Page:The Outline of History Vol 1.djvu/195

 and in the Baltic, and also among the Greek islands. But the Aryans, as we shall see later, were probably not the first peoples to take to the sea.

We have already described the sort of home the primitive Aryan occupied and his household life, so far as the remains of the Swiss pile-dwellings enable us to describe these things. Mostly his houses were of too flimsy a sort, probably of wattle and mud, to have survived, and possibly he left them and trekked on for very slight reasons. The Aryan peoples burnt their dead, a custom they still preserve in India, but their predecessors, the long-barrow people, the Iberians, buried their dead in a sitting position. In some ancient Aryan burial mounds (round barrows) the urns containing the ashes of the departed are shaped like houses, and these represent rounded huts with thatched roofs. See Fig. p. 57.

The grazing of the primitive Aryan was far more important to him than his agriculture. At first he cultivated with a rough wooden hoe; then, after he had found out the use of cattle for draught purposes, he began real ploughing with oxen, using at first a suitably bent tree bough as his plough. His first cultivation before that came about must have been rather in the form of garden patches near the house buildings than of fields. Most of the land his tribe occupied was common land on which the cattle grazed together.

He never used stone for building house walls until upon the very verge of history. He used stone for hearths (e.g. at Glastonbury) and sometimes stone sub-structures. He did, however, make a sort of stone house in the centre of the great mounds in which he buried his illustrious dead. He may have learnt this custom from his Iberian neighbours and predecessors. It was these dark whites of the heliolithic culture, and not the primitive Aryans, who were responsible for such primitive temples as Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany.

His social life was growing. Man was now living in clans and tribal communities. These clans and communities clashed; they took each other's grazing land, they sought to rob each other; there began a new thing in human life, war. For war is not a primeval thing; it has not been in this world for more than