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It has long been fully admitted that the languages constituting the Indo-European or Aryan family are sprung from a common ancestor, and it is even possible by comparing them with each other to arrive at a tolerably definite idea of the principal characteristics of this primitive Aryan speech, and of the state of civilization of the people who used it.

The nation or tribes by whom it was spoken now more than 3000 years ago probably inhabited the table-land which forms part of the modern Persia. They had already acquired not a few of the arts of civilization. They had settled habitations, and even towns and castles, and they possessed the principal domestic animals. They were also workers in several of the metals, and were acquainted with the arts of weaving and of brewing a fermented liquor.

Their language had passed the agglutinative stage, and reached that of inflexion. It had declensions of nouns and adjectives, conjugations of verbs, and the grammatical distinction of gender. The distinctions between the parts of speech had become comparatively well defined, and they had a system of numerals extending as far as a hundred.