ANTHROPOLOGICAL and archaeological discoveries show in north-west Europe, above all in north-west Germany, a Neolithic province with peculiar and characteristic forms of culture. These discoveries show that north-western Germany is the oldest seat of this culture, that from there central Germany was settled, and later on southern Germany. The earliest remains of Nordic origin in southern Germany disclose a stage of culture which for central Germany corresponds to one of the latest stages. The men who so spread show in their remains always the Nordic racial characters, and at the end of the Stone Age, when these Nordic tribes adopted the body-burning custom, they carried it into the lands they conquered, along with their own special forms of weapons, implements, vessels, and houses.

The paths of conquest followed by the Nordic tribes during those ages when body-burning prevailed among them can no longer be traced from the bone remains; but Archaeology has found how to read them from the wanderings of styles. 'We can now see the various styles of the Stone Age wandering in a broad stream from central and south Germany to the Balkans. With them goes the rectangular house, and the journey is made in heavy panoply: strongholds mark its way. The word now is not merely peaceful penetration but conquest. So it is that Troy, on the Hellespont, is reached by them; so Mycene and Tiryns are reached through Thessaly and Boeotia. . . . Into Italy the Nordic stream comes first along the road from Valona into the Po and Tiber country. It only came much later, in the Hallstatt period, into France and Spain in the west. In these movements, all alike starting from the same centre, we behold our continent becoming Indo-European.'¹

All these are roads taken by Nordic tribes: by the Phrygians to Troy and Asia Minor; by the Nordic Hellenes to Greece; by the Nordic Italics (Romans) to Italy; by the Nordic Kelts to France and Spain. To these lands these tribes bring their Indo-European languages, and as the ruling class force them on to the subject, mainly Mediterranean, lower orders.

The conquests by these peoples, however, represent a part only of the spread of the Nordic tribes. Their conquests take them far into Asia, and even to North Africa. We cannot here follow this spread of the Nordics in all its extent. Arldt has shown in his book, Germanische Völkerwellen und ihre Bedeutung in der Bevölkerungsgeschichte Europas (1917), the magnitude of these prehistoric and historic movements of peoples.² The 'Indo-Europeanizing' goes far beyond Europe. Nordic tribes carried their Indo-European tongues to the western boundary of China and beyond India. Many of these tongues may have perished, just as at a later time, with the exhaustion of the last -- that is, the Germanic -- wave of Nordic race, the Gothic, the Lombard, the Burgundian, and other Germanic tongues in the Mediterranean area perished.

It is here, therefore, that the connexion between Race and Language is to be seen. Where to-day Indo-European languages are spoken, there must have been earlier a territory under the sway of a ruling class of Nordic race. The Nordic blood of the ruling class (nobles and free husbandmen) may long ago have run dry in most of these peoples. The tongues brought by Nordic men are still alive to-day (more or less modified by the linguistic tendencies of the non-Nordic lower orders) in Europe and Asia. The peoples who to-day speak Indo-European tongues are in this sense the 'linguistic heirs' of the original Indo-European people.³ 

Germanic languages	Modern Greek
Romance languages	Albanian
Slav languages	Baltic languages
Keltic languages	Languages other than Indo-European

Map XV The Indo-European languages of Europe

The most important of the Indo-European languages preserved to us are: Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, the Slav languages, Greek, Latin, and the Romance derivatives, and the Keltic and Germanic languages (Maps XIV, XV). From the historical records and the sculpture of these peoples we can more or less clearly gather the fact of the former existence of a Nordic noble and husbandman class; there are even memories of an immigration from the north often still clearly preserved.

In the nineteenth century there were long discussions as to where the home of the 'Indo-Europeans' -- that is, of the peoples with Indo-European languages -- is to be sought. Today it is seen that what is in question is the original home of the ruling classes in these peoples. The answer is as follows: 'The home of the Indo-Europeans lies not in Asia, but in north-west Europe, and includes the islands of the west Baltic; on the west it is bathed by the North Sea, and in the south reaches down to the mountain chain which stretches right across the Germany of to-day from the Harz to the Thuringian Forest, to the Fichtel, Erz, and Riesen ranges, and as far as the outermost branches of the western Carpathians; on the east the Oder was perhaps the original boundary, which at an early date may have been already pushed forward to the Vistula.'⁴

Since Much wrote this, many new facts pointing to north-west Europe as the original home of the tribes of Nordic race (carrying the Indo-European languages) have come to light. Thus R. G. Latham (1812-88) is seen to be right when he, the first philologist to do so, in 1851 fixed on Europe as the home of the peoples of Indo-European speech. Researches in language, prehistory, and race point to this original home,⁵ and already in Neolithic times a relatively high culture is found in this region. Ploughing, the highest form of husbandry, had there arisen, and a Stone Age pottery had been developed, excelling that of other Neolithic European cultures in beauty and wealth of form. From this region there began as early as Neolithic times the dispersal southwards and eastwards, to the Alps, the middle Danube, the Balkans, Greece, and south Russia; in the Bronze Age there was a movement over the Alps and to Greece again, then to the Black Sea lands, and to Hither Asia. It may perhaps be assumed that the Nordic movements of conquest along the Danube, following one another like waves, broke through a predominantly Dinaric area, and so drove predominantly Dinaric tribes out of the Danubian lands in two directions, and that it was in this way that the two predominantly Dinaric regions of to-day arose: the one in the area of the Slovenes, Croats, Albanians, Montenegrins, and Serbs; the other in the north-west Ukraine (cp. Map XIV).

In their wanderings towards the south and east the Nordic tribes brought with them various species of grain of northwest European origin, as also plough husbandry and cattlebreeding, and definite laws of land-ownership; they spread the amber of their Baltic home, the rectangular wooden house, the shed which made weaving possible, and which from the peoples of Indo-European speech penetrated as far as Eastern Asia;⁶ from the end of the Stone Age they carried with them the custom of body-burning; and they brought definite religious beliefs, legal and moral conceptions, and a regular system of dividing the year -- all of these being characters whose remarkable agreement among all peoples of Indo-European speech would alone point to one common origin for the ruling classes in these peoples.⁷

The traces of the first Nordic waves are perhaps lost for ever, or at the best only very dimly to be seen. From the time of early prehistory the north of Europe seems to have been the 'womb of the nations' (vagina gentium), the name given it later by the Romans. The dolmens -- great stone structures that can be followed from Sweden, over Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, Belgium, the British Isles, western France, Portugal, Spain, North Africa, to Palestine and Abyssinia -- seem to be the work of one or more Nordic waves, which from time to time were set as ruling classes over Mediterranean populations. Schuchhardt ascribes (wrongly, I think) the dolmens to the West European culture; in the dolmens, too, of Algiers were found the bones of a tall, long-headed people, and in Abyssinia fair and light-eyed persons are still occasionally found to-day.⁸ May we derive the fair Berbers and Kabyles -- among these latter the blondes make up a third to a fifth of the population -- from a wave such as the foregoing? I have gone into this question in my Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes.

The several waves of peoples that can be distinguished cannot all be followed up here. The spread of the Nordic tribes began long before their linguistic differentiation, that is to say, long before the first dialectical differences arose in the basic Indo-European tongue. This basic language may have experienced its first great differentiation between 3000 and 2000 B.C. The several Indo-European languages first arose in the conquered territories, and each one is the expression of what befell some tribe in a particular environment. What has made the Indo-European tongues so unlike one another, in spite of the common element still existing, is the linguistic influence in each case of the non-Nordic element in the peoples of Indo-European speech.⁹

Of the various peoples founded by Nordic tribes only those will be dealt with in more detail in the following who have been of importance for our civilization to-day, or have stood out in history. Zaborowski, in his Les peuples aryens d'Asie et d'Europe (1908), has discussed a great number of Nordic tribes and their remains to-day in Asia. Here the Amorites may be referred to, since they brought Nordic blood -- the blood of the 'sons of Anak' -- into the Jewish nation, especially, it would seem, into the people of the kingdom of Israel (the northern kingdom). David, who perhaps had an Amorite mother, is described (Book of Kings i. 16, 17) as fair (admoni). The Amorites, with other Nordic tribes, seem to have invaded Asia Minor from the Aegean Sea about 1500 B.C. As the highest Being they worshipped a hammer-wielding Thunder god. The Egyptian records make mention of attacks by these 'Amurru' on the Palestine borders of Egypt in the fifteenth century B.C.; and Egyptian paintings again show these fair, light-eyed men with Nordic features about the beginning of the thirteenth century B.C. Nordic Scythians, too, in the seventh century B.C. overran Palestine, and, like the Amorites, seem to have been partly absorbed among its people. Possibly, too, some of the blood of the Nordic ruling class of the Philistines made its way into the Jewish people. To-day light skin, hair, and eyes are still fairly frequent among the Druses of the Lebanon, above all, but also among the Samaritans. The Druses are distinguished by a relatively high education among the people, and have a fairly important literature. They are described as brave, hard-working, clean, hospitable, irritable, cruel, and vengeful -- qualities which would fit in with a racial combination of Nordic, Hither Asiatic, and Oriental blood. The peculiarity of their faith, which is a modification (a kind of Gnosticism) of Islam, in many respects reminding us of beliefs held by the peoples of Indo-European speech, can perhaps be explained by the Nordic strain. Sultan Atrash, the leader of the Druses against the French, is described by the English traveller, W. B. Seabrook, as having blue eyes and a very fair skin.

All the appearances point to the Philistines as having been a people racially like the Achaeans, that is, with a Nordic upper class and Mediterranean lower class, and with Nordic 'giants' as leaders. They were evidently a people intruding into Palestine from Crete, and with a Mycenean culture. 'Their pottery from Gaza is degenerate Mycenean, so is Goliath's armour, the greaves and the helmet, and his choice of single combat -- a choice as full of unknown terrors to the Jews as it is becoming to the Homeric heroes.'¹⁰ When the 'giant' Goliath comes forward between the two armies for single combat, after the fashion of the leaders of the Nordic peoples, expecting to find the same custom among his foes, he is brought down to his death by the stone flung from afar. This custom of the single combat is always coming up among Nordic tribes; so it is among the Indians of old, where the leaders fought before the armies, 'that all the world might see'¹¹; so it is among the Persians, where it is reflected in the saga of the duel between father and son (Rostem and Sorab), as, too, it is among the Germans, where the Song of Hildebrand also tells of the single combat under the eyes of two armies fought by father and son, Hiltibrant and Hadubrant. The custom of the single combat is found in many Germanic chronicles; the Icelandic saga is ever telling of the duel ('Holmgang'); and the Nibelungenlied describes the fall of the Burgundians as a set of duels between leaders, as the Iliad describes the Trojan War. Among the Romans and Kelts, too, we find this duel: such are the single combats of T. Manlius Torquatus and M. Valerius Corvus with Keltic leaders during the fighting in upper Italy (367-349 B.C.).

In these duels between leaders there is seen, as it were, symbolically, the fate hanging over the Nordic ruling classes in the peoples with Indo-European languages. It is these very ruling classes that have ever and again fought against one another to extend the powers of the States founded by them, or to defend the non-Nordic lower classes. As they were lacking in any racial consciousness, the Nordic nobility of the Hellenes was fighting in the Trojan War against the Nordic nobility of the Phrygians and other tribes; the Persians fought against the Medes and Indians; the Persians against the Hellenes; the Kelts against the Romans; the Germans against the Kelts. Thus it was the very warlike qualities of the Nordics that led to the destruction of Nordic blood, and all the wars of European peoples have always taken their heaviest toll from the Nordic sections of these people -- in Western history, most of all, in the Middle Ages, when the Nordic element alone made war, but in all later wars, too, and not less so in the late Great War. It is only an awakening racial consciousness among Nordic men in all those nations which still have enough of Nordic blood which can stop the further and, in the end, utter destruction of this blood, and even bring about a fresh strengthening of the Nordic element in these peoples.

The investigations into the traces left behind them by that widespread Nordic people, the Sacae (Scythians), with its many tribes, are well worthy of attention.¹² It had been living on the steppes of south-eastem Europe, and spread thence as far as Turkestan and Afghanistan, and even to the Indus. The ancient writers (such as Polemon of Ilium, Galienos, Clement of Alexandria, Adamantios) state that the Sacae were like the Kelts and Germans, and describe them as fair or ruddy-fair. The Scythian (Sacae) tribe of the Alans are also described as having a Nordic appearance. Ammianus (about A.D. 330-400) calls them 'almost all tall and handsome, with hair almost yellow, and a fierce look.' Their descendants are probably the chivalrous Ossetes, who stand out among the Caucasian peoples through their tall stature and light colouring (30 per cent. blond).¹³ One part of the Sacae seems to have been merged in other Nordic waves, in the Medes and Persians; another seems to have spread as far as China and Siberia (Semireshchensk), and been lost, giving, however, energetic ruling classes to the tribes of Inner Asiatic race and Turkish speech there settled. It is believed, too, that Scythian blood has been preserved particularly among the Afghans (on this people see below). Hildén in 1914 found a Nordic strain among the Obi Ugrians, which may suggest the Nordic Sacae or the Nordic Tokhari.¹⁴ Among the Tartars there are still found to-day, 'scattered here and there, fair men with cheeks like milk and blood, who have a look of being cut off from the Swedish people.'¹⁵

On the wall-paintings of the Betseklik monastery, near Murtak (in the oasis of Turfan), there are represented blue-eyed, ruddy-blond members of a Turkish tribe. Have we here again the Nordic blood of the Sacae or perhaps of the Tokhari? Quite lately records in an Indo-European language have been found in Inner Asia, linguistic remains dating from the eighth century A.D., and referring to a Tokhari people who had reached the western frontier of China, coming out of the West. The Chinese chronicles make mention in the year 200 B.C. of a Wusun people, described as light-eyed, ruddy, and fair, and compared with the (then) people of India and the Persians. The temple paintings in the oasis of Turfan show such a fair, narrow-faced type of men. About 140 B.C. the Wusun beat back the attack of a Mongolian people (of Inner Asiatic race). In the sixth century again a Chinese traveller describes the Wusun as a people with red hair and blue eyes. The Russian ethnographer Grum-Grzhimailo has collected¹⁶ the information about such tribes as these that have come into Inner Asia, and he describes their bodily appearance as follows: medium, sometimes tall, stature, powerful build, rather long face, fair skin, red cheeks, fair hair, light eyes, a high nose, straight or curved outwards. Now that the north-west European origin of the ruling class in various peoples with Indo-European speech is known, there is nothing to astonish us in the combination of remains of Indo-European languages with historical records of a Nordic people coming from the West, even so deep within Inner Asia. The Sacae and the Tokhari are to be looked on as those Nordic tribes who reached farthest east, and from the Sacae, especially, far-reaching and deep influences on the development of Inner and Hither Asiatic art, and even on the whole culture of Inner and Eastern Asia, would seem to have come.¹⁷ The Nordic strain, too, seems still to show itself in Eastern Asia. Kurz writes as follows: 'In that south-eastern corner of the earth there came about a racial fusion which still finds expression to-day in the physical structure of a part of the upper classes in the Chinese people. In general the Chinese is in height, skin, hair, and shape of the face and skull a typical homo asiaticus, meso- or brachy-cephalic, but often we find, especially in the upper classes, a decidedly long skull and an almost white skin, sometimes combined with handsome European features.'¹⁸ Over and over again, too, the very un-Asiatic energy has been pointed out of the leaders of Mongolian and Turkish tribes, who led their tribesmen on far journeys of conquest; and it has been suggested that there is Scythian blood in these ruling classes.¹⁹

Waves of Nordic peoples, akin to the Thracians, and referred to as the Cimmerians, seem to have reached the Caucasus from the Caspian Sea, and to have crossed it about the seventh or eighth century B.C. In the same period also Phrygian bands of Nordic origin, who had advanced over the Hellespont about 1400 B.C., reached the Armenian plateau from the west. These two Nordic waves seem to have become the ruling class among the Armenians. The Armenian language is derived from the Phrygian (Ascanian). The Nordic immigrants found a population on Armenian territory speaking a language which was not Indo-European, with whom they now formed one people and gave them that Indo-European tongue which lives on to-day as Armenian. The Armenian language shows particularly clearly (according to Hüsing) how the Hither Asiatic lower orders among the Armenians have completely altered this Indo-European language to correspond with their linguistic psychology in the direction of the Caucasian (Alarodic) languages -- that is, in the direction of those languages which originally were peculiar to all the peoples of Hither Asiatic race. The Armenian sounds have been given a 'Caucasian stamp,' and this although the Armenian language has taken over only very few words from the Caucasian languages.²⁰ This change in the language was the more thoroughgoing in that among the Armenians the Nordic upper class seems to have soon begun to disappear, and to-day hardly exists. In the fifth century A.D. the Old Armenian hero Dikran (Greek, Tigranes) is still described as fair. The Armenians to-day are very predominantly Hither Asiatic. Yet in the Caucasus, which one Nordic wave after the other has passed over, Nordic blood has often been very clearly preserved even among the peoples not speaking Indo-European tongues (Figs. 186a, 186b).

It is over the Caucasus, too, that the Nordic Hindus seemed to have pressed forward -- according to Hüsing, perhaps about 1700 B.C. They had been for a long time before that so bound up with the Persians that both tribes spoke one and the same tongue -- the Indo-Iranic (formerly also called 'Aryan'). The traces of this Indo-Iranic (Indo-Persian) basic language point to a common road for the Hindus and the Persians, which seems to have brought these tribes from south Russia to the Caucasus. It must be assumed that the Hindu-Persian tribes had been long settled in south-east Europe, for in the Finnish-Ugrian languages we find as the oldest layer of borrowed words a good many from the Indo-Iranic. Hindu-Persian tribes, or, better expressed, the tribes of Nordic descent which later settled in India and Iran and formed historical peoples, must have been settled in south-east Europe in the neighbourhood of tribes of Finnish-Ugrian language (and East Baltic race). Central and northern Russia were still inhabited by tribes of Finnish-Ugrian language in Herodotus' time (that is, in the fifth century B.C.). South Russia may thus have been the contact area for the Hindu-Persian tribes and those of Finnish-Ugrian speech. Many names of rivers seem to point to south Russia as the transitory area of settlement of the Hindu-Persian tribal community -- those names, that is, which are explained as compounds of the Persian word danu, 'river' (Ossetic don), such as Don, Dnieper (Danapris), Dniester (Danastrus), Danube (Donau). Archaeology, too, has already called this south-east European region a region of settlement by Indo-Iranic tribes.²¹ Kretschmer thinks that the oldest abodes of the Indo-Iranians -- that is, the region where they split off as a separate group from the other tribes of Indo-European speech -- was on the middle reaches of the Danube.

The Hindu-Persian tribes must have come into the neighbourhood of the Hittite people (of predominantly Hither Asiatic race) before 1400 B.C.; this is shown by words in the Hittite language borrowed from the Indo-Iranic. This proves that the Hindu-Persian tribes must have reached the Armenian region, or its neighbourhood, about then. About 1400 B.C. the Hindus, too, make their first appearance as a separate tribe and in this same Armenian region, calling themselves 'Hari' -- that is, 'the Blonds.'²² In the old Indian sagas, gods and heroes are always 'the Blond.' An old Indian saga points, too, to the valleys of Kashmir as a land where the Hindus settled temporarily; while the Hindu Vedas, like the Persian Avesta, even show traces of a winter solstice festival, which can only be explained by a North European origin. In Indra's fight with the monster, Vrittra, it would seem to be the struggle of winter against summer that is described by the Vedas, while Hindus and Romans alike set the abode of the gods in the north. The fighting described in the Hindu Rigveda points (as Brunnhofer first recognized) to Afghanistan as its theatre. From here it was that the migration into the Indian plain took place, and the spreading from the Indus eastwards and south-eastwards.

The immigrants brought with them the art of building in wood, and body-burning, and had a comparatively highly developed social system. In the oldest Hindu accounts we meet with the intrusive tribes of Indo-European speech as 'tall,' 'white,' 'blond,' 'fair-nosed'; the aboriginal people whom they found are called the 'dark skin,' and described as 'small,' 'black,' and 'without a high nose,' or 'noseless.' It is noteworthy that the Hindu word for caste (varna) really means 'colour.' To-day, after thousands of years, it is by having the lightest skin that the highest caste Hindus are still recognized; and the Nordic European finds, as it happened to Haeckel (Fig. 46) on his Indian travels, the Hindus wondering which is the very high caste to which he must belong. The age of the Rigvedas, about 1200 B.C., as yet, however, knows nothing of castes, but only of two racial classes -- that of the immigrants and that of the subject earlier inhabitants. It is only 300 to 400 years later in the age of the Brahmanas that the castes are first mentioned, and along with them there is now a set of intermediate stages between the 'fair' and the 'dark' Hindus. It is the racial mixture, therefore, that has produced the intermediate stages; but at the same time it has led to the caste system as an attempt to ward off this mingling of the races. The Hindus of the highest class saw their supreme God in their own likeness, the fair, red-bearded Thunder god Indra, who, if we take the descriptions of the old songs of the gods, may be called a true Nordic figure of a giant. Vishnu and Savitar, too, are described as fair. The Hindus, like the Persians, had brought the horse with them on their migration into Hither Asia, which animal had been unknown there to the Semitic-speaking peoples down to Hammurabi's time (about 2000 B.C.). In a description written in Hittite of a chariot race, the terms for horse-driving are foreign words from the Hindu. When the Hindus had come into the Indian plain they did their utmost to keep up the old-established horse-racing; but the horse does not thrive in India.²³

The Vedas show that for the early Hindus to have many children was a very great happiness. It may be assumed that the mortality among children in this very class of Nordic immigrants was rather high, since Nordic children even in Southern Europe run greater risks than those of the dark races. It looks, too, as if the Hindus were well aware of the dangers of racial mixture in a region for which they were very ill-adapted. A ruthlessly strict system of caste regulations was to put a bar on to any near intercourse between the Nordic lords and the aborigines. The Code of Manu (coming from the beginning of our era, but preserving a very old tradition), the most important code of the Hindus, contains the laws against the mingling of the castes, and besides these many remarkable eugenic precepts. For a long time racial mixture seems to have been kept within bounds. As a sign of the dislike towards the Hither Asiatic race (this race reaches as far as India, and is to-day fairly clearly to be seen there), the following Indian proverb recorded by Nikostratos may be given: 'He whose eyebrows meet is evil.'²⁴ Those ages when the race was still comparatively pure produced the heroic songs, the Hindu philosophy of Brahminism, and Hindu poetry, lofty achievements of Nordic thought in specific Hindu forms. The Hindu creations of the spirit are always worthy of a deep study, and always arouse our enthusiasm. H. S. Chamberlain has most successfully pointed out the importance of Hindu thought for us in his small work, Arische Weltanschauung (1917). We find in the Hindus, and especially in them as a feature characteristic of all peoples with a Nordic element, a harmony of belief, thought, and invention, as yet unseparated, still near, as it were, to the sources of the Nordic spirit, and developing into spiritual creativeness. In those early times the Hindu tongue -- handed down to us as Sanskrit -- unfolded all its wealth, and found Hindu philologists to describe it whose works are unapproached and without rivals in their grammatical insight.

It was perhaps the appearance of Buddha, born 570 B.C., and of Buddhism (which in its essence had lost all Nordic inspiration), that first wholly and irretrievably broke down the racial discipline and forethought of this wonderfully gifted people. Arising first of all in a region only thinly settled by the Hindus of Nordic blood, and, it would seem, spread abroad mainly by non-Nordic missionaries, Buddhism broke with those old traditions of the Nordic Hindus which were in their very blood, and instead of the pure early Hindu philosophy, set up a doubtful message of salvation, addressed -- this is the important point -- no longer to the Nordic element alone, but to the people of all castes and races. Buddhism sapped the courageous soul of the early Hindu wisdom, and in its stead preached the spirit of resignation so that the great Hindu thinker Sankara in his refutation of Buddhism had to reproach it with having 'only shown its endless verbosity or else its hatred of mankind.'²⁵

Buddhism, too, shows no really constructive thought; it has only been able to distort and put a different value on what Brahminism had created in early Hindu times. Instead of that harmony with all life upheld by the early Hindus, Buddhism led to the abnegation of the will to beget life. The Buddhist tale relates how Buddha silently turned to go when it was told him that his wife had just borne a son. Buddhism, through its demand for the renunciation of the sexual life, through its discouragement of marriage and all property, may have directly helped in the disappearance of Nordic blood; for it is just men of Nordic race that may have embraced more earnestly than men of the dark Indian lower orders a faith which borrowed so much of the old spiritual heritage. The Brahmin wise man had only been allowed to give himself up wholly to a life of thought and contemplation when he had grown old in wedlock and fatherhood, and in taking his share in social life, and had seen his children's children. Buddhism, on the contrary, was hostile to marriage, as indeed to the individual rooting himself at all within his people, and tore him out of his historical framework. Thus it could well be called, though with some exaggeration and overlooking its essential greatness, 'the victorious emblem of a destroying force.'²⁷

In the disappearance of the Nordic element in the Hindu people, as may be easily understood, the Indian climate has played a very important part. As a result of the hereditary tendencies they had acquired in north-west Europe, the Nordic Hindus were not adapted to a tropical region. The Indian environment must have had a deep effect in a negatively selective direction on the Nordic element in the people. In hot summers the mortality among fair children in Asia Minor, for instance, is far higher than among brown children.²⁸ Negative selection (that is, destruction as the result of unfavourable conditions) in the Nordic element, and racial mixture were bound to lead to the decay of the Hindu culture. The Macedonian inroad into India (327-326 B.C.) had already shown the political weakness there. The invasion of the tribes called Indo-Scythians by the Greeks (again from the north-west) seems to have brought about a Nordic revival. These tribes, whose bravery is highly spoken of by Greek writers, seem to have been near akin to the Sacae, or to have been one of the Sacae tribes. They set up a kingdom in north-west India that lasted about from 120 B.C. to A.D. 400, and for a time (from about A.D. 45) stoutly extended its boundaries against Persia. In this 'Indo-Scythian' kingdom there was also a revival of Hindu poetry. In the fourth or fifth century A.D. Kalidasa, the greatest Hindu poet known by name, wrote his splendid poems.²⁹ With the rise of the Mongol dominion (which lasted from the eighth century till 1536) the victory of the Asiatic racial elements in India was complete. Religious belief, thought, and art now took on the characteristics of the Hindu population -- that is, of the dark, racial compounds which the India of to-day shows us. 'The Hindu mind ever drifting farther and farther away from the old Aryans, fashioned the Hindu gods with their hideous many-headed, many-armed figures, glowing with sensuality, cruelty, and ferociousness.'³⁰

But as late as the sixth or seventh century A.D. a slight strain of Nordic blood must still have showed itself. The wall-paintings of Ajanta, dating from this period, show besides men who are already fairly like the Hindus of to-day, men also of tall stature, narrow faces, narrow noses, light skin, and with fair hair and blue eyes. To-day a light skin or light eyes are only seldom seen. Some of the tribes on the north-west frontier among whom Risley found blue-eyed blonds, have evidently kept rather more of the Nordic blood, as, too, probably the Sikhs, whose height averages 1.71 metres.³¹ Otherwise it is the highest Hindu castes, the Brahmins, that best show the Nordic admixture. They are some 6 to 9 centimetres taller than the lower castes, and have a lightish skin compared with the brown to brown-black skin of the lower castes, and also have a rather narrow face and nose. In the higher castes Risley found the colour of the hair 'occasionally shot through by something approaching a tawny shade,' while elsewhere all over India it is brown-black or black. Among the Konkanasth Brahmins of Bombay there are some with grey eyes.³² Maury reports that 'the Brahmins, those Hindus who have kept themselves purest from any mixture, particularly in the Himalayan area, are fair-skinned, and fairhaired, blond or ruddy, like Europeans.'³³

The Hindu language, or rather what the Hindu language has become through race mixture, is spoken, indeed, to-day over a very wide area in India, but the blood of those who brought this language is gone almost beyond any trace. In their language the inhabitants of India to-day are mostly Indo-European, but physically they have become a mixture of several dark races. In the language, too, the influence can be seen of the non-Nordic sections of the Hindus, anyhow in the syntax: 'In the modern Indian languages it is, indeed, doubtful whether syntactically they can be counted as belonging to the Indo-European family.'³⁴

The Persians are found about 900 B.C. in the region about Lake Urumia (Azerbaijan). Thence they advanced into Iran, following a Medic wave of Nordic origin. The Medes often appear as a sister tribe of the Persians, indeed almost quite as a Persian tribal group. As soon as the Persians were strong and numerous enough, they fell on the Nordic kingdom bordering on their territory, and brought the Medes under their yoke. But again and again in the history of the Persians we see the Medic resistance only slowly dying down, and it probably helped a great deal in the disappearance of the Nordic ruling class on both sides. In the seventh century B.C. the Persian dominion already reached over the whole of western Iran. From here it was that the true extension of dominion eastwards began, and later on over the whole of Hither Asia as far as Egypt.

When they came into Iran the Persians had a political system such as is found in the early times of all peoples having a Nordic upper class: a tribal state resting on a union of the clans, which were held together by a strong system of family rule with the father as head (the patria potestas of the Roman people). This was how any State belonging to peoples with a Nordic upper class was built up: starting with the family, through the clan and the group of clans (Persian, vis) to the tribe (Persian, zantu), and then finally to the whole people. It is the same structure which among the Hellenes and Romans led from the family through the clan (genos, gens), and the group of clans (phratia, curia, among the Germans Hundertschaft, hundred) to the tribe (phyle, tribus; among the Germans gau) and the united people (populus).³⁵ In the earliest times of the peoples with Nordic descent there was only a loose union among the clans, and as yet no true State. A people was led by a ruling nobility represented by chieftains, who had only small powers within a group of clans. The individuals making up the people are still free and equal, by virtue of the same Nordic blood in them all. All legal relations were based on a tradition of legal conceptions, which were looked on as holy. Each father of a household was himself priest and judge in his own house. Religion, custom, and law were still an undivided unity; and when a true system of laws grew up, it had to start from the law of the family as the origin of all. In the religion, the holiness of the blood-bond and the duty of propagation were deeply rooted, for the father when dead wished to be held in honour by his children. He who was childless was looked on as unblessed. Therefore it was that marriage was a sacrament. This is shown from old Hindu sources; thus, too, in many Hellenic towns celibacy was punished; thus it was the Roman's duty to marry and preserve his family (matrimonium liberorum quaerendum causa). For the early Persians the highest good was valour and the gift of many children. This is an everrecurring feature in all the peoples of Indo-European speech; they have rightly been called 'a race glorying in wedlock and children.'³⁶ With the decay of these ideas danger was bound to come in all Nordic-led peoples for the inheritance of Nordic blood.

The Persians at the beginning of their history are seen to be living under the conditions of those early times, as were the Germans in Tacitus' description. A change came about at the end of the seventh century B.C., when a king set himself above the tribal leaders. This concentration furnished the strength for new extensions of power. Moreover, the Persian people till after the beginning of the sixth century B.C. were still predominantly Nordic. 'They were nearly all fair or ruddy like the Greeks.'³⁷ At the end of the seventh century or beginning of the sixth century B.C. (according to Hertel about 550 B.C.³⁸) there arose the great figure of Spitama Zarathustra among the Persians, and created for them a religion out of the spiritual inheritance of their early times, to which he gave a new form. This is the first self-conscious religious creation in history -- long before Buddha and the oldest Jewish prophets -- and also the earliest to give an ethical meaning to the whole world process and to the State, and to look on man as playing a part in this far-spread ethical system through his behaviour. Zarathustra's teachings are set forth in the Gatha songs of the Avesta.³⁹ These teachings are directed to a people of husbandmen and cattle-breeders, and steep every action of the husbandmen throughout the day and the year in the spirit of piety, as did the old Roman belief -- the latter in a sober form, the Persian belief of Zarathustra in a form breathing the loftiest ideals.

In Zarathustra's teaching that lofty ethical sense characterizing the old Persians rises to sublime heights. Standing between the never-ending contest between the Good and the Evil Spirit, and controlling it, is Zarathustra's one God, Ahura Mazda. The Good Spirit is Ahura Mazda, so far as he takes on substance in living men through their ethical striving. The Evil Spirit is seen by Zarathustra especially in the 'Flockless,' the wandering 'Robbers' of the south Iranian plain -- so foreign did he feel the Semitic tribes (of predominantly Oriental race), in contrast with whom he felt his own people to be a people of workers.⁴⁰ Zarathustra was on the side of the political change from tribal leadership to the kingship. The Persian religion before him, a belief in several divine beings, had rested on the priesthood of the leading nobles, and seemed to Zarathustra to have lost all life amid the prescriptions of a strict ritual. From the kingship Zarathustra and his disciples hoped to find advantage for his belief in the one God.

Mazdaism, which this great religious founder brought his people, is important for the understanding of the Nordic spirit: it shows the Nordic essence in a Persian form, and seems to show it with great faithfulness. 'Mazdaism gives us a practical and trustworthy measure of values in religious culture, and from the standpoint of universal history in an authoritative and decisive manner. In it the ethical life of a certain people, the Iranians, resting on a heathen tradition, becomes the foundation of religious morality. This standard of reference is a natural one, fashioned by the people itself. It rests, indeed, upon that same self-reliance coming from a good conscience which belonged to the Hellenes, too, as it did to all peoples with a life of their own. But while the Hellenes were content to abide by this self-reliant consciousness, that is to say, a purely instinctive customary behaviour, Spitama "Zarathustra" and his followers formed out of it a moral philosophy which was consciously elevating, educative, and civilizing. Whatever seemed to the consciousness of the pure Aryan people to be good or ill, to be beneficial or harmful, from now on was held to be ethically good or bad, to be a universal good which must be defended and protected, or an evil which must be destroyed. Thus for the first time in the world's history a conception had arisen of a positive religion, which spread over the whole earth in the form of ethical systems of various kinds. And thereby the conception of culture was at one stroke brought into the world, clear-cut and with deep foundations.'⁴¹

Mazdaism⁴² is the loftiest religious creation that has been produced by the peoples of Nordic origin; and the figure of Zarathustra, on which history can shed little light, is felt to be one of the most sublime of those belonging to these peoples, so rich in creative intellects. The Persian man is set right into the midst of the deep-felt conflict between Good and Evil -- these in the sense in which the Nordic Persian was bound by his nature to understand them -- and he is bidden to decide for the Good, to look up to God, that he may take his share in preparing the final victory of God, the Lord of all that is pure, by 'deed, word, and thought.' The moral conflict in man has never been more deeply, more passionately, grasped than in Mazdaism; never has a loftier goal, a more sublime striving towards purity, been taught to mankind. The whole life of the Persian is embraced by Zarathustra's teaching, and embraced with the object of making his life ever more worthy. Thus it is that fasting and celibacy are forbidden as being obstacles to living, and all that is enjoined which heightens life, from the care of children and the yearly sowing ('whoso sows corn, sows holiness') to the practice of moral cleanliness and piety. Industry, vigour of mind and body, and full parenthood were to be furthered; lewdness and abortion were held especially sinful, as signs of turning away from Ahura Mazda. Persians with a numerous offspring were honoured by presents every year by the great King, according to Herodotus; and Plutarch tells us that those parents were praised who had begotten tall, comely children.

Fig. 195 - Dareyavosh (Darius) I, 521-485 B.C., after a sculpture

The unclean man found annihilation at God's final victory, together with the world of evil, of devils, of the adversaries of Ahura Mazda; for in Eternity only purity can exist. It is a sublime and magnificent universe in which the Persian finds himself thus set as a working part of the whole; and he could make this faith a part of his whole being, for it was taken from his inmost feelings. Thus, too, Mazdaism could heighten the inborn characteristics of the Persian nature so as to make of them a shining picture; it brought for the early Persians industry, simplicity, love of truth, and righteousness, and made its kings true kings of the people, who knew how to join wisdom to mildness.

The more Mazdaism discloses itself to research, the clearer do we see the true greatness of the Persians and their culture, which stands as an equal beside that of Greece and of Rome, while ethically it is above them. Gobineau it was who first pointed out how little our 'general education' knows of Persia compared with its real importance.

The laws and customs of the old Persians show always a Nordic nature; simplicity and a straightforward vigour were the marks of this people in its early times. Herodotus describes the Persians as tall, strong, and with a proud bearing, and Herakleides of Pontus calls them 'the manliest and highest-minded of the Barbarians.' Xenophon refers (Anabasis, iii. 2, 25) to the tall, beautiful, Persian woman. Down to the latest times the Persians have suffered in esteem under the judgment passed on them by Hellenic boastfulness and Hellenic hatred, ever repeated by others. Gobineau was the first to recognize the lofty mind of the Persians, and he also saw at once that they were 'in blood and nature a Germanic people.'⁴³ What has always drawn men of insight towards the old Persians is the chivalry, the generosity, the daring, and at the same time the freshness as of childhood, 'all poetry and greatness' (Gobineau), of this people, but above all the ethical depth of the Persian religion showing itself in an education directed towards gratitude, strict truthfulness, and justice. In characters such as these the Persians show themselves to be more Nordic than the Hellenes. Nordic energy, too (opposed to the resignation of Eastern religions), is seen from the fact that the Persian was not to bear with the evil around him, but was to stem it by 'thought, word, and deed.' Such a view of life explains, too, why the sons of noble Persians, according to Herodotus, were brought up at the Great King's Court 'to ride, shoot with the bow, and tell the truth.'

Under Kurash (Cyrus) II, who reigned from 500 B.C., the growth of the Persian kingdom into a great power began. The whole of Iran became Persian, Babylonia was subdued, and Asia Minor was incorporated into the Empire. During this time the Persian power met everywhere with comparatively thickly settled areas of predominantly Hither Asiatic and Oriental race. The king, who is pictured as singularly noble, exercised a very mild rule, and left the conquered peoples a certain independence under Persian and native officials. This was the beginning of the mixture of races and of the disappearance of the Nordic ruling class, which was now to wear itself out in the service of the Persian Empire. In the life of all peoples under a Nordic leadership it has always been imperialism that has brought about decay and death by this same using up of the Nordic part of the people. Always the Nordic class (which at first even carries on the wars alone) spread itself out over wide regions, thus ever growing thinner and thinner, and in the end dying out.

About 400 B.C. pre-Persian beliefs -- beliefs of the non-Nordic lower classes -- forced their way again into the religion of the Persians. Mithra-worship spread, and especially the worship of Anahita, the goddess of fruitfulness, whose worship shows what in Nordic eyes is a spirit of lewdness, the very same spirit in which the Ishtar (Astarte) and Kybele of the Semitic-speaking peoples and the Aphrodite of late Greek times were worshipped; it was the spirit of the Hither Asiatic race or of a Hither Asiatic-Oriental mixture, which was bound to win its way as the Nordic element died out among the Persians and the Hellenes. The Nordic conception of purity was disappearing among the Persians. About 330 B.C. Alexander the Great, with the predominantly Nordic Macedonians, destroyed Persian independence. The peoples whom the Persians had conquered -- Medes, Babylonians, Egyptians, the various tribes of Asia Minor -- had all welcomed the loss of prestige suffered from the Hellenes by the Persians through their fruitless attack on Greece. Thus the empire could no longer withstand Alexander's triumphal march, although he had to praise the strength and courage of his Persian foes.

The warrior class which met the Macedonians seems to have still been predominantly Nordic. In the coloured representations on the Sidon sarcophagus the Persians still have light eyes and hair, fair and reddish moustaches, Nordic noses, but also now and again the almond eyes of the Oriental race, or characteristics of the Hither Asiatic race (cp. Figs. 196, 197).⁴⁴

The Persian people raised itself anew after the fall of the Macedonian dominion, which collapsed in turn through being extended over far non-Nordic regions, while at the same time the Nordic class of warriors and rulers was dwindling away. In Persia, after about 250 B.C., there arose the dominion of the Parthians, a Persian tribe; and from 228 B.C. to A.D. 651 Persia under the royal house of the Sassanids was again a strong power, which withstood with glory both Rome and Byzantium. Nordic blood still shows itself in the seventh century A.D.: so it is in the representations of the Hindu wallpaintings in Ajanta described by Ujfalvy. Of three Persian envoys there represented the first is dark, the second light-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond, the third dark-skinned, blue-eyed, and with a fair beard. Another Persian in the same painting is light-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. The main body of the people, however, must by then have long been predominantly Hither Asiatic or Hither Asiatic-Oriental.

The rule of the Arabs, and with them of Islam, over Persia began in A.D. 651, and brought a wave of Oriental blood with it. Mazdaism was suppressed by the Arabs in bloody persecutions,⁴⁵ the leading and most steadfast families probably suffering the greatest losses. The mental achievements of the Persians still lasted on. Since Goethe's Westöstlicher Diwan the names at least of the Persian poets Firdusi, Nisami, Jelal ed-din Rumi, Sadi, Hafiz, and Jami have become better known. They lived at the time of the Middle Ages in the West. The Arabic literature of the Middle Ages was in great part the work of Persians writing in Arabic. Islamic architecture is derived in great part from Persian sources. It is certainly, too, no mere accident that Sufism, the mysticism of Islam, came probably from Persia, and flourished there most. Islam, like all the Semitic forms of religion, has always seemed unsatisfyingly dry and lifeless to the Nordic soul. Sufism was an attempt to make a faith out of Islam which should better fill the heart, and to open a deeper and richer vein of religious experience. It is significant that Sufism has been derived from Indian philosophy, especially the Vedanta, and also from the old Persian Mazdaisin and neo-Platonism. All these derivations seem to hold something of the truth; at any rate they always point towards the soul of the peoples with Indo-European speech, not towards that of Semitic-speaking peoples.

Ujfalvy reaches the result that as early as the Achaemenid dynasty -- that is, already in the sixth century B.C. -- there are the beginnings of a Semitic strain -- that is, a strain of the Hither Asiatic and the Oriental race -- which in the time of the Sassanids -- that is, between the third and seventh centuries A.D. -- led to the predominance of the blood of these races in the Persian people. Owing to geographical conditions, it was the Hither Asiatic race particularly (on this race, cp. Chapter IV) that was bound to prevail when the Nordic upper class disappeared. Hence we have Ujfalvy's description of the Persians in the time of the Sassanids: 'The nose is markedly aquiline, the eyes wide opened and almond-shaped; the head is remarkably high and short.' Towards the end of the Sassanid times much Arabian blood (according to Ujfalvy), and with it, therefore, much blood of the Oriental race made its way into the Persian people.⁴⁶ The description given by Ammianus Marcellinus⁴⁷ (about A.D. 330 to 400) of the Persians -- he describes them as short, dark-skinned, with much hair, and meeting eyebrows, and as effeminate looking -- this description, although it may be the expression of a hostile disposition, shows, however, that the main body of the Persian people had by the fourth century A.D. become a Hither Asiatic-Oriental mixed race. The influence of the non-Nordic section of the people on the Persian tongue would change this towards the Caucasian languages: this was first noticed by Hüsing and Winckler.

In the Persia of to-day fair hair and light eyes are by no means rare in the old noble families.⁴⁸ Fair people are still occasionally found between Shiraz and Ispahan. Among the Kurds who speak a Persian dialect, the blonds still make up more than half the population in the neighbourhood of Nimruddag and Karakush. The cephalic index of these Western Kurds averages 75. The woman's position among the Kurds is a much freer one than among the Turks and the inhabitants of Persia to-day. The Kurds, too, have often given the East distinguished men down to this day. An example of this is Saladin (Salah-ed-din, 1137-93), who was (according to his contemporaries) a tall Kurdish chieftain, becoming afterwards Sultan. High-minded, brave, just, moral, chivalrous towards women and prisoners, generous, a lover of learning, he has about him but little of that picture of a ruler which has always been typical of the East, but rather something of the picture we have of the early Persian Great Kings.⁴⁹ In the seventeenth century the traveller, Goes, still found fair mountain folk in the Pamirs.⁵⁰ Among the Pamir tribes, especially the Galchas, light eyes and hair are still said not to be rare to-day. But it is especially among the Afghans that a Nordic strain seems to have been preserved. Stiehl found most of the Afghan prisoners of war tall, light-eyed, 'with an open, honest expression in the eyes'; and says that most of them 'could just as well have been born on a farm in north Germany as in the huts of their mountain home.'⁵¹ Probably we have here the Nordic blood of the old Persians and Sacae, for these people had carried their rule far into Asia. In the mountains, too, that dilution of Nordic blood does not take place which we find already in the lowlands of Southern Europe.

The Persian people to-day still shows (Gobineau was the first, too, to stress this) characters which set it apart from the peoples around. 'These "Iranians," according to the descriptions and statements of nearly every traveller, and on the evidence of their literature, have a mentality such as we only find among Europeans. They are the only people in their area open to receive culture, and are marked off by this from all their neighbours in spite of their Islamic mask and of their backwardness to-day. They are the descendants and natural heirs of the old Iranians, on whose culture the whole of Islam has battened, and still battens to-day, without being capable -- it and its Arabic and Turkish protagonists -- of creating anything new from out of itself.'⁵²