On the other hand the French language is spread beyond the political boundaries of the country into the territories of all its Eastern neighbours in Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany, Switzerland and into the Val d'Aosta in North-western Italy. The relation of the late German Empire to language and race is less complicated, but still presents some features of interest. Only two instead of the three great European races are represented, the Nordic and the Alpine, while traces of the pre-Aryan and Celtic tongues which must once have been spoken over a large part of the country have vanished. Within its limits were to be found, however, another Teutonic language, viz., Danish in Schleswig, and representatives of two other branches of the Indo-European on the Western and Eastern marches of the Empire respectively, viz., French in the part of Lorraine annexed in 1871 and Polish in the Eastern provinces. When we turn to Eastern Europe the problem of the relation of nationality to language and race becomes far more complicated. Three instances, however, especially arrest our attention-Hungary, Roumania and Bulgaria. The Hungarian language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian stock, and was, of course, brought in by one of the numerous tribes of Mongoloid origin who wandered into Eastern and Central Europe during the Dark Ages. This language is now, however, spoken by a people who approximate to the Alpine type of Central Europe and have lost their Asiatic features. On the other hand, the Bulgarians, another Finnic people, have settled in the Eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula, and have exchanged their original language for a Slavonic one; while the Roumanians physically resembling their neighbours of Slavonic speech have exchanged a Slavonic tongue for a Romance one. We see thus that in the history of Europe the races appeared first, the languages second, and the nationalities last. The three great European races have been established roughly in their present position since the Bronze Age, perhaps even since the Neolithic. The great linguistic divisions, Romance, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, and Finno-Ugrian, occupy approximately the same geographical areas which they occupied a thousand years ago, but nationality is a phenomenon which scarcely existed before the Renaissance. Political accidents have determined why certain linguistic areas have attained to the dignity of independent States while others have been divided between two or more States and others again are in the position of submerged nationalities. This may be best illustrated by the political history of the Iberian Peninsula. The physical characters of the inhabitants of this part of Europe are remarkably uniform, the population being dolichocephalic and brunet. There is not a single brachycephalic province in Spain. Throughout the Peninsula four languages are spoken, the pre-Aryan Basque in three Northern provinces, Guipozcoa, Viscaya and Alava, and three Romance tongues, Catalan in the Eastern portion of the Peninsula, Castilian throughout the centre from north to south, and Portuguese in the west extending across the Northern frontier of Portugal into the Spanish province of Galicia. If race in the physical sense was to decide political boundaries then the whole Peninsula ought to be under a single Government; if language, then (setting aside the Basques) we should have three States, viz., Portugal, Castile, and Catalonia. As a matter of fact, we have twoPortugal and another embracing Castilians and Catalans which we call Spain. When we look into the cause of this we find that it is due to a marriage contracted in the 15th century between a Queen of Castile and a King of Aragon; if, on the other hand, as Freeman has pointed out, Isabella of Castile had married the King of Portugal instead of the King of Aragon, we should still have had one race and four languges in the Peninsula, but different nations from those which we find to-day. Since the inhabitants of Portugal and Castile would have formed a nation which we should still probably call Spain, while Aragon and Catalonia would have either formed a separate nation or would have become absorbed into France. A nation, it seems, may be formed in two ways; either a political accident has forced a group of people to live under a common government or else a common language, and more especially a literature, has produced a common social consciousness which makes those who speak the tongue and read the literature desire to form an independent political organism. The relation of nationality to language and race ought to be carefully considered at a time when so many are clamouring for the drawing of political frontiers along what are miscalled ethnological boundaries. 18. THE EARLY INHABITANTS OF WESTERN ASIA1 By FELIX VON LUSCHAN Standing on the "New Bridge" in Constantinople, near the Mosque of the Sultan Validé, I have more than once tried to count the languages and dialects spoken by the crowds pressing and pushing between Galata and Stamboul. Turkish and Greek are naturally the most frequently spoken, but one also easily distinguishes much Armenian, Arabic, Kurdish, and Persian. We hear the harsh voices of some Circassian soldiers, and learn from an Abkhasian friend that he does not understand their language and that "it might be" Lesghian. He also tells us that many of his Circassian friends serving in the same regiment are obliged to speak Turkish when they want to understand one another. We then meet Albanians, Bulgarians, Roumanians, and are addressed in Serbo-Croatian by an old priest from Bosnia. You are sure to hear in less than five minutes five other modern European languages, English, French, German, Italian, and Russian, and then your ear is delighted by the melodious Spanish of some Spaniole Jews from Salonika, who still retain the idiom spoken in Spain when they were expelled from there more than 400 years ago, and have thus actually preserved the language spoken by Cervantes. And we hear other Jews on their pilgrimage from Russia and Poland to Jerusalem, speaking their curious Yiddish, a sort of German that no German could understand without making it a special study. Once on this bridge, I had to play the interpreter between a Hungarian Gypsy and some Aptals or other Gypsies from Anatolia, and an instant later I saw a Dinka eunuch sitting on the motor car of an imperial princess and making his selam to a group of equally dark and equally tall Bari or Shilluk. . . . ... Another day, on the same bridge, I met some East Indians, speaking, as they told me, Hindi, Hindustani, and Gujerati, and trying in vain to come to an understanding with a large troup of African hajjis returning from Mecca, some of whom were Hausa, others from Zanzibar and the Swahili coast, others from Wadai and Baghirmi. One may also meet on this bridge Mohammedans from China and from Indonesia, and, to complete this Babylonian confusion of languages, some day or other 1 From Felix von Luschan, "The Early Inhabitants of Western Asia,” the Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1911, published in Journal of the [Royal] Anthropological Institute [of Great Britain and Ireland], volume 41, 1911, republished in Smithsonian Report for 1914, pages 553-577, 1915. even a Papuan from Doreh or some other place in Dutch New Guinea may appear there on his hajj to Mecca. Not less numerous than the languages are the types one meets in Constantinople or in any other of the larger towns in western Asia, and even within a linguistic group there is generally a most striking diversity of somatic qualities. There are Turks with fair and Turks with dark skin; Greeks with short and Greeks with long heads; Arabs with broad and low noses; and other Arabs with narrow and high noses; Kurds with blue and Kurds with black eyes; and the more one studies the ethnography of the Ottoman Empire the more one sees that "Turks" in reality means nothing else than Mohammedan subjects of the Padishah, that "Greeks' means people belonging to the Orthodox church, and that "Arabs" are people speaking Arabic-the somatic difference between a Bedouin from Arabia or Mesopotamia and an "Arab" farmer from near Beyrout is striking, and they have nothing in common except their language. Also the study of the modern religions in western Asia is of no help to us in this labyrinth of types. There are Greeks who look like Mohammedans, and many Ansarîyeh or other (Moslem') sectaries are not to be distinguished from Armenians. Religion, too, is here much more closely connected with late historical events than with races or nations, and is only too often of a merely accidental character. Even the old historians do not help us. Their anthropological interests were generally trifling, and important statements like the note that the Armenians "Todλà opvyťšovoi Tŷ pwvŷ,'” or that a tribe from the Solymian Mountains spoke Phoenician, are extremely rare in the old writers, who give us names like Lycians, Carians, Cilicians, Paphlagonians, Cappadocians, Lydians, and so on, but, generally, do not give us the slightest details as to their place in an anthropological system. So we can well understand how, 50 years ago, G. Rosen, then perhaps the best authority on the nations of Asia Minor and Syria, could say that the anthropology of Western Asia would "always remain a mystery." Since then minute anthropometric researches and vast excavations have both thrown light on most of the problems connected with this "mystery," so that it may now be considered as practically solved. My own way of proceeding was to eliminate one by one every national or racial element that could be traced as having come from outside, and then to study the remainder. It was my good fortune to begin archaeological and anthropometric field work in Lycia as early as 1881, and since that time I have never ceased to collect all available data connected with the natural history of man in western Asia. So it is the work of 30 years of which I shall now try to give a short account, and this will be done best by beginning with the ostensible foreign elements and then describing the remaining tribes and groups. 2 Speak much like the Phrygians. A. DARK AFRICANS These are naturally by far the easiest to eliminate, and they have only in a very insignificant way contributed to the building up of the white communities in Asia Minor and in Syria, although they have been imported there from the earliest historical times down to our own days. Even now there are few houses of wealthy Mohammedans without dark servants, male or female, and without half-caste children of the most various tints. Nowhere, perhaps, with the exception only of Brazil, could miscegenation be better studied than in the large towns of the Levant. Domestic slavery is still flourishing there, and "black ivory" generally comes, as in the old times, from the Upper Nile, but also from Bornu. In the Turkish-speaking south of Asia Minor a dark African is generally called "Arab," in Syria, "Maghrebi" or "Habeshi." As far as I know, social inferiority is never connected with color; half-castes frequently intermarry with whites, but still there is no real negro permeation of the other natives, probably because that section of the offspring which reverts to negro qualities does not stand the climate. B. CIRCASSIANS About a million of the Mohammedan inhabitants of the Caucasus immigrated into Asia Minor and Syria after the fall of Shamyl. The lot of these muhajir (refugees) was generally a melancholy one; the Ottoman Government did its best to give them land, but land without a master is rare also in Turkey, and in many places the result was a fight of all against all or a state or regular brigandage, often resulting in the final extinction of the Circassians. Where the land given to them was really masterless, it lay in unhealthy swamps and marshes, where malaria raged and carried them off at a terrible rate year by year. I know a place near Islahiyeh where more than 1,000 Circassian families were settled about 1880; now only 7 of them remain, and these in a wretched state of fever and disease. Only a very few of these Circassian colonies are really thriving, and probably most of these glorious sons of snowy mountains will in a few generations have paid with their lives for their fidelity to Islam. Till now the Circassian blood has not seriously influenced that of their Turkish neighbors and probably never will. The colonists very seldom give their daughters to Turks or Arabs, and the "soft Circassian beauties" play a larger part in fiction than in actuality. |