Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/201

 and spindles, the metalwork, belts and the like — all go back to pre-historic times. The colours themselves in their nuances and blending and in their technical preparation form a part of the same primeval heritage. Scattered fragments of this art are to be found throughout all Southern Europe, from the Basques to the Slavs of the Balkans, among the Greeks and the Turks. They extend into Asia Minor and up to the boundaries of Persia (at least as regards the linear forms); they are found in Little Russia, in Slovakia and Bohemia, in some parts of Hungary and as far as Sweden and Finland, whither they were transmitted by the Goths who, in their old homes on the Dnieper, borrowed them from the Thracians. The principal features of this highly developed art passed through Asiatic channels, across Siberia — which in remote antiquity was much more densely inhabited than it is today — to the American Continent, where it descended as far as Mexico and the neighbouring republics; the penetration extended by unknown routes, and to a limited degree, as far as the Polynesian Archipelago. But the region in which this art presents itself in the most highly developed form is undoubtedly Roumania. It is characterised by the transformation of natural objects and aspects into a system of geometrical lines: it is an abstract, mathematical, stylized conception of beauty.

The race itself, the ancient Thracian race, whose tribes, the Getes and the Daces, occupied the basin of the Lower Danube and the slopes of the Carpathians, in close union with its neighbours, the maritime Illyrians, lives on today, Romanized in speech, in the countries inhabited by the Roumanians. More closely than the other descendants of the same ethnographical stock they have preserved the physical lineaments of their barbarian ancestors, despite all