place between
475 and 477 A.D. That is an impression beginners may get from the way
history is sometimes taught. Yet it is well recognized that certain slow,
progressive changes were going on uninterruptedly for centuries before
and after; and that if the date 476 A.D. is arbitrarily inserted into
the middle of this development, it is because to do so is conventionally
convenient, and with full understanding that the event marked was
dramatic or symbolic rather than intrinsically significant. In fact, the
value of a historian’s work lies precisely in his ability to show that
the forces which shaped mediæval history were already at work during the
period of ancient times and that the causes which had molded the Roman
empire continued to operate in some degree for many centuries after the
fall of Rome.
Nevertheless there is no doubt that occasional dates have the virtue
of impressing the mind with the vividness which specific statements
alone possess. Also, if the results of anthropological studies are
to be connected with the written records of history proper, at least
tentative dates must be formulated, though of course in a case like this
of the periods of native culture in California it is understood that all
chronology is subject to a wide margin of error.
History provides a start toward a computation, although its aid is a
short one. California began to be settled about 1770. The last tribes
were not brought into contact with the white man until 1850. As early,
however, as 1540 Alarcón rowed and towed up the lower Colorado and wrote
an account of the tribes he encountered there. Two years later, Cabrillo
visited the coast and island tribes of southern California, and wintered
among them. In 1579 Drake spent some weeks on shore among the central
Californians and a member of his crew has left a brief but spirited
description of them. In all three instances these old accounts of native
customs tally with remarkable fidelity with all that has been ascertained
in regard to the recent tribes of the same regions. That is, native
culture has evidently changed very little since the sixteenth century.
The local sub-cultures already showed substantially their present form;
which means that the Fourth Period must have been well established three
to four centuries ago. We might then assign to this period about double
the time which has elapsed since the explorers visited California; say
seven hundred years. This seems a conservative figure, which would put
the commencement of the Fourth Period somewhere about 1200 A.D.
All the remainder must be reconstruction by projection. In most parts
of the world for which there are continuous records, it is found that
civilization usually changes more rapidly as time goes on. While this is
not a rigorous law, it is a prevailing tendency. However, let us apply
this principle with reserve, and assume that the Third Period was no
longer than the Fourth. Another seven hundred years would carry back to
500 A.D.
Now, however, it seems reasonable to begin to lengthen our periods
somewhat. For the Second, a thousand years does not appear excessive:
approximately from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. By the same logic the First
Period should be allowed from a thousand to fifteen hundred years. It
might be wisest to set no beginning at all, since our “First” period is
only the first of those which are determinable with present knowledge.
Actually, it may have been preceded by a still more primitive era on
which as yet no specific evidence is available. It can however be
suggested that by 2000 or 1500 B.C. the beginnings of native Californian
culture as we know it had already been made.
166. THE EVIDENCE OF ARCHÆOLOGY
There is left as a final check on the problem of age a means of
attack which under favorable circumstances is sometimes the most
fruitful: archæological excavation, especially when it leads to
stratigraphic determination, that is, the finding of different but
superimposed layers. Unfortunately archæology affords only limited aid
in California—much less, for instance, than in the Southwest. Nothing
markedly stratigraphical has been discovered. Pottery, which has usually
proved the most serviceable of all classes of prehistoric remains for
working out sequences of culture and chronologies, is unrepresented in
the greater part of California, and is sparse and rather recent in those
southern parts in which it does occur.
Still, archæological excavation has brought to light something. It has
shown that the ancient implements found in shellmounds and village sites
in Southern California, those from the shores of San Francisco Bay in
Central California, and those along the coast of Northwestern California,
are distinct. Certain peculiar types of artifacts are found in each of
these regions, are found only there, and agree closely with objects used
by the modern tribes of the same districts. For instance, prehistoric
village and burial sites in Northwestern California contain long blades
of flaked obsidian like those used until a few years ago by the Yurok and
Hupa. Sites in Southern California have brought to light soapstone bowls
or “ollas” such as the Spaniards a century ago found the Gabrielino and
Luiseño employing in cooking and in jimsonweed administration. Both these
classes of objects are wanting from the San Francisco Bay shellmounds and
among the recent Central Californian tribes.
It may thus be inferred (1) that none of the four local cultures was ever
spread much more widely than at present; (2) that each of them originated
mainly on the spot; and (3) that because many of the prehistoric
finds lie at some depth, the local cultures are of respectable
antiquity—evidently at least a thousand years old, probably more. This
fairly confirms the estimate that the differentiation of the local
cultures of the Third Period commenced not later than about 500 A.D.
167. AGE OF THE SHELLMOUNDS
Archæology also yields certain indications as to the total lapse of
time during the four periods. The deposits themselves contribute the
evidence. Some of the shellmounds that line the ramifying shores of San
Francisco Bay to the number of over four hundred have been carefully
examined. These mounds are refuse accumulations. They were not built up
with design, but grew gradually as people lived on them year after year,
because much of the food of their inhabitants was molluscs—chiefly clams,
oysters, and mussels—whose shells were thrown outdoors or trodden under
foot. Some of the sites were camped on only transiently, and the layers
of refuse never grew more than a few inches in thickness. Other spots
were evidently inhabited for many centuries, since the masses of shell
now run more than thirty feet deep and hundreds of feet long. The higher
such a mound grew, the better it drained off. One side of it would afford
shelter from the prevailing winds. The more regularly it came to be lived
on, the more often would the inhabitants bring their daily catch home,
and, without knowing it, thus help to raise and improve the site still
further.
Some of these shellmounds are now situated high and dry, at some distance
above tide water. Others lie on the very edge of the bay, and several of
these, when shafts were sunk into them, proved to extend some distance
below mean sea level. The base of a large deposit known as the Ellis
Landing mound, near Richmond, is eighteen feet below high tide level; of
one on Brooks island near by, seventeen feet. The conclusion is that the
sites have sunk at least seventeen or eighteen feet since they began to
be inhabited. The only alternative explanation, that the first settlers
put their houses on piles over the water, is opposed by several facts.
The shells and ashes and soil of the Ellis Landing mound are stratified
as they would be deposited on land, not as they would arrange in water.
There are no layers of mud, remains of inedible marine animals, or ripple
marks. There is no record of any recent Californian tribe living in pile
dwellings; the shore from which the mound rises is unfavorably situated
for such structures, being open and exposed to storms. Suitable timber
for piles grows only at some distance. One is therefore perforce driven
to the conclusion that this mound accumulated on a sinking shore, but
that the growth of the deposit was more rapid than the rise of the sea,
so that the site always remained habitable.
How long a time would be required for a coast to subside eighteen feet is
a question for geologists, but their reply remains indefinite. A single
earthquake might cause a sudden subsidence of several feet, or again the
change might progress at the rate of a foot or only an inch a century.
All that geologists are willing to state is that the probability is high
of the subsidence having been a rather long time taking place.
The archæologists have tried to compute the age of Ellis Landing mound
in another way. When it was first examined there were near its top
about fifteen shallow depressions. These appear to be the remains of
the pits over which the Indians were wont to build their dwellings. A
native household averages about 7 inmates. One may thus estimate a
population of about 100 souls. Numerous quadruped bones in the mound
prove that these people hunted; net sinkers, that they fished; mortars
and pestles, that they consumed acorns and other seeds. Accordingly,
only part of their subsistence, and probably the minor part, was derived
from molluscs. Fifty mussels a day for man, woman, and child seem a fair
estimate of what their shellfish food is likely to have aggregated. This
would mean that the shells of 5,000 mussels would accumulate on the site
daily. Laboratory experiments prove that 5,000 such shells, with the
addition of the same percentage of ash and soil as occurs in the mound,
all crushed down to the same consistency of compactness as the body of
the mound exhibits, occupy a volume of a cubic foot. This being the daily
increment, the growth of the mound would be in the neighborhood of 365
feet per year. Now the deposit contains roughly a million and a quarter
cubic feet. Dividing this figure by 365, one obtains about 3,500 as the
presumable number of years required to accumulate the mound.
This result may not be accepted too literally. It is the result of a
calculation with several factors, each of which is only tentative. Had
the population been 200 instead of 100, the deposit would, with the other
terms of the computation remaining the same, have built up twice as fast,
and the 3,500 years would have to be cut in half. On the other hand,
it has been assumed that occupation of the site was continuous through
the year. Yet all that is known of the habits of the Indians makes it
probable that the mound inhabitants were accustomed to go up into the
hills and camp about half the time. Allowance for this factor would
double the 3,500 years. All that is maintained for the computed age is
that it represents a conscientious and conservative endeavor to draw a
conclusion from all available sources of knowledge, and that it seems to
hit as near the truth as a calculation of this sort can.
One verification has been attempted. Samples of mound material, taken
randomly from different parts, indicate that 14 per cent of its weight,
or about 7,000 tons, are ashes. If the mound is 3,500 years old, the
ashes were deposited at the rate of two tons a year, or about eleven
pounds daily. Experiments with the woods growing in the neighborhood
have shown that they yield less than one per cent of ash. The eleven
daily pounds must therefore have come from 1,200 pounds of wood. On the
assumption, as before, that the population averaged fifteen families, the
one-fifteenth share of each household would be eighty pounds daily. This
is a pretty good load of firewood for a woman to carry on her back, and
with the Indians’ habit of nursing their fires economically, especially
along a timberless shore, eighty pounds seems a liberal allowance to
satisfy all their requirements for heating and cooking. If they managed
to get along on less than eighty pounds per hut, the mound age would be
correspondingly greater.
This check calculation thus verifies the former estimate rather
reasonably. It does not seem rash to set down three to four thousand
years as the indicated age of the mound.
This double archæological conclusion tallies as closely as one could
wish with the results derived from the ethnological method of estimating
antiquity from the degree and putative rapidity of cultural change. Both
methods carry the First traceable period back to about 1,500 or 2,000
B.C. After all, exactness is of little importance in matters such as
these, except as an indication of certitude. If it could be proved that
the first mussel was eaten by a human being on the site of Ellis Landing
in 1724 B.C., this piece of knowledge would carry interest chiefly in
proving that an exact method of chronology had been developed, and
would possess value mainly in that the date found might ultimately be
connectible with the dates of other events in history and so lead to
broader formulations.
168. GENERAL SERVICEABILITY OF THE METHOD
The anthropological facts which have been analyzed and then recombined in
the foregoing pages are not presented with the idea that the history of
the lowly and fading Californians is of particular intrinsic moment. They
have been discussed chiefly as an illustration of method, as one example
out of many that might have been chosen. That it was the California
Indians who were selected, is partly an accident of the writer’s
familiarity with them. The choice seems fair because the problem here
undertaken is rather more difficult than many. The Californian cultures
were simple. They decayed quickly on contact with civilization. The bulk
of historical records go back barely a century and a half. Archæological
exploration has been imperfect and yields comparatively meager results.
Then, too, the whole Californian culture is only a fragment of American
Indian culture, so that the essentially local Californian problems would
have been further illuminated by being brought into relation with the
facts available from North America as a whole—an aid which has been
foregone in favor of compact presentation. In short, the problem was
made difficult by its limitations, and yet results have been obtained.
Obviously, the same method applied under more favorable circumstances to
regions whose culture is richer and more diversified, where documented
history projects farther back into the past, where excavation yields
nobler monuments and provides them in stratigraphic arrangement, and
especially when wider areas are brought into comparison, can result in
determinations that are correspondingly more exact, full, and positive.
It is thus clear that cultural anthropology possesses a technique of
operation which needs only vigorous, sane, and patient application to be
successful. This technique is newer and as yet less refined than those
of the mechanical sciences. It is also under the disadvantage of having
to accept its materials as they are given in nature; it is impossible to
carry cultural facts into the laboratory and conduct experiments on them.
Still, it is a method; and its results differ from those of the so-called
exact sciences in degree of sharpness rather than in other quality.
It will be noted that throughout this analysis there has been no mention
of laws; that at most, principles of method have been recognized—such
as the assumption that widely spread culture elements are normally
more ancient than locally distributed ones. In this respect cultural
anthropology is in a class with political and economic history, and with
all the essentially historical sciences such as natural history and
geology. The historian rarely enunciates laws, or if he does, he usually
means only tendencies. The “laws” of historical zoölogy are essentially
laws of physiology; those of geology, laws of physics and chemistry.
Even the “laws” of astronomy, when they are not mere formulations of
particular occurrences which our narrow outlook on time causes to
seem universal, are not really astronomical laws but mechanical and
mathematical ones. In other words, anthropology belongs in the group
of the historical sciences: those branches of knowledge concerned with
things as and how and when they happen, with events as they appear in
experience; whereas the group of sciences that formulates laws devotes
itself to the inherent and immutable properties of things, irrespective
of their place or sequence or occurrence in nature.
Of course, there must be laws underlying culture phenomena. There is no
possibility of denying them unless one is ready to remove culture out
of the realm of science and set it into the domain of the supernatural.
Where can one seek these laws that inhere in culture? Obviously in that
which underlies culture itself, namely, the human mind. The laws of
anthropological data, like those of history, are then laws of psychology.
As regards ultimate explanations for the facts which it discovers,
classifies, analyzes, and recombines into orderly reconstructions and
significant syntheses, cultural anthropology must look to psychology.
The one is concerned with “what” and “how”; the other with “why”; each
depends on the other and supplements it.
CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN NATIVE AMERICA
169. Review of the method of culture examination.—170.
Limitations on the diffusion principle.—171. Cultural
ranking.—172. Cultural abnormalities.—173. Environmental
considerations.—174. Culture-areas.—175. Diagrammatic
representation of accumulation and diffusion of culture
traits.—176. Representation showing contemporaneity and
narrative representation.—177. Racial origin of the American
Indians.—178. The time of the peopling of America.—179.
Linguistic diversification.—180. The primitive culture of
the immigrants.—181. The route of entry into the western
hemisphere.—182. The spread over two continents.—183. Emergence
of middle American culture: maize.—184. Tobacco.—185. The
sequence of social institutions.—186. Rise of political
institutions: confederacy and empire.—187. Developments
in weaving.—188. Progress in spinning: cotton.—189.
Textile clothing.—190. Cults: shamanism.—191. Crisis rites
and initiations.—192. Secret societies and masks.—193.
Priesthood.—194. Temples and sacrifice.—195. Architecture,
sculpture, towns.—196. Metallurgy.—197. Calendars and
astronomy.—198. Writing.—199. The several provincial
developments: Mexico.—200. The Andean area.—201. Colombia.—202.
The Tropical Forest.—203. Patagonia.—204. North America: the
Southwest.—205. The Southeast.—206. The Northern Woodland.—207.
Plains area.—208. The Northwest Coast.—209. Northern marginal
areas.—210. Later Asiatic Influences.
169. REVIEW OF THE METHOD OF CULTURE EXAMINATION
In a previous chapter (VII) it has been shown that culture cannot be
adequately explained either by the innate peculiarities of racial stocks
nor by the influences of geographic environment; that the factors to be
primarily considered in the interpretation of civilization are cultural
or social ones.
In a subsequent chapter (VIII) it was made clear that civilization is to
a great extent the result of accretion. New elements are handed down in
time or passed along in space by a process which psychologically is one
of imitation and in its cultural manifestations is spoken of as tradition
or diffusion. The chapters on the arch and the week, and the alphabet
(X, XI) serve as exemplifications that the principle holds with equal
validity in the domains of mechanical, institutional, and intellectual
activity. It must be accepted therefore purely as the consequence of
an objective or behavioristic examination of human civilization, that
while the element of invention or creative progress remains unexplained,
the factor of diffusion or imitation is the one that is operative in
the majority of cultural events. As contrasted with it, instances of
the principle of independent origin or parallel development prove to
be decidedly rare, and tend to be illusory on searching analysis or to
dissolve into only partial similarities.
In the analysis of the growth of religion in native California (Chapter
XII), the attempt was made to apply an assumption derived from the
diffusion principle—the assumption that normally the more widely spread
element would be the more ancient—to the unraveling of the growth of a
civilization which on account of its poverty has left no chronological
records; in short, to reconstruct the tentative history of a field
lacking ordinary historical data, by converting elements of space into
elements of time.
It may now be worth while to apply this method on a larger scale and
endeavor to outline the pre-Columbian history of the western hemisphere,
which, with some brief and late exceptions in Mexico and Peru, is equally
dateless. The cultural connections of native America with the Old World
are generally conceded to have been slight: its civilization represents
the most important one that in the main developed independently of the
Eur-Asiatic nexus.
170. LIMITATIONS ON THE DIFFUSION PRINCIPLE
To essay, by the mere principle of converting spatial extent into
temporal duration, an accomplishment of such magnitude and ultimately
of such complexity as this, may seem simplistic; and it would be. The
distribution principle may be the most useful of the weapons in the
ethnologist’s armory. But it requires supplement and qualification.
[Illustration: FIG. 33. Schematic illustration of distributions of
culture traits as indicative of their history. _A_, distribution
corresponding to one by accident, and suggesting that each occurrence is
independent of the others. _B_, distribution by contiguous occurrences,
strongly suggesting a single invention and subsequent diffusion. _C_,
distribution interpretable as due either to independent, parallel
origins; or to a single origin, diffusion over the whole area, and
subsequent loss of the trait in most parts, with survival only in
marginal tracts. The loss in the central area might be due to the growth
of a supplanting trait, whose later diffusion had not yet penetrated
to the farthest ends. _D_, distribution suggesting a single origin old
enough for its diffusion to have become extensive, but checked in certain
directions by adverse conditions in nature, communications, or cultural
preoccupation. The specific demonstration of such adverse factors would
substantiate the interpretation.]
First of all, it is obvious that spatial extension must not be measured
mechanically. To work on the assumption that a custom or art practised
over a million square miles was a third as old again as one practised
over seven hundred and fifty thousand, would be too often contrary to
the evidence of known history as well as the dictates of reason. Culture
traits do die out, from inanition, from sterility of social soil, through
supplanting by more vigorous descendants. Continuity is therefore not a
necessary ingredient of geographical range. An ancient trait may have
been displaced in all but a few remote peripheral tracts. The areas of
these may aggregate but little. Yet the distances between them are likely
to remain greater than the longest range of a later trait which has
replaced the earlier one over most of its original territory.
Thus, alphabetic writing is more recent than the ideographic and rebus
methods, but in the year 1500 A.D. was in use over a larger area in
Europe, Africa, and Asia than the surviving Chinese and Mexican systems
occupied. Yet these two outlying systems enclosed between them a larger
tract than those over which the alphabets had diffused.
So, at the same period, was agriculture practised by peoples holding
more area than was occupied by non-agricultural ones. But the former
constituted two great and continuous groups, one in each hemisphere, to
which the non-agricultural peoples in the north of Asia, the south of
Africa, the remote continent of Australia, the north of North America,
and the south of South America were obviously peripheral. Agriculture
being of necessity later than the non-agricultural state, and there being
thus no doubt that the marginal hunting peoples represent the remnant of
a condition that was once world-wide, it appears that there must be a
presumption of validity in favor of reckoning the extent of a scattered
custom by its included rather than its actual area.
Of course, the situation is not always so simple. There may exist the
possibility of two or more marginal areas sharing a trait as the result
of parallelism. Half-hitch basketry coiling in Tasmania and at Cape
Horn might logically be the last survival of a very ancient world-wide
diffusion, or the product of two thoroughly independent inventions,
or of parallel processes of degeneration in isolated and culturally
unstimulated nooks. The last two interpretations in fact seem more
conservative than the first. If half-hitch coiling were as antecedent
in its nature to other coiling and to weaving as wild foods are to
cultivated ones; or if the Old Stone Age remains showed it to have been
actually so; or if it were practised by a considerable number of tribes
in four or five rather large marginal areas instead of two quite narrow
ones, diffusion, and the consequent antiquity of the trait, could be
inferred with high probability. In short, the periphery argument must not
be stretched too thin.
Obviously, too, comparables must be compared: coiling with twining,
hand-weaving with loom-weaving; not, however, the very special variety
of half-hitch coiling with the entire array of weaving techniques. Nor
would it be fair to balance the whole group of true alphabets in the year
500 B.C. against the particular rebus system of Egyptian hieroglyphs from
which they were possibly derived but which they had already much exceeded
in their diffusion. Yet the distribution of all alphabets as against
that of all ideographic and rebus systems would lead, at that date as
two thousand years later, to the same interpretation that the facts of
history actually give.
171. CULTURAL RANKING
Consideration must also be allowed, within certain limits, to cultural
superiority and inferiority. This is a criterion that has been abused
in the earlier anthropology, but it is usable with caution, especially
where a measure of experience confirms the grading that seems rational.
A machine process would normally be later than a manual one: cloth, for
instance, subsequent to basketry. The antiquity of both these products
happens to be so great that little or no direct historical evidence
exists, and their perishability precludes much help from archæology. Yet
there is this indirect evidence: there are peoples that make baskets
only, others that make baskets and cloth, none that make cloth only.
Cloth thus is something superadded, which, not coming into competition of
utility with basketry, coexists with it.
Where two devices serve the same end and come into full contact, the
issue is even simpler, because the better crowds out the worse. There
is no record of any people, once able to produce metal axes or knives,
reverting to or inventing stone ones. An adequate system of recording
events has always maintained itself. Literacy may have become less
frequent, now and then, under economic or military stress, and literature
poorer, but no recording culture has ever gone back wholly to oral
tradition. Specific systems of records have indeed died out—witness
Egyptian and Cuneiform: but only because they were rendered useless by
more efficient systems of pure phonetic writing. These, on the other
hand, have never been known to yield to non-phonetic systems.
It is very different with culture phenomena whose ranking is based
solely on the operation of our imaginations. In such cases judgment
should if possible be wholly suspended until evidence is available. For
fifty or sixty years it has seemed eminently plausible and natural,
even inevitable to most people, that matrilinear institutions preceded
patrilinear ones, because a man must know his mother, but in a condition
of promiscuity would not know his father. Yet incontrovertible historical
evidence of a change is conspicuously deficient, so that the belief
in the antecedence of the matrilineate has remained founded solely in
hypothesis. As has been indicated above (§ 110) and will be shown more
in detail below (§ 185), the indirect evidence of distribution indicates
rather that definitely matrilinear and patrilinear institutions have
tended to be closely associated, and that among exogamous and totemic
peoples the matrilineate has usually been the later phase.
In fact, one important stimulus to belief in matrilineal priority has
been the awareness that the most advanced cultures of the recent period
have inclined to count descent from the father. But it is obviously
unfounded to deduce from this that ancient and primitive nations favored
mother-reckoning. It would be equally logical—or illogical—to infer
that what is had always been since institutions arose, as to argue that
because a thing is now it must formerly not have been.
This points to a further limiting consideration: that it is dangerous
to argue from a fraction of culture history to the whole. Particularly
dangerous is it to infer from the last four centuries to all that went
before. In the present era distant communications have become infinitely
more numerous and rapid. Space has in one sense been almost abolished.
Diffusions that now encircle the planet in a hundred years would in
previous ages often have required a thousand to cross a continent by
halting steps from people to people.
Similarly, the results of the diffusion principle may be vitiated by
an arbitrary bounding of the spatial field of investigation. A review
of African distributions by themselves, for instance, would lead
to many misleading conclusions, because it is obvious that African
culture has evolved not integrally but as a part of the larger complex
Europe-Asia-Africa. What from the angle of Africa thus appears central,
like iron, may really be peripheral; what appears marginal, like Islam,
is often actually central. By comparison America is so discrete from
the Old World, both geographically and historically, that an analogous
attempt is far more justifiable. Yet even here, as will appear, some
influences from the Old World have operated, whose a priori elimination
would lead to false conclusions.
As regards what is high and low, whole cultures as well as culture
elements must be considered. Between two civilizations, it is fair to
assume that the more advanced will normally radiate, the retarded one
absorb. It is known that the drift of diffusion was from western Asia
to Greece in 800 B.C., from Greece to western Asia in 300 B.C. In the
case of a still unexplained trait common to the two areas and limited
to them, the presumption of origin would thus lie in one or the other
tract according to whether its appearance fell in the period of Asiatic
or Greek culture domination. So in America, loom weaving is shared by
Mexicans and Pueblos. If nothing else were known of them except that
the former but not the latter had passed from oral tradition to visible
records, there would be justification for belief in the probability of
importation of the loom from Mexico into the adjacent Southwest. Since
this one item of Mexican superiority is reinforced by the facts that
the Mexicans cultivated a dozen plants to the Pueblos’ three; that they
were expert in several metallurgical processes and the Pueblos at best,
and rarely, hammered native copper; that the Mexicans alone carried on
elaborate astronomical observations, computed with large figures, and had
established an intercommunal dominion, the probability of their priority
in loom weaving becomes so strong as to serve as a fairly reliable
working basis. Still, it is important to remember that in the absence of
the direct testimony of history or archæology such a probability does
not become a certainty. The Greeks were without writing, metal working,
successful astronomy, or empire while these already flourished in Egypt
and Asia and were later carried to Greece. Yet in this general period the
Greeks developed metrical poetry and vowel signs for the alphabet.
Another limitation to the regularity of the diffusion process is to be
found in the inability or unreadiness of undeveloped culture to accept
specialized products of more advanced civilizations; and of any culture
to accept traits incompatible with its existing customs, except on
severe or long continued pressure. A backward tribe might adopt a simple
iron-working technique quite avidly, yet find the manufacture of sewing
machines beyond its endeavors and wants. Among a people owning little
property and no money and therefore not in the habit of counting, and
indifferent to their ages or the lapse of time as expressed in numbers
of years and days, a calendar system like that of the Babylonians
or Mayas would certainly not become established merely because of
contact. They might adopt and make use of the knowledge that there are
some twelve moons in the round of the seasons, and that the solstices
furnish convenient starting points for the count within each year. But
generations and centuries of gradual preparation through acceptance of
such elementary fragments of the elaborate calendrical scheme would
ordinarily precede their ability to take the latter over in completeness.
So with a religion like Christianity or Buddhism carried by a lone
missionary, or shipwrecked sailors, to a people as simple in their life
as the Indians of California. The religion would be too abstract, too
remote, too dependent on unintelligible preconceptions, to be embraced.
A particular Christian or Buddhist trait, say a symbol like the swastika
or cross, might conceivably be taken over and perpetuated as a decorative
motive or as a magical charm. True, if the missionary came in the company
of troops and settlers, and introduced cattle, regular meals, comfortable
clothing, intertribal peace, new occupations and diversions, the old
simple culture would often crumble rapidly, and the higher religion be
adopted as part of the larger change, as indeed happened in California
when the Franciscans entered it. But one would not argue from the
convertibility of the Indians under such circumstances to their equal
readiness to accept Buddhism from sporadic East Asiatic castaways.
172. CULTURAL ABNORMALITIES
Now and then a condition of cultural pathology must be discounted.
About 1889 a messianic religious movement known as the Ghost-dance
fired half the Indian tribes of the United States for a few years. In
1891 this had a wider diffusion than any ancient cult. It represented
something struck from the contact of two culture systems: it was not of
pure native evolution. A point had been reached where the old cultures
felt themselves suffocated by the wave of Caucasian immigration and
civilization. And in a last despairing delirium they flung forth the
delusion of an impending cataclysm that would wipe out the white man with
his labor, penalties, and restrictions, bring back the extinct buffalo,
and restore the old untrammeled life. Such a cult could not of course
have remained permanently active. If analogous excitements occurred in
the prehistoric period, they died away without a trace and may therefore
be disregarded in a view of long perspective. Or at most they served as
ferments productive of other and more stable culture growths. Even if
all knowledge of American religion were blotted out except its condition
in 1891, the careful investigator would stand in no serious danger of
inferring a high antiquity from the broad extent of the Ghost-dance cult,
because of the conspicuous elements which it purloined from that very
Christianity and Occidental civilization whose encroachments gave it
birth.
173. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS
Two other qualifications on the distribution method must be observed,
although they are sufficiently obvious to carry no great danger of
oversight. The first concerns gaps or bounds due to physical environment.
Metallurgy will not be practised on an isolated coral island. Snowshoes
cannot be expected in equatorial lowlands. The spread of the cultivation
of a tropical plant like manioc is necessarily restricted no matter how
great the antiquity of its use. Limitations of diffusion, or breaks in
the continuity of distribution, thus do not count as negative evidence
if climate or soil suffice to explain them. This is in accord with what
has been previously formulated (§ 83) as to environment being a limiting
condition rather than a cause of cultural phenomena.
Secondly, a marginal area need not be literally so. It may actually
be nuclear. Thus in the Philippines, older elements of culture are
best preserved in the interiors of the larger islands. The coasts show
many more imported traits. Communication in the archipelago is by sea,
internally as well as in foreign relations; resistance to travel,
conquest, intercourse, or innovation is by land. The remote area as
regards time may therefore be a mountain range fifty miles inland, while
a coast a thousand miles away is near. So a rough hill tract in a level
territory, a desert encircled by fertile lands, sometimes remain backward
because they oppose the same obstacles to diffusion as great distances.
It is thus evident that valuable as the distribution principle is,
perhaps most important of all non-excavating methods of prehistoric
investigation, it can never be used mechanically. It must be applied
with common sense, and with open-mindedness toward all other techniques
of attack. With these provisos in mind, let us approach the problem of
American culture.
174. CULTURE-AREAS
The native cultures of the New World are signalized by the two
outstanding traits already alluded to. First, they have come to us
virtually in momentary cross section, flat and without perspective. In
general there are few historic data extant about them. Second, they
represent the civilizations of by far the greatest geographical extent
and highest attainment that have developed independently, in the main at
least, of the great web of culture growths which appear to have had their
principal origin in the regions not far from the eastern Mediterranean.
They offer, accordingly, a separate problem, and one which, on account of
the dearth of temporal data, has had to be approached through the medium
of space. As soon, therefore, as knowledge of American cultures became
orderly, its organization was inevitably effected in terms of geography.
The result has been the recognition of a series of culture-areas or
culture-centers, several of which have already been referred to (§
150-152). These geographically defined types of culture are gradual and
empirical findings. They are not the product of a scheme or imagination,
nor the result of theory. They are not even the formulation of any one
mind. They do represent a consensus of opinion as to the classification
of a mass of facts, slowly arrived at, contributed to by many workers,
probably accepted in exact identity by no two of them but in essential
outlines by all; in short, a non-philosophical, inductive, mainly
unimpeachable organization of phenomena analogous to the “natural”
classification of animals and plants on which systematic biology rests.
These culture areas, centers, or types have been established with greater
exactitude for North than for South America. The ten usually recognized
(see Fig. 34) are:
1. Arctic or Eskimo: coastal
2. Northwest or North Pacific Coast: also a coastal strip
3. California or California-Great Basin
4. Plateau: the northern inter-mountain region
5. Mackenzie-Yukon: the northern interior forest and tundra tract
6. Plains: the level or rolling prairies of the interior
7. Northeast or Northern Woodland: forested
8. Southeast or Southern Woodland: also timbered
9. Southwest: the southern plateau, sub-arid
10. Mexico: from the tropic to Nicaragua.
The only serious divergence of opinion as to distinctness or approximate
boundaries might arise in regard to numbers 4 and 5 of this list. The
culture of the Mackenzie region is so deficient and colorless that some
students have hesitated to set it up as a separate unit. The Plateau
culture is also vague as to positive traits. A plausible argument could
be advanced apportioning it between the adjacent Northwest, Plains,
California, and Southwest cultures. In fact, usage has here been departed
from in reckoning the Great Basin, that part of the plateau which is
without ocean drainage, with California instead of the Plateau.
[Illustration: FIG. 34. Culture-areas of America. The numbers refer to
the names as listed on pp. 336, 338. (Modified from Wissler.)]
The Mexican area is less homogeneous than any of the preceding. At least
three sub-centers must apparently be recognized within it: those of
the Nahua or Aztec, Zapotec, and Maya. The Nahua were politically and
economically dominant at the time of discovery, but the Maya center is
likely to be the oldest. To it seems due most of the progress achieved
in architecture, sculpture, calendry, and writing. The sources of
knowledge in the Mexican area are historic and archæological rather than
contemporaneously ethnological, and are available through the medium of
Spanish writings. Also the phenomena are more diverse and intricate, as
is only natural with higher cultures. The consequence is that they are
scarcely as well ordered as those from north of Mexico and have not yet
been brought into as close a comparable relation with the latter as these
among themselves.
South American cultures seem to arrange themselves on fewer lines of
cleavage than those of the northern continent. Only five areas are as
yet distinctly recognizable. This paucity is perhaps due to a less
intensive search for facts and less systematic attempt to classify them,
so that future studies may increase the number of areas recognized. Yet a
simplicity of plan of culture relationships is evident. The narrow strip
between the Andes and the Pacific is a region of rather high culture
throughout, the whole remainder of the continent one of much lower and
comparatively uniform culture. The areas determined are:
11. Colombia or Chibcha: western Colombia with the nearer parts of
Central America and northwestern Ecuador. This is in the main a timbered
region.
12. Andean or Peruvian: from southern Ecuador to northern Chile and
northwestern Argentina. This is distinctively an arid to sub-arid and
unforested belt.
13. Patagonia: characteristically an open, semi-arid country.
14. Tropical Forest: the vast Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata drainages,
prevailingly lowland, humid, and containing the greatest forest in the
world. Three sub-regions stand out with a certain ethnic differentiation,
although the basis of their culture seems to be that of the woodland.
They are: the savannahs of the Guiana region; the highlands of eastern
Brazil; the Chaco, west of the middle La Plata system. All three of these
are open areas or only part timbered.
15. Antillean: the West Indies, including probably the Venezuela coast.
This culture was the earliest to perish in the New World. It received the
first shock of Caucasian discovery and settlement, and its carriers had
no hinterland to which to retreat. It is therefore imperfectly known. Its
closest affiliations are with the preceding area. In fact, the Antillean
may yet prove only a subdivision of the Tropical Forest culture. In the
discussions that follow, it has been omitted, but can in the main be
understood as included in what is said of the Tropical Forest area.
175. DIAGRAMMATIC REPRESENTATION OF ACCUMULATION AND DIFFUSION OF CULTURE
TRAITS
The outstanding facts regarding these fourteen or fifteen culture-areas
can be most vividly presented in a table allotting a column to each area.
Roughly, at least, these columns can follow one another in geographical
order. In each column, then, there might be entered all the culture
traits found in its area. If one culture were twice as rich or complex
as another, the double number of entries would pile up twice as high and
impress the eye.
Actually, such a procedure is hardly practicable. The number of culture
elements is too great. Often too there would be doubt whether a feature
should be reckoned as one or several. Metal working comprises smelting,
casting, forging, alloying, plating, soldering, and welding. These are
distinct techniques. Yet they usually occur together or are all lacking.
One tribe practises simple two-ply twining. Another adds three-strand,
diagonal, and lattice twining and three-strand braiding, probably
as developments of the original two-strand process. As between two
adjacent or related basket-making peoples, this difference may be very
significant; measured against cloth weaving, it is trivial.
Accordingly, in order to render the data more easily apperceived
and conceptualized, only the more fundamental aspects of arts and
institutions have been included in the diagram (Fig. 35), plus some that
perhaps involve intrinsically less significant principles or faculties,
but were of particular importance in the life of the peoples following
them, such as the tipi or skin tent of the Plains tribes. This means
that a necessarily subjective selection of traits has been made in the
compilation of the table. But the reader who is not a specialist in
the matter will generally be grateful for the elimination; and this
elimination has at least been conducted without a conscious bias in any
one direction. If anything, it would seem that the selective condensation
has operated against the preëminence of the advanced areas. With every
possible datum inserted, the peaks in the table would probably overshadow
the valleys much more conspicuously.
Accepting the diagram, then, as affording an approximately truthful
picture, it is obvious that much the greatest advancement took place in
Middle America—the region from Mexico to Peru; and that on the whole
the majority of culture traits found in any of the more backward areas
are shared with this middle region. These are the traits below the
heavy line that steps up and down across the diagram. A minority of
traits—those above the heavy line—are local to the several areas. On the
basic principle that a trait occurring over a continuous territory may be
assumed to have originated but once and to have spread by diffusion, the
bulk of the culture of most of the areas must have come into them from
outside. On the principle that a people with many established arts is
more likely to make a new invention than is a retarded people, the great
majority of the diffused elements may therefore be attributed to a Middle
American source. In this region, then, lay the focal point, the hive, of
American civilization. From it, the tribes of the Lower Amazon and the
upper Mississippi equally derived most of the limited culture which they
possessed.
[Illustration: FIG. 35. Diagram illustrating the occurrence of some
representative elements of culture in the various areas of America. In
general, assumed early elements are below, late ones above, _within
each column_; but for the figure as a whole, horizontal levels do not
indicate contemporaneity as they do in figure 36. Height of columns
is representative of quantity or elaboration of culture content,
which towers impressively in Middle America, to fall away towards the
peripheries. Hatching indicates elements that may once have existed in
areas but are now lacking; stippling, elements perhaps introduced from
Asia. Entries above the heavy line are local developments.]
In South America, the diffusion proceeded broadside from the length of
the Andes. In North America, it radiated fanwise from the south Mexican
angle, the Southwest serving as the gateway or first relaying station
that let through most but not all of what it received. One area alone,
the Northwest Coast, was reached but imperfectly by Middle American
influences, yet attained a tolerable development through its own creative
force, supplemented in some measure by the drift into it of sporadic
culture element migrants from Asia. Here only, then, there occurred a
markedly independent growth of civilization, though definitely secondary
to the great evolution of Middle America which in the main determined the
culture of the twin continents.
176. REPRESENTATION SHOWING CONTEMPORANEITY AND NARRATIVE REPRESENTATION
So far as possible, the traits in each column of the diagram have been
disposed in the order of their presumptive appearance in time. In the
lowest level, for instance, have been set those elements that are likely
to have been common to all the first immigrants into America. Local
developments tending on the whole to be late, have been placed toward the
heads of columns; and, roughly throughout, widely diffused and therefore
apparently early elements are nearer the bottom. In general, accordingly,
the sequence upward of traits indicates their approximate sequence in
time. But this arrangement obviously holds chiefly for each column as
a unit. As between the columns, it breaks down, since the top of each
column would represent the same period, the moment of discovery, and
these tops are not on a level.
The display of the same data in such a manner that vertical position
would adequately represent proportional lapse of time as the horizontal
placing suggests geographical contiguity, would necessitate another
arrangement. In such a diagram the height of each column would be the
same, but the richer cultures would have their constituent elements
more closely crowded. That is, each new invention or institution or
importation followed more rapidly on its predecessor than in the
peripheral areas. For instance, while maize agriculture was spreading
from Middle America to the Southwest and thence to the Northeast, the
Middle Americans were adding varied agriculture and metallurgy, human
sacrifice, and astronomy. The strata in the diagram would therefore
generally not be level but would slope upward from their origin in the
middle. This would be a more accurate schematic representation of what
happened.
On the other hand, difficulties would arise in the graphic
representation. The domestication of the llama, for instance, is confined
to a single area, the Andean. Yet the domestication is rather ancient, as
archæological discoveries prove; perhaps older than the spread of many
culture elements from the Andes into the Tropical Forest, or from Mexico
into the United States. The llama could therefore not be placed properly
near the head of the column representing Andean culture, because the top
of this column would signify recency. It would have to be inserted lower
down, thus breaking the continuity of strata extending through several
areas. Thus the diagram would quickly become so intricate as to lose its
graphic value.
It would simplify the problem if the large mass of culture elements could
be segregated into a small number of groups, each assignable to a stratum
or period, much as the constituents of the religion and then of the
whole culture of the California Indians were analyzed and then regrouped
in the preceding chapter. Such a procedure, however, is much easier
and more accurate for the subdivisions of one limited area than for an
entire hemisphere, because the interrelations of the areas constituting
this are naturally very complex and at many points imperfectly known.
Such a schematic representation of the course of culture in the whole of
the Americas on the basis of as many traits as are included in Figure
35, is therefore not attempted here. Instead, there is reproduced an
analogous but simpler scheme (Fig. 36) recently published by an author
whose primary concern is with Middle America, who has presented his
story in the form of a treatment by larger periods, and in his diagram
extends these to the remainder of the two continents. If his figure seems
different from the preceding one, it should be remembered that the two
approaches are not only from somewhat different angles but independent of
each other, besides which it will be found that the divergence between
the two illustrations (Figs. 35 and 36) is more apparent than intrinsic.
[Illustration: FIG. 36. Diagrammatic representation by Spinden of the
development of native American culture. Fewer elements of culture are
included than in figure 35, but these are definitely placed according to
their indicated sequence in time. While this diagram was prepared with
particular reference to Middle American civilization and therefore has
reference only to the culture areas cut by the line ABCD, and while it
carries the peopling of the continent a few thousand years back of the
time assumed in this book, it is in substantial agreement with the views
expressed in the present chapter.]
At best, however, all diagrams are not only schematic but static; and it
may accordingly be worth while to try to narrate some of the principal
events of the history of American civilization in order to bring out
their continuity and relations as they appear in perspective. But the
reader must remember that this is a reconstruction from indirect and
often imperfect evidence, probably correct in the large and in many
details, certain to be incorrect in some proportion of its findings,
tentative throughout and subject to revision as the future brings fuller
insight. It aims to give the truth as it can be pieced together: it is
never a directly documented story like those familiar to us from orthodox
“history.”
177. RACIAL ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS
The American race can hardly have come from anywhere else than Asia: it
entered the New World perhaps ten thousand years ago. Its affiliations,
as previously set forth (§ 23, 25) are generically Mongoloid. This
statement does not mean that the American Indians are descended from the
Chinese or Japanese, any more than the fact that these are denominated
Mongolians implies belief in their descent from the particular modern
people known as the Mongols. We call ourselves Caucasians without any
intimation that our ancestors lived in the Caucasus mountains or that the
present inhabitants of the Caucasus are a purer and more representative
stock than we. So the Mongolians are that group of “yellow” peoples of
eastern Asia of whom the Mongols form part; and the Mongoloids are the
larger group that takes in Mongolians, East Indians, and Americans.
From the original proto-Mongoloid stem, all three divisions and their
subdivisions have sprung and differentiated. The American Indians have
probably remained closer to it than the Chinese. It would be more correct
to say that the Chinese have developed out of an ancient Indian-like
stock, acquiring slant eyes rather late.
The proto-Mongoloid stem must be ten thousand years old. It is probably
much older. In the Aurignacian period, the third from the last in the Old
Stone Age, twenty-five thousand or so years ago, possibly longer, the two
other great types of living men were already rather well characterized.
The fossil Grimaldi race of this period shows pretty clear Negroid
affinities; the contemporary Cro-Magnon race can probably be reckoned as
proto-Caucasian. It is therefore probable, although as yet unproved by
discoveries, that the proto-Mongoloids were also already in existence.
178. THE TIME OF THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA
About the end of the Palæolithic or beginning of the Neolithic some
of these proto-Mongoloids drifted from Asia into North America. These
were probably the real discoverers of the New World, which they found
inhabited only by brutes. The time of their invasion can be but roughly
fixed, yet within its limits it seems fairly reliable. Had the migration
occurred much later, when the Neolithic was already well under way,
the domesticated animals and plants of the Old World would have been
introduced—cattle, pigs, sheep, wheat, barley, rice, millet, all of which
the Americans lacked. The same holds for inventions like the wheel.
Analogous arguments weigh against a belief in a possible earlier peopling
of America, say in the middle Palæolithic. In that event there ought to
be cave or rock shelter or river terrace deposits corresponding to those
of Europe in containing only implements of Palæolithic type. But none
such have been found in America, or where alleged, their circumstances
have remained matters of controversy.
Further, if Palæolithic man had inhabited the western hemisphere, it is
likely that his fossil remains would have come to light. There has been
much excavation, and numerous investigators are alive to the importance
which evidence of this sort would bear. Yet to date not a single human
fossil of positively Pleistocene age or type has been discovered.
Numerous sensational finds have been announced. But in every case their
geological matrix or stratum has been proved either recent or open to
doubt. And not a single fragment of a skeleton of Neandertal type, or one
equally different from modern man, is on record from America. Every once
alleged Pleistocene skull or part appears to belong to some branch of the
American Indian race as it exists to-day. It is therefore unlikely that
man reached America before the last stage of the Palæolithic.
If the date of the entry is set at ten thousand years ago, the elapsed
period accounts very well for the present diversification of the
American race. There are broad and narrow headed tribes, tall and short
ones, some with hooked noses, others with slightly wavy hair. But the
fundamental type is everywhere the same. The differences seem just such
as environment and mode of life, the accidents of descent from small
groups, and perhaps a slight effect of selection, would be certain to
accomplish in time. In general, the natives of America are remarkably
homogeneous, considering the vast territory they occupy, its variations
of temperature, humidity, altitude, and food supply, and the marked
differences in the living customs of many tribes. The one group that at
all stand apart are the Eskimo; and these are distinct in language and
culture also. Moreover, they occupy the parts nearest to Asia, including
both sides of Behring Strait. Thus they seem to represent a separate
origin. But all the other groups from Alaska to Patagonia are so closely
related somatically, that no comprehensive and generally accepted
sub-classification of them has yet been possible. In fact, the American
race seems almost too undifferentiated to require ten thousand years for
its superficial diversifications; until it is remembered that human races
left to themselves seem in most cases to alter rather slowly. Mixture is
one of the greatest factors of racial change, and in the isolation of
America this element was eliminated to a much larger extent than in most
of the Old World.
179. LINGUISTIC DIVERSIFICATION
Language tells a similar story. The American Indian languages certainly
appear to be diverse. It has been customary to reckon about a hundred
and fifty distinct speech families in North and South America (§ 50).
But many of these are imperfectly known; of late several Americanist
philologists have been inclined to see definite resemblances between
numerous tongues that are superficially different. Buried and disguised
resemblances are being noted, which point to original unity. Thus the
number of genetically distinct families or language stocks is shrinking.
The number to be ultimately recognized bids fair to be small.
Old World conditions are at bottom more similar than at first glance
seems. English and the modern Hindu languages, such as Bengali, although
certainly related, are quite different from each other. The proof of
their common Indo-European origin rests largely on the similarities
between their ancestral forms, Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. These in turn
are tied together more closely by the connecting evidence of other
ancient languages, such as Greek and Latin. Take away these extinct
tongues and the modern transitional ones, imagine English and Bengali to
be the only representatives of Indo-European, and it is doubtful whether
their common parentage could be wholly proved. The relationship would
certainly not be readily recognizable; the most painstaking analysis
would reveal so many words wholly peculiar to each language, and so
many exceptions to every suggestion of regular sound equivalences, that
conservative philologists would perhaps refuse to commit themselves on
the problem of a single origin.
This imaginary situation parallels the actual one in American
linguistics. Not a single ancient form of speech has been preserved. Many
living ones are inadequately known. The fact that some enthusiast has
compiled a grammar of Nahuatl or Quechua or Eskimo does not necessarily
mean that he has dissected out its whole structure. A book devoted to
a language may be as superficial as it looks learned. And the man who
really knew Nahuatl has usually concerned himself very little with
Quechua. So far as he might become acquainted with it, it would appear
so different that the pressing of comparisons would seem sterile. Thus
the great diversity of American languages came to be accepted not because
any one believed it to have been really established, but because until
recently no critical scholar considered himself able to establish serious
connections. It has been a case of unproved rather than disproved unity
of origin.
If the Indo-European languages were not our own but those of a strange
race and therefore known to us much less intensively; if the history
of their ancient forms were obliterated instead of preserved for us
for over three thousand years; and if they were allowed a period of ten
thousand years in which to have differentiated, philology would probably
be assigning them to several distinct stocks. Multiply by three the
amount of difference which Bengali shows from Sanskrit, and by six that
of English from Anglo-Saxon, and a degree of divergence might be attained
roughly comparable to that between Nahuatl and Quechua, or Maya and
Iroquois. This is not an assertion that Nahuatl and Quechua are related.
It is a claim that in the light of present knowledge they might have been
one language ten thousand years ago. A single people with a single speech
could well have given rise in so long a period as that—three hundred
generations—to languages that now seem so different.
And at that, there is no reason for believing that all the American
languages are necessarily derivable from a single mother tongue. There
might have been half-a-dozen or a dozen idioms in use among as many
populations which moved out of Asia into Alaska. For of course it is
improbable that the migration was an isolated, unitary event. More likely
it filled a period of some length, during which a succession of waves
of population lapped from one continent into the other. Each of these
waves, which only the perspective of ages has merged into the appearance
of a single movement, may have brought its own speech, from which in time
there branched out languages that ultimately became so differentiated
as to appear now like distinct families. Not that it is known that this
happened; but it seems inherently plausible that it might have happened,
and there is no present evidence to the contrary.
In short, philology interposes no obstacle to the acceptance of the date
which has been assumed as roughly defining the period of the peopling of
America.
180. THE PRIMITIVE CULTURE OF THE IMMIGRANTS
As to the culture the immigrants brought with them, direct testimony
being lacking, it is necessary to fall back on the working hypothesis
that this culture was about the equivalent of the most backward
American culture of to-day; or, better, of the common denominator of
all American cultures, including the lowest. This procedure yields the
group of elements entered in the bottommost layer of Figure 35. These
elements were either brought along on the invasions or developed so
soon afterwards as to become equally widely diffused. The harpoon, for
instance, was used in Europe in the Magdalenian—at the close of the
Palæolithic. For the bow and arrow, there is no proof in Europe until
the opening of the Neolithic. The dog, the earliest animal attached to
man, is known from the same period, whereas cattle, swine, and sheep
were kept only at the height of the Neolithic (§ 67, 222). As the
American Indians possess dogs, it is difficult to attribute the custom
otherwise than to a heritage from the same culture stage in the Old
World to which the harpoon and bow belong. This connection is made more
certain by the fact that the Indian dog is most closely related not to
the specifically American coyote but to the circumpolar wolf and perhaps
the jackal, and diverged into much the same types of breeds as the
Old World dog. There are American races of dogs—some of them ancient,
as represented by skeletons from mounds, and mummies from Arizona and
Peru—that are respectively droop eared, curly tailed, short legged, long
furred, hairless, or undershot in the jaw, thus corresponding closely to
the breeds evolved with similar traits in the eastern hemisphere, and
virtually forcing the conclusion that the dog was brought into America by
man and not domesticated from a wild species in this continent.
Such evidence as this it is that yields the period indicated—the closing
stages of the Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic—as the time of man’s
entry into America. The ten thousand years set as the lapse since this
event are admittedly more arbitrary. No one pretends to date the remoter
stages of European prehistory exactly. Relative durations are all that it
is legitimate to pin much faith on. Dates are avowedly approximations.
The estimate here chosen for the end of the Paleolithic is 8000 B.C.—ten
thousand years ago. This round number, not taken too literally, has the
virtue of concreteness and seems somewhere near the truth. It may yet
prove to be a few thousand years short or over. But it does allow enough
time, and no obtrusive excess of time, for the diversification of the
Indians in race, speech, and culture; and this seeming accord of the
assumption with the present facts may be taken as a rough corroboration.
The other culture elements assigned in Figure 35 to the first or
immigrant stratum cannot be dated by any concrete remains, since some are
institutions and others are arts whose materials are perishable—baskets
and fire-drills, for instance. They are, however, found among all or
most of the lower American tribes, and recur more or less widely in the
eastern hemisphere.
The first settlers may accordingly be pictured as a people living off
nature; hunting, fishing, gathering roots and fruits and seeds, digging
or picking shellfish. Their best weapons were the bow and the harpoon
with detachable head. The latter may already have been propelled by the
atlatl or spear-thrower, an artificial extension of the arm. Simpler
weapons were also used: clubs, stones, probably darts and spears, perhaps
daggers of bone or stone. Flint was chipped and flaked, other stones
were beginning to be ground or rubbed into form. Bone awls served for
piercing; less certainly, eyed needles for sewing. Cordage of bast was
twisted, and in all likelihood baskets, bins, weirs, traps were woven or
twined, perhaps also nets made. Dogs were alternately played with and
kicked about; they were half kept, half tolerated, probably eaten in time
of need. There was no organization of society but on a basis of blood
and contiguity. Related groups would act together until they fell apart.
Labor was sex allotted; the men of each community possibly maintained
a house or place of meeting at which they gathered in their leisure,
perhaps nightly, and which women feared to enter. Beliefs in souls and
spirits were already immemorially old. The people had risen to the point
of being no longer passive toward the immaterial; the most intense-minded
among them aspired to communication with the spirits; they demonstrated
to their fellows their control and utilization of supernatural beings,
and were what we call shamans. Custom in fact conceded the influence of
the spiritual world on every human being, and felt it to be strongest at
times of passage or crisis—birth, maturity, death. Puberty in particular
seemed important, as portentous of the whole of adult life. The welfare
of the individual and his proper relation to the community were therefore
sought to be insured by spiritual safe-guarding. Girls were secluded,
treated or doctored, trained; boys subjected to whipping or other
ordeals of fortitude; the passing of such initiation admitted them to the
men’s house.
181. THE ROUTE OF ENTRY INTO THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
With such background man entered America at Behring Strait. He may
have navigated; more likely, or more often, he crossed on the ice. The
water distance is only about sixty miles; the Diomede islands lie near
the middle of the gap; and the ice may have extended across pretty
continuously, ten thousand years nearer the peak of the last glaciation.
Long before, there had been a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, by
which horses, camels, cattle, elephants, deer and many other species
extended their range from one continent to another. But this was in
geological antiquity, man’s entry in geological recency—immediacy,
rather; and the divided configuration of the continents was probably
already established. Horses had become extinct in the New World when man
arrived, the elephant tribe probably also. Llamas, pumas, jaguars took
the place of Old World camels, lions, tigers. The fauna of the Americas,
their vegetation, their climate, were nearly as they are to-day.
The Aleutian islands have also been suggested as a migration route. But
their chain is long, the gap at the western end one of hundreds of miles
of open water, scarcely negotiable except to rather expert navigators.
Still weaker would be any supposition of arrival from Polynesia. Here the
distances between the nearest islands and the mainland run to thousands
of miles. Only well-equipped voyagers could survive, and there is nothing
to prove positively that even late Palæolithic man had boats. Further,
all the Polynesian evidence points to a late settling of the eastern
islands of the Pacific; a few thousand years ago at most. Exclusion
therefore indicates the Behring route as the only one to be seriously
considered.
The migration was scarcely a sudden or single one. It went on for
generations, perhaps for thousands of years in driblets. Two or three
explorers would set across and return, to be followed by a few families.
Others succeeded them. There would be no crowding, for a long time no
resistance at the strait on the part of jealous established settlers.
The open south, always milder, generally more fruitful the farther one
went, lay ahead. It must long have drawn immigrants away from the strait
faster than they crossed it. Some of the invading bands almost certainly
differed from one another in customs, perhaps perceptibly in appearance,
though of one general level of culture.
182. THE SPREAD OVER TWO CONTINENTS
Before them lay fifteen million miles of tundra, forest, plains, sea
coast, desert, savannah, jungle, and plateaux, rich in this or that food,
with no occupant to dispute possession or block travel but bear, wolf,
puma, and jaguar—timid beasts compared with those of the Old World.
So the immigrants pushed across the breadth of the continent and down
its length, entered the tropics in Mexico, defiled through Panama—and
a second continent stretched before them. How long it took the first
wanderers to diffuse themselves from Alaska to the Strait of Magellan, it
is impossible to say. Perhaps a couple of thousand years, perhaps only
a few hundred. Curiosity, the desire to see, are strong in men if fear
imposes no restraints.
Sooner or later, at any rate, they were living throughout both
continents. The advance guard had long lost knowledge of the rear, if
indeed the rear did not arrive until after the advance could progress no
farther. When the Caucasian discovered America he might have commenced
at Cape Horn, gone on to a people whose very existence was unknown to
those at his starting point, and repeated the step a dozen times until
his journey brought him to the Arctic. Before the rise of the empires of
Mexico and Peru the number of links in the chain ignorant of each other
would have been greater. The moving bands of the primitive first-comers
no doubt lost touch with each other quickly in even shorter stretches.
Thus diversities of speech, of mode of life, would become established.
A family of brothers might become dominant in a band through the number
of their descendants and so color the somatic type of the group, which
in turn, favored by fortune and expanding, might lay the hereditary
foundation for a sub-racial variety.
Movements of population continued to occur until the present. The maps
of speech stocks previously presented (Figs. 14, 15) prove that distant
migrations took place after great groups like Athabascan, Algonkin,
Uto-Aztecan, Arawak, Tupi, had each lived in compact coherence long
enough to establish a well defined language. But so far as these more
recent migrations can be traced from speech, they no longer trended
prevailingly from north to south and west to east as the first general
diffusion must have moved, but shifted in the greatest variety of
direction. They are a sort of boiling of the kettle, not a downhill
flow. They relieved internal strains and vacillated back and forth with
circumstances; they represented no drift like the first occupation.
Much of their story may ultimately be worked out and provide a national
history of pre-Columbian America. But the effect of these later pressures
and expansions and wanderings on the culture development of the New World
as a whole is likely to have been relatively slight.
183. EMERGENCE OF MIDDLE AMERICAN CULTURE: MAIZE
For perhaps five thousand years little of wide significance happened in
America. There may have been progress, but it was slow, and in the long
perspective of time its slender evidences are not yet determinable. One
can affirm little of this early period except that differences in culture
must have begun to develop in conformity with the localized opportunities
of environment.
But by the end of the first half of the duration of American antiquity,
let us guess somewhere about 3000 B.C., a perceptible differentiation
appears to have taken place between the culture of the Middle
American[24] highland and the remainder of the Americas. The highland
had forged ahead. Especially, perhaps, was this true of the region of
southern Mexico and Guatemala. Why it was here that civilization first
gathered a notable momentum, it is difficult to say; we are dealing
with obscure beginnings at a remote period. An unusual concentration of
population is likely to have been an important factor. This in turn may
have rested on the ease of existence in a sub-tropical area. Advanced
civilizations in general find their greatest opportunities in fairly
temperate environment; incipient ones in semi-tropical climates or
unforested regions in the tropics. At least there are the parallels
of Egypt, Babylonia, India. Possibly the environmental feature of
greatest value to cultural progress in Middle America was its diversity.
Mountain and coast, temperate highland and hot lowland, humid and arid
tracts, tropical jungle and open country, were only a few hours apart.
In each locality the population worked out its necessary adaptations,
and yet it was near enough others of a different adaptation for them
to trade, to depend on one another, to learn. Custom therefore came in
contact with custom, invention with invention. The discrepancies, the
very competitions, would lead to reconciliations, readaptations, new
combinations. Cultural movement and stimulus would normally be greater
than in a culturally uniform area.
Be that as it may, Middle America took the lead. It is in the region of
southern Mexico that a wild maize grows—teocentli, “divine maize,”[25]
the Aztecs called it. From this, in a remote archaic period, the
cultivated plant was derived. At least, such seems to be the probability
in a somewhat tangled mass of botanical evidence. Here then the dominant
plant of American agriculture was evolved: with it, very likely, the
cultivated beans and squashes that are generally associated in native
farming even in parts remote from Mexico.
Pottery has so nearly the same distribution as maize agriculture, as to
suggest a substantially contemporaneous origin, probably at the same
center. This is the more likely because the art is of chief value to a
sessile people, and farming operates more strongly than any other mode of
life to bring about a sedentary condition.
Agriculture almost certainly increased the population. The food supply
was greater and more regular; people got used to living near each other
where before they had unconsciously drifted apart through distrust; and
the proximity in turn, as well as the new stability, would lessen many
of the local famines, hostilities, and other hardships to which the
smaller and less settled communities had been exposed. As the death rate
went down and numbers mounted, specialization of labor would be first
made possible, and then almost forced. A self-contained community of a
hundred cannot permit much specialization of accomplishment and none of
occupation. Every man must be first of all an immediate food getter. On
the other hand a community of a million inevitably segregates somewhat
into classes, trades, guilds, or castes. The individual with decided
tastes and gifts in a particular direction finds his products in enough
demand to devote himself largely or wholly to their manufacture. The very
size of the community as it were forces him to specialization, and thus
diversity, with its train of effects leading to further stimulation, is
attained independently of environment.
184. TOBACCO
For some culture elements, the evidence of early origin in Middle America
is less direct. The use of tobacco, for instance, is as widely spread
as agriculture, but is not necessarily as ancient. Its diffusion in the
eastern hemisphere has been so rapid (§ 98) as to make necessary the
admission that it might have spread rapidly in the New World also—faster,
at any rate, than maize. Moreover, a distinction must be made between
the smoking or chewing or snuffing of tobacco and its cultivation. There
are some modern tribes—mostly near the margins of the tobacco area—that
gather the plant as it grows wild. It is extremely probable that wild
tobacco was used for some time before cultivation was attempted.
Nevertheless tobacco growing, whenever it may have originated, evidently
had its beginning in the northern part of Middle America, either in
Mexico or the adjacent Antillean province. It is here that _Nicotiana
tabacum_ was raised. The tribes to the north contented themselves with
allied species, mostly so inferior from the consumer’s point of view that
they have not been taken up by western civilization. These varieties
look like peripheral substitutes for the central and original _Nicotiana
tabacum_.
The Colombian and Andean culture-areas used little or no tobacco, but
chewed the stimulating coca leaf. This is a case of one of two competing
culture traits preventing or perhaps superseding the other, not of
tobacco never having reached the Andes. Most of the remainder of South
America used tobacco.
185. THE SEQUENCE OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
The most peripheral and backward peoples of both North and South America
even to-day remain without clans, moieties, hereditary totems, or
exogamic groupings (§ 110). Some of these, like the Eskimo and Fuegians,
live at the extreme ends of the continents, under conditions of hardships
which might be imagined to have directed all their energies toward
the material sides of life and thus left over little interest for the
development of institutions. But this argument will not apply to the many
clanless tribes of the California, Plains, and Tropical Forest areas. It
must accordingly be concluded that those American nations that show no
formal organization of society on a hereditary basis—or at least the more
primitive ones who possess no equivalent or substitute—do without this
organization because they never acquired it. This negative condition may
then be inferred as the original one of the whole American race.
Somewhat more advanced culturally, on the whole, and less definitely
marginal, at any rate in North America, are several series of tribes
that do possess exogamic groups—either sibs or moieties—in which descent
goes in the male line and is generally associated with totemic beliefs
or practices. These comprise the tribes of one segment of the Northwest
Coast area; those of one end of the Southwest with some extension into
California; and those of most of the Northern Woodland, with some
extension into the Plains.
Another series of tribes live under the same sort of organization but
with descent reckoned in the female instead of the male line. These
comprise the peoples of one end of the Northwest Coast; those of
one portion of the Southwest; and those of the Southeast, with some
extensions into the Northeast and Plains.
These exogamic-totemic series of tribes average higher in their general
culture than the clanless and totemless ones. On the whole, too, they
are situated nearer the focus of civilization in Middle America. As
between the two exogamic-totemic series the matrilinear tribes must be
accredited with a more complex and better organized culture than the
patrilinear ones. The finest carving in North America, for instance,
is that of the Northwest—totem poles, masks, and the like. Within the
Northwest, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—matrilinear tribes—excel
in the quality of this work. They far surpass the patrilinear Kwakiutl
and Salish. So in the Southwest: the matrilinear Pueblos build stone
towns, obey a priestly hierarchy, and possess an elaborate series of
cult societies. The patrilinear Pimas and southern Californians live
in villages of brush or earth-covered houses, are priestless, and know
at most a single religious society. Again, the matrilineal Southern
Woodlanders had made some approach to a system of town life and political
institutions, the patrilineal Northern Woodlanders did without any
serious institutions in these directions. The one Northeastern group that
established a successful political organization, the Iroquois with their
League of the Five Nations, were matrilinear among patrilinear neighbors
and possessed positive affiliations with the Southeast.
It would be extravagant to maintain that throughout the North American
continent every matrilineal tribe was culturally more advanced than every
patrilineal one. But it is clear that within each area or type of culture
the matrilineal tribes manifest superiority over the patrilineal tribes
in a preponderance of cultural aspects. The matrilineal clan organization
thus represents a higher and presumably later stage in North America
than patrilineal clan organization, as this in turn ranks and temporally
follows the clanless condition.
With one exception, the distribution of the same tribes with reference
to the South Mexican center agrees with their advancement. The Northeast
is distinctly peripheral, the Southeast a half-way tract connected with
Mexico by way both of the Southwest and the Antilles. The matrilineal
Pueblo portion of the Southwest occupies part of the plateau backbone
near the southern end of which the Mexican culture developed. It was
along this backbone that civilization flowed up through northern Mexico.
The coasts lagged behind. They were marginal in Mexico, more marginal
still in the Southwest, where the patrilineal tribes lived on or near the
Pacific.
The one exception is in the Northwest Coast, where the more remote
northerly tribes are matrilinear, the nearer southerly ones patrilinear.
This reversed distribution raises the suspicion that the Northwestern
social organization may have had nothing to do with Mexico, but may be
a purely local product. This suspicion is hardened by the fact that the
Northwest shows a number of other culture traits—some peculiar to itself,
others recurring in well separated areas—which it seems impossible to
connect with Mexico. Several of these traits will be discussed farther
on. For the present it is enough to note their existence as an indication
favorable to the interpretation of the Northwest social organization
as unrelated to Mexico. Thus the abnormal matrilineal-patrilineal
distribution in the Northwest is no bar to the generic finding for North
America that clanless, patrilinear, and matrilinear organizations of
society rank in this order both as regards developmental sequence and
distance from Middle America.
For South America the data are too scattering to discuss profitably
without rather detailed consideration.
The distributional facts outside Middle America thus point to this
reconstruction of events. The original Americans were non-exogamous,
non-totemic, without sibs or unilateral reckoning of descent. The first
institution of exogamic groups was on the basis of descent in the male
line, occurred in or near Middle America, and flowed outwards, though not
to the very peripheries and remotest tracts of the continents. Somewhat
later, perhaps also in Middle America, possibly at the same center,
the institution was altered: descent became matrilinear. This new type
of organization diffused, but in its briefer history traveled less far
and remained confined to the tribes that were in most active cultural
connection with Middle America.
Now, however, a seeming difficulty arises. Middle America, which appears
to have evolved patrilinear and then matrilinear clans, was itself
clanless at the time of European discovery.[26] The solution is that
Middle America indeed evolved these institutions and then went a step
beyond by abandoning or transforming them. Obviously this explanation
will be validated in the degree that it can be shown that probable causes
or products of the transformation existed.
186. RISE OF POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS: CONFEDERACY AND EMPIRE
In general, the transformation would seem to have been along the line of
a substitution of political for social organization. Struggling villages
confederated, with a fixed meeting place and established council; the
authority of elected or hereditary chiefs grew, until these gave the
larger part of their time to communal affairs; towns consolidated. Public
works could thus be undertaken. Not only irrigating ditches and defenses,
but pyramid temples were constructed. In Middle America this condition
must have been attained several thousand years ago. The Mayas had passed
beyond it early in the Christian era. They were then ruled by a governing
class and priesthood, and were erecting dated monuments that testify to a
settled existence of the more successful of their communities.
In the area of the United States, which may be reckoned as perhaps two
thousand years more belated than southern Mexico, political organization
was still in the incipient stage at the time of discovery. The Pueblos
of the Southwest had achieved town life and considerable priestly
control. They had not taken the further step of welding groups of towns
into larger coherent units. In the Southeast, however, while the towns
were less compact physically, and probably less populous, political
integration on a democratic basis had made some headway. The institution
evolved was essentially a confederacy of the members of a language group,
with civil and military chiefs, council houses, and representation
by “tribes” or towns and clans. From the Southeast the idea of the
confederacy was carried into the Northeast by the Iroquois, whose famous
league, founded perhaps before Columbus reached America, attained its
culmination after the French and English settlement and the introduction
of firearms. The Iroquois league was an astounding accomplishment for a
culturally backward people. Its success was due to the high degree of
political integration achieved. Yet it did not destroy the older clan
system, in fact made skilful use of it for its own purposes of political,
almost imperialistic, organization.[27]
Some stage of this sort the Mexican peoples may have passed through.
The Maya form of political organization was evidently similar to that
of the Pueblos, the Aztec development more like that of the Muskogeans
and Iroquois. A thousand years before Columbus the Maya cities were
contending for hegemony like the Greek city-states a millenium earlier.
Then the Nahua peoples forged to the front; and about two centuries
before the invasion of Cortez, Tenochtitlan, to-day the city of
Mexico, began a series of conquests that ended in some sort of empire.
It was a straggling domain of subjected and reconquered towns and
tribes, interspersed with others that maintained their independence,
extending from middle Mexico to Central America, containing probably
several million inhabitants paying regular tribute, held together by
well-directed military force, and governed by a hereditary line of
half-elected or confirmed rulers of great state and considerable power.
The exogamic clan organization as such had disappeared. Groups called
calpulli were important in Aztec society, but they were local, or based
on true kinship, and non-totemic. They may have been the made-over
survivals of clans; they were not clans like those of the Southwest,
Southeast, or Northwest.
Five successive stages, then, were probably gone through in the evolution
of south Mexican society. First there was the pre-clan condition, without
notable organization either social or political; next, a patrilinear clan
system; third, a matrilinear clan system, with more important functions
attaching to the clans, especially on the side of ceremonial; fourth,
the beginnings of the state, as embodied in the confederacy, the clans
continuing but being made use of chiefly as instruments of political
machinery; fifth, the empire, loose and simple indeed, judged by Old
World standards, but nevertheless an organized political achievement, in
which the clans had disappeared or had been transformed into units of a
different nature.
187. DEVELOPMENTS IN WEAVING
In the textile arts, since the successive stages rank one another rather
obviously, and the distributions coincide well with them, the course of
development is indicated plainly.
The first phase was that of hand-woven basketry, which has already been
accredited to the period of immigration, and is beyond doubt ancient.
All Americans made baskets at one time or another. The few tribes that
were not making them at the time of discovery had evidently shelved the
art because their environment provided them with birch bark, or their
food habits with buffalo rawhide, with exceptional ease, and because
their wants of receptacles and cooking utensils were of the simplest.
That basket making goes back to a rudimentary as well as early stage of
civilization is further suggested by the fact that perhaps the finest
ware is made in the distinctly backward areas, such as the Plateau and
California.
A second and a third phase, which are sometimes difficult to distinguish,
are those of loose suspended warps and of a simple frame or incomplete
loom. Pliable cords of some sort, or coarse bast threads, are employed.
The objects manufactured are chiefly wallets or bags, blankets of
strips of fur or feathers, hammocks, and the like. These two processes
are widely spread, but not quite as far as basketry; the northern and
southern extremes of the double continent do not know them. Occasionally,
very fine work is done by one or the other of these two methods. The most
striking example is the so-called Chilkat blanket of the Northwest Coast,
a cloth-like cape, woven, without a complete loom, of mountain goat wool
on cedar bark warps to a complicated pattern—a high development of a low
type process.
The fourth stage is that of the true or complete loom. In America the
loom is intimately associated with the cultivation of cotton. The two
have the same distribution, except for some use of the plant for the
twining of hammocks on a half-loom in portions of the Tropical Forest
area. Disregarding this case as a probable part adaptation of a higher
culture trait to a lower culture, we may define the distribution of both
loom and cotton as restricted to the Middle American areas, the adjacent
Southwest, and perhaps the adjacent Antilles. This is certainly central.
The fifth stage is the loom with a handle or mechanical shedding device,
obviating tedious hand picking of the weft in and out of the warps.
The heddle is proved only for Peru. It was probably used in Mexico. It
may therefore be tentatively assumed to have been known also in the
intervening Chibcha area. It is used to-day in the Southwest, but may
have been introduced there by the Spaniards. This stage accordingly is
limited even more strictly to the vicinity of Middle America.
The sixth stage, that of the loom whose heddles are operated by treadles,
and what may be considered a seventh, the use of multiple heddles to work
patterns mechanically, were never attained by any American people.
The best and finest fabrics were made in Peru, in part probably as
consequence of the addition of wool to the previous repertory of cotton.
This addition in turn probably followed the domestication of the llama
by the Peruvians. The Mexicans had no corresponding animal to tame, and
their textiles lagged behind in quality.
188. PROGRESS IN SPINNING: COTTON
Spinning and weaving are interdependent. Baskets are made of woody rods,
cane splints, root fibers, or straws, all untwisted, but it is probable
that the ability to twist cordage is about equally old as basketry.
At any rate there is no American people ignorant of cord making. The
materials are occasionally sinews, more frequently bast—that is, bark
fibers. These are rolled together, almost invariably two at a time,
between the palm and the naked thigh. Cordage is used for the second and
third stages of weaving. The cotton employed in loom weaving does not
spin well by this rolling method. It was therefore spun by being twisted
between the fingers, the completed thread being wound on a spindle.
This spindle served primarily as a spool or bobbin. In the Old World
the distaff has been used for thousands of years. This is a spindle
with a whorl or flywheel. It is dropped with a twirl, giving both twist
and tension to the loose roving of linen or wool and thus converting it
into yarn by a mechanical means. The New World never fully utilized this
device. The Southwest to-day uses the wheeled spindle, but evidently as
the result of European introduction. Old Mexican pictures and modern
Maya photographs show the spindle stood in a bowl, not dropped. The
whorl which it possessed was therefore little more than a button to
keep the thread from slipping off the slender spindle. For Peru this is
established. Thousands of spindles have been found there, normally with
whorls too small and light to serve as an effective flywheel. It may then
be concluded that all American spinning was essentially by hand; which
is in accord with the absence from all America of any form of the wheel.
The Indian spinning methods were only two: thigh rolling for bast, finger
twisting for cotton.
The origin of the higher forms of spinning and weaving in Middle
America is confirmed by the tropical origin of cotton, on which these
developments depend. The cotton of the Southwest, for instance, was
introduced from Mexico as a cultivated plant. It is derived by some
botanists from a Guatemalan wild species. This may well have been the
first variety to be cultivated in the hemisphere.
189. TEXTILE CLOTHING
Clothing in general is too much an adaptation to climate to render
satisfactory its consideration wholly by the method here followed.
But clothing of textiles shows a distribution that is culturally
significant. The distribution is that of loom-woven cotton; the salient
characteristic is rectangular shape: the blanket shawl, the poncho, the
square shirt and skirt. In the Northwest Coast region hand and half-loom
woven capes and skirts of bast were worn more or less. But these were
flaring—trapezoidal, not rectangular—and thus evidently represent a
separate development.
In all the cloth weaving areas, and in them only, sandals were worn. The
spatial correlation is so close that there must be a connection. It may
be suggested that the sandal originated, or at least owed its spread, to
textile progress. Again the Northwest Coast corroborates by being unique;
it is essentially a barefoot area.
To summarize. The original textile arts of the race were probably first
advanced to the stages intermediate between basket and cloth making in
Middle America. Thence they spread north and south, but not quite to the
limits of the hemisphere, being retained in special usage chiefly in the
Northwest. With the cultivation of cotton in Middle America, spinning and
the loom came into use, and were ultimately carried to the Southwest, but
not beyond. Cloth garments and sandals promptly followed. The heddle was
evidently devised last, and did not diffuse beyond Middle America.
190. CULTS: SHAMANISM
In the matter of religious cults, seven entries have been included in
Figure 35: (1h) shamanism, and (1i) crisis ceremonies, especially for
girls at puberty and the whipping of adolescent boys, two more or less
synchronous traits; (6a) initiating societies, and (6b) masks—also about
contemporaneous; (16) priesthood; and (22) human sacrifice and (23)
temples.
The shaman is an individual without official authority but often of great
personal influence. His supposed power comes to him directly from the
spirits as a gift or grant. He himself, as a personality, has been able
to enter into a special relationship, denied to normal persons, with the
supernatural world or some member thereof. The community recognizes his
power after it is his: the community does not elect him to his special
position, nor accept him in it by inheritance. His communion with spirits
enables the shaman to foretell the future, change the weather, blast the
crops or multiply game, avert catastrophes or precipitate them on foes;
above all, to inflict and cure disease. He is therefore the medicine-man;
a word which in American ethnology is synonymous with shaman. The terms
doctor, wizard, juggler, which have established themselves in usage in
certain regions, are also more or less appropriate: they all denote
shamans. When he wishes to kill his private or public enemy, the shaman
by his preternatural faculties injects some foreign object or destructive
substance into his victim, or abstracts his soul. To cure his friends or
clients, he extracts the disease object, sometimes by singing, dancing,
blowing, stroking, or kneading, most often by sucking; or he finds,
recaptures, and restores the soul. Of the two concepts, that of the
concrete disease object is more widely spread; that of the soul theft
is apparently characteristic of the more advanced tribes; but the exact
distribution remains to be worked out.
The territorial extent of shamanistic ideas and practices is from
the Arctic to Cape Horn. The method of acquiring power from spirits,
the nature of the disease object and its process of extraction, the
conviction that sickness must be caused by malevolent shamanistic power,
there being no such thing as natural death; these and other specific
features of the institution are sometimes surprisingly similar in North
and South America. In fact, they recur in peripheral parts of the eastern
hemisphere—Siberia, Australia, Africa—with such close resemblance as
strongly to suggest their being the remnants of a once world-wide
rudimentary form of religion or religious magic.
191. CRISIS RITES AND INITIATIONS
Crisis rites are of equally broad diffusion and apparent antiquity. They
concern the critical points of human life: birth, death, sometimes
marriage and childbirth; but most frequently, or at least most sacredly,
they are wont to concern themselves with maturity. They are thus often
puberty ceremonials, made for the welfare both of the individual and
of the community, and fitting him or her for reproductive functions as
well as for a career as a useful and successful community member. The
girls’ adolescence rites have been described (§ 154) in some detail
for California. With but minor variations, the account there given
applies to the customs of many American and in fact Old World peoples.
The boys’ rites come at the corresponding period of life, but their
reference to sex and marriage is generally less definite. Fortitude,
manliness, understanding are the qualities they are chiefly intended to
test and fix. Privations like fasting, ordeals of pain, admonitions by
the elders, are therefore characteristic elements of these rites. It
is thus not as surprising as it might seem at first acquaintance that
identical practices, such as having the boys stung by vicious ants,
are occasionally found in regions as remote as California and Brazil:
even the particular method may be a local survival of a wide ancient
diffusion. Perhaps most common of all specific ingredients of the rite
in America is a whipping of the boys. Possibly this commended itself as
combining a test of fortitude and an emotional memento of the counsel
imparted. At any rate it evidently became an established part of the
puberty rites thousands of years ago, and thus acquired the added social
momentum of an immemorial custom in many parts of both North and South
America.
192. SECRET SOCIETIES AND MASKS
Out of the puberty crisis rite for boys there grew gradually a society
of initiates who recruited their ranks by new initiations. As emphasis
shifted from the individual to the community as represented by those
already initiated, the ceremony came to be performed less for the benefit
of the individual than for the maintenance of the group, the society as
such, with its rites, secrets, and privileges. Very often, no one was
excluded but immature boys and females; yet, if the act of admittance was
to have any psychic significance, the exclusion of these elements of the
community had to be made much of. Thus secrecy toward women and children
was emphasized, although often the secrets simmered down largely to the
fact that there were secrets.
The girls’ adolescence ceremony does not seem to have taken this course
of growth, because of its more personal and bodily character, puberty
in women being so much more definite a physiological event. There are
women’s societies among some American tribes. But they seem to be
generally a weaker imitation of the men’s societies after these were
fully developed, not a direct outgrowth of the original girls’ rite.
Shamanism entered as another strain into the formation of the secret
society. Medicine-men often would come to act for the public good, the
occasion would be repeated regularly, and a communal ceremony with an
esoteric nucleus resulted. Also, the shamans at times helped the novice
shamans train and consolidate their spiritual powers. The extension of
this habit perhaps sometimes led, or contributed, to the establishment of
a secret society (§ 158).
Masks are closely associated with secret societies. They disguise the
members to the women and boys, who are told, and often believe, that
the masked personages are not human beings at all. Of course this adds
to the mystery and impressiveness of the initiations, especially when
the masks are fantastic or terrifying. Masks and societies thus are two
related aspects of one thing. But they are by no means inseparable. There
are tribes, like some of the Eskimo, who use masks but can scarcely be
said to possess societies, while in the Plains and elsewhere there are
definite societies that initiate without masks. Physical and economic
conditions in the Arctic operating against large-scale community life or
social elaboration, the masks of the Eskimo may represent merely that
part of a mask-society “complex” which these people could conveniently
take over when the complex reached them.
In the Southwest, among the Pueblos, there are two types of societies.
There is a communal society, embracing all adult males, who are initiated
at puberty by whipping and who later wear masks to impersonate spirits
and dance thus for the public good. There are several smaller societies,
also with secret rites, which cure sickness, recruit their membership
from the cured, and use masks little or not at all. It is clear here
how the two component strains, namely crisis rites and shamanistic
practices, have flowed into the common mold of the society idea and
become patterned by it without quite amalgamating.
193. PRIESTHOOD
This, then, was the second general stage of American religion. The third
is marked by the development of the priesthood. The priest is an official
recognized by the community. He has duties and powers. He may inherit,
be elected, or succeed by virtue of lineage subject to confirmation.
But he steps into a specific office which existed before him and
continues after his death. His power is the result of his induction
into the office and the knowledge and authority that go with it. He
thus contrasts sharply with the shaman—logically at least. The shaman
makes his position. Any person possessed of the necessary mediumistic
faculty, or able to convince a part of the community of his ability to
operate supernaturally, is thereby a shaman. His influence is essentially
personal. In actuality, the demarcation cannot always be made so sharply.
There are peoples whose religious leaders are borderline shaman-priests.
Yet there are other tribes that align clearly. The Eskimo have pure
shamans and nothing like priests. The Pueblos have true priests but no
real shamans. Even the heads of their curing societies, the men who
do the doctoring for the community, are officials, and do not go into
trances or converse with spirits.
Obviously a priesthood is possible only in a well constructed society.
Specialization of function is presupposed. People so unorganized as to
remain in a pre-clan condition could hardly be expected to have developed
permanent officials for religion. As a matter of fact they have not.
There are not even clear instances of a full fledged priesthood among
patrilinear sib tribes. The first indubitable priests are found among
the matrilinear Southwesterners and a few of their neighbors. Thence
they extend throughout the region of more or less accomplished political
development in Middle America. Beyond that, they disappear.
Here once more, then, we encounter a trait substantially confined to the
area of intensive culture and evidently superimposed upon the preceding
stages. This makes it likely that the second stage, that of societies and
masks, originated in the same center, but so long ago as to have been
mostly obliterated by later developments, while continuing to flourish
half way to the peripheries.
Even the priesthood is old in Middle America. This seems reasonably
demonstrable. We do not know its actual beginnings there. But its
surviving conditions at the edge of its area of occurrence may be taken
as roughly indicative of its origin. Among the Pueblos, each priest, with
his assistants, is the curator of a sacred object or fetish, carefully
bundled and preserved. The fetish serves the public good, but he is its
keeper. In fact he might well be said to be priest in virtue of his
custodianship thereof. Associated is the concept of an altar, a painting
which he makes of colored earth or meal. In the Plains area, some tribes
may be somewhat hesitatingly described as having a priest or group of
old men as priests. Wherever such is the case, these half-priests are
the keepers of fetish-bundles; usually they make something like an altar
of a space of painted earth. Areas as advanced as the Northwest Coast,
where distinctive priests are wanting, lack also the bundles and altars.
It looks, therefore, as if the American priesthood had originated in
association with these two ceremonial traits of the fetish bundle and
painted altar—both of which are conspicuously unknown in the eastern
hemisphere.
194. TEMPLES AND SACRIFICE
In Middle America the fetish bundle and picture altar do not appear,
apparently through supersedence by elements characteristic of the next or
fourth cult stage, characterized by the temple and the stone altar used
in sacrifice. Temples, however, were already in luxuriant bloom among the
Maya in their Great Period of 400 to 600 A. D. The beginnings of their
remarkable architecture and sculpture must of course lie much farther
back; certainly toward the opening of the Christian era, very likely
earlier. Before this came the presumptive initial stage of priesthood,
with bundles and altar paintings or some local equivalent. If a thousand
years be allowed for this phase, the commencement of the priesthood
would fall in southern Mexico or Guatemala at least three thousand years
ago; possibly much longer. Peru, perhaps, did not lag far behind.
Temples mark the last phase of native American religion, but the most
purely religious characteristic of the period, independent of mechanical
or æsthetic developments, is human sacrifice. This had long been
practised by the Mayas and in Peru, but reached its culmination in the
New World and probably on the planet, at least as regards frequency and
routine-like character, among the Aztecs. These were a late people, by
their own traditions, to rise to culture and power, attaining to little
consequence before the fourteenth century. It looks therefore as if human
sacrifice had been a comparatively recent practice, perhaps only one or
two thousand years old when America was discovered, and still moving
toward its peak.
Outside Middle America, human sacrifice was virtually nonexistent.
There was considerable cannibalism in the Tropical Forest and Antilles,
but no taking of life as a purely ceremonial act. For the Pueblos of
the Southwest, there are some slight and doubtful suggestions, but it
appears that such deaths as were inflicted were rather punishments than
offerings. The one North American people admittedly sacrificing human
life were the Pawnee, a Plains tribe, who once a year shot to death a
girl captive amid a ritual reminiscent of that of Mexico. This has always
been interpreted as suggestive of a historical connection with Mexico. In
fact, the Pawnee appear to have moved northward rather recently, and most
of their Caddoan relatives had remained not far from the Gulf of Mexico
when discovered.
The precise origin of sacrifice is obscure, although it is significant
that it was restricted to the area of concentrated population and towns.
In Mexico at least there were no domesticated mammals available. The
ultimate foundation of human sacrifice is no doubt the widespread and
very ancient custom of offerings. It is, however, a long leap from the
offering of a pinch of tobacco, a strew of meal, an arrowpoint or some
feathers, or even a few bits of turquoise, to the deliberate taking of a
life. Possibly the idea of self-inflicted torture served as a connection.
The Plains tribes sometimes hacked off finger joints as offerings, and in
their Sun Dance tore skewers out of their skins. In the northern part of
the Tropical Forest knotted cords were drawn through the nose and out of
the mouth—a sufficiently painful process—in magico-religious preparation.
In Mexico it was common for worshipers to pierce their own ears or
tongues, the idea of a blood offering combining with that of penance and
mortification.
It may seem strange that so shocking a custom as human sacrifice
represented the climax of American religious development. Yet in a few
thousand years more of undisturbed growth, it would probably have been
superseded. This is precisely what happened in the Old World, which may
be reckoned as about four to five thousand years ahead of the New. In the
Old World also the really lowly and backward peoples did not sacrifice
men. The practice is a symptom of incipient civilization.
195. ARCHITECTURE, SCULPTURE, TOWNS
To construct stone-walled buildings seems a simple accomplishment,
especially in an environment of stratified rocks that break into natural
slabs. Such flat pieces pile up into a stable wall of room height without
mortar, and a few log beams suffice to support a roof. Yet the greater
area of the two continents seems never to have had such structures. Stone
buildings are confined to Middle America and the Southwest. Outside these
regions only the wholly timberless divisions of the Eskimo make huts
of stone, and for their winter dwellings they are limited to choice of
this material or blocks of snow. The Eskimo hut is tiny, not more than
eight or ten feet across, and the weather is kept out not by any skill in
masonry or plastering, but by the rude device of stuffing all crevices
with sod. The Eskimo style of “building” in stone would be inapplicable
in a structure of pretension. Made larger, the edifice would collapse.
The art of masonry, like agriculture, pottery, and loom weaving, may
therefore be set down as having had its origin in Mexico or Peru, or
possibly in both. It shows, however, this peculiarity of distribution:
at both ends of the area, among the Pueblos of the Southwest in North
America and among the Calchaqui of northwest Argentina in South America,
living houses were stone-walled. In the intervening regions, most
dwellings were of thatch or mud, public buildings of stone. The Aztec,
Maya, and Inca areas have therefore left stone temples, pyramids,
palaces, forts, and the like, but few towns; the Pueblo and Calchaqui,
only towns.[28] How the Middle Americans were first brought to use stone
is not known; but a temple built as such being a more specialized,
decorative, organized edifice than a dwelling, as well as involving some
degree of communal coöperation, it can safely be regarded as a later type
than private dwellings. The occurrence of the stone living houses at the
peripheries confirms their priority. Evidently masonry was first employed
in Middle America for simple public structures: chiefs’ tombs, water
works, platforms for worship. In its diffusion the art reached peoples
like the Pueblos, who lived in small communities, interred their leaders
without great rites, and offered no sacrifices in sight of multitudes.
These marginal nations therefore took over the new accomplishment
but applied it only to their homes. Meanwhile, however, the central
“inventors” of masonry had grown more ambitious and were rearing ever
finer and larger structures, until the superb architecture of the Mayas
and the consummate stone fitting of the Incas reached their climax.
Stone sculpture grew as an accompaniment. It remained rude in Peru, and
chiefly limited to idols, in keeping with the simple, massive style of
architecture. But the Mayas covered their structurally bolder and more
diversified religious buildings with sculpture in relief and frescoed
stucco, and between them set up great carvings of animal and mythical
divinities, as well as luxuriantly inscribed obelisks. Their sculpture is
æsthetically the finest in America and compares in quality with that of
Egypt, India, and China.
Recent excavations in the Southwest have revealed a succession of
stages as regards buildings. The first houses in this region may have
been thatched or earth-roofed. The earliest in which stone was used
were small, dug out a few feet, the sides of the excavation lined
with, upright rock slabs, and a superstructure of poles or mud-filled
wattling added. Then followed a period of detached one-room houses, with
rectangular walls of masonry; and finally the stage of drawing these
together in clusters and raising them in terraced stories. This whole
development can be traced within the area. Yet it by no means follows
that it originated wholly within the area. The knowledge of laying stone
in courses, the impulse or habit of doing so, might, theoretically, just
as well have come from without; and evidently did actually come into the
Southwest from Mexico.
This is a type of situation frequently encountered in culture history
problems. A group of data seem to point to a spontaneous origin on
the spot so long as they are viewed only locally, whereas a broader
perspective at once reveals them as merely part of a development whose
ultimate source usually lies far away. For instance, the backward Igorot
tribes of the interior Philippines rear imposing terraces for their rice
plots; their more advanced coastal neighbors do not. It has therefore
been debated whether the Igorot invented this large-scaled terracing or
learned it from the Chinese. Yet the terracing is only an incident to
rice culture, which is widespread in the Orient, ancient, and evidently
of mainland origin. The knowledge of terracing was therefore no doubt
long ago imported into the Philippines along with rice cultivation, and
the Igorot only added the special local development of carrying the
terraces to a more impressive height. There is no question that the
increase and better concatenation of knowledge is gradually leading to
more and more certain instances of wide diffusions and fewer and fewer
cases of independent origin.
Town life possesses a material aspect—that of the type and arrangement
of dwellings—as well as the social and political aspects already touched
on. The largest towns in America were those of Mexico and Peru, whose
capitals may have attained populations of fifty to a hundred thousand.
The Maya towns were smaller, in keeping with the Maya failure to develop
an empire. The largest towns of the Chibcha of Colombia may have held ten
or twenty thousand souls. The most flourishing pueblos of the Southwest
seem never to have exceeded three thousand inhabitants. The Calchaqui
towns in Andean Argentina were no larger, probably smaller. Southeastern
and Northwest Coast towns ran to hundreds instead of thousands of
population. These figures tell the usual story of thinning away from
center to peripheries.
But local differences were sometimes significant. The Southeastern town,
except for its court and rude public buildings, was straggling and
semi-rural compared with the compact, storied, and alleyed Southwestern
pueblo; often it was less populous. Yet its political and military
development was more advanced, at any rate as a unit in the larger group
of the confederacy.
196. METALLURGY
The use of metals in America falls into three stages. The peripheral and
backward areas, such as Patagonia and California, and those parts of the
Tropical Forest in which nature had denied a supply and remoteness had
shut off trade, did wholly without metals.
In the areas of medium advancement, like the Northwest, Southwest, and
the ancient Mound Builder region of the Ohio Valley, native copper was
beaten out into sheets, trimmed, bent, gouged, and engraved. It was not
smelted from ore nor cast. Its treatment was thus essentially by stone
age processes. Gold, silver, and other metals were not used; iron only
sporadically when it could be obtained in the native metallic state from
a fallen meteorite. The supply even of copper was rarely large. It flowed
in trade, much like precious stones among ourselves, to the wealthier
groups of nations able to part with their own products in exchange for
this substance prized by them for jewelry and insignia but rarely made
into tools.
The third stage is that of true metallurgical processes, and is confined
to the three Middle American areas. Here, copper, gold, silver, and
so far as they were available tin and platinum, were sought after and
worked. Copper at any rate was extracted from its ores by smelting; all
the known metals were fused and cast, both in permanent molds and by
the method of melting wax out of a single-time mold. Wire was beaten or
drawn out; gold leaf and acid plating practised; and welding, hardening
by hammering, and self-soldering were known. Alloys were made: copper-tin
bronze in Bolivia and the south Peruvian highland, whence its use
later spread north, perhaps being carried as far as Mexico (§ 108);
copper-arsenic bronze and copper-silver alloy on the Peruvian coast;
copper-gold in Colombia and Mexico; copper-lead bronze in Mexico.
Nowhere, however, was metal the standard material for tools, which
continued to be mostly of stone or wood. Metallic tools and utensils,
especially knives and axes, were not altogether rare in the bronze region
of South America. The superior hardness of bronze as compared with copper
no doubt proved a stimulus in this direction. But Maya temple-cities were
built with stone tools, and the Aztecs cut and fought with obsidian. In
general, metal remained treasure or ornament. There were not even the
beginnings of an iron culture anywhere in the hemisphere.
In the larger outlines, the history of American metallurgy is thus
simple enough, as something developed late and never diffused beyond
the central region of intensive culture. As to the sequence of use of
the several metals and processes, on the other hand, rather little has
been ascertained. It seems that in these matters South America might
have been somewhat in advance of Mexico, both in time and in degree of
attainments. The age of the metallurgical arts in Middle America must not
be underestimated. In spite of their relative recency, they can hardly
have been less than several thousand years old.
197. CALENDARS AND ASTRONOMY
The earliest stage of anything like time reckoning in America was what
might be called the descriptive moon series. The return of the seasons
marked the year. Within the year, rude track was kept of the passage of
time by following a series of “natural” months or lunations named after
events, such as “heavy cold,” “flying geese,” “deer rutting,” or “falling
leaves.” No one cared and perhaps no one knew how many days there were
in a moon, let alone in a year. No one knew his age, nor, as a rule, how
many years ago any event had taken place. It is a mark of pretty high
civilization when people know how old they are.
From the point of view of accuracy, the moon series calendar left much
to be desired, since there are something over twelve and considerably
under thirteen visible lunations in a solar or seasonal year. Some tribes
allowed twelve moons, others thirteen, in some different individuals
disagreed. Whenever the geese actually flew, debates were settled: it was
flying geese month, and every one went on with the series from there. If
he had happened to get a moon ahead or behind, he accepted the event as a
correction.
The moon series calendar was used by the majority of tribes in the United
States and Canada.
Somewhat more advanced is the solstitial moon series. This takes one of
the solstices, usually the one just before our Christmas, as the fixed
beginning and end of the year. The days are noticeably shortest then.
Some tribes went farther and employed landmarks to observe the place on
the horizon of the sun’s rising. Until the solstice this place shifts
daily southward, after it northward. Also, the noonday shadows fall
longest at the winter solstice. Here then was a point in the year which
was always the same, whereas the geese might fly or the leaves fall early
one year and late the next. The definiteness thus obtained was followed
up by numbering the moons instead of describing them, or by recognizing
both solstices as a frame within which there fell two parallel groups of
six moons, or of five moons and a slightly longer solstitial period.
This method also did not solve the really difficult problem of making
twelve lunations and an irregular fraction fit automatically and
permanently into the solar year; and provision for counting days and
years was still wholly lacking. Yet the first beginnings of exact
astronomical observations had been made and were utilized to give the
year and its subdivisions a certain fixity.
The occurrence of the simple solstitial calendar in North America is
significant. It occurs in the Southwest and Northwest: that is, in the
area most directly influenced by the higher Mexican center, and the area
which made most progress independently of Mexico.[29]
These two stages of the descriptive and the solstitial moon series were
long ago passed through in southern Mexico and a need felt for a more
precise time reckoning. No calendar can either serve accuracy or cover
long periods which fails to concern itself with the exact arithmetical
relation of its smaller units to its larger ones: the number of days in
the month and year, for instance. This concern, would not be difficult
if the relations were simple; but nature has put something over 29½
days into a lunation, something under 365¼ days and a little over 12⅓
lunations into the year. The first step ahead was undoubtedly a day
count, as previously the numbering of the moons had marked an advance
over their descriptive naming. The day count must have revealed the
discrepancy between the actual numbers and those assumed for the larger
units, such as 30 and 360. A great advance was therefore made when the
natural lunation was wholly abandoned and artificial units substituted.
The Mayas, or possibly some previous and forgotten people, invented a
“month” of twenty days, probably because they counted by twenties instead
of tens. Eighteen of these months, with five added leap days, made a
365-day year. Thirteen 20-day months made another and wholly arbitrary
period of 260 days, which the Aztecs, who borrowed the system, called
tonalamatl.[30] The tonalamatl had no basis in nature or astronomy and
was a pure invention: a reckoning device. It ran its course concurrently
with the year as two wheels of 260 and 365 cogs might engage. The same
cogs would meet again at the end of 73 and 52 revolutions respectively,
that is, 365 and 260 divided by 5, their highest common factor. At the
end of each 52 years, therefore, the beginning of the year and of the
tonalamatl again coincided, giving a “calendar round” of that duration.
This 52-year period is the one by which the Aztecs dated.
The Mayas, however, did not content themselves with the 52-year period,
but reckoned time by katuns of 20 and cycles of 400 years.[31] The dates
on Maya inscriptions are mostly from their ninth cycle, with some from
the end of the eighth and beginning of the tenth. This period corresponds
approximately to the first six centuries of the Christian era. The
beginning of the first cycle would fall more than 3,000 years before
Christ. There is no reason to believe that this time reckoning began
then. It is more likely that a little before the time of Christ the Mayas
perfected this system of chronology and gave it dignity by imagining some
seven or eight cycles to have passed between the beginning of the world,
or some other mythological event, and the actual commencement of their
record. From the close of their eighth cycle, however, the dates are
apparently contemporary with the events to which they refer.
This system is so elaborate that it could scarcely have been devised and
adopted all at once. There must have been a time lasting some centuries,
perhaps over a thousand years, previous to the Christian era, during
which the first day count was being elaborated and perfected into the
classical calendar of the early post-Christian Maya monuments.
This calendar did not exhaust the astronomical and mathematical
accomplishments of the Mayas. They ascertained that eight solar years
correspond almost exactly with five “years” or apparent revolutions (584
days) of the planet Venus, and that 65 Venus years of a total of 37,960
days coincide with two calendar rounds of 52 solar years. They knew
that their 365-day year was a fraction of a day short of the true year,
determined the error rather exactly, and, while they did not interpolate
any leap days, they computed the necessary correction at 25 days in 104
years or two calendar rounds. This is greater accuracy than has been
attained by any calendar other than our modern Gregorian one. As regards
the moon, they brought its revolutions into accord with their day count
with an error of only one day in 300 years. These are high attainments,
and for a people without astronomical instruments involved accurate and
protracted observations as well as calculatory ability.
Much less is known of South American calendars; but, like the dwindling
away from Maya to Aztec to Pueblo and finally to the rudiments of the
descriptive moon series of the backward tribes in the northern continent,
so there is discernible a retardation of progress as the Maya focus is
left behind toward the south. The most developed calendar in South
America was that of the Chibchan peoples of Colombia. Beyond them, the
Inca, in their greater empire, got along with a system intermediate in
its degree of development between the Aztec and the Pueblo ones. In the
Tropical Forest and Patagonian areas there do not seem to have been more
than moon name series comparable to those of peripheral North America.
198. WRITING
Related to calendar and mathematics in its origin was writing, which
passed out of the stage of pictographs and simple ideograms only in the
Mexican area. The Aztecs used the rebus method (§ 130), but chiefly
for proper names, as in tribute lists and the like. The Mayas had gone
farther. Their glyphs are highly worn down or conventionalized pictures,
true symbols; often indeed combinations of symbols. They mostly remain
illegible to us, and while they appear to contain phonetic elements,
these do not seem to be the dominant constituents. The Maya writing thus
also did not go beyond the mixed or transitional stage. The Chibcha
may have had a less advanced system of similar type, though the fact
that no remains of it have survived argues against its having been
of any considerable development. The Peruvians did not write at all.
They scarcely even used simple pictography. Their records were wholly
oral, fortified by mnemonic devices known as quipus, series of knotted
strings. These were useful in keeping account of numbers, but could of
course not be read by any one but the knotter of the strings: a given
knot might stand equally for ten llamas, ten men, ten war clubs, or ten
jars of maize. The remainder of South America used no quipus, and while
occasional pictographs have been found on rocks, they seem to have been
less developed, as something customary, than among the North American
tribes. All such primitive carvings or paintings were rather expressions
of emotion over some event, concrete or spiritual, intelligible to the
maker of the carving and perhaps to his friends, than records intended to
be understood by strangers or future generations.
Connected with the fact that the highest development of American writing
took place in southern Mexico, is another: it was only there that books
were produced. These were mostly ritualistic or astrological, and were
painted on long folded strips of maguey fiber paper or deerskin. They
were probably never numerous, and intelligible chiefly to certain priests
or officials.
199. THE SEVERAL PROVINCIAL DEVELOPMENTS: MEXICO
Since the calendrical and graphic achievements enumerated, together with
temple sculpture, lie in the fields of science, knowledge, and art, and
since they show a definite localization in southern Mexico, in fact point
to an origin in the Maya area, they almost compel the recognition of this
culture center as having constituted the peak of civilization in the New
World.
This localization establishes at least some presumption that it was there
rather than in South America that the beginnings of cultural progress,
the emergence out of primitive uniformity, occurred. To be sure, it is
conceivable that agriculture and other inventions grew up in Andean South
America, were transported to Mexico, for some reason gained a more rapid
development there, until, under the stimulus of this forward movement,
further discoveries were made which the more steadily and slowly
progressing Peruvian motherland of culture failed to equal. Conjectures
of this sort cannot yet be confirmed or disproved. Civilization was
sufficiently advanced in both Mexico and Peru to render it certain that
these first beginnings now referred to, lay some thousands of years back.
In the main, Mexican and Peruvian cultures were nearly on an equality,
and in their fundamentals they were sufficiently alike, and sufficiently
different from all Old World cultures, to necessitate the belief that
they are, broadly, a common product.
Still, the superiority of the Mexicans in the sciences and arts carries
a certain weight. If to this superiority are added the indications
that maize and cotton were first cultivated in the south Mexican
area, in other words, that the fundamentals of American agriculture
and loom-weaving seem more likely to have been developed there than
elsewhere; and if further the close association of pottery with
agriculture throughout the western hemisphere is borne in mind, it seems
likely that the seat of the first forward impetus out of the wholly
primitive status of American culture is to be sought in the vicinity of
southern Mexico.
200. THE ANDEAN AREA
The triumphs of Mexican civilization were in the spiritual or
intellectual field; those of Peru lay rather in practical and material
matters. The empire of the Incas was larger and much more rigorously
organized and controlled, their roads longer and more ambitious as
engineering undertakings, their masonry more massive; their mining
operations and metal working more extensive. The domestication of the
llama and the cultivation of certain food plants such as the potato gave
their culture an added stability on the economic side.
The extent of the Inca empire, and of the smaller states that no doubt
preceded it, was of influence in shaping Andean culture. Organized and
directed efforts of large numbers of men were made available to a greater
degree than ever before in the New World. The empire also operated in the
direction of more steady industry, but its close organization and routine
probably helped dwarf the higher flights of the mind. In the quality of
their fabrics, jewelry, stone fitting, and road building, as well as in
exactness of governmental administration, the Peruvians excelled. It
is remarkable how little, with all their progress in these directions,
they seem to have felt the need of advance in knowledge or art for its
own sake. They thought with their hands rather than their heads. They
practised skill and inhibited imagination.
The Incas, like the Aztecs in Mexico, represent merely the controlling
nation during the last stage of development. Their specific culture was
the local one of the highlands about Cuzco. Prehistoric remains from
the coast both north and south, and in the Andean highland southward of
Cuzco in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca and the adjacent parts of Bolivia,
demonstrate that this Inca or Cuzco culture was only the latest of
several forms of Andean culture. At the time of Inca dominion, the great
temple of Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca was already a ruin. Pottery of
a type characteristic of the Tiahuanaco district, and similar in style
to its stone carvings, has been found in remote parts of the Andean
area, thus indicating the district as an early center of diffusion.
Other centers, more or less contemporaneous, some of them perhaps still
earlier, can be distinguished along the coast. In short, the inner
history of the Andean region is by no means summed up in that picture
of it which the Inca domination at the time of discovery presented. New
scientifically conducted excavations throughout the area will no doubt
unravel further the succession of local cultural developments.
201. COLOMBIA
The Chibchas of Colombia, the intermediate member of the three-linked
Middle American chain, fell somewhat, but not very far, below the
Mexicans and Peruvians in their cultural accomplishments. Their
deficiency lay in their lack of specific developments. They do not show
a single cultural element of importance peculiar to themselves. They
chewed coca, slept in hammocks, sat on low chairs or stools; but these
are traits common to a large part of South America. Consequently the
absence or weak development of these traits in Mexico is no indication
of any superiority of the Chibchas as such. The great bulk of Colombian
culture was a substratum which underlay the higher local developments
of Mexico and Peru; and this substratum—varied agriculture, temples,
priesthood, political organization—the Chibchas possessed without notable
gaps. Whatever elements flowed from Mexico to Peru or from Peru to Mexico
at either an early or a late period, therefore probably passed through
them. In isolated matters they may have added their contribution. On the
whole, though, their rôle must have been that of sharers, recipients, and
transmitters in the general Middle American civilization.
202. THE TROPICAL FOREST
The line of demarcation between the narrow Pacific slope of South America
and the broad Atlantic drainage is sharp, especially in the region of
Peru. The Cordilleran stretch is arid along the coast, sub-arid in the
mountains, unforested in all its most characteristic portions. East
of the crest of the Andes, on the other hand, the rainfall is heavy,
often excessive, the jungle thick, communication difficult and largely
dependent on the waterways. Even the Caucasian has made but the slightest
impression on the virgin Amazonian forest at its densest. The Inca
stretched his empire a thousand miles north and a thousand to the south
with comparative ease, establishing uniformity and maintaining order. He
did not penetrate the Tropical Forest a hundred miles. At his borders,
where the forest began, lived tribes as wild and shy as any on earth. The
Andean civilization would have had to be profoundly modified to flourish
in the jungle, and the jungle had too little that was attractive to
incite to the endeavor. Some thousands of years more, perhaps, might have
witnessed an attempt to open up the forest and make it accessible. Yet
when one recalls how little has been done in this direction by Caucasian
civilization in four centuries, and how superficial its exploitation for
rubber and like products has been, it is clear that such a task would
have been accomplished by the Peruvians only with the utmost slowness.
Yet various culture elements filtered over the Andes into the hidden
lowlands. The Pan’s pipe, for instance, an element common to the Andes
and the Forest, is likely to have originated in the higher center.
Elements like the blowgun, the hammock, the chair or stool, are typical
of the northern Forest and Antilles, and may have infiltrated these
areas from Colombia or even been locally developed. The same is true
of the cultivation of the cassava or manioc plant, from which we draw
our tapioca. This, the great staple of the Forest region, is better
adapted to its humid climate than is maize, which flourishes best in a
sub-arid environment. Cassava may therefore be looked upon as perhaps a
local substitute for maize, evolved as a domesticated plant under the
stimulus of an already established maize agriculture. Its cultivation has
evidently spread through the Forest region from a single source, since
the specialized processes of preparing it for food—the untreated root
is poisonous—are relatively uniform wherever it is grown. Maize is not
unknown in the area, but less used than cassava wherever the forest is
dense.
A characteristic quality of those Forest culture-traits which are not
common ancient American inheritance, is that, whether of Middle American
or local origin, they are detached fragments, particular devices having
little or no relation to one another, like the hammock and the blowgun,
or cassava and the Pan’s pipe. Original fundamental processes, higher
accomplishments necessitating order or organization of effort, are
lacking. This is precisely the condition which might be anticipated when
a culture too low to take over a higher one in its entirety had borrowed
from it here and there, as the Forest peoples undoubtedly have borrowed
from Middle America.
Three districts within the Forest area have previously been mentioned (§
174) as regions in which the forest becomes open or disappears, and whose
type of culture is locally modified: Guiana, eastern Brazil, and the
Chaco. Of these the Brazilian highlands constitute an area of unusually
deficient culture. In parts of them agriculture and pottery seem to be
lacking. These highlands are perhaps to be construed as an interior
marginal region representing an isolation within the greater Forest
area. Had these highlands been in juxtaposition to the Andean area, or
even situated near it, they would presumably have been able to take over
Andean culture elements more successfully than the low-lying Forest,
and would then have stood out from this through superiorities instead
of absences. Their remoteness, however, enabled the intervening Forest
region to shut them off from Andean influences of consequence, while
giving to them only part of its own low cultural content.
The peculiarities of the Chaco are due to the opposite reason. The Chaco
is a partly open country at the southerly extremity of the Forest.
It lies close to the foot of the Andes where these broaden out into
the southern Bolivian plateau. It also shades off into the treeless
Patagonian region. It is thus open to influences from three sides, and
its culture appears to represent a mixture of the three adjacent ones.
The basis would seem to be the culture of the Tropical Forest, but
definite Patagonian as well as Andean elements are traceable.
203. PATAGONIA
Patagonia is par excellence the peripheral region of South America,
culturally as well as geographically. As regards civilization, this
is true in the highest degree at the extreme tip of the continent
about Tierra del Fuego. Many of the most widely spread South American
culture traits being lacking here, there is a curious resemblance to the
northerly tribes of North America.
Yet even this culturally disinherited area is not without a few
local developments of relatively high order. The most striking is
the plank-built canoe of the south Chilean archipelago. The skill to
carpenter such boats was exercised in only one other region in the
hemisphere; the Santa Barbara Islands of California. Curiously enough the
latter is also a district of comparatively backward culture. In any event
this built-up canoe of the rude people of the extreme south contrasts
strikingly with the lack of any real boats among the advanced nations in
the Andean area. The moral would seem to be that it is speculative to
base much theory or explanation on any single culture trait.
Of other elements specific to the Patagonian region, there might be
mentioned coiled basketry (§ 104) and the bolas. This is a hunting weapon
of three stones attached to ropes swung so as to wind around the neck
or legs of game. Except at the extreme south, Patagonian culture was
profoundly modified by the introduction of the horse, which soon after
the arrival of the Spaniards multiplied on the open plains. The horse
enlarged the ability of the Patagonian tribes to take game, especially in
the Pampas in the north, increased their wealth, and strengthened their
warlike interests. The same change occurred in the Chaco.
204. NORTH AMERICA: THE SOUTHWEST
In North America the Southwest area lies at the point where the continent
spreads out fanwise. It is therefore the gate or transforming station
through which Mexican influences flowed on their way to the various areas
beyond. Whatever of Mexican culture the Pueblos received and accepted,
they worked over before they passed it on. This reconstitution gave the
culture a new color. Nearly every one on first coming in contact with
Southwestern culture has been struck with its distinctive cast. Analysis,
however, shows few intrinsic elements peculiar to it. The novelty as
compared with Mexico lies in a different emphasis or a new arrangement
of the elements. Masonry, for instance, is used for dwellings instead
of temples. Town life is well developed, but the political organization
which accompanies it in Mexico is much weaker in the Southwest.
205. THE SOUTHEAST
Superficially, Southeastern culture appears different from Southwestern.
Much of the seeming difference is due to the wooded and rather humid
environment; another portion is accounted for by the failure of the
Southeastern tribes to build in stone. But there are differences that go
deeper, such as the poverty of Southeastern ritual and the comparative
strength of political organization. The religious dwarfing may be
attributed to greater distance from Mexico.
The precise routes of diffusion into the Southeast are not wholly
clear. The culture center of the area lay on or near the lower
Mississippi—sufficiently close to the Southwest. Yet the district which
is now Texas intervened, and this was one of distinctly lower culture,
largely occupied by tribes with Plains affiliation. Theoretically it
would have been possible for cultural elements to travel from Mexico
along the Texas coast to the Southeast. Yet what little is known about
the tribes of this coast indicates that they were backward. A third
possibility for the transmission of culture was from the Antilles,
especially by the short voyage from Cuba or the Bahamas to the point of
Florida. Some connections by this route almost certainly took place. But
they seem to have affected chiefly the peninsula of Florida, and to have
brought less into the Southeast as a whole than reached it overland.
206. THE NORTHERN WOODLAND
The Northeast was historically dependent on the Southeast as this was
on the Southwest and the Southwest on Mexico. It was thus the third
stage removed from the origins in Middle America. It was inferior to the
Southeast in several points. Pottery was cruder, clans mostly patrilinear
instead of matrilinear, town and tribal life less organized. Some
exceptions within the Northeast can be traced to direct influences or
migrations from the Southeast. The matrilinear and confederated Iroquoian
tribes of the Northeast, for instance, were linguistic relatives of the
Cherokee in the Southeast.
A similar movement of culture or peoples, or both, occurred at an earlier
time and has left as its remains the mounds of the Ohio valley—local
equivalents of the Mexican temple pyramid. Some of these are of
surprising bulk, and others have the form of animals. Associated with
them are earthwork fortifications which indicate coherent populational
groups of some size. The industries of the Mound Builders were also on a
somewhat higher level, especially as regards artistic quality, than those
of the historic tribes of the region. In detail the Mound Builder culture
represents many interesting points that remain to be cleared up. In the
large, however, it was a temporary local extension of the Southeastern
culture, from which flowed its occasional resemblances to Middle America.
207. PLAINS AREA
The Plains area is adjacent to the Southwest, but a review of its culture
elements shows that a surprisingly small fragment of Southwestern
civilization penetrated it. The most advanced Plains tribes seem rather
to have been in dependence on the Southeast. This is probably to be
explained as the result of a flow of culture up the more immediate
Mississippi valley. The western Plains, close to the Rocky mountains,
were sparsely populated in aboriginal times, and life there must have
been both unsettled and narrow in its scope. Contacts between these
western Plains and the Southwest no doubt existed, but presumably the
Plains tribes were too backward, and too engrossed in their own special
adaptation to their environment, to profit much by what they might have
borrowed from the Pueblos.
Certain specific culture traits were developed on the Plains. The nearly
exclusive dependence on buffalo stunted the culture in some directions,
but led to the originating of other features. Thus the Plains tribes came
to live in tipis—tents made of the skin of the buffalo—pitched these
in regular order in the camp circle, and traveled with the bundled
tents lashed to a “travois” frame dragged by dogs. While they never
accomplished anything notable in the way of confederating themselves into
larger stable groups, nor even in effective warfare, they did develop a
system of “coup counting” or military honors which loomed large in their
life.
During the seventeenth century the horse was introduced or became
abundant on the Plains. It reached the Indians from Spanish sources,
as is shown by their adopting modifications of Spanish riding gear
and methods of mounting. The horse gave them an extension of range
and a greater sureness of food supply; more leisure also resulted.
The consequence was a general upward swing of the culture, which put
it, as regards outward appearances, on a par with the cultures of
other areas that in purely aboriginal times had outranked the Plains.
This development due to the horse is in many ways comparable to that
which occurred in the Patagonian area, but with one difference. The
Patagonians possessed a meager culture. The introduction of the horse
resulted in their hybridizing two elements so dissimilar as their own low
civilization and the Caucasian one. The Plains culture had a somewhat
fuller content. The Plains tribes were also protected from intimate
Caucasian contacts for nearly two centuries, during which they were
able to use the new and valuable acquisition of the horse to enrich and
deepen their culture without essentially remodeling it. Horse transport
was substituted for dog transport, tipis became more commodious and
comfortable, the camp circle spread out larger, more property could be
accumulated. Warfare continued to be carried on as a species of game
with military honors as prizes, but now provided the added incentive of
substantial booty of herds easily driven off.
208. THE NORTHWEST COAST
The North Pacific coast is the most anomalous of the North American
areas, and its history is in many ways unique. It is nearer in miles
to the Southwest and Mexico than is the Northeast, yet agriculture and
pottery never reached it. At the same time the Northwest culture is
obviously more than a marginal one. People with so elaborate a social
organization as these Coast tribes, and with so outstanding an art, were
certainly not peripheral dependents. The explanation is that much of
the development of culture in the Middle American region never became
established in the Northwest, but that this area manifested a vitality
and initiative of its own which led to the independent development of a
number of important culture constituents. The art is in the main of such
local origin, since it does not affiliate closely with the art of other
areas. Very important too was the stress increasingly laid on wealth in
the Northwest. Society was stratified in terms of it. The potlatch, a
combination of feast, religious ceremony, and distribution of property,
is another peculiar outcome of the same tendency. The use of dentalium
shells as a sort of standard currency is a further manifestation.
The working of wood was carried farther than anywhere else. Several
traits, such as the solstitial calendar and matrilinear clans, which
the Northwest Coast shares with other areas, have already been cited as
probable instances of independent evolution on the spot.
All in all, then, it is necessary to look upon the Northwest Coast
culture as one that fell far short of the high civilizations of Middle
America, in fact barely equaled that of the Southwest, yet as the
only one in the New World that grew to any notability with but slight
dependence on Middle America. It is an isolated secondary peak standing
aloof from the greater one that culminated in Mexico and Peru and to
which all the remainder of the hemisphere was subordinate. Figure 35
visualizes this historic relation.
209. NORTHERN MARGINAL AREAS
The Arctic, Mackenzie, Plateau, and California areas were also but
little influenced by Middle American civilization. In fact, most of the
elements which they share with it may be considered direct survivals
of the general proto-American culture out of which the early Middle
American civilization emerged. Yet why these areas on the Pacific side
of North America should have profited so much less by the diffusion of
Mexican advancement than the areas on the Atlantic, is not clear. In the
mostly frozen Arctic and Mackenzie tracts, the hostile environment may
have forbidden. But this explanation certainly does not apply to the
California area which lies at the very doors of the Southwest and yet
refrained from taking over such fundamentals as agriculture and pottery.
Sparseness of population cannot be invoked as a cause, since at least
along the coast the density of population was greater than in almost all
the eastern half of the continent.
Of the people of these four areas, the Eskimo are the only ones that
evinced notable originality. It is easy to attribute this quality of
theirs to the stern rigor of environment. In fact, it has been customary
to appeal to the Eskimo as an example of the popular maxim that necessity
is the mother of invention. Yet it is clear that no great weight can
be attached to this simple philosophy. It is true that without his
delicately adjusted harpoon, his skin boat, his snow hut, his dog sled,
and his seal oil lamp, the Eskimo could not have maintained an existence
on the terrifically inhospitable shores of the Arctic. But there is
nothing to show that he was forced to live in this environment. Stretches
of mountains, desert, and tundra in other parts of the world were often
left uninhabited by uncivilized peoples. Why did not the Eskimo abandon
his Arctic shore or refuse to settle it in the first place, crowding his
way instead into some more favorable habitat? His was a sturdy stock that
should have had at least an equal chance in a competition with other
peoples.
Furthermore it is evident that rigorous environment does not always
force development or special cultural adaptations. The tribes of the
Mackenzie-Yukon and the most northerly part of the Northeast area lived
under a climate about as harsh as that of the Eskimo. In fact they were
immediate neighbors; yet their culture is definitely more meager. A
series of the most skilled devices of the Eskimo were wanting among them.
If necessity were truly as productive a cause of cultural progress as is
commonly thought, these Athabascan and Algonkin Indians should have been
stimulated into a mechanical ingenuity comparable to that of the Eskimo,
instead of continuing to rank below them.
These considerations compel the conclusion that the Eskimo did not
develop the achievements of his culture because he lived in his
difficult environment, but that he lived in the environment because he
possessed a culture capable of coping with it. This does not mean that he
had his culture worked out to the last detail before he settled on the
American shores of the Arctic ocean. It does mean that he possessed the
fundamentals of the culture, and the habits of ingenuity, the mechanical
and practical turn of mind, which enabled him to carry it farther and
meet new requirements as they came up. Where and how he acquired the
fundamentals is obscure. It is well to remember in this connection that
the physical type of the Eskimo is the most distinctive in the New World,
and that his speech has as yet shown no inclination to connect with any
other American language. It is conceivable that the origin of the Eskimo
is to be set at a time later than that of the American race and somewhere
in Asia. The fact that at present there are Eskimo villages on the
Siberian side of Behring Strait is too recent and local a phenomenon to
afford strong confirmation of such a view, but certainly does not operate
against it. Somewhere in the Siberian region, then, within occasional
reach of influences emanating from higher centers of civilization in
Asia or Europe, the Eskimo may have laid the foundations of their
culture, specialized it further as they encountered new conditions in
new Asiatic habitats, and evolved only the finishing touches of their
remarkable adaptation after they spread along the northernmost shores
of America. Some of the Old World culture influences which had reached
them before they entered America may go back to the Magdalenian culture
of the Palæolithic. There are at any rate certain resemblances between
Magdalenian and Eskimo cultures that have repeatedly impressed observers:
the harpoon, spear thrower, lamp, carving, and graphic art (§ 67).
210. LATER ASIATIC INFLUENCES
One set of influences the Eskimo, and to a lesser degree the peoples of
adjacent areas, were unquestionably subject to and profited by: sporadic
culture radiations of fairly late date from Asia. Such influences were
probably not specially important, but they are discernible. They came
probably as disjected bits independent of one another. There may have
been as many that reached America and failed of acceptance as were
actually taken up. In another connection (§ 92) it has been pointed out
how the tale known as the “Magic Flight” has spread from its Old World
center of origin well into northwestern America. A similar case has
been made out for a material element: the sinew-backed or composite bow
(§ 101), first found some three to four thousand years ago in western
Asia. This is constructed, in Asia, of a layer each of wood, sinew, and
horn; in its simpler American form, which barely extends as far south
as the Mexican frontier, of either wood or horn reinforced with sinew.
Body armor of slats, sewn or wound into a garment, seems to have spread
from Asia to the Northwest Coast. The skin boat, represented in its most
perfect type by the Eskimo kayak; the tipi or conical tent of skins;
birchbark vessels; sleds or toboggans with dog traction; bark canoes with
underhung ends; and garments of skin tailored—cut and sewn—to follow the
contours of the body, may all prove to represent culture importations
from Asia. At any rate they are all restricted in America to the part
north and west of a line connecting the St. Lawrence and Colorado rivers,
the part of the continent that is nearest to Asia. South and east of
this line, apparently, Middle American influences were strong enough to
provide the local groups with an adequate culture of American source;
and, the Asiatic influences being feeble on account of remoteness,
Asiatic culture traits failed of acceptance. It is also noteworthy that
all of the traits last mentioned are absent on the Northwest Coast,
in spite of its proximity to Asia. The presumable reason is that the
Northwest Coast, having worked out a relatively advanced and satisfactory
culture adaptation of its own, had nothing to gain by taking over these
elementary devices; whereas to the culturally poorer peoples of the
Arctic, Mackenzie, Plateau, and in part of the California, Plains, and
Northeastern areas, they proved a valuable acquisition.
A careful analysis of Eskimo culture in comparison with north and east
Asiatic culture may reveal further instances of elements that have spread
from one hemisphere to the other. Yet the sum total of such relatively
late contributions from the civilization of the Old World to that of the
New, during the last one or two or three or four thousand years, is not
likely to aggregate any great bulk. Since the early culture importation
of the period of the settlement of America eight or ten thousand years
ago, the influences of the Old World have always been slight as compared
with the independent developments within the New World. Even within the
northwestern segment of North America, the bulk of culture would seem to
have been evolved on the spot. But mingled with this local growth, more
or less modifying it in the nearer regions, and reaching its greatest
strength among the Eskimo, has been a trickling series of later Asiatic
influences which it would be mistaken wholly to overlook.
CHAPTER XIV
THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD PREHISTORY AND ARCHÆOLOGY
211. Sources of knowledge.—212. Chronology of the grand
divisions of culture history.—213. The Lower and Upper
Palæolithic.—214. Race influence and regional differentiation
in the Lower Palæolithic.—215. Upper Palæolithic culture
growths and races.—216. The Palæolithic aftermath:
Azilian.—217. The Neolithic: its early phase.—218. Pottery and
the bow.—219. Bone tools.—220. The dog.—221. The hewn ax.—222.
The Full Neolithic.—223. Origin of domesticated animals and
plants.—224. Other traits of the Full Neolithic.—225. The
Bronze Age: Copper and Bronze phases.—226. Traits associated
with bronze.—227. Iron.—228. First use and spread of iron.—229.
The Hallstadt and La Tène Periods.—230. Summary of development:
Regional differentiation.—231. The Scandinavian area as an
example.—232. The late Palæolithic Ancylus or Maglemose
Period.—233. The Early Neolithic Litorina or Kitchenmidden
Period.—234. The Full Neolithic and its subdivisions
in Scandinavia.—235. The Bronze Age and its periods in
Scandinavia.—236. Problems of chronology.—237. Principles of
the prehistoric spread of culture.
211. SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE
The story of the growth and development of culture in the Western
Hemisphere which has been sketched in reconstruction in the last chapter
is built up from the incomplete information of excavations and the
indirect evidence of culture trait distributions and analyses. Earlier
than about ten thousand years ago, this hemisphere has no known human
history. In the Old World, conditions are doubly different. There is
a long primeval record, stretching perhaps a hundred thousand years
beyond 8000 B.C., documented much like the subsequent culture history
of America, but with a wealth of geological, faunal, and skeletal data
to compensate for the loss of ancient cultural evidences in the lapse
of time. Secondly, for the last ten thousand years, there is a fuller
record than for America. This greater fullness is partly due to the
earlier start toward its higher forms which civilization took in the
Eastern Hemisphere. And this relatively early advancement brought it
about that by 3000 B.C. adequate systems of writing had been achieved in
Africa and Asia, so that contemporary inscriptions have been preserved
to throw direct light on the thoughts and institutions of the people of
that day, and to date the centuries of their rulers for us. These last
five thousand years thus belong to history, rather than to prehistory, in
some parts of the hemisphere; and they allow many a close inference as to
what happened in the previous five thousand years when writing was as yet
unknown or its first systems were being evolved.
These ten thousand years since the close of the Old Stone Age, half
of them studied by the methods of anthropology, half also by those
of history, and the whole forming the richest field in human culture
history, are the subjects of the present chapter and the next.
First, however, it is necessary to refer back to the earliest known
development of civilization in the Old Stone Age (Chapter VI), whose
close is our present starting point.
212. CHRONOLOGY OF THE GRAND DIVISIONS OF CULTURE HISTORY
The period of human existence since the first tool was made is generally
divided into four grand divisions (§ 66, 67): the Palæolithic or Old
Stone Age; the Neolithic or New Stone Age; the Bronze Age; and the Iron
Age. The duration of these four ages is diverse and notably diminishing
from earliest to latest. The last three are comprised within the past ten
thousand years: 8000 B.C. may be looked upon as a reasonably accurate
date for the commencement of the Neolithic. For western Europe, at least,
the probable error of this date is not over one or at most two thousand
years. Back of this approximately fixed point stretches the immeasurably
longer Palæolithic, for the determination of whose duration there is
available not even any semi-historical evidence, and which can only be
estimated in terms of geological alterations, continental glaciations,
and faunal and floral changes—all unsatisfactory means for arriving at an
absolute chronology expressible in years.
To a vague 100,000 B.C. as the tentative figure for the beginning of
the Palæolithic, and an approximate 8000 B.C. for the commencement of
the Neolithic, there can be added 3000 B.C. for the onset of the Bronze
and 1000 B.C. of the Iron Age. The last two dates are averages only.
The Greek islands, for instance, received bronze about this period,
the Orient had it earlier, western Europe not until about 2500 B.C.,
northern Europe still later. In the same way, iron is well attested for
western Asia in the thirteenth century before Christ, for Central Europe
and France about 900 B.C., in Scandinavia some centuries later, in fact
becoming abundant only shortly before the Roman period.
In the wide sense, the outstanding generalizations derivable from these
figures are twofold. As regards the later periods, those of metal and
probably the Neolithic, the west lagged behind the east, the north behind
the south; Asia preceded and invented, Europe followed and imitated. As
regards the entire duration, a tremendous disproportion is observable.
The vast bulk of the total time of culture is covered by the Palæolithic:
the three following Ages are all squeezed into a tenth of the whole.
Within this fraction again the Neolithic takes up half, leaving the
two metal Ages to divide the other half between them. There is a clear
tendency toward acceleration of development.
213. THE LOWER AND UPPER PALÆOLITHIC
Within the Old Stone Age, a primary division is to be made between
the Lower and Upper Palæolithic. The Lower Palæolithic comprises
the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian periods, when Europe was
inhabited by Neandertal man, who was distinct from the modern human
species, and possibly by a pre-Neandertal race not yet discovered.
The Upper Palæolithic, or Reindeer Age, consists of the Aurignacian,
Solutrean, and Magdalenian, with the Azilian as epilogue. Through
these Upper Palæolithic periods long-headed branches of _Homo
sapiens_—ourselves—existed: the Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi, and Brünn types,
some of them foreshadowing the existing Caucasian and Negroid races (§
14, 16-18). The longest step forward in the development of European
Palæolithic civilization comes in the passage from its Lower to its Upper
phase. Before this transition, new achievements were rare and their total
small. The use of fire, of flint cores and flakes, of fracturing and
retouching, possibly the use of wooden handles, a minimal employment
of bone, and a definite disposal of the dead, about sum up known human
attainments to the end of the Lower Palæolithic (§ 81).
Compared with this stock of culture, that of the Upper Palæolithic is
elaborate. Bone awls and weapon points; shell necklaces and armlets;
clothing; painting of the dead; sculpture and engraving—a greater number
of elements than the Lower Palæolithic had been able to accumulate in
perhaps 75,000 years—appear in the Aurignacian. The foundations of the
whole of the Upper Palæolithic civilization were laid in this period.
That the Solutrean added needles and surface retouching of flint, the
Magdalenian a more vigorous development of pictorial line and use of
colors, lamps, harpoons, and spear throwers, represented in the main only
an enriching of the general Upper Palæolithic culture, whose essentials
were determined at the outset.[32]
214. RACE INFLUENCE AND REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION IN THE LOWER PALÆOLITHIC
This profound change raises a natural conjecture. The Lower Palæolithic
culture, at least in its latest form, was carried by Neandertal man;
Upper Palæolithic culture is in great part associated with Cro-Magnon
man, whose anatomy was nearer our own. Did not this relatively modern
structure involve also a relatively modern set of mental faculties, and
these in turn, by their own sheer worth, produce the richer culture? The
supposition is plausible enough, and has been made. But it is sounder
procedure to withhold commitment of opinion. The inference involves the
assumption that approach to our own bodily type is accompanied by higher
native intelligence; and the further assumption that higher intelligence
will automatically produce advance in civilization. Probable as both
these assumptions may seem, they are still undemonstrated, in general and
in particular. The application of the assumptions to the facts therefore
gives an apparent explanation in terms of an ultimate but really unknown
causality. By accepting this hypothetical causality, it turns attention
away from the question of its validity. But the validity of the causal
relation between the body and intelligence, and between intelligence
and culture, is precisely a point that needs elucidation. It needs
elucidation as much as does the change of civilization that occurred in
Europe about 25,000 years ago; and is a much broader problem—indeed,
part of the most fundamental problem that anthropology still faces as
unsolved. Instead of a snapping interpretation of a dubious point in
human history in terms of a couple of still more dubious principles, it
will be wiser to lay these principles aside, for a time at least, and to
reconsider more intensively the facts bearing on the particular point at
issue.
There are two obvious lines of evidence that may help to throw light
on the change from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic, and in fact
aid understanding of the whole Palæolithic. The first comprises the
relations between western Europe and other areas during that period;
the second, regional differences within Europe. In the previous chapter
on the Palæolithic, such considerations have been disregarded in favor
of a schematic presentation of what seemed the salient facts in a
field made sufficiently difficult by the antiquity and incompleteness
of data. The best of these data, and those which arrange themselves
most systematically, are those from Europe, which have therefore been
presented as if they constituted a self-sufficient unit. But it is
unlikely that the culture should have developed in Europe in complete
detachment for a hundred thousand years or that it should have remained
identical over the whole of that continent. It is necessary, in short, to
revise the simple outline of Chapter VI by giving heed to geographical
and other disturbing considerations.
First of all, it is well to realize that what has heretofore been called
the first tool, the Chellean pick or coup-de-poing, was not so much
the only tool of its period as the most characteristic one. It seems
to have been accompanied at all times and everywhere by smaller, less
regularly made implements, some of which were even worked out of flakes
instead of cores and subjected to crude blow-retouching. Further, these
medium-sized pieces were probably “invented” before the coup-de-poing;
which is after all what might be expected, the coup-de-poing being
a comparatively effective, regularly shaped, symmetrical implement
involving both an ideal of form and a tolerable, rough skill to produce.
Several Pre-Chellean stations, containing such smaller implements but no
coups-de-poing, are now recognized by many specialists in prehistory. The
most notable are those of St. Acheul and Abbeville, in northern France;
the remainder are in the same part of that country, in Belgium, or in
southern England, which at that time formed part of the continent. The
fauna of some of these sites is an early one and has been attributed
to the second interglacial era (§ 69) as compared with the third
interglacial in which the Chellean and Acheulean fall.
When the Chellean proper, with its typical, well-developed picks, is
examined, it becomes clear that the distribution of this distinctive
form is limited to a narrow strip of westernmost Europe from Belgium to
Spain. The picks recur in north and east Africa and the districts of Asia
bordering on the Mediterranean. They may not be of exactly the same age
in these regions as in westerly Europe, but they are of the same type,
and in view of the continuity of their distribution must be historically
connected. In fact, the coup-de-poing Chellean might well be described
as essentially an African (or Africo-Asian) development which underwent
an extension across what was then the land-bridge of Gibraltar up the
Atlantic face of Europe (Fig. 37).
The remainder of Europe was evidently also inhabited in this era; but by
people of a variant culture. From Germany eastward into Russia, possibly
Siberia, implements were worked which in part suggest the Pre-Chellean
ones of northern France, in part developments of such Pre-Chellean
pieces, and in part forms approaching Mousterian types. They do not
include Chellean picks. The name Pre-Mousterian has been proposed for
this central and east European culture. This name is appropriate,
provided it is remembered that Pre-Mousterian denotes not a phase
intermediate between the Acheulean and Mousterian of western Europe, but
a culture developed, like the Chellean, yet more or less independently,
out of the Pre-Chellean, and approximately coeval with the pure Chellean
of western Europe and its Acheulean continuation. In other words, two
culture-areas, an African-west-European and an east European, begin to
be discernible from an extremely early time in the Lower Palæolithic
(Fig. 37).
[Illustration: FIG. 37. Early Lower Palæolithic culture-areas (about
100,000-50,000 B.C.). Vertical shading, Chellean-Acheulean culture, with
coups-de-poing. The principal European districts containing typical
Chellean coups-de-poing are marked “C.” Stippling, “Pre-Mousterian”
culture, probably contemporaneous with Chellean and Acheulean, but
lacking coups-de-poing. White, uninhabited or unexplored. (Mainly after
Obermayer.)]
During the Acheulean, the western culture spread somewhat: into southern
England, southeastern France, Italy, and began to overlap with the
eastern culture along the Rhine. In the Mousterian, an assimilation
seems to have taken place: culture, or at least flint industry, became
more uniform over the whole of Europe, and in a measure the near parts
of Asia and Africa also. This general Mousterian culture, with its small
implements and emphasis on retouching, seems more likely to have evolved
out of the pickless eastern Pre-Mousterian than out of the western
Chellean-Acheulean with its large hewn coups-de-poing.
This would suggest an eastern origin for Mousterian man—the Neandertal
race. But it is well not to proceed beyond some slight probability on
this point because it is by no means certain that culture traveled
only as races traveled. In their simple way, culture contacts without
migrations may have been substantially as effective in shaping or
altering civilization fifty thousand years ago as to-day. For all
that can be demonstrated at present, the Mousterian Neandertal men of
western Europe may have been the blood descendants of the undiscovered
Chellean-Acheulean inhabitants of western Europe who had learned more
effective retouching and smaller tools from the east Europeans.
215. UPPER PALÆOLITHIC CULTURE GROWTHS AND RACES
With the advent of the Upper Palæolithic, possibly some 25,000 years
ago, the divergent culture-areas of the early Lower Palæolithic which
had become largely effaced during the Mousterian, emerge again; but with
shifted boundaries. The line of demarcation now is no longer formed
by the Rhine and the Alps, but by the Pyrenees. Throughout the Upper
Palæolithic, most of Spain formed an annex to the North African province,
whose culture has been named the Capsian after the type station of
Gafsa in Algiers. The Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian as they
have been previously described (§ 72-81) ran their course in a middle
European belt stretching from France to Poland (Figs. 38, 39). Northern
Spain, southern England, at times Italy and southern Russia, were more
or less in this mid-European province. The Balkans remain insufficiently
explored; all northernmost Europe was still uninhabited. In general,
it may be said that the mid-European Upper Palæolithic culture is
characterized by the associated traits of work in bone and art; the
contemporary Spanish-African Capsian by specialization along the line
of increasingly smaller and finer flint implements, culminating in neat
microliths measurable only in fractions of inches.
[Illustration: FIG. 38. Aurignacian culture-areas (about 25,000-18,000
B.C.). 1, West-central European Aurignacian, with art. 2, Italian
Aurignacian. 3, Lower Capsian of North Africa and Spain. 4, Lower Capsian
of Syria. 5, South Russia, perhaps post-Aurignacian. (Mainly after
Obermayer.)]
The southern equivalent of the mid-European Aurignacian was the Lower
Capsian, of at least equal territorial extent even in its narrowest form
(Fig. 38). The industry of Syria at this period was allied to the Capsian
of Africa and may be regarded as related to it. The rather scant remains
of the age in Italy are perhaps also to be allied with the Capsian
culture rather than with the true Aurignacian. This makes it look as
if at this time a great Lower Capsian culture-area embraced nearly all
the shores of the Mediterranean. As against this, the mid-European true
Aurignacian, so far as now known, covered only a narrow region.
During the Solutrean and Magdalenian, Africa and Spain were in the Upper
Capsian. Evidence from the eastern Mediterranean begins to fail. Italy is
wholly without discovered remains. There are indications (§ 240) that at
least by the beginning of the Magdalenian in Europe, the favored land of
Egypt had already entered into the Neolithic. If this is so, westernmost
Asia, Greece, and even Italy may have begun to be affected by this higher
phase of culture, and the paucity or absence of their late Palæolithic
remains would be accounted for. This view seems reasonable, but is
unproved.
The Solutrean seems to have been a brief period in western Europe, and
its extent appears limited also (Fig. 39). It reveals two principal
areas: one north of the Danube, the other in southern France. The former
may have been the earlier, from which the culture, or certain phases
of it, such as the art of even surface retouch on leaf-shaped blades,
were carried westward into France. In this connection two facts may be
significant.
First is the circumstance that the north Danubian Solutrean area
possessed an art, apparently largely of Solutrean age, which is quite
different from the Upper Palæolithic art of the west. Naturalism was
scarcely attempted, figures were highly conventional, the style was one
of concentric curves or stippling or hatching.
[Illustration: FIG. 39. Solutrean and Magdalenian culture-areas (about
18,000-10,000 B.C.) S, areas of pronounced Solutrean industry. 1
(vertical shading), Magdalenian culture. _2A_, _2B_, Upper Capsian,
western and eastern provinces, contemporaneous with Solutrean and
Magdalenian. (Based on Obermayer.)]
The second consideration is the Brünn race. This type, which as yet
is known only from a few examples (§ 17), is generally considered
Neandertaloid, but also shows leanings toward the Cro-Magnon race as
well as differences from it. The less dubious Brünn remains, those from
Brünn, Brüx, and perhaps Predmost, are all from Czecho-Slovakia, that
is, the north Danubian region; and they seem to be of Solutrean age.
These facts render it likely that there existed a connection between the
east Solutrean culture, the geometric art, and the Brünn race, and they
indicate at least some probability of the spread of Solutrean culture
from eastern to western Europe. Brünn man may have been a modified
Neandertal man who persisted in the east after Cro-Magnon man had become
established in the west during the Aurignacian. Or he may have been a
local eastern variant of a generic type whose better known western form
we call Cro-Magnon man.
As to Grimaldi man, his Negroid affiliations also seem less startling
once it is clear that the Aurignacian civilization was a mid-European
phenomenon, and that contemporary Spain and probably Italy formed part of
the essentially African development of the Lower Capsian. With southern
Europe a cultural annex of north Africa at this period, the presence
there of a Negroid type is reasonable enough. Further, both the strait
of Gibraltar and that between Tunis and Sicily were land bridges during
part of the Pleistocene; Gibraltar, for instance, probably during the
Lower Capsian and, again, after a subsidence, in the Upper Capsian. The
Mediterranean, in other words, must be conceived not as a great barring
sea, but as a land-locked lake or pair of lakes, so that Europe and
Africa were joined geographically as well as racially and culturally.
As to the Cro-Magnon race, its association with the
Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture of mid-European type is clear enough,
but its origin remains problematical. One naturally looks eastward: to
the north lay ice, to the west the Atlantic, to the south a different
even though related culture. But nothing is really known; no ancestral
Asiatic form, no closely cognate later race, no eastern culture out of
which the Aurignacian might have sprung nor to which it might have been
specifically related. All or some of these may have existed, but in the
absence of discovery, speculation is of little profit. There is the
further difficulty about a theory that brings Cro-Magnon man out of the
east into the west of Europe, that a little later, in the Solutrean,
central Europe, through which he presumably passed, seems to have been
in possession of the Brünn race. True, this might have been a later wave
out of the east; but to derive both races out of Asia, and perhaps the
preceding Neandertal type also, is a bit monotonous as a hypothesis,
besides being one of those assumptions that seem to answer problems
without really helping their understanding.
Much the same may be said as to the fate of Neandertal man—whether he was
exterminated by the Cro-Magnons, or absorbed, or was driven away, or died
out. A single discovery on this point will be worth more than the most
elaborate conjecture.
Two points seem clear, whatever may have been the diffusions of race and
culture at the time that the Lower Palæolithic was being replaced by the
Upper. On the side of flint industry, there was no break: the Aurignacian
is the continuation of the Mousterian. The experts occasionally have
difficulty in agreeing whether a station or level is to be assigned
to the late Mousterian or early Aurignacian. Whatever, therefore, was
imported in the Upper Palæolithic was joined to something that remained
over and continued in middle Europe from the Lower Palæolithic. Secondly,
the center of known naturalistic art development was the west, southern
France especially; perceptibly in the Aurignacian, notably in the
Magdalenian. Yet this tract is peripheral to the Aurignacian-Magdalenian
culture as a whole. It would thus be a forced explanation to look
upon this art as the outright result of a diffusion or migration: the
supposed recipients of the accomplishment would be carrying it farther
than its originators. In other words, Upper Palæolithic art was in the
main a growth on the soil of western Europe, so far as present evidence
indicates. These findings diminish the probability of any large scale
importation of Upper Palæolithic culture ready made as a by-product of
the irruption of a new race. The change from Lower to Upper Palæolithic
was indeed profoundly significant. But much of it may have been
consummated by a gradual evolution within western and central Europe.
It is worth observing that the Lower Palæolithic of Europe with all its
fundamental unity of culture stretched through different climates. The
Chellean was at least in part sub-tropical, the Acheulean a time of
cooling steppe climate, the Mousterian the period of maximum glaciation.
The Upper Palæolithic again has its transition from the close of the
Würm glaciation to the present temperature of Europe broken by three
temporary advances of the ice, known as they occurred in the Alps as the
Bühl, Gschnitz, and Daun phases. The following correlation of climatic
and cultural periods has been suggested: Aurignacian, close of the last
glacial and beginning of the post-glacial; Solutrean, first maximum of
ice recession (_Achenschwankung_); Magdalenian, Bühl advance, second
recession, and Gschnitz advance, corresponding respectively to the early,
middle, and late stages of the period. To these might be added that the
Azilian came at about the third recession and brief final Daun advance;
the Neolithic, with the final recession of ice and appearance of modern
conditions. It is clear that climatic circumstances were not the chief
determining factor in the cultural development of early Europe. Had they
been such, the Chellean would have differed culturally more from the
Mousterian than this from the Aurignacian.
Southern Europe and North Africa were not glaciated in the Pleistocene.
Heavier rainfall, perhaps accompanied by forestation, are likely to have
taken the place of the ice, whereas a change from forest to steppe, or
steppe to desert, corresponded to the recession of the ice in Alpine
and northern Europe. For more distant regions, such as India and south
Africa, the climatic correlations with Europe become dubious; which is
one of the reasons why as yet no sure linking in time can be effected
between their Palæolithic culture and that of Europe.
216. THE PALÆOLITHIC AFTERMATH: AZILIAN
After the Magdalenian, there follows in western Europe the Azilian, or
Azylian, named after Mas d’Azil in the French Pyrenees. It has also been
called Tourassian. This was the period in which the reindeer died out,
being replaced by the deer. Harpoons were accordingly made of deer horn
instead of reindeer antler, the spongier texture of the interior of the
material necessitating a coarser and broader form. Perforations to hold
the harpoon line now began to be regularly provided. Bone implements were
fewer, chiefly awls or simple dart heads. Stone implements became less
important. The best made flint forms were minute points or blades of
geometric form, often trapezoidal. These are the microliths, obviously
intended, in the main, for insertion in wood, sometimes perhaps in
sawlike rows. The great naturalistic Magdalenian art was dead in the
Azilian. Its place was taken by simple conventional designs painted on
pebbles, sometimes curiously suggestive of alphabetic symbols, although
it is unthinkable that they could at this early time, and among so
backward a people as these deer hunters, have served any purpose of
writing. The puzzling designs are more likely to have been used in magic
or religion.
The period of the Azilian was perhaps 10,000-8000 B.C. The climate was
approaching that of to-day, though still cooler. The area of the Azilian
proper was limited to the Pyrenean environs of southern France and
northern Spain. Related and contemporary cultures can however be traced
much farther; and the name Azilian in a larger sense may justifiably be
applied to these also. The greater part of Spain and Portugal and north
Africa were at this time in the Terminal Capsian. This was a local phase
lacking the deer horn harpoons and painted pebbles of the Pyrenees, but
with the microlithic flint industry especially conspicuous. In fact it is
in Africa that the development of the extreme microlithic forms out of
their antecedents, the reduced implements of the Upper Capsian, has been
most clearly traced. In Europe the Azilian forms do not connect nearly
so closely with the preceding Magdalenian. It looks therefore as if the
culture of western Europe in this period were based to a considerable
extent on traits evolved in Africa, to which various additions were
made locally, like the pebble-painting in the Pyrenean area. This
preponderance of African influences is corroborated by the occurrence in
Syria and southern Italy of small flints allied to the Terminal Capsian
ones. The same may be said of a culture phase of northern France, the
Tardenoisian, which extended also to Belgium and England—which latter
seems not to have become finally separated from the continent until about
this era. The Tardenoisian is specifically characterized by microliths
almost indistinguishable from the north African ones, but lacks the
other traits of the south French Azilian. It may also have persisted
longer, into the period which in the south was already early Neolithic.
Approximately contemporary and related is also the south German culture
represented at Ofnet, famous for its nests of skulls from decapitated
bodies; and that in southern Scandinavia called Maglemose (§ 233). In
Scotland and northern England, on the other hand, the harpoon head is
once more to the fore, perhaps because here as in the Pyrenean area
forested mountains and the sea were in juxtaposition and deer and salmon
could both be taken abundantly. The food habits of sub-arid and arid
north Africa must have been quite different; in fact it is evident that
snails were seasonally consumed here in large quantities.
All these local phases interrelate and may be grouped together as Azilian
as designative of the period and generic culture. The map (Fig. 40) shows
the extent to which the manifestations of this culture stage have been
traced. They may prove to extend farther.
Spain, at the close of the Palæolithic, possessed art of three types. In
the north, Magdalenian realism flourished as vigorously as in neighboring
southern France. The paintings of the cave of Altamira, for instance, are
no less numerous and superb than those of Font-de-Gaume. Second, in the
south, there prevailed a conventional style. Men and animals are still
recognizable, but schematically drawn, and among them are pictographic
symbols. Third, in eastern Spain, a cliff art was realistic in purpose,
but crude in execution. One can see without difficulty what the figures
are doing, but the proportions are distorted, and the fresh, vivid, sure
spirit of Magdalenian painting is wholly lacking. The figures represent
people more often than animals: gatherings, dances, long-gowned women,
men with bows. This is the earliest direct or indirect record of the bow
and arrow. It dates from the final phase of the Palæolithic, and the
weapon may not have become employed throughout Europe until the Neolithic
was definitely under way.
It is well to remember in this connection that no specific type of
culture, no matter how old, is likely ever to have existed without
variation over a whole hemisphere or continent. The later any type is,
the greater is the probability that it has had sufficient time for
specific characterization to enable it to be distinguished readily
from the contemporary cultures of other areas. The local provinces
or culture-areas of the Palæolithic foreshadow the deeper regional
differentiations of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.
[Illustration: FIG. 40. Phases of the close of the Palæolithic (about
10,000-8,000 B.C.). _A_, Azilian proper; _C_, Terminal Capsian; _M_,
Maglemose; _O_, Ofnet, Bavaria; _S_, Scotch and north English Azilian;
_T_, Tardenoisian.]
There is some variation of usage as to whether the Azilian is assignable
to the Palæolithic or Neolithic. Some include it with the earliest
Neolithic phases to constitute a Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. The era
has also been designated Epi-Palæolithic and Proto-Neolithic. The concept
of a separate Mesolithic period becomes important in the degree that the
original definition of the Neolithic as limited to the age of polished
stone remains rigorously adhered to. With the Neolithic conceived more
broadly, as discussed in the following section, a separate Mesolithic
becomes unnecessary, and the Azilian takes its place as a final
Palæolithic episode of mixed African and local developments after the
passing of the characteristic European Upper Palæolithic.
217. THE NEOLITHIC: ITS EARLY PHASE
The Neolithic is by original definition the age of polished stone as
opposed to the fracturing of stone in the Palæolithic. In a sense, this
definition is a true one, at any rate for Europe and the Near East. There
is no stone grinding in the Palæolithic and there is in the Neolithic.
But since the two stone ages were first discriminated fifty or more
years ago, a vast body of knowledge has accumulated about them, with
the result that the original criterion has become only an approximate
one. The definition of the Neolithic as the age of ground stone is at
the present time so over-elementary as to have become inaccurate. A long
initial phase of this age did not yet grind stone, but continued to use
tools made by the Palæolithic process of chipping. It was not until the
latter part of the New Stone Age was reached, what we may call the Full
Neolithic, that the grinding and polishing of stone were attempted.
What, then, it is natural to ask, makes the Early Neolithic Age really
Neolithic—what in fact separates it from the Palæolithic? It is a cluster
of traits; a cluster that grew as the Neolithic progressed; but every one
of whose constituents was lacking from the Old Stone Age.
218. POTTERY AND THE BOW
Outstanding in this cluster of cultural traits that mark the Neolithic
is pottery. Wherever, in Europe and the Near East at least, there is
universal agreement that a stage of development was Neolithic, pottery
is present. And conversely, wherever pottery occurs, no one has yet
doubted that a true Neolithic stage existed. The earliest potteryless
phases, such as that of Maglemose, which have sometimes been designated
as Proto-Neolithic, sometimes as Mesolithic, can advantageously be
considered terminal Palæolithic.
Second in importance is the bow, which in general appeared
contemporaneously with pottery. The evidence for its existence is
sometimes less clear. Pottery is imperishable and unmistakable. The
bow and arrow, on the other hand, are made of materials that decay in
a few years, under ordinary conditions. Only the stone or bone point
preserves, and this cannot always be distinguished with positiveness from
the head of a light spear or even from a small knife blade. There was a
time, for instance, when the smaller flint blades of the Solutrean were
often regarded as arrow points, whereas now the tendency, based on more
intensive comparisons, is to deny the bow and arrow to the Magdalenian
as well as the Solutrean. Certainly the harpoon and its thrower are so
numerous and indubitable in the Magdalenian that there would be reason
to expect an important weapon like the bow to have left at least some
sure traces: a definitive type of recognizable arrow head would have been
worked out. But such is not the case.
These two culture elements, pottery and the bow, signalized an enormous
advance over the past. Both required definite technical skill to
manufacture. And both were of the greatest service. Whole lines of foods
could now be utilized that had formerly been passed by: soups, stews,
porridges. Plants whose seeds or parts before were inedible, or almost
so, were added to the diet as soon as they could be boiled. The bow made
possible long range fighting, the free pursuit of large game, and the
capture of many small mammals and birds which previously it must have
been difficult to take. The harpoon was developed chiefly for fishing. It
would be of little help in killing birds, rabbits, and the like, or large
and dangerous animals like wild cattle.
219. BONE TOOLS
Hand in hand with the invention or rather introduction of the bow and
pottery—it seems doubtful whether they were devised in Europe—went an
increased employment of bone and horn tools at the expense of stone. This
drift had already begun in the Upper Palæolithic; in fact, is one of the
signs that mark it off from the Lower Palæolithic. It became accentuated
as the Upper Palæolithic wore on, still more prominent in its closing
Azilian phase[33]—hence the increasing minuteness of flint blades—and
continued into the early Neolithic. A good working chisel, wedge, awl,
or needle, for instance, must be smooth. This finish is difficult in
chipped stone, but easily attained in bone or horn by rubbing. It was not
therefore until stone grinding came into use in the later Neolithic, that
bone and horn began to fall in significance as materials. But they had
performed their service. It is unlikely that stone polishing would have
been attempted but for the experience and long habits of the polishing
process as acquired in dealing with the softer materials.
220. THE DOG
The first animal was also domesticated about the beginning of the
Neolithic. Dog remains have been found in two very late post-Magdalenian
Palæolithic sites, one in Scotland, the other in Denmark, both apparently
Azilian in age. Then, the Danish kitchenmiddens, which began in the
first stage of the Early Neolithic, contain innumerable bones that have
been gnawed by dogs. The animals may still have been half wild at this
period, since their own skeletons are rare in the middens. Evidently the
species was not yet firmly attached to man; its members went off to die
in solitude. This is what has generally been predicated on hypothetical
grounds of the history of dog and man. Contrary to most domesticated
animals, the dog is thought not to have been captured and tamed outright,
but to have attached himself to human beings as a parasitic hanger-on,
a shy, tolerated, uncared-for scavenger, living in a stage of symbiotic
relationship with our ancestors before his real domestication. This view
the prehistoric evidence seems to confirm.
221. THE HEWN AX
One more trait signalizes the Early Neolithic: the hewn stone ax. This
was a chipped implement, straight or slightly convex along the cutting
edge, tapering from that to the butt, about twice as long as broad,
rather thick, unperforated and ungrooved; in fact perhaps often unhandled
and driven by blows upon the butt: a sharp stone wedge as much as an ax,
in short. The whole Palæolithic shows no such implement: even the Azilian
has only bone or horn “axes.”
It is hardly necessary to repeat for the Neolithic what has already been
said of the Palæolithic periods: the older types, such as chipped flint
tools, continued very generally to be made. Such persistence is natural:
a survival of a low type among higher ones does not mean much. It is the
appearance of new and superior inventions that counts.
The Early Neolithic can be summed up, then, in these five traits:
pottery; the bow and arrow; abundant use of bone and horn; the dog; and
the hewn ax.
222. THE FULL NEOLITHIC
It is the later or Full Neolithic, beginning probably between 6000 and
5000 B.C. in western Europe, that is marked by the grinding or polishing
of stone. Even this criterion is less deep-going than might be thought
from all the references that prehistorians have made to it, since the new
process was put to limited service. Practically the only stone implements
that were ground into shape in Europe were of the ax class: the ax head
itself, the celt or chisel, hammer stones, and clubheads. The mill is the
principal artifact that can be added to the list. The ax long remained
what we to-day should scarcely dignify with the name of ax head: an
unpierced, ungrooved blade. It is only toward the end of the Neolithic in
Europe, after metal was already in use in the Orient and Mediterranean
countries, that perforated and well ground stone axes appear; many of
these make the impression of being stone imitations, among a remote,
backward people, of forms cast in bronze by the richer and more advanced
nations of the South and East.
Much more important than the ground stone ax in its influence on life was
the commencement, during the Neolithic, of two of the great fundamentals
of our own modern civilization: agriculture and domestic animals.
These freed men from the buffetings of nature; made possible permanent
habitation, the accumulation of food and wealth, and a heavier growth
of population. Also, agriculture and animal breeding were evidently
introduced only after numbers had reached a certain density. A sparse
population, being able to subsist on wild products, tends to remain
content with them. A fertile area with mild winters may support as high
as one soul per square mile without improvement of the natural resources;
in large forests, steppes, cold climates, and arid tracts, the territory
needed for the subsistence of each head becomes larger in a hunting stage
of existence.
The cultivated food plants of the European Neolithic were barley, wheat,
and millet, pease, lentils, and somewhat later, beans and apples. All
of these seem to derive from Mediterranean or west Asiatic sources. Of
non-edible plants there was flax, which served textile purposes and
involved loom weaving.
The species of domesticated animals numbered four, besides the dog:
cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. The horse,[34] cat, hen, duck, came into
Europe during the metal ages, in part during the historic period.
223. ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS
The place of first domestication of the four oldest species is not known
surely. Most of them had wild representatives in Europe long before and
after the domesticated forms appear, but the same was true in western
Asia and Egypt, and the general priority of these tracts in metal working
and other cultural achievements makes it likely that their inhabitants
were also the first to tame the animals in question. The subject is as
intricate as it is interesting, because of difficulty which biologists
experience in tracing the modified tame forms back to the wild species
with certainty. The mere fact of continued domestication, even without
conscious selection in breeding, often alters a species more from what
may have been its old wild form than this differs from another wild
species.
It is however clear from the unusually abundant and well preserved
Lake-dwelling remains of Switzerland that the earliest known domestic
animals of this region were considerably different from the nearest
native species. The wild bull or urus of Europe, _Bos primigenius_,
was large and long-horned. His bones in the oldest lake dwellings seem
to come from wild individuals that had been hunted. Alongside are the
remains of the domesticated _Bos brachyceros_, a short-horned form, small
and delicately built. Later, though still in the Neolithic, long-horned
tame cattle appear in the lake dwellings. Apparently the short-horns
had first been imported from the south; then the native urus was tamed;
finally, the two strains were crossed. These strains are thought to
survive in our modern cattle, those of eastern and central Europe being
prevailingly of the _primigenius_, of western Europe of the _brachyceros_
type.
A similar story applies to the pig. The first domesticated swine of
Switzerland were small, long-legged, and easily distinguishable from
the wild boar of the region. It thus is likely that they were imported
domesticated. In the Bronze Age, pigs grew larger, due perhaps to
crossing with the wild species. Sheep were certainly brought into Europe,
as there is no corresponding wild form; the goats, too, have their
nearest relatives in Asia. They were perhaps tamed before sheep. At any
rate, goats prevailed in the earlier lake dwellings, whereas later, sheep
outnumbered them.
Similar arguments apply to the origin of the cultivated plants in Europe.
For some of these, such as wheat, wild relatives—possible ancestors—are
known from Asia, but not from Europe. Also there has been such a drift
of later cultivated plants—legumes, greens, and fruits—from Asia and
the Mediterranean into Europe during the Bronze and Iron Ages, as to
render it probable that the earliest flow was in the same direction. The
instances of diffusion from north to south are few: oats, rye, and hemp
are perhaps the principal. These plants, however, were carried southward
slowly and accepted reluctantly, whereas the northerners were in general
avid of any southern or Oriental form which would bear their climate, as
the progressive spread and increased use of new forms shows. Furthermore,
even oats, rye, and hemp appear to be Asiatic in origin, and thus to have
entered Europe merely from the east, instead of southeast.
224. OTHER TRAITS OF THE FULL NEOLITHIC
The earliest animals were kept for their flesh and hides. Two or three
thousand years passed before cattle were used before the plow or to draw
wagons. Both the plow and the wheel were unknown in Europe until well
in the Bronze Age, after they had been established for some time in
Asia. Still later was the use of milk. Here again Asia and Egypt have
precedence.
Many other elements of culture appear in the Full Neolithic. Houses
were dug into the ground and roofed over with timbers and earth. The
dead were buried in enduring chambers of stone: “dolmens,” often put
together out of enormous slabs; or excavations in soft bed rock. Upright
pillars of undressed stone were erected—either singly as “menhirs”
or in “alignments”—in connection with religious or funerary worship.
Pottery was ornamented in a variety of geometric decorative styles,
usually incised rather than painted; their sequences and contemporary
distributions in several areas are gradually being determined.
225. THE BRONZE AGE: COPPER AND BRONZE PHASES
There is no abrupt break between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Metal
was at first too rare, too difficult to mine and smelt and work, to be
used extensively. It served for special weapons, tools, and ornaments
of the wealthy. The life of the mass of the population went on in much
the old channels for generations or centuries after the new material had
become known. This was true especially of peoples in oreless regions, or
too backward to have learned the art of metal working. To such nations,
the first bronze came as an imported rarity, to be guarded as a treasure
or heirloom.
Of even less immediate effect than the discovery of bronze, was that
of the first metals known, copper and gold. The latter is of course
too scarce and too soft to serve for anything but ornaments; and pure
copper also, even when hardened by hammering, is of little use for
many mechanical purposes. It makes a fairly efficient dagger, a rather
mediocre ax, and a poor knife. The result was that a recognizable period
of copper preceded the true Bronze Age, yet that it was essentially a
last phase of the New Stone Age, with the metal creeping in as something
subsidiary. In Italy and Spain it has therefore become customary among
archæologists to speak of an “Eneolithic” period as a transition stage in
which some copper, and occasionally bronze of low tin content, occur. In
central and northern Europe, the equivalent stage falls somewhat later
and is sometimes called the Stone-Bronze period.
Bronze is an alloy of tin with copper, harder than the latter, easier to
melt, and casting better. In many properties it resembles brass, by which
term it is referred to in the English Bible; but must not be confounded
with it. Brass is an alloy of zinc with copper, of much later discovery,
apparently in Asia, and until recent centuries little used in Europe. As
regards bronze, even a two per cent addition of tin to copper results
in a perceptible hardening; and five to ten per cent produce a greatly
superior tool metal.
The origin of bronze is a problem of some difficulty, because the
earliest known users of bronze, the peoples of the Near East, possessed
little or no tin. There are said to have been tin supplies in the
Khorasan district of Persia, which might have been drawn upon by the
pre-Babylonians and thence carried to Egypt. The chief source of the tin
of later antiquity was Spain and England. But at the outset of the Bronze
Age, the Orientals did not even know of the existence of these countries,
while their natives, still ignorant of copper, could not have mined tin
for the purpose of hardening that basic metal.
Just how, then, bronze was discovered, is still unknown; but it must have
been in Western Asia not later than the fourth millenium B.C. Before
3000 B.C., in the period of the first dynasties ruling over united
Egypt, the art had been established in that country, since bronzes low
in percentage of tin have been discovered from that era. While ancient
Egypt mined its own copper in the adjacent Sinai peninsula, it is barren
of tin resources, so that the latter metal must have been imported.
Within a few centuries, bronze began to be used in Crete and Troy, and by
2500 B.C. in Italy and Spain, whereas it did not penetrate central and
northern Europe until about 1900 B.C., according to the usual estimates.
That the use of bronze over these widespread areas is a connected
phenomenon, a case of single origin and diffusion, is clear from the
manner in which the art spread from its center of invention like a wave
which arrived later the farther it had to travel. The spread is confirmed
by the fact that certain implement forms such as early triangular daggers
and later swords traveled with the material. Had the western natives
discovered bronze for themselves, they would have cast it into shapes
peculiar to themselves, instead of adopting those long established among
the Orientals.
226. TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH BRONZE
About coincident with bronze there developed in Egypt and Babylonia
a flood of new arts and inventions: writing; sunburned brick; stone
masonry; sculpture and architecture; the arch; the plow and later the
chariot; the potter’s wheel, which turns clay vessels with mechanical
roundness; astronomical records and accurate calendars; an enhanced
cult of the dead and greater monuments for them. Many of these elements
were carried into westernmost Asia and the Ægean Islands; not so many
to Italy; fewer still to Spain and France; and a minimum to central and
northern Europe. But it would be an error to infer from the continued
backwardness of the northern peoples that they were wholly passive and
recipient. In their simpler, more barbaric way, they remodeled much of
what they had carried to them, altered the form, decorated it in their
own style, made much of some item which filled but an insignificant
place in the more complex civilization of the southeast. The fibula or
safety-pin, for instance, was seized upon with avidity by the central and
north European nations, made ornate and tremendously enlarged, until it
sometimes measured half a foot in length and more than half a pound in
weight with spiral whorls, bosses, pin clasps, or attached rings as big
as a palm. The Baltic nations, the farthest reached by this diffusion,
in particular threw themselves into the development of the fibula with
zest, success, and a large measure of decorative taste.
Even longer is the history of the sword. This has two lines of historic
development. The one-edged sword or saber tends to curvature and is
essentially a hewing weapon, not intended for thrusting, or only
secondarily so adapted. This form is first known in western Asia, is
apparently of Asiatic origin, and is the direct ancestor of the Saracen
and Indian scimitar, the Malayan kris and barong, the Japanese samurai’s
sword. The two-edged sword with point has at all times—until after the
introduction of firearms—been the prevailing form in Europe. Its ancestor
is the Egyptian bronze dagger, which in turn is probably derived from a
copper and ultimately a flint blade of dagger length. The Egyptian dagger
never grew to more than half-sword length, but the type was early carried
to Crete and Italy and Spain. By 2500-2000 B.C. the latter countries
were using triangular wide-bladed daggers of copper and bronze, with a
basal breadth not much less than the length. The handle was a separate
piece, riveted on. Gradually the length grew greater, the breadth less,
the edges more nearly parallel, the point sharper; the half-sword and
then the sword evolved out of the dagger. The handle, or its spike, came
to be cast with the blade. These drawn-out forms traveling to central
and northern Europe, were made there of greater and greater length,
especially after iron was known. For three thousand years, and from the
southern Mediterranean in its progress to the North Sea, the sword grew
longer and longer, but always by gradual modification: the whole series
of forms shows a transition in both time and geography. The Greek and
Roman sword remained of thigh length, and was used mainly for thrusting;
the Keltic and Germanic weapon was for hewing and almost unwieldy;
blades so big as to require two-handed swinging finally came to be
employed—a barbaric, ineffective exaggeration to which the long-cultured
Mediterraneans never descended.
[Illustration: FIG. 41. Prehistoric domed tombs built on the principle of
corbelling (§ 116): a probable example of the spread of a culture device
over a continent. Above, Mycenæ, Greece; middle, Alcalar, Portugal;
below, New Grange, Ireland. The Mycenæan structure, 1500 B.C. or after,
at the verge of the Iron Age, is probably later by some 1,000 years than
the others, which are late Neolithic with copper first appearing; and its
workmanship is far superior. (After Sophus Müller and Déchelette.)]
227. IRON
Iron was worked by man about two thousand years later than bronze. It is
a far more abundant metal than copper, and though it melts at a higher
temperature, is not naturally harder to extract from some of its ores.
The reason for its lateness of use is not wholly explained. It is likely
that the first use of metals was of those, like gold and copper, that
are found in the pure metallic state and, being rather soft, could be
treated by hammering without heat—by processes more or less familiar to
stone age culture. It is known that fair amounts of copper were worked
in this way by many tribes of North American Indians, who got their
supplies from the Lake Superior deposits and the Copper River placers in
Alaska. If the same thing happened in the most progressive parts of the
Eastern Hemisphere some 6,000 years ago, acquaintance with the metal may
before long have been succeeded by the invention of the arts of casting
and extracting it from its ores. When, not many centuries later, the
hardening powers of an admixture of tin were discovered and bronze with
its far greater serviceability for tools became known, a powerful impetus
was surely given to the new metallurgy, which was restricted only by the
limitations of the supply of metal, especially tin. Progress went on
in the direction first taken; the alloy became better balanced, molds
and casting processes superior, the forms attempted more adventurous or
efficient. For many centuries iron ores were disregarded; the bronze
habit intensified. Finally, accident may have brought the discovery of
iron; or shortage of bronze led to experimenting with other ores; and a
new age dawned.
Whatever the forces at work, the actual events were clearly those
outlined. And it is interesting that the New World furnishes an exact
parallel with its three areas and stages of native copper, smelted copper
and gold, and bronze (§ 108, 196), and with only the final period of iron
unattained at the time of discovery.
228. FIRST USE AND SPREAD OF IRON
Some of the earliest known cases of the use of iron were decorative:
for jewelry, or as inlay upon bronze. Finds of this sort have been
made in Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and the Caucasus. Once however
the extraction of the new material had become known, its abundance was
so great as to further its employment, which grew fairly rapidly,
though held back by several factors. One of these retarding causes was
the prevalence of the casting process, which had become definitely
established for bronze and was carried on with great skill, whereas
iron lends itself to ready casting only in a foundry and for objects of
larger size than were in customary use among the ancients. They forged
their iron, and this new art had to be gradually learned. At its best, it
could not produce some of the finer results of casting; in ornaments and
statuettes, for instance.
Wrought iron is comparatively soft. A bronze knife will cut or shave
better than a forged iron one. It was not until it was discovered
that the iron from certain ores could be converted into steel by
tempering—plunging the heated implement into water—that the new metal
became a tool material superior to bronze. The invention of tempering
seems to have followed fairly soon after the discovery of iron. But some
centuries elapsed before this art became at all general.
Finally, conservative fashion operated to delay the undisputed supremacy
of iron. Bronze has an attractive goldenish color; it oxidizes slowly
and superficially; it was anchored in ritual; and it tended to remain
associated with state and splendor, with wealth and nobility, whereas
iron crept into commonplace and humble usages. Nearly four centuries
after iron became known in the Greek world, the Iliad mentions it
but twenty-three times, bronze two hundred and seventy times. In the
Odyssey, a more bourgeois epic, and a little later in authorship, the
proportion of references to iron is higher: twenty-nine to eighty. The
first four books of the Old Testament, the composition of whose older
parts is usually placed synchronous with that of the Iliad—about 850
B.C.—but whose outlook is the conservative one of religion, mention iron
still more rarely: four times as against eighty-three references to
bronze—“brass” the Authorized Version calls it.
Which nation first made iron available to the world has not yet been
ascertained. It was almost certainly some people in western Asia. The
Hittites of Asia Minor, the Chalybes of Armenia, are prominent contenders
for the honor. It could scarcely have been the most civilized people of
the region, the Babylonians, because their alluvial country contains
neither ore nor stone. The time was probably subsequent to 1500 B.C.,
but not long after. By the time of Rameses the Great, in the thirteenth
century, the metal was known and somewhat used in Egypt, being imported
from the Hittites. Contemporaneously, the early Greek invaders who
overthrew the Ægean culture of Crete and Mycenæ and Troy were in the
beginnings of the Iron Age. Italy learned the new material from the
Etruscans about 1100 B.C. Babylonian and Assyrian records seem to refer
to it some few centuries earlier. The Jews in the time of Saul, 1000
B.C., are said by the Bible to have had little iron and no steel, a fact
that made possible their oppression by the Philistines of the coast. This
people, apparently descendants of the Minoan Cretans, have recently been
alleged as the discoverers of the art of steel making; though whether
with reason, remains to be proved. In central Europe iron became fairly
abundant about 900 B.C., and was soon mined and smelted locally. In
northern Europe its first sporadic appearance is soon after, but its
general prevalence, justifying the use of the term Iron Age, not anterior
to 500 B.C.
In the Far East, the history of iron is little known. In India, where it
is likely to have been derived from western Asia or Persia, its first
mention is at the end of the Vedic period, whose close is variously
estimated at 1400 B.C. and 1000 B.C. The metal must have been new then:
it was called “dark blue bronze.” The Hindus later carried knowledge of
iron and steel-working to the Malaysian East Indies.
When China got its first iron is not known, though it appears to have
been comparatively late. By the early part of the seventh century before
Christ, iron had become common enough to be taxed. But it was used for
hoes, plowshares, hatchets, needles, and domestic purposes only. Not
until the fifth century B.C. did steel-making become introduced into
China, and bronze begin to be superseded for weapons. Even in the first
century after Christ the natives of southernmost China were fighting with
bronze weapons in their struggle against amalgamation with the empire.
At any rate, the Chou dynasty, the period of the production of the
literary classics, from the eleventh to the third century B.C., was still
prevailingly a time of bronze, as attested both by native historical
records and the evidences of archæology. This lateness of iron in the
Far East raises a strong probability that the Chinese did not enter
the iron stage through their own discovery but were led into it by the
example of Mongol or Turkish peoples of north central Asia, who in turn
leaned upon the western Asiatics.
Japan has a definite Iron Age, well known through excavations. It is
thought to have begun about the fourth century B.C. This approximate
contemporaneity with China, whereas in nearly all the remainder of its
culture Japan borrowed from China and followed long behind it in time,
suggests that the Japanese or neighboring Koreans may have learned of
iron directly from the north Asiatic teachers of the Chinese.
229. THE HALLSTADT AND LATÈNE PERIODS
North of the Mediterranean lands, the prehistoric Iron Age of Europe
is divided into two periods: that of Hallstadt, named after a site in
Austria, and lasting from about 900 to 500 B.C.; and that of LaTène,
designated from a famous discovery in Switzerland, which stretched from
500 B.C. until almost the birth of Christ. The Hallstadt period is
better developed in middle than in western Europe: it was influenced
from Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. It prevailed along the Adriatic
and Danube as far as Bosnia and Hungary; over all but northern Germany;
in Switzerland; and in eastern France. Its flow was northwestward. The
LaTène culture was carried primarily by Kelts, falls into the period of
their greatest extension and prosperity, and centers in France. Here
it seems to have developed under the stimulus of Greek colonization at
Marseilles, to have spread northward to the British Isles, and eastward
into central Europe. Its general flow was northeastward.
Considerable iron and bronze work of some technical fineness was made
during the Hallstadt and LaTène periods. Fibulas, jewelry, weapons, and
cult apparatus were often elaborate. But the quality of the cultures
remained homespun, backward, and barbaric as compared with the plasticity
and polish which contemporary Greek civilization had attained.
The Hallstadt culture, for instance, was wholly without cities, stone
architecture or bridges, paved roads, coins, writing of any sort, the
potter’s wheel, or rotary millstone; nor was metal used for agricultural
implements. It was a time of villages, small towns, and scattered homes;
of sacred groves instead of temples; of boggy roads, of ox-carts and
solid wooden wheels; of a heavy, barbaric, warlike population, half
like European peasants, half like pioneers; self-content, yet always
dimly conscious that in the southern distance there lay lands of wealth,
refinement, and achievement.
The LaTène time showed many advances; but, relatively to the
civilizations of Greece and Rome—it was the period of Phidias and Plato,
of Archimedes and Cicero—the northern culture was as many milestones of
progress behind as during the Hallstadt era. The coins in use were Greek,
or local imitations of Greek money, their figures and legends often
corrupted to complete meaninglessness. Writing was still absent. Some
attempts at script began to be made toward the close of LaTène, but they
resulted in nothing more than the awkward Ogham and Runic systems. Until
perhaps a century or two before Cæsar, there were no cities or fortified
towns in Gaul. When they arose, it was on heights, behind walls of mixed
logs, earth, and stone, as against the masonry circumvallations which the
Ægean peoples were erecting more than a thousand years before. Even these
poor towns were built only by Kelts; the Germanic tribes remained shy of
them for centuries longer. Society was still essentially proto-feudal and
rustic. But there had filtered in from the Mediterranean, and were being
wrought locally, holed axes, iron wagon wheels, the potter’s wheel and
potter’s oven, rotary mills, dice, tongs, scissors, saws, and scythes—all
new to these northern lands, and curiously modern in their fundamental
types as compared with the essentially half-primitive, half-barbarian
suggestion that Hallstadt manufactures carry.
230. SUMMARY OF DEVELOPMENT: REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION
Two conclusions emerge from the facts reviewed in this chapter and
serve to prevent an over-simple and schematic conception of the growth
of prehistoric civilization. The first is that successive phases of
culture, even in the earliest times, cannot be identified, much less
really understood, by reference to any single criterion such as this or
that technique of working stone or the knowledge of this or that metal.
In every case the culture is complex and characterized by a variety
of traits whose combination produces its distinctive cast. The more
important of these culture traits, with particular reference to Europe,
may be summarized thus:
_Period_ _Culture Elements Appearing_
Iron Iron, steel; in the Orient, alphabet
Bronze Metals, alloying, megaliths; in the Orient,
masonry, writing
Full Neolithic Domesticated animals and plants, stone polishing
Early Neolithic Pottery, bow
Upper Palæolithic Bone work, harpoon, art
Lower Palæolithic Fire, flint work
The second conclusion is that differentiation of culture according
to region is too great to be lightly brushed aside. Even for the
Palæolithic, which is so imperfectly known outside of Europe, and whose
content is so simple, it is clear that the developmental sequences in
Europe cannot be correctly interpreted without reference to provincial
growths and their affiliations in other continents (§ 214-216). In the
Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, regional diversity increases. Egypt
and China, India and France, present deeply differentiated pictures in
3000 B.C., and again in 1000. Their cultures have throughout a separate
aspect. And yet innumerable connections link them. The very bronze and
iron that name the later ages, the grains and animals that are the
basis of their economic life, were intercontinentally disseminated,
and represent in most of the lands that came to possess them an import
from an alien focus of growth. And currents usually run both ways.
China received metals, wheat, cattle and horses, cotton, architecture,
religion, possibly the suggestion of script, from the west; but she gave
to it silk and porcelain, gunpowder and paper. Also there are inertias
and absences to be reckoned with. The Near East probably gave to Europe
most of the elements of civilization which the latter possessed during
the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron periods; but much which the Near East
had, it failed to transmit. Writing flowed into Europe a full two
thousand years after bronze, with which it was coeval in origin. Coinage
is far later in the Orient than masonry, but outstripped it and became
earlier established in western Europe.
The result is a great tangled web, whose structure is only gradually
being revealed by painstaking comparison and intensive study. Often the
most convincing evidence as to the composition and direction of the
culture currents is provided by highly specialized matters: styles of
pottery decoration, shapes of ax heads, forms of ornamental safety-pins.
It is not because these minutiæ are so fascinating in themselves that
archæologists are endlessly and often tediously concerned with them. It
is because these data offer the longest clues through the labyrinth,
because on their sure sequences can be strung hundreds of otherwise
non-significant or detached facts. But the results are as yet incomplete;
they are and promise to remain forever complex; and their systematic
presentation in coherent narrative awaits a larger and future treatment.
It will be wisest, in a work of the present compass, to outline the whole
development of a single area, to serve as a type sample.
231. THE SCANDINAVIAN AREA AS AN EXAMPLE
The most satisfactory region for such a purpose is Scandinavia—the
peninsula, Denmark, and the Baltic coasts, including much of northeast
Germany. This was a glacier-covered area in the Mousterian, and either
obliterated or uninhabited in the Upper Palæolithic. It has therefore no
Old Stone Age history. During the Magdalenian, the glaciers had shrunk
to cover only most of the Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. Denmark
was ice-free. But what is now the Baltic stretched as an open sound from
the North Sea across southern Finland and northwestern Russia to the
Arctic Ocean. From this ocean as well as the remaining glaciers emanated
a low temperature, in which there throve arctic forms of life, especially
the small shell _Yoldia arctica_, which flourishes only where the sea
bottom temperature ranges between 1° plus and 2° minus Centigrade. This
great, chilly sound of some sixteen to ten thousand years ago is known
as the Yoldia Sea. Denmark and the German coast must still have been
cold, as the remains of the sub-arctic flora show, and were without human
inhabitants.
232. THE LATE PALÆOLITHIC ANCYLUS OR MAGLEMOSE PERIOD
Around 10,000 B.C., as western Europe was entering upon the Azilian
aftermath of the Palæolithic, the land at both ends of the Yoldia Sea was
elevated sufficiently to cut this off from the open ocean. The Baltic was
thus closed at both ends, instead of neither, as before, or one only,
as now. The rivers continued to flow into it; it became brackish and
almost fresh, and the fauna changed. The distinctive fossil shell became
_Ancylus fluviatilis_, from which the great lake is known as the Ancylus
Lake. The Scandinavian flora once more included real trees, chiefly pines
and birches.
Man occupied south Sweden and Denmark in the Ancylus period. At Maglemose
have been found his remains during this Scandinavian equivalent of the
Azilian. Here he appears to have lived on rafts floating on a lake, which
subsequently filled with peat. Whatever fell overboard, became embedded
in the growing peat and was preserved. The inhabitants cut their raft
logs and firewood with axes of bone and elk horn, some of them perforated
for handles. They had bone fish-hooks, harpoons with single and double
rows of barbs, and still others with slits for the insertion of minute
flint blades, much like saw teeth. Some of the microlithic points have
also been found. All of the stone was chipped; there is no trace of
polishing other than of bone and antler. They engraved, sometimes in
a deteriorated style of Magdalenian naturalism, sometimes with simple
geometric ornaments. The dog accompanied these people, perhaps was
already half tame. Remains similar to those of Maglemose have been found
in several of the Baltic lands.
233. THE EARLY NEOLITHIC LITORINA OR KITCHENMIDDEN PERIOD
Within perhaps two thousand years, the Baltic opened again as at present,
grew saltier, and took on much its present conditions, except for being
somewhat larger. The water warmed, and _Litorina litorea_ and the oyster
became the characteristic molluscs. The climate was milder than before,
and the forests changed from birches and pines to oaks.
The men of this period lived largely on oysters and scallops, whose
shells piled up about their habitations by millions, forming ridge-like
mounds sometimes hundreds of yards long. These are the Kjökkenmöddings,
or Kitchenmiddens, refuse heaps or shell heaps. Among the shells are
ashes, bones of the land animals and birds that were hunted, and lost or
broken utensils. Some of the Maglemose implements continued to be used,
such as bone awls, chisels, and fish-hooks. Others were no longer made:
harpoons, the minute flint blades, and engraved objects. But new forms
had come in: above all, pottery and the stone ax—evidences that this was
an early period of the Neolithic, even though polished stone was still
lacking. The ax or “splitter” was chipped—hewn is really a more fitting
term—oval or trapezoidal in outline, the cutting edge convex or straight.
It seems to have been lashed to an elbow handle: there was no groove
or perforation. The pottery was coarse, dark, and undecorated except
sometimes for rows of crude dot impressions along the edge. Another new
implement was a handled bone comb with four or five teeth. It appears
to have been employed for carding rather than hair-dressing. The bow
was in use: arrowheads bore a cutting edge in front. The dog was the
only domestic or semi-domesticated animal; probably a Spitz-like breed,
perhaps of jackal origin. He managed to gnaw most of the bones that have
been preserved in the shell layers.
Approximately contemporary with the Danish kitchenmiddens, and similar
to them in their cultural repertoire, are a Spanish phase known as
Asturian and the Campignian of northern France. The Asturian remains are
also shell deposits. Their lower levels contain bones of cattle that
had perhaps been domesticated; middle strata add the sheep; and in the
uppermost, pottery appears. The northern ax is replaced by a handheld
pick. The Campignian possessed hewn axes or splitters similar to the
Danish ones; pottery; domesticated cattle; and seems to have made a
beginning of agriculture with barley. It would thus seem that pottery
and the hewn ax were the characteristic general criteria of this Early
Neolithic stage, with domesticated animals and agriculture coming in
earlier in southern and middle Europe, whereas the northerners continued
to depend longer on shellfish and game.
234. THE FULL NEOLITHIC AND ITS SUBDIVISIONS IN SCANDINAVIA
Two or three thousand years passed, and by about 5500 B.C. the
Scandinavian climate had become slightly cooler once more, the oaks gave
way to birches and pines, the Baltic lost some of its salt content, and
the oyster grew scarcer. The Kitchenmidden or Litorina period of the
Early Neolithic was over; the Full Neolithic had arrived. Axes were
polished, cattle kept, grain grown. Four Stages of development are
discernible.
5500-3500 B.C. Burials in soil. Sharp-butted axes.
3500-2500 B.C. Burials in dolmens, chambers of three to five
flat upright stones, roofed with one slab. Narrow-butted axes.
2500-2100 B.C. Burials in _Allées couvertes_ or _Ganggraeber_,
chambers of dolmen type but larger and with a roofed corridor
approach. Thick-butted axes. Some copper. Beautifully neat and
even chipping of flint daggers, lance heads, arrowpoints, some
suggesting by their forms that they may be flint imitations of
bronzes already in use on the Mediterranean. The same is true
of perforated stone axes, ground into ornamental curves, such
as are natural in cast metal.
2100-1900 B.C. Burials in stone cysts, progressively decreasing
in size. Thick-butted axes. Chipped daggers and curving axes
reminiscent of bronze forms continue. The first bronze appears,
its percentage of tin still low.
235. THE BRONZE AGE AND ITS PERIODS IN SCANDINAVIA
Bronze reached the Scandinavian region late, as a well developed
art, and its working soon showed a high degree of technical and
æsthetic excellence. But arts that in the Orient had appeared almost
simultaneously with bronze—writing, masonry, wheel turning of pottery—did
not reach Scandinavia until after bronze had been superseded by iron
there. The consequence was that the Northern culture remained on the
whole thoroughly barbarous. And yet, perhaps on account of this very
backwardness, an aloofness resulted which drove the Scandinavian
bronze-workers to follow their own tastes and develop their own forms and
styles, often with taste as exquisite as simple. In other words, a local
culture grew, much like the analogous local cultures in America which
have been traced in previous chapters. Yet the basis of this Northern
bronze culture was southern and Oriental invention; and the south and
east continued to influence Scandinavia. The northern safety-pin, for
instance, underwent the same stages as the southern one: backs that were
first straight and narrow, then sheetlike, then bowed, with the ends
enlarging to great buckles or disks. But the southern fibula, whatever
its type or period, was one-piece and elastic, the northern at all times
made of two separate parts, and without real spring.
Connection with other countries is evident from the Northern bronze
itself, at least the tin of which, if not the alloy, was imported.
Yet the finds of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, numerous as they are,
do not contain a single specimen that can be traced to Egypt or to
Greece. Even pieces made in middle Europe are rare. And molds, ladles,
unfinished castings, prove that the North cast its own bronze on the
spot. First knowledge of the art had evidently seeped in from the region
of Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary, which in turn derived it from the
Italian and Balkan peninsulas, which at a still earlier time had learned
it from Egypt or Asia.
It appears, then, that it would be equally erroneous to regard the
Scandinavian Bronze Age as an independent development or to regard it
as a mere copy or importation from the Orient. It was neither; or, in a
sense, it was both. Its origin lies in the great early focal point of
civilization in the Near East; its specific form, the qualities which
it took on, are its own. The disseminated ingredient, the basis due to
diffusion, must be admitted as fully as the elements of local development
which mark off a distinct Northern culture-area, or sub-focus of cultural
energy.
This interplay of forces is typical also of the Iron and New Stone
Ages, and it is the number of local centers of culture growth, their
increasingly rapid flourishing as time went on, and the multiplication of
connections between countries, that render the prehistory of Eur-Asiatic
civilization so difficult. If enough were known of the life of the
Palæolithic, it is probable that a similar though less intricate tangle
of developments might be evident for that period also.
The resemblance to the interrelations of areas within America is
manifest. The Southwest stands to southern Mexico as Scandinavia does
to the Orient: suffused by it, stimulated by it, created by it, almost;
yet at all times with a provincial cast of its own. The Southwestern
specialist can trace a continuous evolution on the spot which tempts him
to forget the obvious and indisputable Mexican origins. The Mexicanist,
on the other hand, impressed by the practical identity of fundamentals
and close resemblance in many details, is likely to see Southwestern
culture only as a mutilated copy of the higher civilization to the south.
Correct understanding requires the balancing of both views.
Close equivalents of the culture-areas of American ethnologists are in
fact recognized by European archæologists. Thus, Déchelette distinguishes
seven “geographical provinces” in the Bronze Age of Europe, as follows:
1, _Ægean_ (Greece, islands, coast of Asia Minor); 2, _Italian_ (with
Sicily and Sardinia); 3, _Iberian_ (Spain, Portugal, Balearics); 4,
_Western_ (France, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, southern Germany,
Switzerland, Bohemia); 5, _Danubian_ (Hungary, Moravia, the Balkan
countries); 6, _Scandinavian_ (including northern Germany and the Baltic
coast); 7, _Uralic_ (Russia and western Siberia).
The fourteen hundred years generally allowed the Scandinavian Bronze Age
are divisible into five or six periods,[35] which become progressively
shorter.
2500-2100, Neolithic, with copper, and 2100-1900, with
occasional bronze, have already been mentioned.
1900-1600 B.C. Burial in stone cysts. Little decoration of
bronze, and that only in straight lines. Flat ax heads or
celts. Triangular daggers. Daggers mounted on staves like ax
heads.
1600-1400 B.C. Occasional cremation of corpses, the ashes
put into very small cysts. Decoration of bronze in engraved
spirals. Flanged and stop-ridged axes. Swords. Straight fibulas.
1400-1050 B.C. Cremation general. Axes of socketed type. Bowed
fibulas. Bronze vessels with lids.
1050-850 B.C. Spiral ornament decaying. Fibulas with two large
bosses. Ship-shaped razors.
850-650 B.C. Ornamentation plastic, rather than engraved, often
produced in the casting. Rows of concentric circles and other
patterns replace spirals. Fibulas with two large disks. Knives
with voluted antennæ-like handles. Sporadic occurrence of iron.
650-500 B.C. Iron increasing in use; decorative bronze
deteriorating.
236. PROBLEMS OF CHRONOLOGY
The dating of events in the Neolithic and Metal Ages is of much more
importance than in the Palæolithic. Whether an invention was made in
Babylonia in 5000 or in 3000 B.C. means the difference between its
occurring in the hazy past of a formative culture or in a well advanced
and directly documented phase of that culture. If the dolmens and other
megalithic monuments of northern Europe were erected about 3000 B.C.,
they are older than the pyramids of Egypt and contemporaneous with the
first slight unfoldings of civilization in Crete and Troy. But if their
date is 1000 B.C., they were set up when pure alphabetic writing and iron
and horses were in use in western Asia, when Egypt was already senile,
and the Cretan and Trojan cultures half forgotten. In the one case, the
megaliths represent a local achievement, perhaps independent of the
stone architecture of Egypt; in the other event, they are likely to be a
belated and crudely barbarian imitation of this architecture.
But in the Palæolithic, year dates scarcely matter. Whether the
Mousterian phase culminated 25,000 or 75,000 years ago is irrelevant: it
was far before the beginning of historic time in either case. If one sets
the earlier date, the Chellean and Magdalenian are also stretched farther
off; if the later, it is because one shrinks his estimate of the whole
Palæolithic, the sequence of whose periods remains fixed. It is really
only the relative chronology that counts within the Old Stone Age. The
durations are so great, and so wholly prehistoric, that the only value of
figures is the vividness of their concrete impression on the mind, and
the emphasis that they place on the length of human antiquity as compared
with the brevity of recorded history. Palæolithic datings might almost be
said to be useful in proportion as they are not taken seriously.
At the same time, the chronology of the Palæolithic is aided by
several lines of geological evidence that are practically absent for
the Neolithic and Bronze Ages: thickness of strata, height of river
deposits and moraines, depth of erosion, species of wild animals. The
Neolithic is too brief to show notable traces of geological processes.
Its age must therefore be determined by subtler means: slight changes
in temperature and precipitation; the thickness of refuse deposits; and
above all, the linking of its latter phases to the earliest datable
events in documentary or inscriptional history. By these aids, comparison
has gradually built up a chronology which is accepted as approximate
by most authorities. This chronology puts the beginning of bronze in
the Baltic region at about 1900 B.C., in Spain at 2500, the first Swiss
lake-dwellings at 4000, the domestication of cattle and grain in middle
Europe around 5500, the first pottery-bearing shellmounds about 8000
B.C. Of course, these figures must not be taken as accurate. Estimates
vary somewhat. Yet the dates cited probably represent the opinion of the
majority of specialists without serious deviation: except on one point,
and that an important one.
This point is the hinge from the end of prehistory to the beginning
of history: the date of the first dynasties of Egypt and Babylonian
Sumer. On this matter, there was for many years a wide discrepancy among
Orientalists. The present tendency is to set 3400 or 3315 B.C., with
an error of not over a century, as the time when upper and lower Egypt
began to be ruled by a single king, Mena, the founder of the “first
dynasty”; 2750 as the date of Sargon of Akkad, the first consolidator and
empire-builder in the Babylonian region; and about 3100 as the period of
the earliest discovered datable remains from the Sumerian city states.
The longer reckoning puts the Egyptian first dynasty back to about 4000;
according to some, even earlier; and Sargon to 3750. This last date rests
on the discovery by Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, successor of
Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C., of a deeply buried inscription
in a foundation wall erected by Naram-sin, son of Sargon. Nabonidus had
antiquarian tastes, and set his archæologists and historians to compute
how long before him Naram-sin had lived. Their answer was 3,200 years—the
thirty-eighth century B.C., we should say; and this figure Nabonidus had
put into an inscription which has come down to us. All this looks direct
and sure enough. But did the king’s scholars really know when they told
him that just 3,200 years had elapsed since his predecessor’s reign, or
were they guessing? The number is a round one: eighty forties of years,
such as the Old Testament is fond of reckoning with. The trend of modern
opinion, based on a variety of considerations, is that the Babylonian
historians were deceiving either the king or themselves.
The bearing of the discrepancy is this. The scholars who are in more
or less agreement that bronze reached Mediterranean Europe about 2500
and Northern Europe about 1900, were generally building on the longer
chronology of the Near East. They were putting Mena around 4000 and
Sargon in 3750. This allowed an interval of over a thousand years in
which bronze working could have been carried to Spain, and two thousand
to Denmark. With the shorter chronology for Egypt and Babylonia, the
time available for the transmission has to be cut down by a thousand
years. Should the European dates, therefore, be made correspondingly more
recent? Or is the diminished interval still sufficient—that is, might
a few centuries have sufficed to carry the bronze arts from the Orient
to Sicily and Spain, and a thousand years to bear them to Scandinavia?
The interval seems reasonable, and is accordingly the one here accepted.
But it is possible that if the shorter chronology becomes proved beyond
contradiction for Egypt and Babylonia, the dates for the Neolithic and
Bronze Ages of Europe may also have to be abbreviated somewhat.
One famous time-reckoning has in fact been made by the Dane Sophus
Müller, who, without basing very much on any Oriental chronology,
shortens all the prehistoric periods of Europe. His scheme of approximate
dating is reproduced, with some simplifications, in Figure 42. It will
be seen that he sets the second or dolmen period of the Full Neolithic
in Scandinavia from about 1800 to 1400 B.C., whereas the more usual
reckoning puts it at 3500 to 2500; his earliest Kitchenmidden date is
4000, as against 8000.
[Illustration: FIG. 42. The development of prehistoric civilization in
Europe. Simplified from Sophus Müller. His absolute dates are generally
considered too low, but their relative intervals are almost undisputed.
The diagram shows very clearly the persistent cultural precedence of the
countries nearest the Orient, and the lagging of western and especially
of northern Europe.]
237. PRINCIPLES OF THE PREHISTORIC SPREAD OF CULTURE
This chronology has much to commend it besides its almost daring
conservatism; especially the clarity of its consistent recognition of
certain cultural processes. Five principles and three extensions are set
up by Müller:
1. The south [of Europe, with the Near East] was the vanguard
and dispensing source of culture; the peripheral regions,
especially in the north [of Europe] followed and received.
2. The elements of southern culture were transmitted to the
north only in reduction and extract.
3. They were also subject to modifications.
4. These elements of southern culture sometimes appeared in the
remoter areas with great vigor and new qualities of their own.
5. But such remote appearances are later in time than the
occurrence of the same elements in the south.
6. Forms of artifacts or ornaments may survive for a long time
with but little modification, especially if transmitted to new
territory.
7. Separate elements characteristic of successive periods in
a culture center may occur contemporaneously in the marginal
areas, their diffusion having occurred at different rates of
speed.
8. Marginal cultures thus present a curious mixture of traits
whose original age is great and of others that are much newer;
the latter, in fact, occasionally reach the peripheries earlier
than old traits.
The basic idea of these formulations is that of the gradual radiation of
culture from creative focal centers to backward marginal areas, without
the original dependence of the peripheries wholly precluding their
subsequent independent development. It is obvious that this point of
view is substantially identical with that which has been held to in the
presentation of native American culture in the preceding chapter.
It is only fair to say that a number of eminent archæologists combat the
prevalent opinion that the sources of European Neolithic and Bronze Age
civilization are to be derived almost wholly from the Orient. They speak
of this view as an “Oriental mirage.” They see more specific differences
than identities between the several local cultures of the two regions,
and tend to explain the similarities as due to independent invention.
Since knowledge of ancient cultures is necessarily never complete, there
is a wide range of facts to which either explanation is, theoretically,
applicable. But the focal-marginal diffusion interpretation has the
following considerations in its favor.
Within the fully historic period, there have been numerous undoubted
diffusions, of which the alphabet, the week, and the true arch may be
taken as illustrations. At least in the earlier portion of the historic
period, the flow of such diffusions was regularly out of the Orient;
which raises a considerable presumption that the flow was in the same
direction as early as the Neolithic. On the other hand, indubitably
independent parallelisms are very difficult to establish within historic
areas and periods, and therefore likely to have been equally rare during
prehistory.
Then, too, the diffusion interpretation explains a large part of
civilization to a certain degree in terms of a large, consistent scheme.
To the contrary, the parallelistic opinion leaves the facts both
unexplained and unrelated. If the Etruscans devised the true arch and
liver divination independently of the Babylonians, there are two sets of
phenomena awaiting interpretation instead of one. To say that they are
both “natural” events is equivalent to calling them accidental, that is,
unexplainable. To fall back on instinctive impulses of the human mind
will not do, else all or most nations should have made these inventions.
Of course it is important to remember that no sane interpretation of
culture explains everything. We do not know what caused the true arch to
be invented in Babylonia, hieroglyphic writing in Egypt, the alphabet
in Phœnicia, at a certain time rather than at another or rather than
in another place. The diffusion point of view simply accepts certain
intensive focal developments of culture as empirically given by the
facts, and then relates as many other facts as possible to these. Every
clear-minded historian, anthropologist, and sociologist admits that we
are still in ignorance on the problems of what caused the great bursts of
higher organization and original productiveness of early Egypt and Sumer,
of Crete, of ancient North China, of the Mayas, of Periclean Athens. We
know many of the events of civilization, know them in their place and
order. We can infer from these something of the processes of imitation,
conservatism, rationalization that have shaped them. We know as yet as
good as nothing of the first or productive causes of civilization.
It is extremely important that this limitation of our understanding be
frankly realized. It is only awareness of darkness that brings seeking
for light. Scientific problems must be felt before they can be grappled.
But within the bounds of our actual knowledge, the principle of culture
derivation and transmission seems to integrate, and thus in a measure to
explain, a far greater body of facts than any other principle—provided
it is not stretched into an instrument of magic and forced to explain
everything.
CHAPTER XV
THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY
238. The early focal area.—239. Egypt and Sumer and their
background.—240. Predynastic Egypt.—241. Culture growth
in dynastic Egypt.—242. The Sumerian development.—243.
The Sumerian hinterland.—244. Entry of Semites and
Indo-Europeans.—245. Iranian peoples and cultures.—246. The
composite culture of the Near East.—247. Phœnicians, Aramæans,
Hebrews.—248. Other contributing nationalities.—249. Ægean
civilization.—250. Europe.—251. China.—252. Growth and spread
of Chinese civilization.—253. The Lolos.—254. Korea.—255.
Japan.—256. Central and northern Asia.—257. India.—258.
Indian caste and religion.—259. Relations between India and
the outer world.—260. Indo-China.—261. Oceania.—262. The East
Indies.—263. Melanesia and Polynesia.—264. Australia.—265.
Tasmania.—266. Africa.—267. Egyptian radiations.—268. The
influence of other cultures.—269. The Bushmen.—270. The West
African culture-area and its meaning.—271. Civilization, race,
and the future.
238. THE EARLY FOCAL AREA
The prehistoric archæology of Europe and the Near East, outlined in the
last chapter, besides arriving at a tolerable chronology, reveals a
set of processes of which the outstanding one is the principle of the
origin of culture at focal centers and its diffusion to marginal tracts.
Obviously this principle should apply in the field of history as well as
prehistory, and should be even more easily traceable there.
In the Western Hemisphere it is plain that the great hearth of cultural
nourishment and production has been Middle America—the tracts at the
two ends of the intercontinental bridge, the Isthmus of Panama. That a
similarly preëminent focal area existed in the Eastern Hemisphere has
been implied over and over again in the pages that immediately precede
this one, in the references to the priority of Egypt and Babylonia—the
countries of the Nile and of the Two Rivers. These two lands lie at no
great distance from each other: they are closer than Mexico and Peru.
Like these two, they are also connected by a strip of mostly favorable
territory—the “Fertile Crescent” of Palestine, Syria, and northern
Mesopotamia. Curiously, the two countries also lie in two continents
connected by a land bridge: the Isthmus of Suez is a parallel to that of
Panama.
Both in Egypt and in Babylonia we find a little before 3000 B.C. a system
of partly phonetic writing, which, though cumbersome by modern standards,
was adequate to record whatever was spoken. Copper was abundant and
bronze in use for weapons and tools. Pottery was being turned on wheels.
Economic life was at bottom agricultural. The same food plants were
grown: barley and wheat; similar beer brewed from them. The same animals
were raised: cattle, swine, sheep, goats; with the ass for transport.
Architecture was in sun-dried brick. Considerable walled cities had
arisen. Their rulers struggled or attained supremacy over one another
as avowed kings with millions of subjects. A regulated calendar existed
by which events were dated. There were taxes, governors, courts of
law, police protection, and social order. A series of great gods, with
particular names and attributes, were worshiped in temples.
239. EGYPT AND SUMER AND THEIR BACKGROUND
It is scarcely conceivable that these two parallel growths of
civilization, easily the most advanced that had until then appeared on
earth, should have sprung up independently within a thousand miles of
each other. Had Sumerian culture blossomed far away, say on the shores of
the Pacific instead of the lower Euphrates, its essential separateness,
like that of Middle American civilization, might be probable. But not
only is the stretch of land between Babylonia and Egypt relatively short:
it is, except in the Suez district, productive and pleasant, and was
settled fairly densely by relatively advanced nations soon after the
historic period opens or even before. The same is true of the adjoining
regions. Canaan, Syria, Mesopotamia, Troy, Crete, Elam, southwestern
Turkistan, had all passed beyond barbarism and into the period of city
life during the fourth and third millenia B.C. This cannot be a series of
coincidences. Evidently western Asia, together with the nearest European
islands and the adjacent fertile corner of Africa, formed a complex but
connected unit, a larger hearth in which culture was glowing at a number
of points. It merely happened that a little upstream from the mouths of
the Nile and of the Euphrates the development flamed up faster during the
fifth and fourth millenia. The causes can only be conjectured. Perhaps
when agriculture came to be systematically instead of casually conducted,
these annually overflowed bottom lands proved unusually favorable;
their population grew, necessitating fixed government and social order,
which in turn enabled a still more rapid growth of numbers, the fuller
exploitation of resources, and division of labor. This looks plausible
enough. But too much weight should not be attached to explanations of
this sort: they remain chiefly hypothetical. That culture had however
by 3000 B.C. attained a greater richness and organization in Egypt and
in the Babylonian region than elsewhere, are facts, and can hardly be
anything but causally connected facts. These two civilizations had
evidently arisen out of a common Near Eastern high level of Neolithic
culture, much as the peaks of Mexico and Peru arose above the plateau of
Middle American culture in which they were grounded.
Of course this means that Egypt and Sumer did not stand in
parental-filial relation. They were rather collateral kin—brothers, or
better, perhaps, the two most eminent of a group of cousins. Attempts
to derive Egyptian hieroglyphic from Babylonian Cuneiform writing, and
vice versa, have been rejected as unproved by the majority of unbiased
scholars. But it is likely that at least the idea of making legible
records, of using pictorial signs for sounds of speech, was carried from
one people to the other, which thereupon worked out its own symbols and
meanings. Just so, while the Phœnician alphabet has never yet been led
back to either Egyptian, Cuneiform, Cretan, or Hittite writing with
enough evidence to satisfy more than a minority fraction of the world of
scholarship, it seems incredible that this new form of writing should
have originated uninfluenced by any of the several systems which had been
in current use in the near neighborhood, in part in Phœnicia itself, for
from one to two or three thousand years. Such a view denies neither the
essentially new element in Phœnician script nor its cultural importance.
It does not consider the origin of the alphabet explained away by a
reference to another and earlier system of writing. It does bring the
alphabet into some sort of causal relation with the other systems,
without merging it in them. It is along lines like this that the relation
of early Egypt and Babylonia to each other and to the other cultures of
the ancient Near East must be conceived.
240. PREDYNASTIC EGYPT
Egyptian civilization was already in full blown flower at the time of
the consolidation of Lower and Upper Egypt under the first dynasty in
the thirty-fourth century. Its developmental stages must have reached
much farther back. Hieroglyphic writing, for instance, had taken on
substantially the forms and degree of efficiency which it maintained
for the next three thousand years. An elaborate, conventional system
of this sort must have required centuries for its formative stages.
A non-lunar 365-day calendar was in use. This was easily the most
accurate and effective calendar developed in the ancient world, and
furnished the basis of our own. It erred by the few hours’ difference
between the solar and the assumed year. This difference the Egyptians
did not correct but recorded, with the result that when the initial
day had slowly swung around the cycle of the seasons, they reckoned
a “Sothic year” of 1,461 years. One of these was completed in 2781;
which gives 4241 B.C. as the date of the fixing of the calendar. This
is considered the earliest exactly known date in human history. Of
course, a calendar of such fineness cannot be established without long
continued observations, whose duration will be the greater for lack
of astronomical instruments. Centuries must have elapsed while this
calendar was being worked out. Nor would oral tradition be a sufficient
vehicle for carrying the observations. Permanent records must have been
transmitted from generation to generation; and these presuppose stability
of society, enduring buildings, towns, and a class with leisure to devote
to astronomical computations. It is safe therefore to set 4500 B.C. as
the time when Egypt had emerged from a tribal or rural peasant condition
into one that can be called “civilized” in the original meaning of that
word: a period of city states, or at least districts organized under
recognized rulers. From 4500 on, then, is the time of the Predynastic
Local Kingdoms.
Beyond this time there must lie another: the Predynastic Tribal
period, before towns or calendars or writing or metal, when pottery
was being made, stone ground, boats built, plants and animals being
domesticated—the typical pure Neolithic Age, in short. Yet with all
its prehistoric wealth, Egypt has not yet produced any true Neolithic
remains. It is hardly likely that the country was uninhabited for
thousands of years; much more probably have Neolithic remains been
obliterated. This inference is strengthened by the paucity and
dubiousness of Upper Palæolithic artifacts in Egypt. Lower Palæolithic
flint implements are abundant, just as are remains from the whole of the
period of metals. What has happened to the missing deposits and burials
of the Upper Palæolithic and Neolithic that fell between?
Apparently they have been buried on the floor of the Nile valley under
alluvial deposits. The Eolithic and Lower Palæolithic implements are
found on the plateau through which the valley stretches; also cemented
into conglomerate formed of gravel and stone washed down from this
plateau and cut into terraces by the Nile when it still flowed from
30 to 100 feet higher than at present; and on the terraces. Just when
these terraces were formed, it is difficult to say in terms of European
Pleistocene periods; but not later than the third glacial epoch, it would
seem, and perhaps as early as the second. As the Chellean of Europe is
put after the third glaciation in the chronology followed in this book,
the antiquity of the first flints used, and perhaps deliberately shaped,
in Egypt, is carried back to an extremely high antiquity by the specimens
imbedded in the terrace cliffs.
About the time of the last glaciation—the Mousterian or end of the Lower
Palæolithic in Europe—the Nile ceased cutting down through the gravels
that bordered it and began to build up its bed and its valley with a
deposit of mud as it does to-day. From excavations to the base of dated
monuments it is known that during the last 4,000 years this alluvium has
been laid down at the rate of a foot in 300 years in northern Egypt.
As it there attains a depth of over a hundred feet, the process of
deposition is indicated as having begun 30,000 or more years ago. Of
course no computation of this sort is entirely reliable because various
factors can enter to change the rate; but the probability is that,
other things equal, the deposition would have been slower at first than
of late, and the time of the aggrading correspondingly longer. In any
event geologists agree that their Recent—the last 10,000 years or so—is
insufficient, and that the deposition of the floor of the Nile valley
must have begun during what in Europe was part of the Würm glaciation.
This is the period of transition from Lower to Upper Palæolithic (§ 69,
70, 213) in Europe. The disappearance of Upper Palæolithic remains in
Egypt is most plausibly explained by the fact that the Upper Palæolithic,
just as later the Neolithic, was indeed represented in Egypt, very likely
flourishingly, but that in the mild climate its artifacts were lost or
interred on or near the surface of the valley itself and have therefore
long since been covered over so deep that only future lucky accidents,
like well-soundings, may now and then bring a specimen to light.
For the Neolithic, there actually are such discoveries: bits of pottery
brought up from borings, 60 feet deep in the vicinity of one of the
monuments referred to, 75 and 90 feet deep at other points in lower
Egypt. The smallest of these figures computes to a lapse of 18,000
years—nearly twice as long as the estimated age of the earliest pottery
in Europe. It is always necessary not to lay too much reliance on
durations calculated solely from thickness of strata, whether these are
geological or culture-bearing. But in this case general probability
confirms, at least in the rough. In 4000 B.C., when Egypt was beginning
to use copper, western Europe was still in its first phase of stone
polishing; in 1500 B.C., when Egypt was becoming acquainted with iron,
Europe was scarcely yet at the height of its bronze industry. If the
fisher folk camped on their oyster shells on the Baltic shores were
able to make pottery by 8000 B.C., there is nothing staggering in the
suggestion that the Egyptians knew the art in 16,000 B.C. They have had
writing more than twice as long as the North Europeans.
The dates themselves, then, need not be taken too literally. They are
calculated from slender even though impressive evidence and subject to
revision by perhaps thousands of years. But they do suggest strongly the
distinct precedence of northern Africa, and by implication of western
Asia, over Europe in the Neolithic, as precedence is clear in the Bronze
and early Iron Ages and indicated for the Lower Palæolithic.
If, accordingly, the beginning of the Early Neolithic—the age of
pottery, bow, dog—be set for Egypt somewhere around 16,000 B.C., about
coeval with the beginning of the Magdalenian in middle western Europe
(§ 215), the Full Neolithic, the time of first domestication of animals
and plants and polishing of stone, could be estimated at around 10,000
B.C., when Europe was still lingering in its epi-Palæolithic phase (§
216). One can cut away several thousand years and retain the essential
situation unimpaired: 8000, or 7000 B.C., still leaves Egypt in the
van; helps to explain the appearance of eastern grains and animals in
Europe around 6000-5000 B.C.; and, what is most to the point, allows a
sufficient interval for agriculture and the allied phases of civilization
to have reached the degree of development which they display when the
Predynastic Local Kingdoms drift into our vision around 4500 B.C. A long
Full Neolithic, then, is both demanded by the situation in Egypt and
indicated by such facts as there are; a long period in which millet,
barley, split-wheat, wheat, flax, cattle, sheep, and asses were gradually
modified and made more useful by breeding under domestication. This Full
Neolithic, or its last portion, was the Predynastic Tribal Age of Egypt;
which, when it passed into the Predynastic Local Kingdoms phase about
4500 B.C., had brought these plants and animals substantially to their
modern forms, and had increased and coördinated the population of the
land to a point that the devising of calendar, metallurgy, writing, and
kingship soon followed.
241. CULTURE GROWTH IN DYNASTIC EGYPT
The story of the growth of Egyptian civilization during the Dynastic
or historic period is a fascinating one. There were three phases of
prosperity and splendor. The first was the Old Kingdom, 3000-2500,
culminating in the fourth dynasty of the Great Pyramid builders, in the
twenty-ninth century. The second was the Middle or Feudal Kingdom, with
its climax in the twelfth dynasty, 2000-1788. After the invasion of
the Asiatic Hyksos in the seventeenth century, the New Empire of the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties arose, whose greatest extension fell
in the reign of Thutmose III, 1501-1447, although the country retained
some powers of offensive for a couple of centuries longer. There followed
a slow nationalistic decline, a transient seventh century conquest
by Assyria, a brief and fictitious renascence supported by foreign
mercenaries, and the Persian conquest of 525 B.C., since which time Egypt
has never been an independent power under native rulers. A waning of
cultural energy, at least relatively to other peoples, had set in before
the military decline. By 1000 B.C. certainly, by 1500 perhaps, Egypt was
receiving more elements of civilization than she was imparting. She still
loomed wealthy and refined in contrast with younger nations; but these
were producing more that was new.
Copper smelted from the ores of the Sinai peninsula had apparently come
into use by 4000, but remained scarce for a long time. The first dynasty
had some low grade bronze; by 2500 bronze containing a tenth of tin was
in use. Iron was introduced about 1500 or soon after, but for centuries
remained a sparing Asiatic import. In fact, the conservatism that was
settling over the old age of the civilization caused it to cling with
unusual tenacity to bronze. As late as Ptolemaic and Roman times, when
the graves of foreigners abounded in iron, those of Egyptians were still
prevailingly bronze furnished.
Quite different must have been the social psychology three thousand years
earlier. The first masonry was laid in place of adobe brick to line tomb
walls in the thirty-first century; and within a century and a half the
grandest stone architecture in human history had been attained in the
Pyramid of Cheops. This was a burst of cultural energy such as has been
equalled only in the rise of Greek art or modern science.
Glass making seems to have been discovered in Egypt in the early
dynasties and to have spread from there to Syria and the Euphrates. The
earliest glass was colored faïence, at most translucent, and devoted
chiefly to jewelry, or to surfacing brick. Later it was blown into
vessels, usually small bottles, and only gradually attained to clearness.
From western Asia the art was carried to Europe, and, in Christian times,
to China, which at first paid gem prices for glass beads, but later was
perhaps stimulated by knowledge of the new art into devising porcelain—a
pottery vitrified through.
The horse first reached Egypt with the Hyksos. With it came the war
chariot. Wheeled vehicles seem to have been lacking previously. The
alphabet, the arch, the zodiac, coinage, heavy metal armor, and many
other important inventions gained no foot-hold in Egypt until after the
country had definitely passed under foreign domination. The superior
intensity of early Egyptian civilization had evidently fostered a spirit
of cultural self-sufficiency, analogous to that of China or Byzantine
Greece, which produced a resistance to innovation from without. At
the same time, inward development continued, as attested by numerous
advances in religion, literature, dress, the arts, and science when the
Old Kingdom and New Empire are compared. In the eleventh and twelfth
dynasties, for instance, the monarchy was feudal; in the eighteenth lived
the famous monotheistic iconoclastic ruler Ikhnaton.
The civilization of ancient Egypt was wholly produced and carried by a
Hamitic-speaking people. This people has sometimes been thought to have
come from Asia, but its Hamitic relatives hold Africa from Somaliland
to Morocco even to-day, and there is no cogent reason to look for its
ancestors outside that continent.
242. THE SUMERIAN DEVELOPMENT
The story of Babylonia is less completely known than that of Egypt
because as a rockless land it was forced to depend on sun-dried brick,
because the climate is less arid, and also because of its position.
Egypt was isolated by deserts, Babylonia open to many neighbors, and
so was invaded, fought over, and never unified as long as Egypt. The
civilization was therefore never so nationally specific, so concentrated;
and its records, though abundant, are patchy. Babylonia, the region of
the lower Euphrates and Tigris, was the leading culture center of Asia in
the third and second millenia before Christ; and while mostly a Semitic
land in this period, its civilization was the product of another people,
the Sumerians, established near the mouth of the two rivers in the fourth
millenium. It was the Sumerians who in this thousand years worked out
the Cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing—mixedly phonetic and
ideographic like the Egyptian, but of wholly different values, so far
as can be told to-day, and executed in straight strokes instead of the
pictorial forms of Hieroglyphic or the cursive ones of its derivative
Hieratic. It was the Semites who, coming in from the Arabian region, took
over this writing, together with the culture that accompanied it. Their
dependence is shown by the fact that they used characters with Sumerian
phonetic values as well as by their retention of Sumerian as a sacred
language, for which, as time went on, they were compelled to compile
dictionaries, to the easement of modern archæologists.
Of the local origins of this Sumerian city-state civilization with
its irrigation and intensive agriculture, nothing is known. It kept
substantially abreast of Egypt, or at most a few centuries in arrears. In
certain features, as the use of metals, it seems to have been in advance.
Egypt is a long-drawn oasis stretched through a great desert. Babylonia
lies adjacent to desert and highland, steppe and mountains. Within a
range of a few hundred miles, its environment is far more varied. Not
only copper but tin is said to have been available among neighboring
peoples. So, too, Babylonia is likely to have had the early domestic
animals—except perhaps cattle—earlier than Egypt, because it lay nearer
to what seem to have been their native habitats. The result is that
whereas Egyptian culture makes the superficial impression of having been
largely evolved on the spot by the Egyptians, Sumerian culture already
promises to resolve, when we shall know it better, into a blend to which
a series of peoples contributed measurably. The rôle of the Sumerians,
like that of their Semitic successors, was perhaps primarily that of
organizers.
243. THE SUMERIAN HINTERLAND
There are some evidences of these cultures previous to the Sumerian
one or coeval with it. In Elam, the foot-hill country east of Sumer, a
mound at Susa contains over 100 feet of culture-bearing deposits; in
southern Turkistan, at Anau, 300 miles east of the Caspian sea, one is
more than fifty feet deep. The date of the first occupancy of these
sites has been set, largely on the basis of the rate of accumulation of
the deposits—an unsafe criterion—at 18,000 and 8000 B.C. respectively.
These dates, particularly the former, are surely too high. But a remote
antiquity is indicated. Both sites show adobe brick houses and hand-made,
painted pottery at the very bottom. Susa contains copper implements in
the lowest stratum; Anau, three-fourths way to the base—in the same
level as remains of sheep and camels. Still lower levels at Anau yielded
remains of tamed cattle, pigs, and goats, while wheat and barley appear
at the very bottom, before domesticated animals were kept. Whatever the
date of the introduction of copper in these regions, it was very likely
anterior to the thirty-first century, when bronze was already used by the
Sumerians. These excavations therefore shed light on the Full Neolithic
and Eneolithic or Transition phases of west Asiatic culture which must
have preceded the Sumerian civilization known to us.
The languages of these early west Asiatic peoples have not been
classified. Sumerian was non-Indo-European, non-Semitic, non-Hamitic.
Some have thought to detect Turkish, that is Ural-Altaic, resemblances
in it. But others find similarities to modern African languages. This
divergence of opinion probably means that Sumerian cannot yet be safely
linked with any other linguistic group. The same applies to Elamite,
which is known from inscriptions of a later date than the early strata
at Susa. What the Neolithic and Bronze Age people of Anau spoke there
is no means of knowing. The region at present is Turkish, but this is
of course no evidence that it was so thousands of years ago. The speech
of the region might conceivably have been Indo-European, for it lies
at the foot of the Persian plateau, which by the Iron Age was occupied
by the Iranian branch of the Indo-Europeans, who are generally thought
to have entered it from the north or northwest. But again there is not
a shred of positive evidence for an Indo-European population at this
wholly prehistoric period. The one thing that is clear is that the
early civilization of the general west Asiatic area was not developed
by the Semites who were its chief carriers later. This is a situation
parallel to that obtaining in Europe and Asia Minor, whose civilization
in the full historic period has been almost wholly in the hands of
Indo-Europeans, whereas at the dawn of history the nations who were
culturally in the lead, the Hittites, Trojans, Cretans, Lydians,
Etruscans, and Iberians, were all non-Indo-European.
244. ENTRY OF SEMITES AND INDO-EUROPEANS
The Semitic invasions seem to have proceeded from the great motherland of
that stock, Arabia, whose deserts and half-deserts have been at all times
like a multiplying hive. Some of the movements were outright conquests,
others half-forceful penetrations, still others infiltrations. Several
great waves can be distinguished. About 3000 there was a drift which
brought the Akkadians, Sargon’s people, into Babylonia, perhaps the
Assyrians into their home up the Tigris, the Canaanites and Phœnicians
into the Syrian region. About 2200 the Amorites flowed north: into
Babylonia, where Babylon now sprang up and the famous lawgiver Hammurabi
ruled; into Mesopotamia proper; and into Syria. Around 1400, the
Aramæans gradually occupied the Syrian district, and the Hebrews began
to dispossess the Canaanites. Around 700 still another wave brought the
Chaldæans into Babylonia, to erect a great Semitic kingdom once more—that
of Nebuchadnezzar. Then, for more than a thousand years, Arabia lay
contained within herself, dammed perhaps by the Persian, Macedonian,
Parthian, and Roman empires, until in the seventh century after Christ
Mohammedanism led forth her peoples. A much earlier movement, at an
unknown time, had brought the forefathers of the Abyssinians across the
mouth of the Red Sea into Africa, and the Hyksos who overthrew the Middle
Kingdom of ancient Egypt may have been Semites.
The Indo-Europeans entered southwest Asia later and permeated it more
locally than the Semites. Soon after 2000 the Kassites or Kossæans
intruded into Babylonia; they seem to have been Indo-Europeans, perhaps
Iranians. Around 1500 the Mitanni were a power on the upper Euphrates
between the Assyrians and the Hittites of Asia Minor. Their personal and
god names as preserved in Assyrian Cuneiform inscriptions show them to
have been an Iranian people. The latter are not recognizably referred to
in their permanent home on the Iranian plateau until about 1000, but may
well have settled there a thousand years earlier. Their close relatives,
the Indic branch, are believed to have begun their entry of India about
2000-1500 B.C. or soon after.
245. IRANIAN PEOPLES AND CULTURES
By the seventh century B.C., the Iranians were civilized and strong
enough to participate in the overthrow of Semitic Assyria, whose
principal inheritors they became. From then on for over twelve hundred
years, with only a century of interruption due to Alexander and his
successors, a succession of Iranian powers dominated not only the plateau
but Babylonia and Mesopotamia: Medes, Achæmenian Persians, Parthians,
Sassanian Persians. A strong national consciousness was evolved and
reinforced by a national religion—Zoroastrianism, Magism, Fire-worship,
the Avestan faith, are some of its names. This Iranian religion endured
nearly three thousand years, and still survives among a shrunken number
of followers, notably the emigrant Parsis—that is, “Persians”—of India;
and its basic ideas of the eternal conflict of good and evil, truth and
lie, and of a single supreme deity of righteousness, have influenced
many other cults, including Christianity. The long contact between Iran
and the Tigris-Euphrates valley and their frequent political unity since
600 B.C. reacted favorably to the intensification of culture in the
highlands; with the result that when the Arabs and later the Turks broke
from their marginal homes into the old civilized parts of western Asia,
they absorbed heavily from the long established cultures of Iran. Much of
Arab and Turkish civilization is really Persian, and goes back ultimately
to Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian origins.
Soon after the Iranians pushed southward out of the steppe on to the
plateau east of the Caspian, other Indo-Europeans drove southward west
of the Caspian and Black Sea; the Armenians into the seats which they
have held ever since, the Kardouchoi into the Kurd country, tribes
allied to the Balkan Thracians and the Phrygians into Asia Minor. The
centuries before and after 1000 B.C. were the period of these movements,
all of which failed to penetrate as deeply into the heart of the
west Asiatic cultural center as had the Semitic inflows. Nor was the
Indo-Europeanization of all the newly occupied territories as permanent
as the corresponding Semitization. Asia Minor, which is now prevailingly
Turkish, is the one area of consequence that in the historic period has
been de-Indo-Europeanized in speech (§ 50).
246. THE COMPOSITE CULTURE OF THE NEAR EAST
In this western end of Asia, then, from the Hellespont to Persia and from
the Caucasus to the Arabian desert, beginning five thousand years ago
and probably more, a motley of nations was thrown together—autochthonous
peoples of several sorts, Semites, Indo-Europeans, possibly
Ural-Altaians. Their contacts enabled each to acquire many of the
new devices developed by the others, to combine these with their own
attainments, and thus to be a source of culture stimulation over again
for the others. The largest tract of rich lowland in the area was the
Fertile Crescent which bowed from Jerusalem northward and eastward into
Mesopotamia and then down the course of the Tigris and Euphrates to their
mouths, and here, for several millenia, civilization tended to advance
most intensively. Within this Crescent, again, its southeastern end, the
drainable and irrigable alluvial plain of Babylonia, averaged in the lead
from the earliest known Sumerian times until shortly before the Christian
era. Yet political dominance often shifted elsewhere: to Egypt, which
conquered to the Euphrates in the fifteenth century B.C.; to the Hittites
of Asia Minor in the fourteenth and thirteenth; to the Assyrians of the
middle Tigris in the twelfth and eleventh and again in the eighth and
seventh centuries. Culturally, too, almost every one of the many nations
or tracts comprised within the west Asiatic area developed a degree of
independence; each added features or modified those which it borrowed;
each gave to its local civilization a cast of its own, without losing
touch with the others.
247. PHŒNICIANS, ARAMÆANS, HEBREWS
Thus, the Phœnicians, or some Semitic people closely related and
geographically near them, by 1000 B.C. developed, presumably out of
one of the several part-phonetic or syllabic writings in use about or
among them, the true alphabet (§ 134). In the two or three centuries
following, they established a commercial and maritime supremacy over the
Mediterranean that led to the founding of Carthage, direct trade as far
as Spain and indirect to Britain, and transmission of the alphabet and
other knowledge to the Greeks.
Another trading people, although an inland one, were the Aramæans,
Semites of the same wave as the Hebrews but established north of
Palestine in Syria, with Damascus as their greatest center. Never more
than a secondary political power, they penetrated other countries
peacefully, brought in their system of measures and weights, their
writing, and even their language. Assyria had become half Aramaic
speaking by the time of her fall, and the every-day language of Palestine
in the days of Jesus and for some centuries before was Aramaic. Aramæan
script, a cursive form of the Phœnician alphabet, gradually replaced
Cuneiform writing, first for business and then for official purposes,
throughout western Asia and beyond. In the fourteenth century, the Syrian
and Palestinian city rulers had written their reports and dispatches
to the Egyptian overlord in Cuneiform, which a corps of clerks in the
Foreign Office or Dependencies Department at Tell-el-Amarna transcribed
into Hieroglyphic or Hieratic. In the fourth century, Persian officials
were employing Aramæan for official communications. As the Cuneiform
more and more died out, derivatives of Aramæan became the alphabets of
Persia; of at least part and possibly the whole of India; of the Jews;
of the Arabs; of the Nestorian Christians; and of the ancient Turks, the
Mongols, and the Manchus. Practically all Asia except perhaps India, so
far as it writes alphabetically, thus derives its letters from an Aramæan
source (§ 146).
Equally profound was the influence of the neighboring Hebrews in another
phase of civilization. At the time they first entered history, about
1400 B.C., the Hebrews worshiped a tribal god Jahveh. They believed
that there were many gods beside him, but that they were his people and
he their god. A growing national consciousness led them more and more to
emphasize the special relation between him and them, to the exclusion
of worship of other deities which was constantly creeping in from their
Canaanite, Phœnician, Aramæan, and Egyptian neighbors. Thus they grew
into the stage of monolatry, or worship limited to one god. As however
Assyria and Babylonia first threatened and then engulfed them, and
their national impotence became more and more evident, they confided
less in themselves, as they had done in the brief days of their little
tenth century glory, and trusted increasingly in their god as their
salvation. National hopes fell and divine ones rose; until the Hebrew
people passed from thinking of the Lord as all powerful to thinking of
him as one and sole: monotheism had evolved out of monolatry as this
had grown out of a special tribal cult. Historically the monotheistic
idea was not new. Ikhnaton of Egypt had proclaimed it more than half
a thousand years before the Hebrew prophets. The concept may actually
have been carried over; but it certainly drew sustenance of its own on
Hebrew soil and first became established there as a cardinal, enduring
element of a national civilization. The Hebrews adhered to monotheism
with an ever-increasing insistence; until the concept was taken over by
Christianity and Islam—two of the three great international religions;
Buddhism, the third, being essentially atheistic. Here then is another
tremendously spread cultural element of deep significance that originated
as a local west Asiatic variant.
248. OTHER CONTRIBUTING NATIONALITIES
Almost every people in the area, in fact, made its special contribution.
In Asia Minor evolved the concept of a great primal mother goddess,
known to the Greeks as Cybele. Lydia, in western Asia Minor, coined the
earliest money about 700 B.C. Some people near the Black Sea in eastern
Asia Minor seem to have been the first to develop the working of iron
and perhaps of steel. The Kassites from the north or east probably
introduced the horse into Babylonia, soon after 2000 B.C. Thence it
spread, as the animal of royalty, aristocracy, and the special arm of
chariot warfare, until it reached Egypt some three hundred years later.
The first domestication of the horse was apparently in central Asia;
the transmission to Europe may have been direct rather than through
Mediterranean Asia. The camel had been tamed earlier, also in central
Asia. Its remains appear in Turkistan in the copper period; and in Israel
the Arab Midianite raiders whom Gideon defeated rode camels, while some
generations later, in David’s time, about 1000 B.C., horses were still
scarce.
249. ÆGEAN CIVILIZATION
On the island of Crete, almost equidistant from Asia, Africa, and Europe,
there began to grow up with the introduction of bronze, about 3000 B.C.,
a civilization most of whose elements were imported, but which added
to them and molded the whole of its mass with unusual originality.
Three great periods, named the Early, Middle, and Late “Minoan” after
the legendary Cretan king Minos, are distinguishable in the abundant
remains which excavation has brought to light; each of these is divisible
into three sub-periods designated I, II, III. At some sites, such as
Knossos, the remains of successive sub-periods are separated by layers
of packed-down earth deposited when an old settlement was obliterated
and serving as floor for the next occupation. Underneath the Bronze Age
deposits were thick strata from the Neolithic, with unpainted pottery.
With the Early Minoan, about 3000 B.C., painted pottery as well as
bronze came in, to be followed by the potter’s wheel and a system of
hieroglyphic writing unrelated to the Egyptian. In the Middle Minoan the
pottery became polychrome, palaces were built, art took a remarkable
naturalistic turn in pottery and fresco painting and carving, and the
hieroglyphics evolved into a linear, probably syllabic, script. The
beginning of the Late Minoan, from the sixteenth to the fourteenth
century B.C., saw the culmination of Cretan civilization. Then something
violent happened, the palaces were destroyed, and after a brief decadence
Minoan culture passed out at the arrival of the first of the historic
Greeks, at the opening of the Iron Age, about 1250 B.C.
The Minoans left no chronology of their own and their writing is unread.
But datable Egyptian objects found in Cretan strata of identified period,
and Cretan objects characteristic of particular periods found at datable
Egyptian sites as the result of trade, have made possible an indirect
but positive chronology for Minoan culture. The second sub-periods of
Early, Middle, and Late Minoan respectively were contemporary with the
Sixth, Twelfth, and Eighteenth Dynasties on the Nile. From 2000 B.C. on,
Minoan dates are therefore reliable within a century and sometimes less.
Industry, commerce, games, a light, practical style of architecture,
above all a graceful realistic art, flourished particularly from Middle
Minoan III to Late Minoan II. There was evidently considerable wealth,
a leisure class, and life was prevailingly peaceful and surrounded with
charm.
The Minoans were a Caucasian people of Mediterranean race. Their language
is unknown, but seems to have been distinct from the later Greek, and
therefore probably non-Indo-European. When their home power crumbled, a
fragment appears to have taken refuge in Asia and founded the Philistine
cities which for a time pressed the tribal Hebrews and which gave their
name to Palestine.
A related culture appears in the ruins of the successive cities of
Troy; on the islands of the Ægean Sea; and in mainland Greece, where
it has been called Mycenæan, after the citadel and town attributed to
Agamemnon. Ægean perhaps is the name least likely to confuse, for this
larger culture of which the Cretan Minoan was long the most illustrious
representative. The table outlines the principal correlations.
[Illustration]
The thirteenth century brought the Greeks, then a rude, hardy, and at
first non-maritime people, fighting their way south and wrecking or
sapping the Ægean civilization. Culture lost its bloom, life became hard,
the outlook contracted. Art shriveled into crude geometric ornamentation,
the forms became childishly inept, intercourse with the Orient sank to
a minimum, and when trade and foreign stimulation revived they were at
first in Phœnician hands. It is not until the seventh century that true
history begins in Greece, and in the main only to the sixth that the
rudiments of that characteristic Hellenic philosophy, literature, and
art can be traced, which were released after the Persian wars early in
the fifth century. Yet the half thousand and more years of dark ages
between Ægean and classic Greek civilization did not entail a complete
interruption. The Greek often enough smote the Mycenæan or Minoan. More
often, perhaps, he settled alongside him, possibly oppressed him, but
learned from him. He choked out Ægean culture, but nourished his own
upon it. The Homeric poems, composed in Greek during this period of
retrogression, picture a civilization essentially Ægean; and along with
them much other cultural tradition must have been passed on.
At any rate, when Greek culture reëmerged, it was charged with Oriental
elements and influences, but perhaps even more charged with Ægean ones.
Its games, its unponderous architecture, its open city life, the free
quality of its art, its political particularity, its peculiar alert
tenseness and feeling for grace, had all flourished before on Greek
soil. Their flavor is un-Asiatic and un-Egyptian of whatever period. We
have here another instance of the tenacity of the attachment of cultural
qualities to the soil; of the faculty, at once absorptive and resistive,
that for thousands of years, however inventions might diffuse and culture
elements circulate, succeeded in keeping China something that can fairly
be called Chinese, India Indian, Egypt Egyptian, the Northwest and
Southwest of America Northwestern and Southwestern respectively; in a
degree even kept Europe, so long culturally dependent on the Orient,
always European.
250. EUROPE
With Greece we have entered the realm of what is conventionally
regarded as history. For the rest of Europe, prehistoric archæology
and its record of illiterate peoples abut so closely on history in the
ordinary sense, that a tracing of the transition takes one promptly
into documentary study. There is much in this early historical field
that is of anthropological interest, and just back of it lies more
that is specifically so: where the round headed peoples came from who
began to appear in Europe during the Neolithic; whether peoples like
Ligurians, Sicilians, Scythians, were Indo-Europeans or not, and of
what branch; where the blond Nordic type took shape and whether it
originally spoke dialects of the Germanic group; who built Stonehenge and
the other megalithic monuments of western Europe; where the first home
of the Indo-Europeans lay. But such problems are intricate, and usually
answerable, if at all, from stray indications scattered among masses
of literary and historical data controllable only by the specialist,
whose primary interests tend in other directions. Where these documented
indications fail, the problems become speculative. We have no clear
record of any indubitable Indo-European people, in or out of Europe,
before the second millenium B.C. When they appear in history, they are
already differentiated into their familiar main divisions. The Bronze
Age Scandinavians seem likely to have been Indo-Europeans and perhaps of
the Germanic branch; for the Neolithic an identification would be mere
guessing. The LaTène Iron culture is characteristically Keltic, that of
the Hallstadt period and area less certainly Illyrian and Keltic. And
after all, such considerations concern speech, or race, which can be
associated with any culture. Our present concern being primarily with
the latter, it will be more profitable to pass on from these questions
and turn to regions remote from those in which Occidental civilization
assumed its modern form.
251. CHINA
China, far from Europe and known to the outside world only recently,
possesses a civilization so different from ours in a multitude of
aspects, that thought of connection between the cultures seems at first
unreasonable. One thinks of rice, pagodas, bound feet, queues, silk, tea,
ancestor worship, a strange, chopped, singing speech, and writing in
still stranger characters. Yet the Chinese have long had a civilization
identical in many of its constituents with our own: civil government,
rimed poetry, painting, trousers, wheat and barley, our common domestic
animals, bronze and iron, for instance. Since most of these culture
elements are wanting in Africa and Oceania, as well as in native America,
there is no inherent reason why they should be expectable in China.
Their repetition in China and in the West as the result of independent
causes would be remarkable. Evidently many if not all of this group of
common traits represent absorptions into the civilization of China, or
diffusions out of it into the West, much as the larger part of early
European civilization was imported out of the nearer Orient.
In the broader perspective of culture history, then, China no longer
stands aloof. The roots of her civilization are largely the same as those
of our own. In this light, understanding of Chinese civilization involves
two steps. The first is the tracing of the elements derived from the
west or imparted to it. The second is the recognition of how these were
remodeled and combined with elements of local growth and thereby given
their peculiarly Chinese cast and setting.
Authentic historical records of China go back only three thousand years,
and her archæology is little known. Beyond the beginning of the Chou
dynasty, about 1100 B.C., or more exactly, beyond a point when this
dynasty was about three centuries old, in 827 B.C., the Chinese possess
only legendary history, in which slight strands of fact are interwoven
with fabricated or fabulous constituents. Then, too, the Chinese have
long been genuinely more advanced than their neighbors, than all of
their world, in fact; with the result that they could hardly escape
the conviction of their own superiority and self-sufficiency, and the
belief that they had devised almost everything in their own culture. This
presumption led to the conscientious manufacture by native historians of
dates for inventions which were really made outside of China.
Beginning, then, in the ninth century B.C., we find the Chinese a settled
and populous people in the lower valley of the great Yellow river, in
what is now the northeastern corner of the “Eighteen Provinces” or China
proper, from about Si-an-fu to Peking. They may have come from middle
Asia or still farther west by a national migration, as has sometimes been
conjectured: there is nothing to show that they did, and a great deal to
suggest that they had lived in or near their seats of that period long
before. It is difficult to imagine that the Chinese could have moved out
of central Asia without leaving a part of their number behind, or without
leaving conspicuous traces of their culture among their former neighbors.
Of this there is no evidence. For one of the most advanced peoples of
its time to remove itself and its civilization complete and unimpaired
would be without parallel in history, and indeed is inconceivable as soon
as one turns from the vague idea to face specific details of the process.
Nevertheless the Chinese as we first know them had the principal grains
and tamed animals, the metals and plow and wheel of contemporary Eastern
Asia and Europe. While it is scarcely thinkable that this great complex
of culture traits should not have been due to connections with the
west, there is every probability that these connections were of the
sort that have been traced so frequently in foregoing pages: diffusions
unaccompanied by populational drifts, or at least in the main independent
of them. When it is recalled that western Turkistan held cereal-growing
and animal-raising inhabitants far back in the Neolithic, and that the
Bronze period is definitely represented in Siberia,[36] such transmission
will not seem far fetched. It is also well to remember that all through
the historic period central Asia contained farming populations, cities,
traders, and skilled artisans, some measure of which evidences of
higher culture it is only necessary to project a few thousand years
backward to complete the link in the cultural chain between China and
the west. We tend to overlook this fact because it is the transient Hun
and Mongol invasions that chiefly obtrude into both western and Chinese
history. Whenever the nomads ceased boiling over, they receded from the
historians’ view. Obviously they could not have migrated and fought
and burnt and slain among each other continuously. The more settled
life at home, which they led most of the time, and into which they were
always inclined to take over the religion, writing, and arts of the
Orient, India and China, is the phase of their existence most likely
to be overlooked, but which, from the point of view of the history of
civilization, is far more important than their evanescent conquests. In
this underlying phase they were the connectors of Near and Far East.
It is interesting in this connection that so far as more recent
transmissions between China and the west are datable or positively
traceable, they took place chiefly by the long land route through central
Asia. The first trade between the Roman empire and China of the Han
dynasty was overland; so was the introduction of Buddhism and cotton from
India. In each case sea communication came later. It was scarcely before
Mohammedan times that ocean trade between China and the west became
important.
On the other hand, the Chinese and other east Asiatics always lacked,
and still lack, several aspects of the grain-cattle-horse-wheel-metals
cluster that are very ancient and practically universal in Europe, the
Near East, and even central Asia. They do not use milk or its products,
wool, nor bread-leaven. It has been suggested that the cluster was
transmitted to China before these traits had been added to it; and
that when they finally might have reached China, they found its people
satisfactorily established in a culture containing substitutes for these
traits, and therefore resistive to them.
It is significant that even to-day northern China, within which the
oldest known China lay, still cultivates wheat, barley, and millet,
and breeds cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and swine, as did the Swiss
lake-dwellers; whereas in southern China the typical grain and animal are
rice and the buffalo, as in Indo-China and Malaysia. There are evidently
two fundamentally distinct economic systems here, characteristic
respectively of Europe and west and north Asia, and of southeastern
Asia; and evolving in the main independently. The first civilized China,
that of the Chou period, that which produced Confucius as its literary
standardizer, and has chiefly shaped Chinese traditions and institutions
ever since, belonged to the great northern and western cycle; was in fact
its easternmost outpost.
This brings up the question whether Chinese writing could not also have
sprung from a western source, notably the Sumerian Cuneiform, which it
superficially resembles in its linear, non-pictorial strokes, and in
its mixed ideographic-phonetic method. The connection has indeed been
asserted, but no satisfactory evidence of specific correspondences has
been adduced. The most that it seems valid to maintain is that a remote
connection is thinkable; a connection not extending beyond a limited
number of characters or the idea or method of writing. The earliest
Chinese characters preserved on bronzes are nearly two thousand years
younger than the most ancient inscriptions of the system which developed
into the classic Cuneiform. Both systems are fairly crystallized when
they first come to our knowledge. Their formative stages, in which such
connection as they might have would be most apparent, are obscure. It is
well to remember that Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic, which were
virtually contemporaneous and much nearer to each other geographically,
have not yet been brought into specific relation as regards their origins.
252. GROWTH AND SPREAD OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION
Chou China at first embraced most of Shensi and Honan, southern Shansi
and Chihli, and western Shantung. It was feudal, and practically as
separatist as mediæval Germany. The chief functions of the over-king
were to perform sacrifices, to admonish the kings and princes, and to
govern his small dynastic domain. Unity lay not so much in an effective
organization as in an idea, the feeling of a common race and especially
of a common civilization. This idea has persisted to the present. It is
adhesion to the culture of China, to its deep roots, its permanence,
its humanities, that has always made Chinamen feel themselves Chinamen;
has in fact sooner or later turned into Chinamen all alien elements,
whether they were intrusive conquerors or primitive folk, that came to be
included within the limits of the realm. In this way common customs and
ideals already united the dozen or more larger Chou states and hundreds
of dependencies; and chronic internal warfare did not prevent this era
from being the age of Confucius, Laotse, Mencius and the other great
sages that from the sixth to the fourth centuries formulated the typical
Chinese character and attitude.
During the latter part of the Chou period began a gradual reduction
of the number of feudal states, due to the larger swallowing the
smaller. By the middle of the third century, two of these had emerged as
preponderant: Ts’in in the west, centering about the Wei valley, and Ch’u
on the south, along the middle Yangtse. Both were frontier states, less
cultivated and hardier than the others, and regarded as barbarian or only
half Chinese. Ts’in may have included some Hunnish absorptions; Ch’u very
likely represented the rule of a Chinese dynasty over a native population
whose original affiliations may have been either with the non-Sinitic
Anamese of to-day, with the Shan-Siamese division, or with some closer
branch of the Sinitic family, but who were gradually assimilating the
culture and speech of the northern old China. At last, in 223 B.C., Ch’u
fell before Ts’in, and within two years the remaining states in the
northeast collapsed. For the first time China, from nearly its present
frontier to south of the Yangtse, was effectively under one active ruler,
Shi Hwang-ti, the “first emperor.” His dynasty crumbled almost at his
death, but only to be succeeded by the famous Han line, under which,
in the two centuries before and the two after Christ, China extended,
consolidated, and prospered. The boundaries of the empire were pushed, in
name at least, to virtually their present limits; and though political
control may often have been slight, cultural influence progressed rapidly
south of the Yangtse, much as Gaul became Romanized at the same time.
Even the survival of half-independent barbarian groups here and there in
the south and west has its parallel in the persistence of Keltic speech
in French Brittany. By the seventh to ninth centuries after Christ, when
the empire flourished once more under the Tang dynasty, the mass of
southern China may be considered to have been substantially assimilated.
Even the southern coast, which was the last area to be integrated,
and which retains to-day the greatest dialectic differentiations and
autonomous tendencies, had become part of the Chinese polity and
civilization. The consequence was that when in the thirteenth century the
Mongols and in the seventeenth the Manchus conquered the empire, they
accomplished little more than the overthrow of one dynasty by another.
The course of Chinese culture went on undisturbed, as it had in several
previous historic periods when half of the realm passed temporarily
under the sway of nomads or barbarians from the north.
A considerable measure of the cultural predominance of China over her
neighbors is to be ascribed to her more numerous population, which in
turn was partly due to the cultural advance. The Chinese were the first
nation to maintain a system of fairly reliable census records. In the
first century and a half after Christ, under the Hans, ten censuses
showed from 29 to 83 million inhabitants, the average being 63 millions,
or about the same as the estimated population of the Roman empire at its
height; somewhat more than that of Europe when America was discovered. A
thousand years later, between 1021 and 1580, eight censuses yielded from
43 to 100 millions, with an average of 62 millions. Under the Manchus
the population gradually rose from 125 millions in 1736 to 380 in 1881.
To-day, the northern half of China is about twice as populous as the
southern, and the eastern half exceeds the western in the same ratio.
This superior density of population in the northeast reflects the fact
that ancient China was the northeast. The same grounding in the past is
evident in the fact that from the time of the Chous until the Mongol
conquest in 1268, the imperial capitals lay mainly in Shensi or Honan,
the core of the old kingdom.
Many ingredients of modern Chinese civilization, and most of its
distinctive color, have been present in it since the opening of the
historic period. Such are the use of hemp and silk as the typical textile
materials; of jade as the precious stone of the nation; the tremendous,
life-long moral authority accorded to parents, and the associated worship
of ancestors; the unusual respect and rewards for learning; a professed
contempt for war and emotional activity; aversion for mythological and
metaphysical, scientific, or any other sort of speculation, and coupled
therewith an unflagging interest in practical ethics, in the cultivation
of character, in the finer shaping of the relations of individuals. These
and other leanings endow Chinese civilization with something persistently
idiomatic, with a quality of coherent originality. If this civilization
were less great, China and the countries influenced by it would be spoken
of as constituting what among barbarous and savage peoples we call a
culture-area. In the widest perspective, they are such. China, India,
the West—which in this view of course includes the Near East as well as
Europe—are the three great focal centers of civilization in the eastern
hemisphere. Their cultures have risen far above those of the intervening
and peripheral nations. Until quite recent centuries, the three have run
their courses with approximately equal achievement. And while exchanging
elements since prehistoric times, they have each molded both what they
borrowed and what they devised into a unified and distinctive design,
have stamped it with original patterns. In short, culture development in
China, India, and the Occident has been coördinate.
Of course, this distinctness of the three great regions of Old World
civilization does not imply that diffusion of culture elements between
them ever ceased. It is the form more than the content of civilization
that is peculiar to the three areas. From India, for instance, China
derived Buddhism, which was accorded a reception under the Hans and
cultivated with fervor in the following centuries. Cotton came in the
wake of the religion—first as a rare and valuable textile, then to be
grown. The West, within the historic period, gave glass and perhaps the
impulse toward a Chinese “invention”—porcelain, a glazed-through pottery.
In recent centuries the West acted as transmitter for several elements
of American origin, tobacco, for example, and maize, which quickly
became an important food-plant in parts of China. There have even been
reimportations. Gunpowder is said to have been used for fireworks in
China in the fifth century, for war in the twelfth, but its employment
for the propulsion of missiles from firearms is due to introduction by
the Altaic nations in the fifteenth century. From the fourth century B.C.
on, there are repeated references in Chinese sources to the magnetic
needle and to “south-pointing chariots”—apparently a compass-like device
used on land, though probably only as a mechanical toy. Then the needle
was applied to geomantic purposes, until Arab or other foreign sailors
took it up as a true mariner’s compass, and in the eleventh or twelfth
century reintroduced it to the Chinese as an instrument of navigation.
Nor was civilization as stagnant in China as the outsider is likely
to think, who becomes aware first of all of its persistent native
flavor. The old war chariot, for instance, went out of use about
contemporaneously in China and the West. Printing from engraved blocks
was in vogue in the sixth century after Christ, from movable clay types
in the dynasties between the Tangs and the Mongols, from metal types
not much later, since the art was established among the imitating
Koreans in the fifteenth century. A system of classifying the numerous
characters was invented before the Tangs; the modern one of grouping
them according to 214 radicals, under the Mings. True encyclopædias were
first compiled in the fourteenth century—four hundred years earlier than
in the West. The system of awarding office on the basis of literary
examinations took root under the Hans and became organized under the
Tangs. The earliest poetry, three thousand years ago, was rimed, and
had four or five monosyllabic words in the line. In the Tang time, the
line became extended to seven words; and still later was the origin of
the peculiar rhythm of alternating tones—a system by which every other
word was one bearing the “even” tone and those between any of the other
tones. Paper making is said to date from the Hans, and paper money was
first issued—disastrously as in some of the first Western attempts—under
the Mongols. These and dozens of other instances that might be compiled
exemplify, as does the history of ancient Egypt, that even those
cultures constantly move to which one is tempted to apply the stigma
“conservative” or “tradition-bound.”
253. THE LOLOS
Scattered in the mountains of southern and western China are a number of
barbarous, semi-independent peoples of distinctive ways and speech who
maintain their national or tribal status. They seem on first contact to
promise a picture of the pre-Chinese culture of the area, but examination
shows their customs to be a blend of primitive and advanced, ancient and
recent elements. The Lolos of Szechuan may serve as an example. They eat
meat from their herds, use no milk, but wear woolen clothing. They grow
neither cotton nor rice. They raise oats, buckwheat, maize, and potatoes.
Two of these plants are of north or west Asiatic origin; the others are
American. Plows are used. Houses are of lashed bamboos, and rain-coats
of palm-fiber. No pottery is made, but iron is worked into weapons and
tools by native smiths. The Lolos are warlike. They fight like Malaysians
with lance and sword. They are organized “feudally,” into nobility and
commoners, with tribal heads or lords. They marry cousins. Religion
resembles that of the more backward Indo-Chinese and Malaysian peoples.
Sorcerer-priests cure disease; sacrifice animals for their blood, the
flesh being eaten; offer also fermented liquor; divine the future by
observing parts of the sacrificed animals—the cracks that develop in
heated shoulder-blades (§ 97). There is a native system of writing,
which seems to derive from Chinese stimulus, if not sources. It is
obvious that this culture has fused together very old elements that are
characteristic of southeastern Asia, with elements that have flowed in
from remote sources or during the most recent centuries. It is also clear
that certain ingredients of Chinese culture have been freely absorbed and
others rejected by this mountain people.
Such cultures as that of the Lolos may be described as internally
marginal or peripheral. They differ from externally marginal cultures,
like those of the Bushmen, Australians, Fuegians, in that the latter, on
account of their geographical remoteness, have retained their ancient
level with relative purity. Included marginal cultures, on the contrary,
being of necessity exposed to subsequent influences, are regularly a
mixture of belated and recent ingredients, no matter how well integrated
these may have become.
254. KOREA
Korea has repeatedly been under the political authority of China, more
often autonomous, but for three thousand years has been dependent on
China culturally. Non-Chinese influences have also reached it: such
as an alphabet of Indian origin (§ 149); and probably the earliest
iron industry came in from Altaic sources. In its turn, the peninsula
transmitted to Japan: until about a thousand years ago, Chinese writing
and culture reached Japan mainly via Korea. The spread of Chinese
civilization was perhaps largely of the usual, slow, diffusing kind,
but was several times accelerated by the settlement in Korea of groups
of Chinese refugees, colonists, or adventurers; for instance in Chou
and Han times. The center of power and civilization within Korea has
gradually moved southwards, which suggests the waning of original central
Asiatic affiliations as Chinese ones became stronger. The first realm
to be defined was Fuyu on the Sungari river. Then followed Kokorai or
Korai, whence our name Korea. In the centuries immediately before and
after Christ, Shinra and then Hiaksai, farther south on the peninsula,
came into the lead. By the beginning of this period not only the writing
but the classic books of China had been introduced. Since the fourteenth
century Confucianism has been the state religion—though the people had
long before become Buddhists—and literary examinations for office of the
Chinese type have been in vogue.
255. JAPAN
Japan is the one country of eastern Asia from which considerable
prehistoric data are available. There are indeed no indubitable evidences
of any Palæolithic culture or race, but shellheaps and burial mounds
abound and have been explored. The shell deposits, of which 4,000 have
been found, are probably the accumulation of refuse of occupation by the
Ainu, the first known inhabitants of Japan, now surviving only in the
extreme north of the island chain and in Sakhalien, and still a primitive
people. This race is different from the Japanese, and has often been
classified as Caucasian (§ 27). The shell deposits show the aborigines
to have been fishers and hunters, without agriculture or edible domestic
animals. They had the bow, dog, incised hand-made pottery, and ground
stone axes, and were thus approximately in an early Neolithic stage.
A somewhat dubious bronze age is sparsely represented in southern Japan.
It has been ascribed to an invasion about the seventh century B.C., but
is perhaps only an early phase of the iron age. Iron was brought in at a
time not precisely determined, but likely to have been about the fourth
century B.C., by the so-called Yamato people—evidently the ancestors
of the Japanese of to-day—who seem to have come from Korea and at any
rate occupied the southern islands first. Thence they fought their way
northward, gaining territory at the expense of the natives but slowly.
Fifteen centuries ago the northern third of the main island was still
in Ainu possession. These early Japanese erected megalithic chambers or
corridors as tombs for their princes, covering them with mounds of earth.
More than 3,000 of these structures are known. The early emperors were
buried in double mounds, some of them of great area. From the fifth to
the seventh century Korean influence was strong; the Chinese writing
and classics were imported from that country. Later relations between
the two nations were more intermittent, perhaps because of the growing
consolidation and strength of Japan from the eighth century on.
The cultural debt of Japan to China is great, but less than that of
Korea. The Japanese added 47 purely phonetic syllabic characters to
the Chinese writing, in order to represent their own proper names,
grammatical forms, and the like. These characters would have sufficed for
a simple, efficient, and purely native script, but have remained a mere
supplement to the ideographic Chinese system (§ 105). The mandarin and
examination system of China were never taken over by the Japanese, who
clung to their feudal customs more than two thousand years later than
China. The ancestor worship of the Chinese and the official Confucian
religion also did not become established in Japan, the state cult
being Shinto, the crystallization of a primitive set of rites and of a
mythology which has parallels in the Occident, in the East Indies and
Oceania, and even in North America, rather than in China.
An early Malaysian strain in both Japanese race and culture has been
alleged, but this is a subject on which more evidence is needed. Japanese
speech does not elucidate the origins of the nation, the language—like
that of Korea—not being determined as related to any other. The physical
type, on the other hand, and this applies also to Korea, is allied to
that of China.
256. CENTRAL AND NORTHERN ASIA
It has become a habit to regard central and northern Asia as a hive for
humanity, as the area from which nations and races have chronically
swarmed. Whenever the origin of a people remains obscure, be they
Neandertals, Alpines, Sumerians, Chinese, Japanese, Aryans, or what not,
some one propounds the convenient hypothesis of deriving them from this
vast interior land, which in many cases amounts to an explanation of the
half-known by the unknown. Of late there has been added the fashion of
attributing the expansions to climatic drying-up of central Asia, which
forced the population out. There appears to be considerable evidence of
such progressive desiccation; but its degree, and still more the extent
of its influence upon culture and emigration, remain to be ascertained.
A more balanced view would concede the recurrence and occasional
destructiveness of the invasions out of central Asia, but would view them
rather as transient and relatively superficial phenomena from the point
of view of civilization; and on the other hand would recognize that under
all the boiling of tribes and peoples, the growth and spread of culture
went steadily on, even in the tracts which one is wont to associate only
with the perpetual breeding of elusive and devastating nomads. In short,
it is wise to guard against a natural overestimation of the sensational,
cataclysmic aspects of the history of the interior Asiatic peoples. It is
their spasmodic irruptions which the self-centered nations of the West,
of India, and of China, have been chiefly concerned with. Their attempts
at achieving stability, their increments to the world’s culture, their
rôle as peaceful transmitters, have lain at home, largely out of vision
of the peoples clustered about the foci of civilization.
It may be added that the temptation to the outsider to burst by force
into the seats of wealth and splendor as soon as firmness of guard
slackens, is not confined to Ural-Altaians, but is ever present in
history. Amorites, Hebrews, Arabs, Æthiopians, Lybians, Greeks, Kelts,
Germans, Hindus, and Malays have all played this part at one time or
another. Semite, Hamite, and Aryan are no different in such regard from
Ural-Altaian, except that in the short span conventionally known as
history the former have happened more often to be the ins and haves,
the central Asiatics the outs and have-nots. Further, the destructive
effect of nomad migrations, even where accompanied by mass settlement of
population, is everywhere transient so far as civilization is concerned.
Hebrew and Hellenic, Arab and Germanic tribes did crash cities and
empires before them, but they tore down only what was already moribund,
and brought in new systems of thought, new methods of feeling and
organization, which, however crude at first, soon added new qualities to
culture. The chief distinction of the north Asiatics is that, excepting
some terror-striking massacres, they were both less subversive and less
constructive culturally than Semites and Indo-Europeans. They barely
dented the civilization of the West as they barely dented that of India
and China. If Russia is backward as compared with western Europe, it is
not from having been Tatar-ruled a few centuries, but because Russia
has long been peripheral to the Mediterranean focus of civilization and
therefore chronically belated. It was the very thinness of her culture
that made mediæval Russia succumb to the Mongol wave which pounded vainly
against the more consolidated civilization of central Europe and quickly
drew off.
To define the exact contribution of the North Asiatics to civilization
is difficult: partly because of the comparative paucity of available
archæological and historical records; partly because their habitat did
not contain one of the greater hearths of civilization at which its most
distinctive forms were sweated out. The area has always been relatively
though not extremely peripheral. The horse, indeed, can be set down as
one important gift of the Ural-Altaic peoples or their predecessors to
general civilization. It is only in central Asia that a wild horse—not
a tame breed that has run wild—is to be found; and it seems to have
been from the north that soon after 2000 B.C. the animal was introduced
into Mesopotamia and India. Biological considerations also point to
interior Asia as the most likely area of first domestication of several
of the earlier fundamental animals of culture, especially the sheep and
goat. The comparatively advanced culture of Anau in Turkistan in the
Neolithic and early Bronze periods is also significant, even though
this site lies only just within the great steppe and plateau country.
Some of the jade and jade-like stone used for tools and ornaments in
the Swiss lake-dwellings appears to have come from inner Turkistan. The
probability of the central Asiatic peoples having been the transmitters
of metals, cattle, grains and other important groups of culture elements
from the Near to the Far East has already been mentioned, as has the
established trade between China and the Mediterranean world in Roman
times (§ 251). Indeed the very character of the country and cultural
conditions which favored a considerable degree, though not an absolute
prevalence, of nomadism in interior Asia, seem also to have fostered, in
many periods, a longer range of trade than flourished elsewhere. Finally,
it appears that the Turks and Mongols had at least a hand in the early
use of gunpowder for firearms; and, as already mentioned, the first
state paper money, that of China, was issued by a Mongol dynasty. It is
scarcely rash to predict that the intensive study of the interior Asiatic
peoples from both prehistoric and historic sources, without speculative
bias or plunging of opinion, will prove one of the most illuminating
contributions to the history of general civilization.
The original unity of the Ural-Altaians—with the Turks, Mongols,
and Tungus-Manchu as the Altaic or definitely Asiatic group,
Finno-Ugrians as Uralic or Eurasian, and Samoyeds as specifically
Arctic representatives—is accepted on linguistic grounds by almost
all authorities in the field. Yet the career of the several divisions
has been diverse. The Finno-Ugrians have mainly been peaceful: the
Finns definitely so for two thousand years: the Hungarian Magyars were
exceptional when they terrorized central Europe a thousand years ago.
Both these nations have long since become integrally absorbed into
European culture. They are the only Ural-Altaic peoples with this
experience. The remainder of the Finno-Ugrians have for some centuries
become increasingly submerged under Russian civilization; much as in the
Far East the Manchu-Tungus have gradually fallen more and more under
either Chinese or, of late, Russian cultural influence. As between the
Turks and Mongols, the greatest single conquest, that of Djengis Khan and
his successors, falls to the record of the latter; but the Turks have
been the more numerous, stable, and advanced people. They have frequently
settled as well as invaded; and are the only known stock, as previously
mentioned (§ 245), that has ever seriously and permanently encroached
on territory once held by Indo-Europeans—in Asia Minor and the Caspian
region. The later so-called Mongol conquests, those of Tamerlane and
the Indian Moguls, were made by armies mainly of Turks under dynasties
tracing back to former Mongol leaders. The Turks in general have inclined
to Mohammedanism on coming into contact with the world religions, the
Mongols to Buddhism, although Christianity in its Nestorian form once
made considerable numbers of converts among both.
Several important historic peoples cannot yet be assigned with certainty
to one or the other of the Ural-Altaic divisions, or are variously
classified: thus the Huns, most likely to have been Turks; the White Huns
or Ephthalites; the Avars; and the ancient Bulgars.
In northern and eastern Siberia there live, besides the Samoyed, a
series of non-Ural-Altaic peoples, truly peripheral and retarded in
culture, who seem once to have occupied larger areas but to have
shrunk or been partially absorbed before Ural-Altaic expansion. These
include the tribes sometimes grouped as Yeniseian; the Yukaghir; the
Kamchadal-Koryak-Chukchi group; a few Eskimo who have either failed to
cross Behring strait or have come across it from America; and perhaps the
Ainu of Japan and Sakhalien. These have been called the Palæo-Asiatic
peoples, though their diverse languages render their community of origin
dubious. How far they may be considered as following a positively similar
culture, except in direct response to an extreme climate, is also
doubtful. Their rigorously marginal position and depriving environment
stamp their culture with a preponderance of negative traits. The
possession of domesticated reindeer is common to several of these peoples
as well as to the Tungus and the Finno-Ugric Lapps of northern Russia and
Scandinavia. Reindeer-breeding among these groups appears to be due to
a transmission, in the sense of being a reflex of contact, an imitation
of the cattle or horse breeding of the more favorably situated nations
to the south. It is also interesting and probably significant that the
American Eskimos never domesticated the reindeer, although they depended
largely upon its hunt.
Racially the array of north and central Asiatic peoples shades from
pronounced Caucasian to extreme Mongoloid type. The Mongols have given
name to their whole larger racial stock, and the Tungus-Manchu and
northeast Siberian savages clearly form part thereof. The Turks in the
main are rather Caucasian, although all intergradations occur according
to region; as also among the Finno-Ugrians. The Hungarians to-day are
not only Caucasians but Alpines; the Finns definite Nordics; the Lapps a
strange partial graft of Nordic traits on broad faced and broad headed
Mongolian physique.
257. INDIA
India is not a country, but a connected block of lands shut off from the
remainder of the world by lofty mountains and harboring a population
approximating those of Europe and of China. Its 300,000,000 inhabitants
constitute nearly a fifth of humanity. Historically, India forms a
continent as fully as does Africa. Culturally, it must be equated with
the Occidental or Mediterranean area and with China as one of the three
great and substantially coördinate focal points which civilization
developed in the eastern hemisphere.
Racially the peoples of India are prevailingly Caucasian, but both the
two other great stocks are represented. Nearly everywhere, but especially
in the south, there is an evident admixture of a dark skinned, broad
nosed, long headed type. This is more likely to have had Australoid
than Negro affinities before its absorption; remnants of it, like the
Veddas of Ceylon and Irulas and some other tribes of the Deccan, are
often grouped with more easterly peoples as representatives of an
original Indo-Australoid race (§ 24, 27, 260). So far as this race can
be reconstructed, it seems to have been less Negroid than the Australian
of to-day; that is, it possessed more Caucasian resemblances. In fact,
it might almost be described as proto-Caucasian. In this light the
modern Hindu[37] would be a varying mixture of two related strains—the
undifferentiated proto-Caucasian, approximating the Australian and
perhaps having ultimate Negroid relations without being Negroid; and
the specialized Caucasian typical of the Occident; the former strongest
in the south, the latter almost pure in the northwest of India. This
hypothesis has this to commend it: it squares with the facts that the
Hindu in spite of his dark complexion makes almost universally the
impression of being essentially “white” in race; and that he differs
outstandingly from what a mulatto-like blend of Negro and Caucasian would
be.
In the north and east of India, Mongolian resemblances begin to appear,
as the natural result of thousands of years of contact of two stocks.
It would seem that the proportions of racial blood in India, and in the
rough their geographical distribution, parallel the proportions of the
numbers of speakers of tongues belonging to the several families. More
than three-fourths of the Hindus speak Indo-European dialects. Most of
the remainder are Dravidas in the south and Kolarians in the east central
parts—the same regions in which the Indo-Australoid or proto-Caucasian
element is most conspicuous. Along the northeastern edge, Tibeto-Burman
speech has spilled in with the Mongolian type. However, while the races
have blended, the languages have remained distinct. As almost everywhere,
the linguistic classification is therefore clearer cut in India than
the racial one. Consequently it is misleading to infer from a Hindu’s
speaking a Sanskrit-derived language that his Caucasian blood is pure,
or conversely to conclude that all Dravidians have broad noses and black
skins.
The Kolarians have been thought by some to possess ancient linguistic
relatives to the east (§ 50), and certainly possess cultural ones in this
direction (§ 262). Dravidian speech has not been thus connected, even
tentatively, and one indication points to its former westward extension:
the Brahui language in Beluchistan, which appears to be the remnant of an
old Dravidian offshoot.
The ancient culture of India is inadequately known. Archæological
exploration and analysis have been insufficient; yet they have gone far
enough to suggest that the prehistoric development followed different
lines from those in the West, so that the findings of European prehistory
cannot be applied to interpret such knowledge as there is on India. Thus
the Lower Palæolithic stage is well represented in India, but there
is nothing to show whether or not it was contemporaneous with that of
Europe. There is some possibility that it passed into the Neolithic
without the intervening Upper Palæolithic which is so important in
western Europe (§ 213). It seems dubious whether there was a true Bronze
Age in India. More pre-iron implements of pure copper seem to have been
found than of tin bronze.
The early Kolarian culture seems preserved in considerable degree among
the modern Kolarians, who are backward hill or forest tribes, that is,
internally peripheral to the prevalent higher civilization. At any
rate, their culture resembles that of many less advanced populations
to the east, well out into Oceania. This presumably ancient and partly
surviving “Indo-Oceanic” culture is discussed below (§ 262). As regards
its history within India, this is almost certain: the old culture is
nowhere any longer pure, but has regularly absorbed elements of the
advanced civilization that surrounds it; and conversely has contributed
to the latter. For instance, one of the great recognized cults of India
is Sivaism, which tends frequently to bloodiness and obscenity and is a
strange mixture of philosophical rationalization and crass superstition.
One of the most frequent attributes of Siva is a necklace of skulls; a
feature that looks as if it might go back to the skull cult which is a
typical ingredient of Indo-Oceanic culture.
The old Dravidian culture was probably more advanced than the Kolarian
but is more difficult to reconstruct because of its extensive blending
with the culture brought in or developed by Indo-Europeans. The
Dravidians, perhaps because they were the more advanced and populous,
were able to accept the intrusive culture and yet maintain themselves,
whereas the Kolarians either preserved themselves by resisting
civilization or had their speech and identity absorbed by it. When
the Dravidians first begin to creep into history, shortly before the
Christian era, they already possess cities, kingdoms, commerce, writing,
and philosophy. They have on the whole contributed less to Indian
civilization than the Indo-Europeans: its center always lay in the north;
but they have long formed an integral part of it.
The Indo-Europeans are first known to us from their religious hymns,
the Vedas, which have been preserved as sacrosanct by succeeding ages,
and constitute the oldest continuously transmitted documents in history.
They date from 2000 or 1500 to not after 1000 B.C., and are in Sanskrit,
which is fairly close to Avestan or Old Persian, the two languages and
their descendants constituting the Indo-Iranian or proper Aryan branch of
Indo-European. When Indo-European as a whole is designated as Aryan, it
is by an extension of the term. The region of India to which the Vedas
almost wholly refer is the Indus drainage, that is the northwest, the
parts adjoining the Iranian highland, whence the invaders came or through
which they passed.
Vedic Aryan culture was of late Bronze Age type. Whether the bronze was
really such, or copper, it is mentioned more frequently than iron, as in
Homer and the older books of the Bible. Grains, cattle, horses, chariots
and wagons, the plow, wool and weaving, gold, patriarchal chieftains
and a tribal society, a nature mythology, non-communal rituals with
constant but prevailingly bloodless sacrifices, are the characteristics
of this culture. It smacks more of the Europe of its time than of the
contemporary Orient. It is unbound, ready to pack up and move without
being essentially nomadic; half peasant-like and half aristocratic; an
uncitified semi-civilization, pioneer rather than backwoods. The temples
and writing, walled towns and kingdoms, district gods and royal tombs of
Egypt, Babylon, Canaan, Minoan Greece are wanting. The picture is that
of the first historic Indo-Europeans elsewhere, in eastern and central
Europe; with whom the Aryans undoubtedly were or had been in connection
through the countries north of the Black and Caspian seas.
A few centuries after the Vedas, the culture depicted by the literary
remains is profoundly altered. The scene has shifted to the Ganges
valley. There are cities and palaces, wealth and pomp. There are kings,
priests, townsmen, peasants, hermits and ascetics. Caste is in vogue.
Cotton and rice are in use. There is a deal of philosophizing; life
appears complex and difficult; pessimism is abroad, soul rebirth taken
for granted, spirituality emphasized. Concepts to which western science
later returned, the atom and ether, are familiar. In all essentials,
post-Christian Hinduism had been blocked out in this pre-Christian
period. Only a few elements like money and writing are lacking.
This change from the Vedic age is not fully accounted for, and the time
usually allowed for its occurrence is insufficient. Buddha was born B.C.
563 or 557. His religion assumes ideas which are part of the Sankhya
philosophy—in many ways the subtlest philosophy of all India and one of
the great thought systematizations of the world. Its founder Kapila is
placed about 600 B.C., and must have had predecessors. Caste seems a
thing of development. It is absent in the Vedas, but Buddhism is already
in a measure a protest against it. It seems difficult to squeeze such
growths into a few hundred years. It is true that the florescence of
Greece came with a rush; but Greek civilization rose from the debris of
the older Minoan one and was in contact with the cultures of Asia. In
India there is no sign of an antecedent high civilization, and a greater
dearth of known foreign influences between 1000 and 600 B.C. than at
any other period. The transposition of the cultural center eastward
must enter into the problem. Perhaps a larger and wealthier pre-Aryan
population was encountered by the Aryans along the Ganges, contact
and mixture with whom proved provocative of innovation. Or possibly
the movement and development in the east began while the Vedas were
still being composed along the Indus, and were ignored by them. Or,
conceivably, the Aryans on the Ganges may have been the first comers,
who quickly altered in the direction of their future civilization but
remained obscure to our vision during the period in which the Vedas
were being made or retained by the later comers of the Punjab, in whose
memories and sub-arid environment their former steppe culture remained
more unmodified. These are only speculations: they emphasize the gap in
our understanding of this important chapter of world culture history.
258. INDIAN CASTE AND RELIGION
Caste is peculiarly Indian. Nowhere else is it so complex, so
systematically worked out and endlessly reinforced by ritual and taboo,
so pervasive of conduct and thought. It has been ascribed to the
conflict of races, to the drawing of a color line by conquerors in order
to keep their lineage and culture pure. If so, it has failed egregiously,
as the physical anthropology of modern India shows. The explanation is
obviously inadequate. Castes do represent race to a certain extent, but
they also represent nationalities, tribes, common residence, religious
distinctness, occupations, cultural status. Whatever sets off a group in
any way may be sufficient to make it a caste in India. If groups diverge
within an established caste, they become recognized as sub-castes,
perhaps finally to develop into wholly separate castes. Priests, nobles,
clerks, fishermen, street-sweepers are castes; so are the Parsis; so are
hill tribes that maintain their primitive customs—the Dravidian Todas
for instance are reckoned a high caste. Clearly we have here a generic
system, a pattern of organizing society, into which every sort of group
as it actually forms is fitted. Caste is a way of thought which the Hindu
has tried to universalize.
All Indian castes are in theory strictly endogamous: intermarriage is
intolerable. All possess an intrinsic, unchangeable worth. Thus they
automatically rank themselves. Each possesses an occupation, a mode of
life and customs, a set of prescribed rituals, inherently peculiar to
it. The greater the restrictions and prohibitions incumbent upon it, the
less it relaxes to comfort and indifference, and the more spiritual it
is, the higher its grade. In consequence it is also the more pollutable,
and so its restrictions are drawn the closer. The wider the gap of
non-intercourse, of non-contact with lower castes, the greater becomes
its purity. Caste observance is thus a virtue, an aid to religion
and morality; breaking caste an ultimate indecency; the offspring of
inter-caste unions necessarily lower than either parent, and their
descendants, unless from matings with their own miserable kind, lower
still, in an infinitely descending series. There is no elevating a caste.
The very attempt to rise is a vice that brings degradation as a result,
since castes are eternal, founded in nature, absolute, so that alteration
is of necessity a sullying.
Such is the Hindu scheme—which in actuality is lived up to in no single
point. Perverse as the system seems to men reared in other cultures, it
must be admitted to possess completeness, self-consistency, and the
desire to preserve inward worth. It differs from the basic assumptions of
our civilization in that it sees value as something already existing and
therefore to be maintained, not to be created; it tries to fit life into
a theoretical pattern; it is futureless. Yet all the facts show that as
historical realities castes have changed enormously and are changing now.
Obviously therefore each generation ignores the changes last made and
repeats its insistence on caste perpetuity and unalterability. Such is
the hold of patterns on men’s minds.
The theorizing which the Hindu does about caste is characteristic of him
in all cultural manifestations. The relation which can be thought out
between one fact or act and others, the compartment to which it can be
assigned in a system, are of more interest to him, as compared with the
fact itself, than to peoples of other civilizations. Hence philosophy
has flourished in India, but native history has been inadequate and
disorderly. Hence too the abstract sciences of logic, mathematics,
grammar enjoyed an early original development, equal for a long time
and in part antecedent to that which they attained in the West. On the
other hand the astronomical and still more the physical and biological
sciences remained backward: they were concerned with concrete objects.
The Hindus seem never to have made a move of their own toward devising
a system of writing; but once the Semitic alphabet had been introduced,
they modified, expanded, and rearranged it into a more logical scheme,
a more consistent one phonetically, than any other people has given it
(§ 146). It is probably no accident that chess and our “Arabic” position
numerals with a symbol for zero (§ 109) are Hindu inventions, and that it
is only in India that priests have for age after age been ranked higher
than rulers.
It is natural that a culture of such inclinations should exalt the
mind and soul above the body. Hence the extraordinary development of
asceticism in Indian religion; its deep pessimism as regards life on
this earth; its insistence on the superior reality of soul, with which
is connected the universal assumption of rebirths; the working out of a
system of unescapable moral causality called _karma_ in place of a scheme
of mechanical causation; the tendencies toward pantheistic identification
of soul and God, or atheistic denial of divinity as distinct from
soul; and the thoroughly anti-materialistic bent of almost all Hindu
philosophy. It is also intelligible that these qualities should have
imparted to Indian religion a superior degree of spiritual intensity
which was appreciated by the nations to the north and east when Buddhism
was presented to them, and caused them to embrace it.
Like Christianity, however, Buddhism found no permanent favor among
the people and in the land of its origin. It flourished in India for a
time, but was rarely looked upon as more than a sect; after something
over a thousand years it died out completely, except in Ceylon, at the
very period that its hold on non-Indian nations to the north and east
was strengthening. Its place was taken in India by the miscellaneous
assemblage of cults, all theoretically recognizing Brahman ascendancy,
that in the aggregate constitute what is known as Hinduism. Hinduism
is not a religion in the sense that Christianity, Mohammedanism,
Buddhism are “religions.” It recognizes no personal founder, no head or
establishment; it tends to exclude foreigners rather than to convert
them; it is national instead of universal. It accepts and reinforces the
existing institutions of its particular culture: caste, for instance,
which Buddhism tried to transcend. Hinduism is therefore comparable to
the ancient Greek and early west Asiatic religions in consisting of a
series of locally or tribally different cults never integrated or fully
harmonized, conscious and tolerant of one another, resting on common
assumptions and similar in content, everywhere in accord with tradition
and usage, resistive to organization into a larger whole but tied into a
certain unity through reflecting a more or less common civilization.
Hinduism is also comparable to Confucianism and Shintoism with this
difference. These grew up analogously, but early became associated with
the central government or imperial authority, to which India never
attained. They gradually became official religions, as which they
survive; such religious piety as the population of China and Japan
experiences finding its outlet chiefly through Buddhism. Buddhism may be
said to have failed in India because it aimed at being a world religion;
because it tried to be international instead of national, to overlie all
cultures instead of identifying itself with one. The Hindu like the Jew
preferred remaining within the limits of his nationality and particular
civilization.
259. RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA AND THE OUTER WORLD
The first culture influence whose entry into India can be traced in any
detail was that carried by the Vedic Aryans from the northwest. In fact,
as already mentioned, more is known about this importation than of what
it encountered in India. In the post-Vedic period, the introduction of
the Semitic alphabet suggests that other cultural ingredients also flowed
into India from the west without direct record being preserved of their
transmission. The Persian and Macedonian conquests extended only over
the westernmost margin of India and were of little direct influence.
But the latter was followed by a semi-Hellenization of southwestern
Asia, including for instance the establishment of a Græco-Bactrian
kingdom in southern Turkistan and Afghanistan, adjacent to India; and
for several centuries a stream of Greek culture elements trickled into
the heart of India. Sculpture, architecture, astronomy, drama, coinage,
derived new impetus, in some cases even their origin, from this source.
In some instances the Hindus were no more than copiers of Hellenistic
models: Greek hangs and folds were given to sculptured garments, Greek
astronomical measurements taken over without change. Yet as the centuries
wore on and new imports along these lines lessened and then died out,
the introduced elements became more deeply incorporated into Indian
civilization, modified and encrusted more and more heavily by distinctive
Hindu styles, until now their superficial appearance makes an impression
of independent native growth. The working over of the Semitic alphabet
into its Hindu forms may be taken as typical of the nature and degree of
this remodeling of the Hellenistic culture imports.
Soon after 700 A.D. commenced a series of Mohammedan invasions and
conquests—Arab, Afghan, and Mongol-Turkish—also from the northwest, and
of course accompanied by a new series of culture influences—firearms, for
instance, and the true arch—which in their turn underwent absorption and
partial transformation.
The flow of culture between India and the Mediterranean world has not
been wholly eastward. Cotton; the common domestic fowl; probably the
buffalo and rice; perhaps asceticism, monastic life, and certain mystic
points of view; position numerals with zero; chess; and some of the
concepts of modern philology, were transmitted westward. Eastern Africa
was influenced, largely through the medium of Arab sea trade. Towards
the north and northeast as far as Mongolia and Japan, India has been
a dispenser of culture content and has taken little in return. Toward
the southeast, Indian influence has been the largest component in the
civilization of Indo-China and the East Indian archipelago, which as
regards their higher attainments may be regarded as cultural dependencies
or extensions of India.
260. INDO-CHINA
Farther India or Indo-China, the great southeastern peninsula of Asia,
falls somewhat short of India and China in area, is less densely
inhabited, and contains a population which is of definitely Mongolian
type except for some scattered fragments of hill tribes. On the basis
of speech, four groups are to be distinguished. In the southwestern and
southeastern corners of the peninsula, in the former kingdoms of Pegu
and Cambodia, are the Mon and the Khmer, certainly related to each other
and perhaps distantly connected with the Malayo-Polynesian family. On
the east are the Anamese, with a monosyllabic, tonal language whose
affiliations are doubtful. It contains a Chinese element, but perhaps
by absorption rather than by original connection. The center and west
of Indo-China are occupied respectively by the peoples of the T’ai or
Siamese-Shan and Tibeto-Burman groups, both probably collateral offshoots
with Chinese from what may be called the original Sinitic stock (§ 50).
The movement of population has clearly been out of inner Asia into the
peninsula. The Mon-Khmer are situated like half submerged remnants. Burma
on the map hangs from Tibet like the outgrowth that it probably is. Seven
centuries ago, the T’ai empire was centered in Yünnan, in southwestern
China. Siam represents a southward shift of the seat of T’ai power after
Mongol conquest (Fig. 12).
The Malay peninsula is Siamese in its narrow or neck portion. The head
is inhabited by three racial groups. The Semang in the interior are
pure Negritos. The Sakai or Senoi, also in the interior, are short in
stature, dark, and broad nosed, but wavy-haired. They resemble a series
of hill tribes scattered from India to the East Indies: the Vedda of
Ceylon, the Irula and other tribes of southern India, the Toala of
Celebes (§ 27, 257). Perhaps the Kolarians or Munda-Kol of central
India, the Moi and other groups of Indo-China, the Nicobar islanders,
and certain nationalities of Sumatra are also to be reckoned as
partial representatives of the same type. This race, if it is such, is
generalized, with certain Caucasian and other Negroid but few Mongoloid
resemblances. It is perhaps to be classed as Australoid, and has been
named Indo-Australoid. The third racial group of the peninsula are the
Malays, who, at least in large part, are emigrants in comparatively
recent centuries from Sumatra. Culturally the Malay peninsula belongs
with the East Indies rather than with Indo-China.
Three main layers of civilization are evident in Indo-China. The old
native culture was allied to that of the East Indies and the islands
beyond—whatever the speech may have been. Even to-day backward tribes of
both regions, especially inland, often show strikingly similar customs:
the use of bark cloth, for instance, separate houses for unmarried men
and girls. This culture remains fairly well defined in spots as far west
as Assam and the Kolarian region of India.
The two other civilizations have flowed in from India and China.
Practically everything of higher culture in Indo-China traces back
directly to these two countries. The Indian influence has been both wider
and deeper than the Chinese. It brought in Buddhism and writing, and
colored art and architecture. This Indian influence began more than two
thousand years ago, and while it may have weakened somewhat after India’s
return from Buddhism to Brahmanism, it has never ceased. As there were
no notable Indian conquests, this influence is an excellent example of
the normal, gradual type of cultural pervading. Chinese contacts are
equally old as the Indian, but have mostly remained confined to the area
adjacent to the Middle Kingdom. The Anamese have adopted the Chinese
system of family names, Confucianism, literary examinations, and the
like, sometimes more largely as a conscious endeavor than in fact.
261. OCEANIA
From the Malay peninsula the vast island region of Oceania stretches
eastward to within two thousand miles of America. Australia deserves
to be set apart on account of its continental size, isolation, and
ancient biological independence. Oceania proper falls into five natural
divisions. These are Indonesia or Malaysia[38] or the East Indies, where
large islands are scattered among many small ones; Papua or New Guinea;
and three tracts of relatively small, widely separated islands rising out
of the depths of the Pacific: Melanesia, a broken chain southeastward
from New Guinea; Micronesia, to the northeast; and Polynesia, far
eastward. Two primary facts stand out in regard to the inhabitants. Papua
and Melanesia are peopled with blacks, the Oceanic Negroids; the other
regions have brown inhabitants of prevailingly Mongoloid affiliations.
Linguistically a single fundamental speech, the Malayo-Polynesian,
prevails over all of Oceania except Papua, whose tongues so far as known
fail to connect with any others or with one another. Large unanswered
problems inhere in these distributions: how the Oceanic Negroids are
related to those of Africa, from whom they are so remote geographically
but whom they resemble so strikingly in type; how the black Melanesians
came to talk dialects of Malayo-Polynesian,[39] which otherwise is a
speech of brown peoples. More in detail, there are questions such
as where and how the Polynesians developed their somewhat aberrant
racial characteristics; what may be the relations of a more and a less
specifically Mongoloid, a broader and a longer headed strain, among the
East Indians; and whether the latter of these connects racially with the
“Indo-Australians.”
262. THE EAST INDIES
Culturally, the East Indies are the most diverse of the Oceanic regions,
in that the various islands, and within the larger islands adjacent
districts, sometimes contain populations heavily tinctured with Asiatic
civilization, sometimes tribes whose customs are far more aboriginal.
However, there is no people in the East Indies that has wholly escaped
the influence of Asiatic culture: the difference is always one of degree,
although ranging from what is currently called semi-civilization to
savagery. The profoundest influence has been exerted by India. This began
nearly two thousand years ago and remained active for over a thousand; it
introduced architecture, sculpture, writing, monarchy, religion, iron,
cotton, and a host of other elements of higher culture. The earlier
Indian influence was Buddhist and its seat of power centered in southern
Sumatra; the later was Brahman and reached its zenith in Java. The
number of immigrants was probably small, their effect enormous. A group
of refugees, a younger son of a royal house with his retinue, a band of
adventurers, would found a colony, sometimes conquering the natives,
sometimes attaching them peacefully to their leadership, and soon a
little kingdom was flourishing, which in time sent out other offshoots or
absorbed its rivals until its name commanded respect and tribute for long
distances across the sea. It was a procedure which the Mohammedanized
Malays later repeated over the East Indies, and which on the Asiatic
continent some centuries earlier had carried Chinese civilization far to
the north and south of its original limits, and Aryan speech and culture
throughout India. The kingdoms struggled, throve, decayed, and succeeded
one another; the permanent aspect of the process was the ever deeper
though irregular permeation of life with new arts and ideas.
The influence of China came later and was less than that of India. In the
thirteenth century the Sumatran Malays were converted to Mohammedanism
and began a career of expansion which culminated in the complete conquest
of Java by 1478, carried their faith over much of the area, and was
checked only by the advent of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Dutch.
Mohammedanism, besides its cult and law, introduced some new elements of
culture, such as firearms; but perhaps its most important effect was that
it put an end to the growth of the specifically Indian type of influence
in Malaysia.
Underlying these strains from the historic civilizations of Asia was a
semi-primitive culture, many of whose elements were shared by the East
Indians with the Indo-Chinese and Melanesians, and which in part can
be traced from India to Polynesia. This Indo-Oceanic culture included
agriculture—with rice and sugar cane in Malaysia and on the mainland;
domestic animals of its own—the buffalo, pig, and fowl—different from
those of north and west Asia; pottery, bark clothing, possibly bronze,
though if so this was intrusive; men’s clubs or sleeping houses; a
non-political organization of society on the basis of kinship and tribal
community; and such practices as head hunting and skull cult. The
employment of bamboo and rattan was a prime characteristic, and seems to
have prevented a vigorous stone age from having flourished in the East
Indies and adjacent regions. Bamboo is perhaps capable of serving more
different cultural uses than any one other plant. It makes satisfactory
houses, rafts, knives, spears, bows, arrows, blowguns, textiles, cooking
vessels, receptacles, and musical instruments, with a minimum of labor.
It is best worked with metal tools, and has therefore perhaps experienced
its most thorough utilization at the hands of peoples too backward
to secure a large supply of metals for themselves but able to obtain
a limited stock of iron from their neighbors. Nevertheless even the
prehistoric culture of the region is likely to have made large use of
bamboo.
This primitive culture of course varied locally. It was also not of
unitary origin. It certainly contained elements that were older than
others, or that originated in different parts of the area. Rice and fowls
for instance are likely to be more recent than skull cult and use of
bamboo. The culture may even resolve, when it shall have been analyzed
more intensively, into two or more fairly separable strata. But, taken
in block, it must once have prevailed with fundamental similarity from
eastern India well out into the Pacific, since everywhere within this
tract there are to-day hill and jungle peoples whose culture conforms
at least roughly to the type. It is necessary to remember, however,
that nowhere does this culture survive in purity. To some degree the
influence of the greater Asiatic civilizations has made itself felt among
the most aloof tribes. They mix a few Hindu religious concepts with
their head hunting rituals, for instance, or know how to forge imported
iron, or even grow American maize. They have everywhere been exposed in
some degree to contact with cultures of subsequent level. Thus it is
characteristic that the Negritos, whose scattered distribution indicates
that they may have been the first inhabitants of the East Indies, possess
a debased or parasitic Malaysian culture instead of a specific Negrito
one.
263. MELANESIA AND POLYNESIA
As one passes out from the East Indies into New Guinea and Melanesia, the
mass effect of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization comes to an end, and
the primitive culture that has been outlined is altered. Metals, rice,
the buffalo, disappear. The growing of taro and other tropical plants,
the pig and fowl, the use of bamboo where nature permits, skull cult or
cannibalism, remain. Other features, such as the totemic and matrilinear
moiety organization of society and adolescence rites for girls, obtrude,
and are sometimes elaborately developed. How far such traits represent
secondary local developments or on the other hand survivals from a
Negroid culture phase anterior to that of primitive Malaysian-Southeast
Asiatic culture, is not clear. Local diversity of custom is unusually
great in both New Guinea and Melanesia.
Micronesia and Polynesia present a different although allied set of
problems. The Polynesians in particular manifest a remarkable uniformity
of speech and, on the whole, of culture, especially in view of the
thousands of miles of ocean through which their island groups are
dispersed. This uniformity suggests that the language and culture became
characterized in a limited area from which they spread over Polynesia
after or while contact with the remainder of the world was lost. But
it is difficult to settle even tentatively on such an area of original
characterization because certain sides of Polynesian culture are
relatively high and carry suggestions of Asia, whereas other elements
are lacking which would be expectable if higher Asiatic influences had
ever carried to the ancestral Polynesians. Royal lineage, for example,
bears to the Polynesians a powerful implication of sanctity, of descent
from the gods, such as is unparalleled among any truly primitive people.
Religion and mythology also contain an abstract, spiritual strain that
is almost reminiscent of Buddhism. Yet there seems no single specific
idea or name that can be traced to an Asiatic source; and the essentially
ancient ideas of magic and taboo are strong—the word taboo itself is
Polynesian. There are structures and sculpture in stone, sometimes
monumental, but never more than barbaric in quality. The absence of
metals may mean little, since they might have been possessed but the art
have been lost in the island habitat, often coralline. Yet pottery, the
bow and arrow, the men’s club house, the clan or moiety type of society,
are also wanting or weakly developed. On the other hand, the dog, pig,
and fowl, cultivated plants like taro, bark cloth, cannibalism, and human
sacrifice are shared with the island regions to the west.
The various Polynesians possess genealogies and often migration
traditions which on comparison, and after computation of the number of
generations, seem to point to two waves of migration, both within the
Christian era, perhaps about the fifth and tenth centuries respectively.
The traditions fail, however, to throw clear light on the area of origin,
since they attribute this either to Hawaiki, which may be either Java or
a mythical land, or crisscross back and forth among the island groups
within Polynesia. Something of the mysteriousness which the discoverers
felt continues to attach to the origin and history of this people, and
is deepened by the fact that the affiliations of their racial type remain
ambiguous.
264. AUSTRALIA
The human history of Australia is as detached from that of the remainder
of the world as its biological history. The race is distinctive:
sub-Negroid, it might be called. The languages relate to no other. The
culture is primitive and well characterized. The isolation of Australia
was aided by the fact that the one approach to it other than by a
sea-voyage of some length, the approach across Torres Straits, was
blocked by New Guinea, the area of most backward culture in Oceania.
The Papuans did not possess enough civilization to hand on much to the
Australians; but they prevented higher elements from Asia from flowing to
them.
The Australians lacked not only all agriculture and domestic animals, but
pottery, the bow, and apparently the harpoon. These deficiencies would at
once stamp their culture as pre-Neolithic in type, were it not that they
grind some stone implements.
All in all, Australian culture is unusually meager on the industrial and
economic side. Houses, clothing, weapons, boats, tools, are most scantily
developed: often lacking and always rude. This poverty of Australian
material culture cannot be explained wholly from the prevailing desert
character of a large part of the continent, since the natives of the most
favored regions were not appreciably better off as regards variety of
arts conducive to comfort.
Social organization is much more complicated than the arts. Most of the
Australians are divided into moieties, which frequently are subdivided
into four classes or eight-sub-classes, all exogamous. A frequent
peculiarity is that the child belongs to a different class from both
its parents. So far as the moiety is concerned, custom varies locally
as to whether the child is born into the mother’s or father’s side of
the community. Frequently there are also hereditary totemic groups.
These may be subdivisions of the moieties or descend independently of
them. A few tribes, chiefly in southeastern Australia, are without
moieties or classes; some are totemless (Fig. 29). The moiety scheme
of course prescribes equally that one must marry into the opposite
moiety and out of one’s own. The extension of this principle to classes
and sub-classes still farther limits the group among whom marriage is
permissible, thereby emphasizing its prescriptive character. Where the
individual belongs to a third or different class from his parents,
his wife must come from the fourth or remaining one, and his children
will belong again to the first or second, according as moiety descent
is patrilinear or matrilinear. Consequently he has blood relatives in
every class; and conversely all the members of each class stand in a
certain defined kinship to every individual in the community, according
to their respective sex and age. This means not only that certain
relatives are within the absolutely prohibited degrees, but that others
are prescriptive spouses. These are only a few of the innumerable
ramifications and variations of Australian social organization.
The origin of these social schemes is in dispute. Some ethnologists
interpret them as original inventions of the Australians, manifestations
of their peculiar primitiveness. Others look upon then as evolved
somewhere in the region between India and Melanesia where analogous
institutions are frequently encountered, and as carried into Australia
by diffusion or migrations. The contiguity of Australia to the
Indo-Melanesian area of totems, moieties, unilateral descent, etc., is
not likely to be wholly a matter of coincidence (§ 110). Moreover, the
strongest development of this type of organization within Australia is
on the whole in the northern part, the tribes that show least or none of
it being in the south, farthest from the presumptive entrance via New
Guinea. On the other hand, certain features of the systems are confined
to Australia: the classes and sub-classes, the occasional coexistence
but non-relation of totems and moieties, for instance. These variations
must have originated among the Australians; and this raises the question
whether many other traits may also be indigenous. The most probable
course of events would appear to have been the importation of the basic
pattern of exogamy, followed by its diffusion with numerous new growths
in Australia.
Religious status fits the same interpretation. Ceremonial practices
are often, both abundant and elaborate, but ring the changes on
fundamentally primitive concepts like imitative magic, bewitching, taboo,
adolescence and other crisis rites. These concepts, as implicit in a
series of customary acts, might all have been imported at a very early
time; in fact in the main very likely go back to Palæolithic culture.
On this foundation the Australians developed their locally varying
superstructures of religion, which often differ conspicuously in specific
content, and into which they poured a notable quantity of imagination or
social creativeness. They evolved nothing of a fundamentally “higher”
type of cult because of their unusual degree of insulation from all the
more important later streams of culture. There occurred no significant
import of either new religious elements as such, nor of material factors
like agriculture which might have raised the economic status, increased
the population,[40] forced a political organization, and ultimately led
to the growth of basically new religious patterns among the Australians
themselves.
To return to material culture, it may be noted that the boomerang
groups with Australian rites and social organization in being a highly
specialized form of a fundamentally simple and presumably early type,
namely the throwing stick or flat club. Crescentic throwing sticks are in
use in Asia and America: they fly faster and straighter than rod shaped
or knobbed ones. The Australians alone added the twist which gives the
boomerang its peculiar flight. They may have been led to evolve this
feature through not having higher types of weapons such as bows and
arrows to engage their interest and energies. At any rate, the discovery
of the quality imparted by the twist may have been made by accident, such
as the warping of an implement, and random experimenting may have brought
the improvements.
Whether the relatively unimportant implements of ground stone in
Australia represent an invention made there or should be considered one
of the small group of culture elements which like the moiety system may
have been imported subsequently to the main stock of Australian culture,
remains to be ascertained. This main stock is certainly ancient, and
in its content may be regarded as approximately equivalent to the
Palæolithic culture of Europe and probably connected with it by an early
diffusion; although in the specific forms taken by their corresponding
types the two cultures obviously differ greatly, as indeed the lapse of
time and stretch of distance between them would render inevitable.
265. TASMANIA
Tasmania is situated toward Australia as Australia is toward
Asia-Oceania. It constitutes an ultimate periphery. Of what little
culture Australia had received from the remainder of the hemisphere,
Tasmania again received only a part. The prevailing opinion that the
Tasmanians were the most primitive of recent peoples is therefore
probably justified. They lacked everything that the Australians lacked;
and in addition lacked spear-throwers, boomerangs, shields, and ground
stone tools. They are the one population among whom it seems reasonably
certain that a culture of Palæolithic type was preserved unmixed until
modern times. They had chipped knives, axes, scrapers, and similar
tools; wooden spears and clubs; bark rafts; windbreak huts; cordage and
baskets; paint; ornaments of bone and other animal parts. Unfortunately
the Tasmanians numbered only a few thousands, died rapidly on contact
with civilization, and became extinct in the nineteenth century before
scientific study of their culture or speech had been made. Their religion
and society therefore perished almost unrecorded. Their racial type is
preserved in skeletal material and photographs. It is clear that it
differed from that of the Australians. Their hair was woolly. They have
consequently sometimes been reckoned as Oceanic Negroes rather than as
an Australian sub-type. It is likely that they represent the first human
strain to enter Australia, which was later absorbed or exterminated on
that continent by the Australians, surviving only in the protected island
of Tasmania.
266. AFRICA
Africa is the second largest of the continents, the most compact and
least indented, and, except for Australia, the most deficient in great
mountain systems and the most arid. The only considerable forested area
lies in its west central portion; the remainder ranges from parkland
through steppe to desert. The population is the densest of any continent
reckoned as prevailingly uncivilized: a hundred and twenty-five millions
or more, some ten to a dozen souls to the square mile.
As regards its races, it is important to remember that the northern
third or half of Africa is inhabited by native “whites.” There is much
confusion on this point. We tend to say African when we mean Negro. Until
recently the word Moor in north European countries often meant Negro,
although it denotes Mauretanians, Moroccans, who are Caucasians. It is
true that almost across the breadth of Africa there is a transition zone
in which it is arbitrary to classify the population as definitely Negro
or Caucasian. But over the vaster bulk of the continent, there is never
doubt as to the substantial distinctness of the racial stocks.
The oldest stone age is well represented. Implements of Chellean type in
particular have been discovered in a number of areas. Whether these are
contemporary with the Chellean remains of Europe is not wholly certain,
since they are generally surface finds. An Upper Palæolithic phase, the
Capsian, with three sub-periods, is well established for North Africa
(§ 215). It was approximately coeval with the Aurignacian, Solutrean,
Magdalenian, and probably Azilian of western Europe, and influenced them.
Syria and Spain were largely Capsian in culture. The Neolithic is less
well marked as a distinctive phase in Africa; and evidences of a separate
Bronze Age, other than in Egypt, have nowhere been discerned. There is a
bronze art with casting in lost molds in Benin. This is of undetermined
origin. It may be ancient; but so far as can be told to-day, iron came
into use in much of Africa as early as bronze, and is worked by modern
tribes who do not know bronze. Dolmens and other megalithic monuments
are abundant in north Africa, absent south of the Sahara. Some of them
are later than the similar European megaliths, since iron horse-bits
have been found associated with them. It is evident from this summary
that Europe and Africa have been closely associated in their prehistoric
culture, especially in its remote stages. Two sets of fossil human
remains corroborate the connection: Grimaldi man of Italy was pre-Negroid
in type, Rhodesian man more or less Neandertaloid.
Iron is smelted, worked, and used throughout Africa except among the
dwarf tribes. Apparatus and technique are usually simple, but efficient.
Smiths often constitute a caste, sometimes a wandering one. Some tribes
rank them highly, others repute them wizards, nearly all accord them a
special social position. There is no other area so large and culturally
so backward as Africa south of the Mohammedan belt, in which an iron
industry flourishes. The existence of the art therefore raises a problem.
Some have thought that its origin was indigenous, that perhaps even Egypt
derived its knowledge of iron from Negro peoples. On the whole, however,
it is much more probable that the reverse holds. In the more than three
thousand years since iron was worked in Egypt, the process could readily
have been transmitted through the continent. The long lapse of time, the
distances traversed, the comparative cultural backwardness of central and
south Africa, would allow for, in fact would almost dictate, both the
simplicity and the specializations of the technique.
267. EGYPTIAN RADIATIONS
Ancient Egyptian influences have penetrated Africa more significantly
than has generally been thought. It is only recently that a beginning
has been made in tracing them out in detail in the Nile Sudan. For so
intensive a civilization as that of Egypt to exist in juxtaposition to
the southeastern Hamitic tribes and the Negroes for five or six thousand
years without radiating innumerable elements of culture into their life
would be unparalleled. In fact the dynastic Egyptians used materials like
ostrich feathers that were imported from far south, and depicted Negroid
physical types. The trade and association involved must have flowed both
ways. The elements most typical of Egyptian civilization, and its fabric
and organization, need by no means have been imparted along with the
elements that were transmitted. The fact that they were not seems to be
what has delayed wide recognition of Egyptian influence in Negro Africa.
The general character of the culture of a modern central African tribe
and of the ancient Egyptians being so profoundly different, diffused
culture ingredients would therefore often appear among the Negroes in
a different form, and always in a different setting, thus tending to
disguise their historic connection. The failure of certain Egyptian
traits to seep through Africa is also readily accounted for. A backward
population broken up into small communities without much stability
would have difficulty fitting such an art as writing into their scheme
of life, in fact would find it useless. It is therefore not surprising
that none of the un-Mohammedanized tribes of the continent write.
Similarly, masonry would be needless, perhaps economically unfeasible,
under the prevailing social conditions of central Africa. On the other
hand, so obviously utilitarian an art as iron working might be quickly
taken up, once it had been brought into a simple technique. In the same
way, an adaptable domestic animal or plant would tend to be accepted
and diffused, while a concomitant scheme of political organization or
elaborated religious system might fail to make even a beginning of
penetration. It is in this way that several animals of Asiatic origin
came to be kept through considerable parts or almost the whole of Africa;
the horse, camel, sheep, fowl, for instance, of which at least the first
two entered through the gateway of Egypt.
This does not mean that all constituents of African culture have their
origin in Egypt; still less that the colors or patterns of African
cultures can be derived from that country. However great a bulk of
culture may be absorbed by one people from another, the organization
which is given this, the stamp put upon it, is necessarily more or less
distinctive, because the introduced constituents meet others already
established; and especially because the recipient culture, even if low,
already possesses a form of its own into which it unconsciously attempts
to fit the new content, and into which, unless the influx is sudden
and great, it usually succeeds in fitting the imports for a time.
However, any specific culture trait common to ancient Egypt and the
modern Negroes is suspect of a common origin, which ordinarily—though
not universally—would mean an Egyptian or more remote origin. Yet the
resolution of such a suspicion is not always easy. Much depends on the
extent and continuity of the geographical distribution of the trait, and
on the actuality and specificity of the resemblance. On these points the
necessary information is often still incomplete.
The general relation of Africa as a whole to Egypt is paralleled by the
relation of western Europe of four thousand years ago to the Orient.
The bronze, cereals, tamed animals, and many other culture elements of
Europe, including religious traits like the ax cult, can be derived
from the Near East. But the cities, monarchies, temples, inscriptions,
astronomy, and art of the Orient had not penetrated to farther
Europe. Moreover, European Bronze Age culture was not merely Oriental
civilization with half or three-fourths its content omitted. It enjoyed
an organization of its own, followed local and at least partly original
trends, possessed what might metaphorically be called an organic unity as
great as that of any Oriental culture.
268. THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER CULTURES
Two other great cultural influences have long affected Africa. As far
back as the strictly historic period extends, its Mediterranean shore
has been generally under the control of peoples belonging to Western
civilization—Carthaginians, Romans, or Arabs. As in the case of Egypt,
it is unthinkable that the cultures thus planted in the north could
have been wholly without effect on the remoter parts of the continent.
In fact, for the Arabs, who both penetrated the farthest and are the
most recent comers, influence far into the Sudan is manifest. The other
exposure was toward the east, and here, as might be expected, Indian
influences, chiefly sea-borne through Arab restlessness, have been
potent. Eastern Africa has hump-backed cattle, cotton, the pit-loom,
perhaps the fowl, from this source. Madagascar, though mainly Negro in
race, is Malaysian in speech and prevailingly Malaysian in culture as the
result of similar maritime influences from the east.
In these lights, much of African culture which cannot yet be definitely
traced to an extra-African source and which until recently was
generally assumed to be of purely native origin, may prove to be due
to transmission from Asia or Europe. The powerful kingdoms repeatedly
established by successful leaders among both Sudan and Bantu Negroes,
kingdoms embracing diverse tribes and sometimes continuing under the
same dynasty for several centuries, may be due to Egyptian or Mohammedan
example. The same can be said for the prevalence of slavery, which is
both more widespread and more important economically in Africa than in
any other large region of similarly retarded cultural level. Possibly
the frequency of polygyny belongs in the same category. It is true that
Negro economic life is generally so organized that wives represent
investment and create wealth. This fact might be the result of the
influence of old economic tendencies upon introduced polygyny. Or the
form of marriage might be the outcome of the economic scheme of life
characteristic of Africa. Yet even in the latter case an indirect foreign
causation can be suspected, since primitive peoples, at any rate those
unquestionably beyond the influences of the Eur-Asian civilizations, like
the Australians and Americans, generally do not place heavy social stress
on wealth. The African point of view as regards economic success, with
the African attitude toward marriage as a consequence, may therefore be
partly due to extra-African stimulus and example.
Such stimulus seems more easily demonstrable for the proverbs and riddles
which abound in Africa, since proverbs were completely and riddles
almost wholly wanting in the western hemisphere, and are therefore not
the native and spontaneous outflow of the human mind which our own
familiarity with them might tempt us to take for granted (§ 90).
The totemic and exogamic institutions of Negro Africa (§ 110) are
difficult to understand. Their distribution, both in totality and
as regards their several forms, is patchy. Clans sometimes coexist
with castes or occupational classes, sometimes tend to coincide with
them. Matrilineal institutions crop up irregularly among prevailingly
patrilineal ones. In several separate areas the totemic and exogamic
groups are divorced, even following opposite lines of descent. The large
blocks of peoples sharing substantially the same form of organization in
Australia, the regularity of regional and typological graduation of forms
of organization characteristic of North America, find no counterpart in
Africa. The reason would seem to be that the Australian and American
cultures developed in isolation and from within, undisturbed; whereas
Africa has long been subjected to a cultural bombardment which constantly
mingled new traits with old, foreign with acclimated, and acclimated
with indigenous. The native cultures were therefore unable to follow
the relatively smooth sequence of development by area or stage which
occurred in Australia and America; the injected ferments caused a
cultural bubbling in which elements dissociated, combined, intensified,
or disappeared according to intricate circumstances. It is possible that
other phases of African culture owe their appearance of randomness under
classification to the same set of causes.[41]
269. THE BUSHMEN
Two local culture-areas, as they would be called on American soil, emerge
with fair distinctness: The Bushman and the West African.
The Bushmen of the far south about the Kalahari desert are distinctive
in both race (§ 26) and speech. Culturally they also stand apart as an
exceptionally primitive people, lacking the agriculture, cattle and
fowls, and iron working of the Negroes. They are expert hunters, stalking
or wearing down game until it is within range of their poisoned bone or
stone pointed arrows, while the women pry up roots with stone weighted
digging sticks. They live under rock shelters or on the leeward side
of rude windbreaks. Subterranean water is sucked up through reeds and
kept in ostrich egg shells. All this suggests an early Neolithic or even
largely Palæolithic culture type, which accords well with the remote
and environmentally unfavorable habitat. It is as if the peripherally
situated Bushmen had retained up to the present, and with few additions,
the culture that prevailed in Europe ten thousand years ago. It is
certainly striking that they carve and paint animal figures on rock faces
and in caves with a fidelity and unconstrained naturalism that remind of
Magdalenian art.
The Hottentots, who are neighbors of the Bushmen and approach them in
physical type, appearing to be a mixture of Bushman and other blood,
are culturally less retarded, having cattle and iron. In central Africa
another dwarf black race, the Pygmies or Negrillos, probably represent
a people of once primitive status. But their actual cultural condition
is parasitic rather than natively primitive, thus resembling that of
their relatives the East Indian Negritos. They live among Negro tribes,
acknowledge their kings, trade forest and hunting products for the
agricultural yield and manufactures of the Negroes, and speak dialects of
the latter’s languages. They thus constitute a racially accentuated caste
or economic class within Bantu culture; and although shy and backward,
cannot be said to preserve a relatively pure early culture as do the
Bushmen.
270. THE WEST AFRICAN CULTURE-AREA AND ITS MEANING
Over the larger northern portion of the Congo drainage and along the
Guinea coast from the Niger mouth to the Senegal, there prevails a well
defined West African culture. This is marked by a number of traits which
within Africa are approximately confined to it. These traits include
the cultivation of the banana but general absence of millet and cattle;
gabled houses of thatch, other Africans building domed or conical
structures or mud dwellings; clothing of palm fiber or bark; straight
self-bows with pointed ends and encircling ridges for the attachment of
the looped cord of rattan; shields of wood or cane, in place of which
other Africans employ leather bucklers, shields of hide, or parrying
sticks; face masks for religious purposes; carvings of the human form;
slit wooden drums; xylophones; and a number of other traits.
Two interpretations can be suggested for this consistent and
geographically limited association of traits. One makes use of the
recurrence of many of the elements in the Indo-Oceanic and especially
the Melanesian area. As the latter is also Negroid territory, an ancient
connection is conceivable. This would obviously have to be old enough
to precede the Egyptian, west Asiatic, and Indian-East African culture
developments. These later growths would be interpreted as having spread
less far, although obliterating the antecedent Negroid culture so far
as they did diffuse. This explanation fits well with the principle
that, other things equal, superposed culture strata appear centrally,
underlying ones survive marginally. Proof, however, must depend on
whether the parallel traits are really specifically similar, whether they
constitute a reasonably large proportion of the culture of the two areas,
and whether they are lacking in the intervening region. This evidence is
naturally difficult to assemble.
The other interpretation is less incisive. It looks upon the resemblances
as at least partly conditioned by environment; and would tend to explain
the remainder as due to a diffusion, early indeed, but gradual and
applying to single elements or small clusters of traits rather than to
an association of traits large enough to form a culture and moving as
a single block. In this connection it is significant that the Oceanic
area is one of tropical forest, and the West African area the only
large forested tract in its continent. Hence the absence of cattle
and open-country grains, the use made of the banana. Hence too the
possibility of bark cloth; and the extremely serviceable rattan cord,
which in turn may have demanded a certain type of bow; whereas other
types, like the sinew-backed bow, would be unsatisfactory in the humid
climate. And the carving of wood, while not due to the forest, was at
least made possible by it. In short, diffusion may have been the motive
power involved, but like environmental conditions in the two areas caught
and helped to preserve such elements as were diffused—stabilized the
culture once it was adapted to the soil and rendered it more resistive
to importations of traits worked out in different climates. This
interpretation at any rate makes smaller assumptions than its competitor,
and serves as an illustration of the need of environmental conditions
being kept in mind in the explanation of culture, even though the
essential explanation be in social or cultural terms.
271. CIVILIZATION, RACE, AND THE FUTURE
Culture may be independent of race; possibly is wholly so. But culture
must be carried by races of some sort; and it may be of interest to
consider whether the sweep of culture history reveals certain races as
the most favorable carriers or as inherently constituted to be producers
and dispensers of civilization (§ 44-46).
On the whole, the greatest share of culture production has fallen to
Caucasians. The art of Upper Palæolithic Europe, the laying of the
foundations of modern civilization along the Nile and Euphrates six
or seven thousand years ago, the more special ancient efflorescences
like that of Crete, not to mention most of the advances of the last
twenty-five hundred years, all fall to the account of the white race.
The part of the Mongoloids must not be underestimated. Even if the
foundation of Chinese civilization prove to be largely western, its main
structure is native, and the alien elements that flowed in during the
last three thousand years have been thoroughly adapted to this structure.
The fact that derivative civilizations like the Japanese have succeeded
in reaching a high degree of organization and refinement argues still
further for the vigor of Chinese culture. Then, the East Indians, another
Mongoloid branch, have shown a fair power of assimilation. In the past
two thousand years they may be said to have accepted and digested at
least as much of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization as the North Europeans
took over from Mediterranean sources between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D.
Finally, the achievements of the American Mongoloids in Mexico and Peru
must be given heavy weight because they appear to have been made in utter
isolation, without the stimulus of contact or import, and on the basis of
nothing more than a late Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic culture.
The share of the Negroids in the higher advances has been small. Africa,
to be sure, lies off to one side from the great Eur-Asian axis, and
like southern India and Arabia has suffered from constituting almost a
blind alley. Yet central Africa is no farther from the Mediterranean
than is northern Europe. East Africa lies open to Egypt which six and
five and four thousand years ago represented the apex of civilization.
Yet Negro Africa to-day possesses scarcely more culture elements of
Egypto-Babylonian origin than remote Scandinavia had absorbed by 500
B.C., and far fewer than Scandinavia had in 1000 A.D. It is hard to
believe that this difference is due wholly to desert and jungle and
tropical heat.
There is a parallel in the Oceanic Negroes. The Australians may be
disregarded in this connection, both on account of the isolation of their
continent and the doubt whether they are to be reckoned as a branch
of the Negroid stem. But the Papuans and Melanesians are undisputedly
Negroid and far less touched by influences of higher culture than the
adjacent East Indians. It may be only geographic accident that writing
and iron and kingship and Hindu and Arab religion traversed the Oceanian
islands as far as the brown Mongoloids inhabited them, but stopped
dead at the threshold of the blacks. Even the brown Polynesians, much
more remote in the central Pacific than the Melanesians, possess more
elements that are presumably traceable to Asia—such as their cosmogony,
genealogies, kingship.
It is of course not fair to argue from cultural accomplishment to racial
faculty unless all times and parts of the world are considered equally,
and not safe to interpret the evidence too rigorously then. But the
consistent failure of the Negro race to accept the whole or even the
main substance of the fairly near-by Mediterranean civilization, or to
work out any notable sub-centers of cultural productivity, would appear
to be one of the strongest of the arguments that can be advanced for an
inferiority of cultural potentiality on their part.
Yet the weakness of correlation of race faculty and civilization, except
in the most general way, can be driven home to North Europeans and North
Americans as soon as the relative parts played in culture history by
the several Caucasian divisions are examined. On the ground of long
continued lead in productivity, of having reared the largest portion of
the structure of existing civilization, the Mediterranean branch of the
Caucasian race would have to be awarded the palm over all others. To it
belonged the Egyptians; the Cretans and other Ægeans; the Semitic strain
in the Babylonians; the Phœnicians and Hebrews; and a large element in
the populations of classic Greece and Italy, as well as the originators
of Mohammedanism. With the Hindus added as probably nearly related, the
dark whites have a clear lead.
The next largest share civilization would owe to the Alpine-Armenoid
broad-headed Caucasian branch. This may have included the Sumerians, if
they were not Mediterranean; comprised the Hittites; and contributed
important strains to the other peoples of Western Asia and Greece and
Italy.
By comparison, the Nordic branch looms insignificant. Up to a thousand
years ago the Nordic peoples had indeed contributed ferment and
unsettling, but scarcely a single new culture element, certainly not
a new element of importance and permanence. For centuries after that,
the center of European civilization remained in Mediterranean Italy or
Alpine France. It is only after 1500 A.D. that any claim for a shift of
this center to the Nordic populations could be alleged. In fact, most
of the national and cultural supremacy of the Nordic peoples, so far as
it is real, falls within the last two hundred years. Against this, the
Mediterraneans and Alpines have a record of leading in civilizational
creativeness for at least six thousand years.
It is clear therefore that any fears of the arrest and decay of human
progress if a particular race should lose in fertility or become absorbed
in others, are unfounded. Such alarms may be attributed to egocentric
imagination. They resemble the regrets of an individual at the loss which
the world will suffer when he dies; what he really fears is his own
death. When we loosen the hold of such narrow and essentially personal
emotions, and allow our minds to range over the whole of the labors and
gradual achievements of humanity, irrespective of millenium or continent,
the result is an imperturbed equanimity as to the slight and temporary
predominance of this or that racial strain and as to the stability or
future of culture. To contribute to this larger tolerance and balance of
mind is one of the functions of anthropology.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Ethnography is sometimes separated, as more descriptive, from
Ethnology as more theoretically inclined.
[2] The place or “station” Grimaldi must not be confused with the
Grimaldi race mentioned below. The grottos at Grimaldi contained two
skeletons of Grimaldi racial type and a larger number of Cro-Magnon type.
The Grimaldi race is therefore really not the most representative one of
the locality Grimaldi; but as it has not yet been discovered elsewhere,
there seems no choice but to call it by that name.
[3] It has been maintained that individuals of Cro-Magnon type can still
be found in southern France and reckoned as a distinct element in the
population of certain districts; but the Cro-Magnon race as such has
disappeared.
[4] The usual nomenclature for cephalic index is on the basis of round
numbers: broad or round headed or brachycephalic above 80; medium
headed or mesocephalic between 75 and 80; narrow or long headed or
dolichocephalic below 75. Yet, as the average for mankind is in the
neighborhood of 79, this terminology makes far more brachycephalic than
dolichocephalic peoples. Groups frequently spoken of as long headed are
often really mesocephalic by the accepted definition: a large proportion
of Europeans, for instance. It would result in both more accuracy and a
better balancing of the limits if the three types of head form were set,
as has been suggested, at 81 and 77 in place of 80 and 75.—The index of
the skull (strictly, the cranial index) is two units less than that taken
on the living head.
[5] On the living, platyrhine noses have an index of breadth compared
with length above 85, mesorhine between 70 and 85, leptorhine below 70;
skeletally, the same three terms denote proportions above 53, between 48
and 53, and below 48.
[6] The distribution of the races is described as it existed before
the era of exploration and colonization that began toward the end of
the fifteenth century. Although for practical purposes they have been
submerged by Caucasians in the greater part of the Americas, Australia,
and South Africa, it is the native races whose distribution is referred
to.
[7] Noun incorporation is really an etymological process rather than a
grammatical one. In most cases it is the result of a language permitting
compounds of nouns with verbs, or verbs with verbs, to form verbs: “to
rabbit-kill,” “to run-kill,” and so on. This construction, which is
perfectly natural and logical, happens to be so alien to the genius of
the Indo-European languages that it has been singled out as far more
notable and significant than it deserves. Pronominal incorporation is
discussed below (§ 60).
[8] Recently, certain “rostro-carinate” pre-Palæolithic implements have
been much discussed by British archæologists, and in the past year or two
there have been some adherents of other nationalities. The implements are
referred in part to the Pliocene, that is, late Tertiary, and are said to
be accompanied by hearths. The evidence to be adjudicated is technical,
and some years will probably elapse before expert opinion settles into
tolerable agreement on the authenticity of the objects as artifacts and
their age.
[9] The Krapina bones (§ 14) are by some assigned to the Chellean or
Acheulean.
[10] It will be noted that the second of these tables is an amplification
of the upper part of the first.
[11] A Pre-Chellean period, without large picks, and associated with the
Second Interglacial fauna (§ 69, 214), is recognized by some specialists.
[12] A period known as the Azilian, dated about 10,000-8,000 B.C.,
usually included in the Palæolithic, is discussed in chapter XIV in
connection with a review of the Palæolithic outside Europe and of the
relations between the Palæolithic and Neolithic.
[13] Of course this does not mean that the tribes beyond the edge are
without culture. They would normally be under influences from other
centers. And in a certain degree every people possesses initiative and is
constantly tending to invent or produce culture, though perhaps only of a
simple order. It is only from the point of view of the Southwest and its
Pueblo focus that the extra-marginal tribes possess a zero culture.—For
examples of other cultural step pyramids, see § 164, 175, Fig. 35.
[14] It has not been. The Maya series runs: 1 not made out, 2
rattlesnake, 3 tortoise, 4 scorpion, 5 king vulture, 6 marine monster,
7 bird, 8 frog (?), 9 deer (?), 10 and 11 not made out, 12 death,
13 peccary. Comparison with the Old World list shows 8-scorpion and
4-scorpion, and 1-ram and 9-deer (?), as the only resemblances.
[15] Grammarians generally recognize a greater number because they follow
the example of ancient grammarians and are interested in the history or
theory of language. But any one giving a purely empirical picture of
French or English would put the situation as it is put here.
[16] 12 × 10 = 120 ÷ 2 (highest common factor of 10 and 12) = 60.
[17] Or 360 and 7,200 respectively in calendrical notations.
[18] This section will not be found confusing if it is read with the
following points clearly in mind. A tribe is a political unit, a sib or
clan or moiety a social unit forming one of several divisions of such a
political unit. A tribe corresponds in savage or barbarous life to the
state or nation among ourselves. The sib is a sort of enlarged family.
The blood relationship is often mainly fictitious, but it is considered
actual or treated as such, and is the basis of the prohibition of
marriage within the sib. The origin of the sib seems to have been the
family. The terms sib, clan, and gens are here used synonymously. Some
writers restrict “clan” to sibs with descent in the female line, “gens”
to sibs with male descent. Sib is perhaps the best general term, clan the
one most used.
[19] Three out of four, to be exact; but two eastern areas, which are
almost in contact and perhaps rather closely connected in history, are
for convenience treated here as if they were one.
[20] It is perhaps hardly necessary to remark that the association
here found between the various elements of the exogamic complex would
not conflict with patrilinear descent being on the whole the earlier
and matrilinear the later phase to appear in each of the independent
developments of the complex. Nor would it prevent each separate
continental development from undergoing its own history of diffusion, as
represented in § 185.
[21] It seems quite doubtful whether any American people held seven as a
mystic number in pre-Columbian times. The case most frequently cited is
that of the Zuñi. But these people had a Christian mission in their town
for two centuries; they still employ four and six far more frequently
than seven in their rituals; and their unmissionized neighbors the Hopi
and Navaho esteem four or six but not seven. The other Indians stressing
seven lived either on the Atlantic slope, such as the Delaware and
Cherokee, and have therefore long been in contact with the colonists;
or in the Plains—notably the Siouan tribes—and there came into direct
and indirect relations with the French for two hundred years before
ethnologists visited them. Moreover, the number which the Plains tribes
most frequently used in regard to sacred matters was four. The mystic
value of seven may therefore be traceable to European influence wherever
it appears in America.
[22] Except perhaps for the fragments of the Baal Lebanon bowl.
[23] These areas are discussed further in the next chapter, especially in
§ 174.
[24] Mexico, Central America, and the coast and mountain parts of
Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
[25] Maize is the name of the plant in England, continental Europe, and
Latin America. In the United States “corn,” short for Indian corn, is in
current usage; but this word means grain or cereal in general.
[26] The contrary has been alleged. To dispose of the allegations
seriatim would involve the minute examination of much evidence. Clan
organization is here used in reference to arbitrary, named, intratribal
exogamic groups to which the individual belongs inalienably by virtue
of his birth, his descent being necessarily reckoned on one side only;
and totemic phenomena being usually though not always associated with
the group. A segregation of society into groups based primarily on
blood kinship, co-residence, town quarters, occupation, social rank,
or subordination to a chieftain is not a clan organization. Nor is the
unilateral reckoning of descent a sufficient criterion. Our modern family
names descend patrilineally without any historical connection between
them and a clan organization. In general, statements as to the existence
of clan systems in Middle America, at least among the advanced nations of
Mexico and Peru, rest either on a loose use of terms; on the assumption
that they must have existed at the time of discovery; or on a forward
projection into the historic period of the belief that they had once
existed. This belief is accepted here without such projection.
[27] Why the Southwest with its solid towns of a thousand and more
inhabitants, its generally greater advancement, and proximity to Mexico,
should never have progressed to larger political units, is not wholly
clear. The reason may be that the Pueblo was a heavily ritualized
culture, whose emphasis was on the priest, not the governor or councilor.
Such government as the Pueblos had was distinctly theocratic. They were
also disinclined to fight. Southeastern religion was quite simple in
comparison, an important priesthood lacking, and the warlike spirit
rather strong.
[28] The kiva or estufa of the Southwest, a ceremonial chamber, is a
partial exception. Yet even it differs from the living room of the
same region chiefly in use. Structurally it may be somewhat larger, or
circular instead of rectangular, but does not depart widely from the
dwellings. Functionally it is a development of the primitive “men’s
house,” not a temple.
[29] Some of the Eskimo followed a solstitial reckoning also, but
probably as a result of the unusual astronomical phenomena of their high
latitudes rather than as the consequence of cultural influence.
[30] The tonalamatl was not divided into 13 discrete month periods of
20 days each, but was a permutation system of 20 names with 13 numbers,
yielding a recurrent cycle of 260 days each designated by its particular
combination of name and number. See § 106.
[31] The years in this reckoning were somewhat short: 360 days.
[32] So primary is the distinction within the Palæolithic of its
Lower and Upper halves, that some authors, for purposes of elementary
presentation, have felt justified in calling these halves the Old and the
Middle Stone Ages. This is unfortunate because this “Middle” Stone Age is
in scientific writings always included in the Palæolithic, whereas the
Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age of many archæologists embraces the more
or less transitional periods such as the Azilian and Maglemose (below,
§ 216) between the end of the Palæolithic and the definitive or Full
Neolithic. Nevertheless, the unorthodox terminology has the merit of
condensing detail with a broad sweep.
[33] These are the proportions of implements of flint to those of bone or
horn in several stations of different age:
Hundsteig, Austria, early Aurignacian 20,000 2
Sirgenstein, Würtemberg, Aurignacian 1,000 rare
Sirgenstein, Würtemberg, early Solutrean 700 10
Predmost, Czecho-Slovakia, Solutrean 25,000 many
Schweizersbild, Switzerland, late Magdalenian 14,000 1,300
Maglemose, Denmark, Azilian 881 294
Oban, Scotland, Azilian 20 150
[34] The horse seems to have survived wild in parts of Europe until the
Neolithic, but the first domesticated forms, in the Bronze Age, appear to
have been brought in from Asia.
[35] In France, four or five periods are distinguished: 2500-1900;
1900-1600; 1600-1300; 1300-900 B.C. The first of these is a time of
copper rather than bronze, with northern France still Neolithic. If five
periods are admitted, an era around 1300 B.C. is recognized as a separate
division.
[36] A Uralic Bronze Age culture-area is recognizable as stretching with
considerable uniformity from the Dniepr in southwestern Russia to Lake
Baikal in the latitude of eastern Mongolia, and centering about Minusinsk
on the upper Yenisei. It possessed horse trappings, an abundance of
sickles that argue a population primarily agricultural, and socketed axes
related to the type that occurred in western Europe between about 1400
and 1000 B.C. This bronze culture shows definite resemblances on the one
hand to that of the Danubian area—and, it may be added, of the Caucasus;
on the other, to the ancient bronzes of China.
[37] In India, “Hindu” means any native who adheres to the higher cults
of native origin which collectively constitute the “religion” known as
Hinduism; in effect, the non-savage and non-Mohammedan inhabitants.
Hindus and Mohammedans are contrasted in local usage. In this book, Hindu
is synonymous with Indian, irrespective of religion.
[38] The Malays proper, whose home until the twelfth or thirteenth
century lay in Sumatra, are to be distinguished as a particular people
from the Malaysian or East Indian group which we name after them, in the
same way that the Mongols are a nation which is but one of many that
constitute the Mongolian race and Mongoloid stock.
[39] Several languages in the interior of the larger Melanesian islands
have been described as non-Malayo-Polynesian. If they confirm as such,
they may be regarded as survivals of a group of languages which were the
original tongues of the Melanesians and are probably to be classed with
the Papuan languages. The Malayo-Polynesian speech of the majority of the
modern Melanesians may in that case be considered as having been taken
over through contacts with brown peoples of a higher culture. A similar
situation exists in Madagascar, which in race is predominantly Negroid,
but whose speech is purely and whose culture largely Malaysian.
[40] The population attained only to a minority fraction of a million,
perhaps not over 150,000 all told.
[41] It may be corroborative of this interpretation that totemism and
exogamy are more irregularly distributed, and therefore more difficult
to reconstruct as to their history, in South than in North America. The
Tropical Forest area, in which these institutions occur in South America,
has long been exposed to the influence of the higher civilization of the
Andean region, much as Africa has been exposed to Europe and Asia.
INDEX
Abbeville, 398
Abyssinian, 96, 135, 451
Academies, 132
Acceleration, 395
Achæmenian, 452
Achenschwankung, 406
Acheulean, 153, 395-410
Adolescence Rite, _see_ Girls’ Rite
Adriatic, 53, 424
Ægean, 418, 423, 425, 432, 456, 457, 459, 505;
sea, 457
Æthiopian, _see_ Ethiopian
Afghan, Afghanistan, 211, 284, 484
Agamemnon, 457
Agglutinating languages, 100, 102
Agra, 251
Agriculture, 184, 211, 218, 238, 294, 329, 354, 370, 379, 381, 383,
389, 414, 442, 446, 449, 492, 501
Ainu, 35, 40, 41, 42, 51, 53, 73, 470, 475
Akkad, 434, 451, 458
Alabama, 78
Alaska, 213, 218, 295, 303, 345, 347, 350, 351, 421
Alarcón, 318
Albanian, 95, 105
Alcalar, 420
Aleph, 270, 271
Aleutian Islands, 350
Alexander, 255, 451
Alexandria, 255
Algiers, 400
Algonkin, 100, 135, 352, 389
Alignments, 416
Allées couvertes, 430
Alloy, 426
Alpha, 270
Alphabet, 223, 224, 241, 264, 269-292, 326, 329, 330, 333, 426, 438,
442, 448, 454, 469, 482, 484
Alpine (race), 41, 42, 43, 55, 63, 77, 472, 476, 506
Alps, 149, 150, 400, 406
Altaic, 95, 469, 474
Altamira, 408
Altars, 187, 188, 294, 310, 368
Amazon, 338, 340, 382
Amber, 166
Amenhotep IV, 458
American Indians, 38, 39, 41, 44, 47, 64, 67, 73, 145, 197, 199, 252,
324, 343, 348, 421
Amorites, 451, 472
Analytical languages, 220
Anam, Anamese, 96, 465, 485, 487
Anau, 449, 450, 473
Ancestor worship, 466, 471
_Ancylus fluviatilis_, lake, period, 428
Andaman Islands, 45
Andes, Andean area, 228, 338, 342, 354, 381, 382, 384, 501
Anglo-Saxon, 56, 83, 104, 113, 117, 118, 221, 346, 347
Animal speech, 106
Animism, 218
Anthropoid, 13, 21, 32, 63, 109, 152
Anthropometry, 30
Anthropomorphize, 106, 219
Antilles, Antillean area, 339, 356, 361, 369, 382, 385
Anvils, 165
Apache, 181, 187, 188
Aphrodite, 256
Apostles, 195
Arab, Arabs, Arabia, Arabic, 53, 96, 104, 111, 113, 136, 205, 208,
210, 211, 213, 230, 258, 269, 282, 285, 286, 287, 290, 449,
451-456, 467, 472, 473, 484, 485, 499, 504, 505
Aram, Aramæan, Aramaic, 270, 285, 287, 422, 451, 454, 455
Arapaho, 135, 294
Araucanian, 100
Arawak, 100, 352
Arch, 209, 241-252, 326, 418, 448;
corbelled, 245, 420;
true, 246, 438, 485
Archimedes, 425
Architecture, 229, 241, 371, 418, 424, 426, 433, 484, 488
Arctic, Arctic area, 236, 295, 336, 388, 389, 391
Argentina, 218, 338, 370
Arizona, 187, 294, 296, 303, 304, 310, 348
Armenia, Armenian, 43, 53, 95, 207, 260, 262, 452
Armenoid, 505
Armor, 129, 391
Arsenic, 374
Art, 390, 502
Art, Palæolithic, 171
Artifacts, 138, 142, 437
Arunta, 236
Aryan, 95, 111, 472, 479, 480, 484, 488
Ascetics, 479, 482, 485
Asia Minor, 43, 95, 202, 203, 207, 217, 422, 432, 450-453, 455, 474
Ass, 441, 446
Assam, 486
Assiniboine, 294
Assyria, Assyrian, 96, 104, 202, 247, 423, 447, 451, 453-455, 458;
Assyroid, 53
Astrology, 254, 379
Astronomy, 208, 253, 256, 324, 333, 341, 374-378, 418, 443, 482, 484,
499
Asturian, 429
Athabascan, 135, 352, 389
Atheism, 455, 483
Athens, Athenian, 84, 124, 438
Atlatl, 167, 349
Atom, 479
Atreus, 246
Aurignac, 32
Aurignacian, 27, 29, 153-179, 343, 395, 396, 400, 402, 404-406, 412,
496
Australia, Australian, Australoid, 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 51-55,
64, 95, 98, 145, 146, 182, 222, 232-236, 253, 329, 364, 469,
476, 486, 487, 492-495, 500, 501, 505;
Australioid, 55
Austria, 69, 157, 173, 412, 424, 431
Austro-Hungary, 203
Authorized Version, 422
Avars, 475
Avestan, 220, 452, 479
Awl, 165, 349, 396, 406, 412, 429
Ax, 143, 144, 145, 168, 413, 417, 427-430, 432, 470, 495;
cult, 499
Aymara, 100, 105
Azilian, 166, 177, 395, 396, 406-410, 412, 413, 428, 496
Aztec, 100, 134, 166, 225, 260, 266, 268, 310, 338, 353, 359, 369,
371, 374, 376-378, 380.
_See also_ Nahua
Baal Lebanon Bowl, 269
Babylon, Babylonia, Babylonians, 96, 113, 142, 203, 204, 207, 209,
211, 217, 232, 247, 251, 253-255, 257, 258, 266, 268, 305, 333,
353, 417, 418, 422, 423, 433-435, 440-443, 448, 449, 451-453,
455, 458, 479, 505
Bahamas, 385
Baikal, 462
Balearics, 432
Balkan, Balkans, 43, 53, 401, 424, 431, 432, 452
Baltic sea, coasts, languages, 43, 95, 418, 427, 428, 430, 432, 434,
445
Bamboo, 469, 489, 490
Banana, 502, 503
Bantu, 32, 39, 96, 100, 119, 500
Baptist, 3
Bark cloth, 486, 489, 491, 502, 503
Barley, 344, 414, 429, 440, 446, 450, 460, 463
Barong, 419
Baskets, 349, 360, 495;
coiled, 222, 384;
twilled, 221
Basque, 104, 105, 121, 194, 197
Bast, 349, 360, 362
Batik, 223, 289
Bavaria, 157
Beans, 353, 414
Beer, 441
Behaviorism, 327
Behring Sea, 218;
Strait, 213, 350, 390, 475
Belgium, Belgian, 23, 24, 111, 147, 398, 407, 432
Beluchistan, 477
Bengal, 289;
Bengali, 221, 346, 347
Benin, 496
Berber, 53
Beta, 270
Beth, 270
Bible, 115, 271, 417, 423, 479
Binet-Simon, 75
Birch bark, 360
Bisaya, 290
Bison, 152
Blackfeet, 135, 294
Black Sea, 452, 455, 479
Blond, 111
Blood relationship, 232
Blowgun, 382, 489
Blumenbach, 49
Boar, _see_ swine
Boas, 55
Bohemia, 29, 432
Bolas, 384
Bolivia, 105, 228, 380, 383
Bombay, 302
Bone implements, 164, 176, 396, 411
Bonn, 27
Books, 379
Boomerang, 494, 495
Borneo, 209, 253, 290
Borrowing, _see_ diffusion;
linguistic, 91
_Bos brachyceros_, 415;
primigenius, 152, 415
Bosnia, 424
Bow, 143, 167, 182, 218, 348, 349, 408, 411, 426, 429, 446, 470,
489, 491, 492, 494, 502, 503;
composite, 218.
_See also_ Sinew-backed
Bowditch, 230
Brachycephalic, 37, 63
Brahman, Brahmanism, 483, 488
Brahmi, 287
Brahui, 135, 477
Brass, 417, 422
Brazil, 105, 194, 197, 222, 224, 226, 227, 339, 365, 383
Bread, 463
Bregma, 31, 32;
angle, 31;
position index, 31
Brick, 418, 441, 447, 448, 450
Brihaspati, 258
Britain, British, Briton, 43, 82, 305, 424, 454
British Columbia, 202, 295, 296, 305
Brittany, Breton, 104, 465
Broken Hill Bone Cave, 25
Bronze, 227, 228, 373, 374, 417, 419, 422, 425, 430, 440, 445, 447,
450, 458, 489, 496, 499
Bronze Age, 142, 146, 228, 246, 394, 408, 414-421, 426, 430, 431,
435, 436, 446, 450, 456, 460, 462, 470, 473, 478, 479, 496, 499
Brooks island, 321
Brunet, 77
Brünn, 28, 32, 34, 155, 395, 402, 403, 404
Brüx, 29, 32, 403
Buddhism, Buddhist, 123, 204, 214, 289, 291, 333, 334, 455, 463, 467,
470, 475, 480, 483, 486, 488, 491;
Buddha, 480
Buckwheat, 468
Buffalo, 294, 334, 386, 463, 485, 489, 490
Bühl, 406
Bulgars, 475
Burial, 141, 171
Burma, 485
Bushmen, 39, 45, 51, 52, 54, 55, 96, 173, 469, 501, 502
Buttress, 247
Byzantine, 210, 250, 448
Cabrillo, 318
Caddoan, 369
Cæsar, 81, 105, 276, 425
Cahuilla, 236
Calchaqui, 370, 371, 372
Calcutta, 68
Calendar, 285, 374-378, 388, 418, 441, 443, 446
California, 125, 211, 222, 224, 236, 251, 294, 296, 327, 333, 342,
350, 365, 373, 388, 389, 391;
Central, 296-317;
Northwestern, 296-317;
Southern, 296-317
California-Great Basin area, 295, 336
Calpulli, 359
Calvarial height index, 31
Calvarium, 30
Cambodia, 485
Camel, 450, 456, 498
Camp circle, 386
Campignian, 429
Canaan, Canaanites, 441, 451, 455, 479
Canada, 236
Cancer, 67, 70
Cannibal, 141, 194, 369, 490, 491
Cape Horn, 329, 351, 364
Capital letters, 282
Carib, 100
Carnivores, 11, 295
Caspian Sea, 95, 400-409, 451, 452, 479
Cassava, 382
Caste, 479, 480, 497, 500, 502
Cat, 414
Catalina Island, 310, 311
Cathedral, 250, 251
Catholic, Roman, 257
Cattle, 344, 348, 414, 416, 426, 429, 430, 441, 446, 449, 450, 463,
473, 479, 499, 501, 502, 503
Carthage, Carthaginians, 96, 270, 454, 499
Castillo cave, 157
Caucasian race, 3, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 49, 52,
53, 55, 58, 62, 67, 79, 120, 124, 155, 230, 334, 339, 343, 351,
382, 387, 395, 457, 470, 475, 476, 477, 486, 496, 504, 505, 506;
languages, 105
Caucasus, 43, 421, 453, 462
Cave period, 151
Cebidæ, 13
Celebes, 46, 486
Census, 466
Cephalic index, 30, 37, 38, 56
Cetaceans, 11
Ceylon, 67, 476, 483, 486;
_see also_ Singhalese
Chaco, 339, 383, 384
Chalcis, 274
Chaldæan, 204, 451
Chalybes, 422
Chancelade, 27, 32
Chapelle-aux-Saints, 24
Charade, 264
Charente, 24
Chariot, 418, 448, 455, 467, 468, 479
Charles V, 203
Charleston, 70
Chellean, 153, 179, 395, 398, 399, 405, 406, 433, 444, 496;
pick, 150, 158, 160, 397-398
Chelles, 153
Cheops, 447
Cherokee, 225, 253, 386
Chess, 482, 485
Cheyenne, 294
Chibcha, 100, 228, 338, 372, 378, 381.
_See also_ Colombia
Chihli, 464
Children’s speech, 118
Chile, 384
Chilkat blanket, 361
Chimpanzee, 13, 22, 23, 27, 32
China, Chinese, 5, 39, 65, 68, 69, 95, 96, 103, 111, 113, 119, 203,
204, 210, 221, 223, 224, 226, 228, 259, 260, 266, 268, 291,
292, 329, 343, 371, 423-425, 438, 447, 458, 459, 460-474, 476,
483, 485-489, 504.
_See also_ Sinitic
Chinook, 120
Chipped stone, 142, 412
Chou, 423, 461, 463, 464, 466, 470
Christian, 195, 256-258, 305, 447, 454;
Christianity, 198, 209, 237, 257-259, 292, 302, 333, 334, 452, 455,
475, 483
Chronology, 319, 323, 327, 433, 434, 440, 457
Cross, 333
Ch’u, 465
Chukchi, 210, 213, 475
Chungichnish Cult, 310-315
Cicero, 425
Cities, 441
City-states, 359, 434, 443, 449
Clan, 232, 355, 360, 385, 388, 491, 500
Climate, 183, 192, 212, 405, 448, 472
Cloaca Maxima, 248
Coca, 212, 354, 381
Codes, 132, 137
Coinage, coins, 424-426, 448, 455, 484
Coliseum, 248
Colombia, 260, 338, 354, 372, 374, 378, 381, 382.
_See also_ Chibcha
Color line, 481
Colorado river, 296, 298-318, 391
Columbus, 210, 290
Column, 243, 344
Comanche, 294
Combe-Capelle, 27, 29, 32
Compass, mariner’s, 467
Complex, 199, 211, 237, 238, 292, 366, 462
Confederacy, 359, 360
Confucianism, 470, 471, 483, 487;
Confucius, 464
Congo, 502
Conservation, 438
Conservatism, 135, 276, 283, 291, 468
Constantine, 258
Constantinople, 250
Constellations, 204
Constitution, 133
Context, cultural, 217
Continuant sounds, 92
Conventionalization, 266, 267
Convergence, _see_ Parallelism;
convergent languages, 124
Copernican, 8, 59, 208
Copper, 332, 373, 416, 417, 419, 421, 432, 441, 445, 447, 449, 450,
456, 458, 478, 479
Copper river, 421
Coptic, 104
Cordage, 349, 362, 495
Core, 160, 164, 176, 395, 398
Corrèze, 24
Corsican, 5
Cortex, 110, 137
Cortez, 203, 359
Cotton, 361, 362, 379, 426, 463, 467, 468, 479, 485, 488, 499
Counter weight, 246
Coup counting, 387
Coup-de-poing, 157, 158, 397, 398
Court, Supreme, 132, 133
Couvade, 194
Coyote, 348
Cranial capacity, _see_ Skull capacity
Cranial index, 37
Crete, Cretan, 223, 268, 269, 305, 418, 419, 423, 433, 438, 441, 442,
451, 456, 457, 458, 504, 505
Crisis rites, 363, 364, 365, 494
Cro-Magnon, 15, 27-30, 32, 34, 48, 155, 173, 344, 395, 396, 403, 404,
405
Crow, 294
Crusaders, 203
Cuba, 385
Culture area, center, 295, 336, 432, 466, 501
Cuneiform, 266, 268, 269, 422, 449, 451, 454, 463, 464
Cuzco, 380
Cybele, 455
Cycle, 226, 255, 376, 377
Cyclopean walls, 458
Czecho-Slovakia, 28, 157, 403, 412
Dagger, 417, 418, 429, 432
Dakota, 116
Damascus, 454
Danube, 402, 432;
Danubian, 462
Dark Ages, 249
Darwin, 8, 11
Daun, 406
David, 456
Dawson, 22
Day count, 376
Deccan, 476
Déchelette, 420, 432
Decimal, 231
Deerskin dance, 312, 313
Degrees of circle, 207
Delaware, 253
Demotic, 266
Deniker, 52
Denmark, Danish, 67, 412, 427, 428, 435
Dentalium, 388
Descent, _see_ matrilinear, patrilinear, unilateral
Devonian, 140
Diegueño, 310, 311
Diffusion, 194-215, 218, 220, 224, 233, 238, 239, 269, 301, 326-328,
372, 418, 431, 437, 440, 462, 493, 494, 503;
in language, 119
Di-Gamma, 278
Digging sticks, 501
Diomede islands, 350
Diphtheria, 69
Dipylon (pottery), 458
Distribution (geographic), 197, 327, 328, 335, 357, 499, 500
Divination, 209, 469
Djengis Khan, 474
Dniepr, 462
Dog, 106, 109, 151, 348, 349, 387, 391, 412, 428, 429, 446, 470, 491
Dolichocephalic, 21, 37, 63
Dolmen, 416, 430, 433, 435, 496
Domesticated Animals, 414, 426, 434, 444, 446, 451, 492, 498
Dordogne, 24, 27
Double-headed eagle, 202, 223
Drachma, 207
Drake, 318
Drama, 484
Dravidian, Dravida, 52, 53, 55, 96, 100, 105, 119, 135, 477, 478, 481
Dreams, 188
Drift (period), 151
Dubois, 21
Duck, 414
Duodecimal, 207
Düsseldorf, 24
Dutch, 105, 111, 489
Dwarf Black, _see_ Negrito
Dynastic, dynasties, 434, 446, 457, 500
East Indies, East Indians, 44, 46, 53, 67, 98, 213, 221, 232, 253,
260, 289, 343, 423, 471, 485, 486, 487, 488, 490, 504, 506
Easter Island, 98
Eclipses, 254
Ecuador, 228, 338
Egypt, Egyptian, 30, 55, 96, 104, 113, 141, 142, 173, 202-204, 211,
223, 232, 244, 253, 255, 258, 259, 262, 265-267, 269, 291, 305,
330, 333, 353, 371, 402, 414, 416-419, 423, 425, 431, 433-435,
438, 440-449, 453-459, 468, 479, 496-500, 503-505.
Eighteen Provinces, 461
Elam, Elamite, 441, 449, 450
Elementary Ideas, 195
Elephant, 152, 174, 350
Ellis Landing mound, 321, 323
Empire, 333, 360, 380, 483
Encyclopædia, 468
Endocrine, 66
Endogamy, 481
Eneolithic, 417, 450
England, English, Englishmen, 67, 76, 78, 84, 134, 213, 400, 401,
407, 408, 417
Environment, 326, 502
Eoanthropus, 23
Eocene, 18
Eolithic, 146-148, 444, 446
Ephthalites, 475
Epicanthic fold, 44
Epi-Palæolithic, 409
Eriocomi, 54
Eskimo, 32, 45, 51, 53, 100, 121, 146, 181, 212, 213, 241, 336, 345,
346, 366, 367, 370, 375, 390, 391, 475
Estrangelo, 291
Estufa, 371
Ether, 479
Ethiopian, 49, 52, 472
Ethnography, 6
Ethnographic province, 295
Ethnology, 6
Etruscans, 209, 211, 217, 248, 249, 251, 278, 423, 438, 451
Eubœa, 274
Eugenics, 7
Euphrates, 203, 441, 447, 448, 451-453, 504
Euplocomi, 54
Eurasian, Eur-Asiatic, 53, 253, 327, 431, 500, 504
Euthycomi, 54
Evolution, 7
Evolutionistic anthropology, 9
Examinations, literary, 468, 470, 487
Exogamy, 232-238, 355-360, 490, 492, 493, 500, 501
Eye Color, 40, 106
Faïence, 447
Family, 232;
linguistic, 88, 194, 345;
names, 487
Far East, 423, 424, 474
Fasting, 364
Fashions, 126, 129, 215
Fertile Crescent, 440, 453
Fetish bundle, 368
Feudal, Feudalism, 125, 425, 448, 469, 471;
Kingdom of Egypt, 446
Fibula, _see_ safety-pin
Fiji, 45
Filipinos, 67
Finland, Finns, 95, 427, 474, 476
Finno-Ugric, 95, 110, 474, 475, 476
First Salmon Rite, 304-316
Firearms, 419, 467, 474, 484, 489
Fire, 140, 169, 176, 395, 426
Fire-drill, 218, 349
Fire-worship, 302, 452
Fish, 183
Flake, 160, 164, 176, 395, 398
Flax, 414, 446
Flemish, Fleming, 105, 111
Flood legends, 200
Florida, 385
Focus (of culture), 189, 356, 377, 426, 431, 437, 440, 467, 472, 473,
476
Folk-lore, 198-202
Folkways, 128
Fonts, 282
Font-de-Gaume, 408
Foramen magnum, 26
Fossil, 137
Fowl, 414, 486, 489-491, 498, 499, 501
France, _see_ French
Franciscan, 333
Frank, 104
French, France, 43, 117, 121, 136, 220, 250, 253, 276, 395, 398, 400,
402, 405, 407, 408, 418, 424, 426, 429, 432, 506
Fricative sounds, 92
Frija, 256
Frontal angle, 33
Fuegian, 469
Fuyu, 470
Gables, 502
Gabrielino, 188, 190, 310, 311, 320
Gafsa, 400
Galley Hill, 29, 32
Galton, 83
Gamma, 270, 275
Ganges river, 479, 480
Ganggraeber, 430
Gaul, 105, 305, 425, 465
Gender, sex, 119
Genealogy, 491, 505
Generation, 57
Genetic classification, 88, 103
Genius, 71, 83, 273
Gens, 232
German, Germany, 43, 104, 117, 118, 135, 398, 421, 424, 427, 432,
464, 472
Germanic, 95, 124, 221, 419, 425, 460, 473
Ghost-dance, 334
Gibbon, 13
Gibraltar, 24, 32, 398, 404
Gideon, 456
Gimel, 270
Girls’ Rite, 300-316, 365
Glabella, 31, 33
Glaciation, Glacial period, 18, 23, 149, 350, 444
Glass, 447
Goat, 44, 415, 441, 451, 463, 473
Gold, 373, 374, 416, 421, 479
Gorilla, 13, 21, 22, 26, 27, 32, 64
Goths, Gothic, 104, 220, 251, 284;
architecture, 250
Græco-Bactrian, 484
Grain, 379, 446, 462, 463, 473, 503
Grammar, 482
Great Basin, 236, 296, 336
Greece, Greek, 93, 95, 103, 111, 113, 126, 129, 204, 210, 211, 220,
226, 244, 253, 265, 269, 270-273, 346, 359, 395, 419, 421, 424,
431, 432, 447, 454, 455, 456, 457, 459, 472, 480, 483, 484, 506
Greenland, 150
Gregorian calendar, 377
Grenelle, 30
Grimaldi, 27-29, 34, 48, 155, 157, 344, 395, 404, 497
Grimm’s law, 93
Gros Ventre, 236
Ground painting, 310
Ground stone, 142, 144, 410, 444, 492, 494, 495
Gschnitz, 406
Guatemala, 185, 223, 352, 362
Guiana, 339, 383
Guinea, 502
Gunpowder, 426, 467, 474
Günz, 18, 21, 150
Gypsy, 56
Habit, 275, 283
Hadrian, tomb of, 249
Haeckel, 55
Hafting, 168, 176
Haida, 295, 356
Hairiness, 39, 62
Hair texture, 39, 41, 45, 62
Half-breeds, 81
Half-hitch coiling, 329
Hallstadt, 424, 425, 460
Hamites, Hamitic, 96, 113, 119, 120, 448, 450, 472, 497
Hammock, 361, 381, 382
Hammurabi, 451, 458
Han, 463, 465-468, 470
Harpoon, 165, 167, 348, 349, 389, 390, 396, 406, 408, 411, 426, 428,
429, 492
Haruspicy, 209, 210
Harvey, 125
Hawaii, 69, 73
Hawaiki, 491
Head hunting, 489, 490
Hebrew, Hebrews, 96, 103, 201, 207, 211, 253, 265, 269, 282, 285,
286, 451, 457, 458, 472, 473, 505.
_See also_ Jew
Heddle, 222, 361
Hellenism, Hellenistic, 225, 255, 484
Hellespont, 453
Hemp, 415, 416, 466
Hepatoscopy, _see_ Liver divination
Heraldry, 203
Herd instinct, 59, 128, 277
Heredity, 34, 72, 80, 239
Hermes, 256
Herodotus, 9
Hesi Dance, 309
Hiaksai, 470
Hieratic, 266, 449, 454
Hieroglyphic writing, 266, 443, 449, 454, 456, 458
Himyarites, 287
Hindi, 221
Hindu, 39, 41, 42, 44, 111, 126, 210, 224, 231, 239, 247, 260, 287,
288, 289, 346, 423, 472, 481, 482, 484, 490, 504, 505, 506;
Hinduism, 476, 480, 493.
_See also_ India
Hippopotamus, 152
History, 482
Hittites, 202, 223, 268, 269, 422, 423, 442, 451, 453, 458, 506
Hokan, 121
Homer, 210, 278, 459, 479
_Homo Heidelbergensis_, 22;
_Mousteriensis_, 24;
_Neandertalensis_, 24, 27, 29;
_primigenius_, 24;
_sapiens_, 27, 29, 34, 155, 395
Homonyms, 223
Honan, 464, 466
Hongkong, 68, 69
Hopi, 135, 181, 187, 236, 252
Hoplites, 129
Horse, 152, 350, 384, 387, 414, 426, 433, 448, 455, 458, 462, 463,
473, 479, 497, 498
Hottentot, 45, 52, 54, 71, 96, 120, 121, 145, 502
Hour, 207, 225
Hrdlička, 65
Huastec, 135
Huichol, 203
Hun, 462, 465, 475
Hundsteig, 157, 412
Hungary, Hungarian, 69, 87, 95, 110, 424, 431, 432, 474, 476.
_See also_ Magyar
Hupa, 313, 320
Huxley, 55
Hyksos, 104, 446, 448, 451, 458
Iberian, 43, 432, 451
Ibero-insular, 53
Ideograms, ideographic writing, 223, 224, 263, 291, 329, 449
Independent Evolutions, 260.
_See also_ Parallelism
Igorot, 372
Ikhnaton, 448, 455
Iliad, 422
Illyrian, 460
Imitation, 216, 239, 326, 327, 468
Inca, 134, 242, 371, 378, 380, 382
Incorporating languages, 100, 102, 104, 121
India, 44, 46, 52, 53, 95, 96, 105, 202, 204, 210, 211, 223, 251,
258, 269, 287, 290, 353, 371, 406, 419, 423, 426, 452, 454,
459, 462, 463, 466, 467, 469, 472-486, 488-490, 493, 499, 503,
504.
_See also_ Hindu
Indian Ocean, 45, 49
Indic, 135, 452
Indo-Afghan, 53
Indo-Bactrian, 287
Indo-Australian, Indo-Australoid, 44-46, 55, 476, 477, 486, 488
Indo-China, 46, 234, 260, 358, 463, 469, 485, 486, 489
Indo-European, 95, 96, 100, 111, 113, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 135,
220, 221, 286, 346, 450-453, 457, 459, 460, 473, 477-479
Indo-Germanic, 95
Indo-Iranian, Indo-Iranic, 221, 479
Indo-Melanesian, 493
Indo-Oceanic, 478, 489, 502
Indonesia, Indonesian, 44, 53, 487
Indus River, 479, 480
Inflecting languages, 100, 102, 220
Inion, 31
Initiation, 363, 364, 389, 438
Inter-continental distribution of races, 49
Intelligence tests, 75
Interglacial periods, 18, 23, 250, 398
Invention, 58, 142, 166, 167, 168, 176, 179, 182, 185, 186, 191, 197,
216, 239, 264, 268, 269, 271, 273, 286, 311, 327, 328, 353,
371, 376, 398, 418, 431, 438, 459, 461, 467, 482, 493
Iran, Iranian, Iranic, 95, 450-452, 479
Ireland, 246, 420, 432
Iron, 332, 373, 419, 421, 422, 426, 430, 433, 445, 447, 455, 458,
469, 479, 488, 490, 496, 497, 498, 501, 502, 505
Iron Age, 142, 146, 394, 408, 415, 419-426, 431, 446, 450, 456, 470
Iroquois, 100, 121, 347, 356, 359, 386
Irrationality, 277
Irula, 41, 46, 476, 486
Ishtar, 256
Islam, 253, 332, 455
Israel, 456
Isolating languages, 100, 102, 124
Isolation, 182, 195, 197, 383, 492, 501, 505
Isthmus, 440, 441
Italy, Italian, 76-79, 209-217, 247, 250, 253, 274, 400-402, 404,
417-419, 423, 424, 432, 497, 506
Ivory, 166, 172, 175
Jackal, 348, 429
Jade, 466, 473
Jahveh, 455
Japan, Japanese, 24, 35, 39, 40, 65, 69, 97, 100, 107, 113, 119, 204,
210, 224, 259, 343, 419, 424, 470-472, 475, 485, 504
Java, 19, 258, 289, 489, 491
Javelin, 165
Jersey, 24
Jerusalem, 453
Jesuit, 204
Jesus, 255, 257, 454
Jeu-di, 256
Jew, Jewish, 44, 53, 57, 127, 183, 257, 258, 423, 454, 484.
_See also_ Hebrew
Jim Crow, 58
Jimsonweed, 306-316
Johannesburg, 67
Jumping Dance, 312, 313
Jupiter, 254, 256, 258
Kalahari, 501
Kamchadal, 475
Kaph, 274
Kapila, 480
Kappa, 275
Kardouchoi, 452
Karma, 482
Kassites, 451, 455, 458
Katun, 376
Kayak, 391
Kelts, Keltic, 95, 104, 105, 419, 424, 460, 472
Keres, 187
Kesslerloch, 157, 177
Keystone, 247
Kharoshthi, 287
Khmer, 485
Khorasan, 417
Kings, Kingship, 441, 446, 478, 488, 491, 499, 500, 502, 505
Kiowa, 294
Kitchenmiddens, 412, 429, 430, 435
Kiva, 371
Kjökkenmöddings, 429
Klamath, 115
Knossos, 456
Kokorai, 470
Kolarian, 41, 46, 98, 105, 477, 478, 486
Koph, 274, 275
Koppa, 275
Korai, 470
Korea, Korean, 96, 204, 291, 292, 424, 468-471
Koryak, 210, 475
Kossæans, 451
Krapina, 24, 32, 154
Kris, 419
Kuksu Cult, 306-316
Kurds, 53, 452
Kwakiutl, 295, 356
Kyoto, 69
La Ferrassie, 24, 157
Lake-dwellings, 434, 463, 473
La Madeleine, 153, 175.
_See also_ Magdalenian
La Mairie, 176
Lamp, 389, 390, 396
Language, 57
Laotse, 464
La Plata, 338, 339
Lapp, 53, 475, 476
La Quina, 24
La Tène, 424, 425, 460
Latin, Latins, 76, 95, 103-105, 111, 113, 119, 124, 126, 132, 136,
274, 278, 346
Latitude, geographical, 68
Laugerie Basse Haute, 27
Laurel-leaf blade, 162
Law, phonetic, 92;
scientific, 324
Lead, 374
League of Five Nations, 356
Least common multiples, 226
Leaven, 463
Le Moustier, 24, 32, 153-179.
_See also_ Mousterian
Lentils, 414
Ligurians, 459
Limiting conditions, 226, 335
Linguistic family, _see_ family, linguistic
Linnæus, 49
Lintel, 243, 244
Lissotrichi, 54, 55
Lithuanian, 95
_Litorina litorea_, 428;
period, 428, 430
Littoral, 53
Liver divination, 209, 210, 217, 248, 438
Llama, 342, 350, 361, 380
Lolo, 95, 210, 468, 469
London, 29
Loom, 222, 332, 360-362, 379, 414
Lophocomi, 54
Los Angeles, 310
Lotus, 244
Louisiana, 2
Lourdes, 174
Lucretius, 9
Luiseño, 188, 310, 320
Lunation, 374, 375, 376
Lybians, 472
Lydia, 451, 455
Macedonia, Macedonian, 104, 129, 451, 484
Mackenzie (Yukon) area, 295, 336, 388, 389, 391
Madagascar, 98, 488, 500
Magdalenian, 27, 28, 146, 153-179, 348, 390, 395, 396, 400, 402,
404-408, 411, 412, 427, 433, 496, 502
Magellan, Strait of, 351
Magic, 200, 219, 232, 254, 491, 494
Magic Flight, 198, 201, 218, 391
Magism, 452
Maglemose, 396, 408, 410, 412, 428, 429
Magnetic needle, 467
Magyar, 95, 110, 474.
_See also_ Hungarian
Maidu, 121, 307, 309
Maize, 185, 218, 237, 341, 353, 379, 382, 467, 468, 490
Malay, 52, 54, 488, 489
Malayan, 49, 149
Malayo-Polynesian, 98, 100, 119, 121, 485, 487
Malay Peninsula, 45, 98, 258, 290, 486, 487
Malaysian, Malaysia, 41, 44, 46, 136, 209, 222, 223, 257, 289, 423,
463, 469, 471, 472, 486-490, 500
Mammoth, 151, 152, 174, 175
Manchu, 95, 291, 454, 465, 466, 474, 476
Maneh, 207
Mangyan, 290
Manila, 68, 69, 290
Manioc, 382
Marduk, 256
Marginal areas, cultures, 335, 383, 388, 437, 440, 469, 473, 475,
478, 503
Mars, 254, 255
Marseilles, 424
Mas d’Azil, 157, 406
Masks, 187, 294, 356, 363, 366, 369, 502
Masonry, 370, 371, 380, 385, 418, 426, 427, 430, 447, 498
Mathematics, 482
Matrilinear descent, 232-238, 331, 355-360, 490, 493, 500
Mauer, 22
Mauretanians, 496
Maya, 100, 105, 113, 116, 135, 197, 205, 206, 223, 225, 226, 228,
230-232, 239, 246, 261, 262, 266, 268, 333, 338, 347, 349, 358,
362, 368, 369, 371, 372, 376-378, 438
Measles, 66
Measures, 454
Medes, 452
Medicine-man, _see_ Shaman
Mediterranean (race), 41-43, 55, 77, 82, 457, 505, 506
Mediterranean Sea, area, 43, 49, 81, 120, 222, 250, 287, 335, 398,
402, 404, 419, 425, 430, 435, 454, 474, 476, 485, 499, 504
Megalith, 426, 433, 460, 471, 496, 497
Melanesia, Melanesian, 41, 44, 52, 55, 98, 227, 232, 234, 236, 487,
489, 490, 493, 502, 504
Melanochroid, 53, 55
Mena, 434, 435
Mencius, 464
Menhir, 416
Mentone, 27, 29
Memphis, 70
Mercre-di, 256
Mercury, 254-256
Mesha, 269
Mesolithic, 396, 409, 410
Mesocephalic, 37
Metal Age, 141, 149
Metallurgy, 332, 341, 373
Mesopotamia, 202, 215, 247, 250, 440, 441, 451-453, 473
Mesozoic, 15
Mexico, Mexican, 65, 105, 185, 203, 228, 229, 236, 244, 251, 260,
261, 290, 295, 310, 329, 332, 338, 340, 342, 351, 356, 357,
361, 369, 370, 372, 374, 379, 384, 385, 387, 431, 440, 442, 504
Mexico, Gulf of, 369
Microliths, 406, 407, 428
Micronesia, Micronesian, 98, 487, 490
Middle America, 205, 206, 213, 340-342, 352-358, 361, 363, 367, 368,
370, 371, 373, 381, 383, 385, 388, 391, 440-442
Middle Kingdom, 446, 451
Middle Stone Age, 396, 409
Midianite, 456
Migration, 195, 214, 228, 461, 472, 491
Milan, 250
Milk, 463, 468
Millet, 414, 446, 463, 502
Milton, 115
Mina, 204
Mindel, 18, 150
Mindoro, 290
Ming, 468
Minoan, 423, 456-459, 479, 480
Minos, 456
Minuscules, 281
Minusinsk, 462
Miocene, 18, 148
Mission style, 251
Missing link, 11
Missionaries, 204, 333
Mississippi River, 294, 340, 385;
valley, 386
Mit, 259
Mitanni, 451, 458
Mithra, Mithraism, 258, 259
Miwok, 236, 307
Moab, 269
Mogul, 251, 475
Mohammedan, Mohammedanism, 96, 198, 223, 251, 258, 259, 290, 451,
463, 475, 476, 483, 484, 488-490, 497, 500, 504, 506
Mohave, 188, 190, 236, 311
Moi, 41, 46, 486
Moiety, 232-238, 355, 360, 490, 492, 493, 494
Mon, 485
Mon-Khmer, 98
Money, 480
Mongol, 95, 210, 214, 251, 291, 343, 424, 454, 462, 465, 466, 468,
473, 474, 475, 484, 485, 487
Mongolia, 204, 462, 485
Mongolian, 30, 35, 44, 54, 343, 476, 477, 485
Mongoloid, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 49, 52, 53, 55, 62, 343, 475, 486-488,
504, 505
Monolatry, 455
Monosyllabism, 124
Monotheism, 448, 455
Moor, Moorish, 250, 496
Moravia, 24, 29, 432
Mores, 128
Morocco, Moroccans, 211, 448, 496
Mortillet, Gabriel de, 153
Mosaic law, 184
Mother goddess, 455
Mother tongue, 94, 96
Mound Builders, 212, 373, 386
Mourning Anniversary, 303-316
Mousterian, 23, 25, 45, 153-179, 395, 398, 400, 405, 406, 427, 433,
444
Mouth, 374, 376
Mulatto, 80
Müller, F., 54
Müller, Sophus, 420, 435
Munda-Kol, 98, 486
Muskogean, 100, 359
Mutations, 239
Mycenæ, 246, 420, 423
Mycenæan, 420, 457, 458, 459
Nabonidus, 434
Nabu, 256
Nahua, Nahuatl, 105, 116, 134, 338, 346, 347, 359.
_See also_ Aztec
Napoleon, 5
Naram-sin, 434
Nasal index, 38
Nashville, 70
Natal, 67
Nationality, 56, 111
Naturalism in art, 177, 402, 408, 456, 458, 502
Navaho, 116, 187, 188, 190, 236, 252, 296
Neandertal, 32, 48, 64, 110, 139, 155, 395, 396, 400, 404, 405, 472;
Neandertaloid, 403, 497
Near East, 207, 417, 426, 437, 442, 443, 474
Nebuchadnezzar, 434, 451
Needle, 165, 349, 396, 412, 423
Negrillo, 502
Negrito, 39, 41, 45, 46, 52, 55, 73, 486, 490
Negro, 3, 28, 32, 36, 39, 41, 44, 45, 52, 58, 77, 79, 84, 105, 106,
111, 196, 205, 477, 495-502, 505
Negroid, 30, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 49, 53, 55, 62, 73, 155, 344,
395, 404, 476, 486, 487, 488, 490, 492, 497, 503, 504, 505
Neolithic, 30, 142, 144, 146, 168, 170, 177, 344, 348, 394, 395, 402,
406, 408, 410-416, 426, 429, 432, 433, 434, 435, 437, 438, 442,
444-446, 450, 456, 458-460, 462, 473, 478, 492, 496, 501, 504;
Early Neolithic, 143, 410, 412, 413, 426, 428, 429;
Full Neolithic, 143, 145, 396, 410, 413, 416, 426, 430, 435, 446,
450
Nestorian, 291, 454, 475
Net, 349
Nevada, 296, 303
New Empire, 446, 448
New Grange, 420
New Guinea, 45, 98, 213, 232, 234, 487, 490, 492
New Mexico, 187, 251, 294, 296, 304, 310
New Orleans, 70
New Stone Age, _see_ Neolithic
New-year rites, 312-315
New York, 78, 79
Nicaragua, 336
Nicknames, 236
Nicobar, 486
Niger, 502
Nile, 105, 440, 442, 444, 445, 457, 497, 504
Nippur, 247
Noah, 96
Nordic, 39, 41-43, 55, 82, 460, 476, 506
Northeast area, Northern Woodland, 295, 336, 341, 355, 385, 386, 389,
391
North Sea, 43, 419, 427
Northwest area, North Pacific Coast, 235, 253, 295, 317, 336, 340,
355, 357, 360, 361, 363, 368, 373, 375, 387, 388, 391, 459
Norwegian, 111
Nubian, 54
Numbers, holy, 252
Numerals, Arabic, 230, 275, 482;
position, 230;
Roman, 230
Nutka, 295
Oats, 415, 416, 468
Obercassel, 27, 28
Oblique eye, 44
Obstacle Pursuit, _see_ Magic Flight
Occident, 467, 471, 476, 477
Oceania, 44, 45, 49, 98, 235, 259, 471, 478, 487, 492, 505
Odyssey, 422
Ofnet, 157
Ogham, 425
Ohio Valley, 212, 373, 386
Old Kingdom, 446, 448
Old Stone Age, _see_ Palæolithic
Oligocene, 18, 148
Omaha, 294, 303
Orang-utan, 13, 32, 64
Oregon, 303, 313
Orient, 395, 413, 415, 417, 418, 426, 427, 430-432, 435, 437, 438,
457, 459, 461, 462, 479, 499
Oriental mirage, 437
Orinoco, 338
Orthodox, 257
Ostrich, 497, 501
Overblowing, 227
Overlapping, 36, 39
Over-tones, 227
Pagoda, 460
Palæo-Asiatic, 475
Palæolithic, 23, 63, 142-179, 345, 348, 350, 390, 393-410, 413, 426,
433, 470, 495, 501, 504;
Lower, 151, 154, 161, 172, 395-410, 411, 426, 444-446, 477;
Upper, 27, 29, 151, 154, 155, 161, 165, 395-410, 411, 412, 426,
427, 444, 445, 478, 496, 504
Palæozoic, 15
Palawan, 290
Palestine, 183, 305, 440, 454, 457
Pali, 11, 291
Panama, 351, 440, 441
Pan’s pipes, 226, 382
Pantheon, 249, 251
Papago, 184
Paper, 426, 468;
money, 468, 474
Papua, Papuan, 45, 52, 54, 55, 98, 487, 492
Parallelism, Parallels, 197, 198, 216-240, 261, 262, 268, 269, 281,
327-329;
in language, 119;
primary, 223, 225;
secondary, 220
Paris, 214
Parsis, Parsees, 302, 452, 481
Parthenon, 244
Parthia, 452
Patagonia, Patagonian area, 53, 338, 345, 373, 378, 383, 384, 387
Patrilinear descent, 232, 331, 344-360, 493, 500
Pattern, 130, 199, 367, 467, 481, 482, 493, 494, 498
Patwin, 307, 309
Pawnee, 369
Pea, 414
Peat, 428
Pebbles, painted, 407
Pegu, 485
Peking, 461
Penutian languages, 125
Pericles, Periclean, 83
Périgord, 27, 29
Permutations, 225, 376
Peripheral, _see_ marginal
Persia, Persian, 95, 104, 204, 221, 259, 261, 302, 417, 423, 447,
450, 451, 452, 454, 459, 479, 484
Peru, 105, 125, 203, 228, 240, 260, 327, 338, 341, 348, 361, 362,
369, 370, 372, 374, 378-381, 440, 442, 504
Peschel, 51
Pessimism, 479, 482
Phalanx, 129
Phidias, 425
Philippines, 45, 209, 210, 289, 290, 335, 372
Philistine, 184, 423, 457, 458
Philology, 485
Philosophy, 478, 479, 480, 482, 483
Phœnicia, Phœnician, 96, 184, 207, 265, 269, 270-272, 274, 285, 438,
442, 451, 454, 455, 457, 505
Phonetic law, 94
Phonetic writing, 263, 449
Phrygians, 452
Pictographs, picture-writing, 224, 263, 378
Pig, _see_ swine
Piltdown, 15, 22, 23, 26, 64, 110, 154
Pilum, 129
Pima, 181, 187, 190, 356
Pipe, 211
Pitch, absolute, 226, 227
Pithecanthropus, 14, 19, 21-23, 26, 30, 32, 64, 139, 140, 147, 154
Pit-loom, 499
Pizarro, 203
Plains area, 236, 294, 295, 336, 340, 355, 366, 368, 369, 386
Planets, 225, 254, 377
Plateau area, 236, 295, 336, 388, 391
Platinum, 373
Plato, 425
Pleistocene, 18, 19, 26, 110, 147-150, 154, 344, 404, 406, 444
Pliocene, 18, 148
Plow, 416, 418, 423, 462, 469, 479
Poles, Poland, 76, 77, 78, 401
Polished stone, _see_ ground stone
Polygyny, 500
Polynesia, Polynesian, 39, 41, 42, 46, 52, 53, 65, 67, 98, 124, 145,
182, 232, 236, 260, 350, 487-491, 505
Polysynthetic languages, 100, 102
Pomo, 120, 307
Pompeii, 256
Poncho, 363
Pope, 276
Porcelain, 426, 448, 467
Portugal, Portuguese, 213, 246, 407, 420, 432, 489
Postglacial, 28
Potato, 280, 468
Potlatch, 388
Pottery, 143, 188, 189, 211, 315, 316, 319, 353, 370, 379, 383, 385,
389, 410, 411, 416, 426, 427, 429, 434, 441, 444-446, 448, 450,
456, 458, 467, 469, 470, 489, 491, 492
Potter’s wheel, 418, 425, 456, 458
Predmost, 29, 157, 403, 412
Predynastic, 443, 444, 446
Pre-Chellean, 154, 399
Pre-Mousterian, 398, 400
Priest, 188, 209, 254, 267, 294, 358, 363, 367, 369, 381, 469, 479,
481, 482
Primates, 11, 13, 152
Printing, 468
Prismatic flake, 162, 164
Prognathism, 24, 30, 38, 41, 56, 62
Progress, 292
Promiscuity, 331
Prophets, 455
Protestantism, 258
Proto-American, 388
Proto-Caucasian, 44, 344, 476, 477
Proto-Mongoloid, 343, 344
Proto-Neolithic, 409, 410
Proverbs, 196, 400
Psychology, 225, 226, 237, 239, 325, 362, 447
Ptolemaic, 208, 255, 447
Ptolemy, 255
Puberty rites, 365, 366
Pueblo, 181, 184, 187, 188, 190, 192, 296, 305, 332, 356, 358, 359,
366-370, 377, 378, 384
Punjab, 287, 480
Pulse, 65
Punic, 270
Pygmies, 45, 502
Pyramid, 242, 358, 371, 386, 433, 446-447, 458
Pyrenees, 104, 400, 406, 407
Quadroon, 80
Quipus, 378
Quaternary, 18, 149
Quebec, 217
Quechua, 100, 105, 134, 346, 347
Race, 326, 460;
classification, 34-57;
concept, 3-6, 56, 57, 396, 481, 504-506;
fossil, 11-33;
problems, 58-86
Radiations, 437, 497
Rain-coat, 469
Rajah, 210
Rameses, 422
Rationalization, 59, 60, 277, 281, 283, 438
Rattan, 489, 502, 503
Raven legends, 218
Realism in art, _see_ naturalism
Reason, 276, 277, 292
Rebirth, 479, 482
Rebus writing, 223, 263-268, 291, 329, 330, 378
Recent, 18, 149, 445
Red Sea, 287, 451
Reform, 275, 276
Reindeer, 151, 152, 154, 165, 176, 177, 406, 475
Rejects, 144
Relativity of standards, 127
Renaissance, 284
Resist dyeing, 223
Respiration, 65
Retouching, 161, 395, 398, 400
Revolution, Russian, 276
Rhine, 400
Rhinoceros, 151, 152
Rhodesia, 25;
Rhodesian Man, 25, 26, 64, 497
Rice, 344, 372, 363, 468, 479, 485, 490
Richmond, 321
Riding gear, 387
Rime, 468
Riss, 18, 150
River Drift, 151
Roads, 380, 424
Rock shelters, 501
Rocky mountains, 202, 294, 386
Rodents, 11, 295
Roman, Rome, 77, 82, 104, 126, 129, 190, 195, 198, 209, 211, 230,
248, 250, 256, 265, 269, 273, 274, 305, 395, 419, 425, 447,
474, 499;
Empire, 204, 207, 258, 451, 463, 466
Romance, 95, 104, 121
Romanesque, 249, 250
Rostro-carinate implements, 148
Runic writing, 425
Russia, Russian, 49, 53, 95, 203, 213, 285, 398, 401, 427, 432, 462,
473-475
Rutot, 147
Rye, 415, 416
Sabæans, 287
Sabbath, 257, 258
Sacramento River, 367;
Valley, 309
Sacrifice, 469, 479, 491;
human, 341, 363, 369, 370
Safety-pin, 418, 419, 424, 427, 431-433
Sahara, 496
Sakai, 46, 486
Sakhalien, 470, 475
Salish, 120, 295, 356
Samoyed, 96, 474, 475
Sandals, 363
San Francisco Bay, 307, 320
San Joaquin River, 307
Sankhya philosophy, 480
Sanskrit, 103, 124, 126, 136, 220, 287, 289, 346, 347, 477, 479
Santa Barbara Islands, 384
Santander, 157
Saracen, 250, 419
Sardinia, 432
Sargon, 434, 435, 451, 458
Sassanian, 250, 452
Saturn, 254, 255, 258
Saul, 423
Scandinavia, Scandinavian, 43, 284, 395, 408, 427, 428, 430, 431,
432, 435, 460, 475, 505
Scapulimancy, 210, 469
Schoetensack, 21
Schweizersbild, 157, 412
Scimitar, 419
Scotch, Scots, Scotland, 28, 117, 190, 408, 412
Sculpture, 371, 396, 418, 484, 488, 491
Scythian, 459
Semang, 486
Semite, Semitic, 53, 96, 100, 103, 111, 113, 119-121, 135, 224, 268,
272, 274, 285, 286, 289, 448-454, 472, 473, 482, 484, 505
Senegal, 502
Senoi, 41, 46, 486
Sequoya, 225
Serb, 43
Shabattum, 257
Shakespeare, 115
Shansi, 464
Shaman, 303-311, 349, 363, 366, 367
Shan-Siamese, 95, 465, 485
Shantung, 464
Sheep, 210, 414, 415, 429, 441, 446, 450, 463, 473, 498
Shekel, 207
Shell Mounds, 212, 429, 434, 470
Shensi, 464, 466
Shield, 502
Shi-Hwang-ti, 5, 465
Shinra, 470
Shinto, 471, 483
Shoshonean, 135
Shoulder blade divination, _see_ Scapulimancy
Siam, 486
Si-an-fu, 461
Sib, 232
Siberia, 53, 210, 213, 218, 222, 350, 364, 390, 398, 432, 462, 475,
476
Sicilian, Sicily, 250, 404, 432, 435, 459
Sickles, 462
Sierra Nevada, 303
Silk, 426, 465
Silver, 373, 374
Sinai, 417, 447
Sinew-backed bow, 316, 391, 503
Singapore, 68
Singhalese, 135
Sinitic, 95, 100, 485
Siouan, 100, 135, 253;
Sioux, 294
Sirgenstein, 412
Sivaism, 478
Sixty in measures, 207
Skin boat, 389, 390
Skull capacity, 21, 23, 24, 38, 39, 137
Skull cult, 478, 489, 490
Slav, Slavic, 76, 95, 111, 257
Slavery, 500
Sled, 389, 390
Smallpox, 66, 69
Smiths, 497
Smoking, _see_ tobacco
Snails, 408
Soffit, 246
Solomon Islands, 226
Solstices, 375, 388
Solutré, 153, 157
Solutrean, 27, 29, 153, 395, 396, 400, 401, 403, 406, 411, 412, 496
Somaliland, 448
Somatology, 5
Sonant sounds, 93
Sothic year, 443
Soul, 171, 187, 349, 364, 482, 483
Sound shift, 93
Southeast area, Southern Woodland, 295, 336, 358, 360, 373, 385, 386
Southwest area, 181, 184, 190, 211, 235, 294, 296, 304, 317, 336,
340, 341, 355, 356-358, 360, 361, 369-372, 375, 384, 387, 389,
431, 459
Spanish-American, 310
Spain, Spaniards, Spanish, 69, 119, 121, 134, 203, 212, 223, 250,
251, 289, 290, 361, 384, 387, 398, 400-402, 404, 407, 408,
417-419, 432, 435, 454, 489, 496
Spanning, 242
Sparta, 129
Spear thrower, 166, 349, 390, 396, 495
Specialization, 311, 317, 354, 367
Spindle, 362
Spinning, 222
Split, 446
Spy, 24, 34
Stability of speech, 104
St. Acheul, 157, 398
Stations, 151, 157
Stature, 30, 37, 41
Steel, 422, 423, 426, 456
Stock, linguistic, _see_ Family, linguistic
Stone Age, 141, 145, 396, 489, 496
Stone-Bronze period, 417
Stopped sounds, 92
Straits Settlements, 68
Stratification, 319, 445, 450;
stratigraphy, 319, 324
St. Sophia, 250, 251
Stucken, 201
Sudan, 39, 52, 54, 96, 497, 499, 500
Suez, 441
Sumatra, 248, 289, 486, 487, 489
Sumer, Sumerian, 113, 203, 223, 266, 268, 434, 438, 441, 442, 448,
449, 452, 453, 458, 463, 472, 506
Sun Dance, 294, 369
Sungari river, 470
Superior, Lake, 421
Supraorbital ridges, 21, 24, 29
Surd sounds, 93
Survival, 281
Susa, 449, 450
Sussex, 22
Suwanee river, 3
Swastika, 123, 333
Sweden, 428
Swine, 414, 415, 441, 450, 463, 490, 491
Swiss, Switzerland, 111, 157, 177, 412, 415, 421, 424, 431, 432
Sword, 418, 419, 432
Syllabic writing, 224, 226
Symbiosis, 412
Synthetic languages, 220
Syria, 250, 258, 270, 291, 402, 407, 440, 441, 451, 454, 496;
Syriac, 291
System, 266, 267;
systemization, 480
Szechuan, 468
Taboo, 491, 494
Tagalog, 290
Tagbanua, 290
T’ai, 95, 485, 486
Taj Mahal, 251
Talent, 207
Tamerlane, 475
Tang, 465, 468
Tano, 187
Taos, 181
Tapioca, 382
Tapuya, 100
Tardenoisian, 407
Taro, 490, 491
Tasmania, 32, 39, 45, 55, 222, 329, 495
Tatar, 473
Tectiform paintings, 170
Telegrams, 283
Tell-el-Amarna, 454
Temperature, 65
Temple, 358, 363, 368, 369, 371, 381, 385, 386, 441, 479
Tenochtitlan, 359
Teocentli, 353
Tepecano, 310
Tertiary, 18, 23, 148
Testament, Old, 210, 422, 435
Tewa, 187, 236
Texas, 236, 385
Textile patterns, 221, 223;
processes, 222
Thor, 256
Thracians, 452
Thutmose III, 447, 458
Tibet, 204, 210, 248, 290, 485
Tibeto-Burman, 95, 477, 485
Tie dyeing, 223
Tierra del Fuego, 222, 384
Tiger, 152
Tigris, 203, 448, 451, 452, 453
Time reckoning, 225
Tin, 227, 228, 373, 417, 421, 430, 431, 447, 449, 478
Tipi, 294, 340, 386, 391
Titicaca, Lake, 380
Tlingit, 117, 295, 356
Toala, 41, 46, 486
Tobacco, 211, 212, 302, 354, 467
Toda, 481
Tokyo, 69
Toloache, 310
Tomahawk pipe, 212
Tonalamatl, 376
Torres Straits, 492
Totem, 232-238, 331, 355-360, 490, 492, 493, 500, 501
Tourassian, 406
Town life, 372, 385, 386
Tradition, 239, 326
Travois, 387
Treadle shed, 222
Tribe, 232
Trinil, 21
Tropical Forest area, 338, 339, 342, 355, 361, 369, 370, 373, 378,
381, 382, 501
Trousers, 460
Troy, 418, 423, 433, 441, 451, 457, 458
Tsimshian, 295, 356
Ts’in, 465
Tübatulabal, 135
Tuberculosis, 69
Tungus, 95, 474, 475
Tunis, 404
Tupi, 100, 105, 352
Turco-Tartar, 53
Turk, Turkey, Turkish, 95, 103, 203, 287, 424, 450, 452, 453, 474,
475, 476, 484
Turkistan, 204, 287, 441, 449, 454, 455, 462, 473, 484
Turquoise, 187, 188
Twins, identical, 71
Two Rivers, 440
Typhoid, 69
Tyrrhenians, 248
Unconscious, 125-131
Ugrian, 53
Ungulates, 11, 29
Uigur, 291
Unilateral descent, 232-238, 358, 493
Ulotrichi, 54, 55
United States, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 98, 106, 107, 133, 181, 213, 268,
296, 334, 342, 358
Ural-Altaic, 96, 100, 118, 450, 453, 472, 474, 475
Uralic, 95, 432, 462, 474
Urus, _see_ Bos primigenius
Uto-Aztecan, 121, 352
Vau, 278
Vault, 243, 346
Vedas, 479, 480;
Vedic, 423, 479, 480, 484
Vedda, 39, 41, 46, 55, 476, 486
Vei, 225
Vendre-di, 256
Venus, 254, 255, 256, 377
Victory Dance, 300, 302
Vigesimal, 231
Virama, 288
Vocabulary, size of, 114
Vowel points, 286, 288
Wagon, 416
Wailaki, 207
Walloon, 111
Washington, 281
Waterloo, 5
Wealth, 295, 388
Wealth-display dances, 306-316
Week, 226, 241, 252-262, 326
Wei valley, 465
Welsh, 104, 117
West African area, 196, 205, 225, 234, 501, 502
West Indies, 211, 339
Wheat, 344, 414, 415, 426, 441, 446, 450, 460, 463
Wheel, 123, 362, 416, 424, 430, 441, 448, 462
Whipping, 363, 365
Whistle, 165
White Huns, 475
Willendorf, 173
Windbreak, 495, 501
Wissler, 337
Woden, 256, 257
Wolf, 348
Woodward, 22
Wool, 361, 463, 468, 479
World-renewing rites, 312-315
Writing, 223, 224, 228, 263-292, 333, 418, 426, 431, 433, 435, 441,
442, 445, 446, 449, 454, 463, 469, 471, 478-480, 482, 486, 488,
498, 500.
_See also_ Alphabet, Pictographs, Phonetic
Würm, 18, 23, 150, 405, 445
Würtemberg, 412
Xanthochroid, 53, 55
Xylophone, 502
Yamato, 470
Yangtse river, 465
Yellow river, 461
Yenisei, 462
Yeniseian, 475
Y-grec, 279
Yokuts, 125, 188, 307, 310
_Yoldia arctica_, 427;
Sea, 427, 428
Yucatan, 205, 231, 246
Yuki, 307
Yukaghir, 475
Yuma, 311
Yünnan, 486
Yurok, 313, 320
Zapotec, 338
Zayin, 278
Zero, 230, 482, 485
Zeta, 278
Zeus, 256
Zinc, 417
Zodiac, 204, 254, 448
Zoroastrianism, 252
Zulu, 116
Zuñi, 181, 187, 252
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