Part 1

In the year 1854 was heard for the first time a voice of doubt. The sceptic was an English ethnologist, by name Latham, who had spent many years in Russia studying the natives of that country. Latham was unwilling to admit that a single one of the many reasons given for the Asiatic origin of our family of languages was conclusive, or that the accumulative weight of all the reasons given amounted to real evidence. He urged that they who at the outset had treated this question had lost sight of the rules of logic, and that in explaining a fact it is a mistake to assume too many premises. The great fact which presents itself and which is to be explained is this: There are Aryans in Europe and there are Aryans in Asia. The major part of Aryans are in Europe, and here the original language has split itself into the greatest number of idioms. From the main Aryan trunk in Europe only two branches extend into Asia. The northern branch is a new creation, consisting of Russian colonisation from Europe; the southern branch, that is, the Iranian-Hindu, is, on the other hand, pre-historic, but was still growing in the dawn of history, and the branch was then growing from West to East, from Indus toward Ganges. When historical facts to the contrary are wanting, then the root of a great family of languages should naturally be looked for in the ground which supports the trunk and is shaded by the crown, and not underneath the ends of the farthest-reaching branches. The mass of Mongolians dwell in Eastern Asia, and for this very reason Asia is accepted as the original home of the Mongolian race. The great mass of Aryans live in Europe, and have lived there as far back as history sheds a ray of light. Why, then, not apply to the Aryans and to Europe the same conclusions as hold good in the case of the Mongolians and Asia? And why not apply to ethnology the same principles as are admitted unchallenged in regard to the geography of plants and animals? Do we not in botany and zoology seek the original home and centre of a species where it shows the greatest vitality, the greatest power of multiplying and producing varieties? These questions, asked by Latham, remained for some time unanswered, but finally they led to a more careful examination of the soundness of the reasons given for the Asiatic hypothesis.

The gist of Latham’s protest is, that the question was decided in favour of Asia without an examination of the other possibility, and that in such an examination, if it were undertaken, it would appear at the very outset that the other possibility - that is, the European origin of the Aryans - is more plausible, at least from the standpoint of methodology.

This objection on the part of an English scholar did not even produce an echo for many years, and it seemed to be looked upon simply as a manifestation of that fondness for eccentricity which we are wont to ascribe to his nationality. He repeated his protest in 1862, but it still took five years before it appeared to have made any impression. In 1867, the celebrated linguist Whitney came out, not to defend Latham’s theory that Europe is the cradle of the Aryan race, but simply to clear away the widely spread error that the science of languages had demonstrated the Asiatic origin of the Aryans. As already indicated, it was especially Adolphe Pictet who had given the first impetus to this illusion in his great work Origines indo-européennes. Already, before Whitney, the Germans Weber and Kuhn had, without attacking the Asiatic hypothesis, shown that the most of Pictet’s arguments failed to prove that for which they were intended. Whitney now came and refuted them all without exception, and at the same time he attacked the assumption made by Rhode, and until that time universally accepted, that a record of an Aryan emigration from the highlands of Central Asia was to be found in that chapter of Avesta which speaks of the sixteen lands created by Ormuzd for the good of man, but which Ahriman destroyed by sixteen different plagues. Avesta does not with a single word indicate that the first of these lands which Ahriman destroyed with snow and frost is to be regarded as the original home of the Iranians, or that they ever in the past emigrated from any of them. The assumption that a migration record of historical value conceals itself within this geographical mythological sketch is a mere conjecture, and yet it was made the very basis of the hypothesis so confidently built upon for years about Central Asia as the starting-point of the Aryans.

The following year, 1868, a prominent German linguist - Mr. Benfey - came forward and definitely took Latham’s side. He remarked at the outset that hitherto geological investigations had found the oldest traces of human existence in the soil of Europe, and that, so long as this is the case, there is no scientific fact which can admit the assumption that the present European stock has immigrated from Asia after the quaternary period. The mother-tongues of many of the dialects which from time immemorial have been spoken in Europe may just as well have originated on this continent as the mother-tongues of the Mongolian dialects now spoken in Eastern Asia have originated where the descendants now dwell. That the Aryan mother-tongue originated in Europe, not in Asia, Benfey found probable on the following grounds: In Asia, lions are found even at the present time as far to the north as ancient Assyria, and the tigers make depredations over the highlands of Western Iran, even to the coasts of the Caspian Sea. These great beasts of prey are known and named even among Asiatic people who dwell north of their habitats. If, therefore, the ancient Aryans had lived in a country visited by these animals, or if they had been their neighbours, they certainly would have had names for them; but we find that the Aryan Hindus call the lion by a word not formed from an Aryan root, and that the Aryan Greeks borrowed the word lion (lis, leon) from a Semitic language. (There is, however, division of opinion on this point.) Moreover, the Aryan languages have borrowed the word camel, by which the chief beast of burden in Asia is called. The home of this animal is Baktria, or precisely that part of Central Asia in the vicinity of which an effort has been made to locate the cradle of the Aryan tongue. Benfey thinks the ancient Aryan country has been situated in Europe, north of the Black Sea, between the mouth of the Danube and the Caspian Sea.

Since the presentation of this argument, several defenders of the European hypothesis have come forward, among them Geiger, Cuno, Friedr. Müller, Spiegel, Pösche, and more recently Schrader and Penka. Schrader’s work, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, contains an excellent general review of the history of the question, original contributions to its solution, and a critical but cautious opinion in regard to its present position. In France, too, the European hypothesis has found many adherents. Geiger found, indeed, that the cradle of the Aryan race was to be looked for much farther to the west than Benfey and others had supposed. His hypothesis, based on the evidence furnished by the geography of plants, places the ancient Aryan land in Germany. The cautious Schrader, who dislikes to deal with conjectures, regards the question as undecided, but he weighs the arguments presented by the various sides, and reaches the conclusion that those in favour of the European origin of the Aryans are the stronger, but that they are not conclusive. Schrader himself, through his linguistic and historical investigations, has been led to believe that the Aryans, while they still were one people, belonged to the stone age, and had not yet become acquainted with the use of metals.