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Rh Romans, all the peoples of modern Europe (save the Basques, the Finns and the Lapps, the Magyars or Hungarians, and the Ottoman Turks), together with the Persians and the Hindus and some other Asian peoples.

—Long before the dawn of history in Europe and while they were yet in the Neolithic stage of culture (sec. 6), the clans and tribes of the hitherto undivided Aryan family began to break up and to scatter.

Some of these tribes in the course of their wanderings found their way into the great river plains of Lidia and out upon the table-lands of Iran. They subjugated the aborigines of these lands and communicated to them their language. These Aryan invaders and the natives, thus Aryanized in speech and probably somewhat changed in blood, became the progenitors of the Iranians and the Hindus of history.

Other clans and tribes pushed into the peninsulas of Greece and Italy, and, mingling with the peoples already settled there, founded the Greek and Italian city-states, and from the germs of culture which they carried with them, or which they found among the native populations or afterwards received from the Oriental lands, developed what is known as the Classical Civilization. Yet other tribes of the family, either through peaceful expansion, through social relations, or through conquest, had, long before our era, made Aryan in speech almost all the remaining regions of Europe.