Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/122

 XIX The Primitive Aryans FOUR thousand years ago, that is to say about 2000 B.C., central and south-eastern Europe and central Asia were probably warnaer, moister and better wooded than they are now. In these regions of the earth wandered a group of tribes mainly of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race, sufficiently in touch with one another to speak merely variations of one common language from the Rhine to the Caspian Sea. At that time they may not have been a very numerous people, and their existence was unsuspected by the Babylonians to whom Hammurabi was giving laws, or by the already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt which was tasting in those days for the first time the bitterness of foreign conquest. These Nordic people were destined to play a very important part indeed in the world's history. They were a people of the parklands and the forest clearings; they had no horses at first but they had cattle ; when they wandered they put their tents and other gear on rough ox waggons ; when they settled for a time they may have made huts of wattle and mud. They burnt their important dead ; they did not bury them ceremoniously as the brunet peoples did. They put the ashes of their greater leaders in urns and then made a great cir- cular mound about them. These mounds are the " round barrows " that occur all over north Europe. The brunet people, their pre- decessors, did not burn their dead but buried them in a sitting position in elongated mounds ; the " long barrows." The Aryans raised crops of wheat, ploughing with oxen, but they did not settle down by their crops ; they would reap and move on. They had bronze, and somewhen about 1500 b.c. they acquired iron. They may have been the discoverers of iron smelting. And some- when vaguely about that time they also got the horse— which to begin with they used only for draught purposes. Their social life did not centre upon a temple like that of the more settled people