Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/17

 PREHISTORIC HISTORY 5 The Semites appear to have grown up first of all in Arabia, and thence to have spread themselves over Western Asia in a succession of invasions. They came into direct Semites and contact with the two great civilisations which were AJT 3 - 118 - already in existence, and they did not spread beyond Western Asia. Where the Aryans started from we do not know for certain. But for a long time they did not come into contact with the older civilisations at all. They appear to have had their cradle some- where further towards the north, and to have migrated in great waves first south-eastwards through Afghanistan into India, on the east of the Akkadians and Semites. In a second series of migrations they spread all over Europe without striking into Western Asia. Here we come across an interesting problem. During the second millennium, or period of one thousand years, before the Christian Era, that is between 2000 and 1000 B.C., there were highly civilised peoples in Asia Minor, in the Islands of the Mediterranean, in the Grecian peninsula, and in Italy. But we can find out so little about their languages that no one quite knows whether they were Mongolian, or Hamitic, or partly Semitic, or partly Aryan. Without either affirming or denying that these peoples represent a comparatively early Aryan migration, we can make some tolerably definite statements about the movements Asiatic of the Aryan peoples which were going on during the Aryans - long centuries when great powers were flourishing in Western Asia and Egypt. Probably it was during the third millennium that their great hosts fought their way through the mountains into the plains of Northern India. Either a large number of them turned aside into Persia, or else Persia was occupied later by a separate migrating body ; for there was certainly a close connection in the language and the religious ideas of the Aryans of India and of Persia. The Aryans who migrated across Europe are divided into groups chiefly according to their languages. All the Aryan lan- guages are akin ; that is to say we can be sure that they originally arose out of one common language. That of the Indian Aryans, called Sanskrit, must have departed less from the original than any of the others.