near the Hindu-Koh mountains; but so definite a determination possesses not the slightest shadow of authority or value. We really know next to nothing of the last movements which have brought any branch of the family into its present place of abode; even these lie beyond the reach of the very hoariest traditions which have come down to us. The daylight of recorded history dawns first upon the easternmost, the Indo-Persian or Aryan, branch. The time is probably not far from two thousand years before Christ. We there see the Sanskrit-speaking tribes but just across the threshold of India, working their way over the river-valleys and intervening sand-plains of its north-western province, the Penjab, toward the great fertile territory, watered by the Ganges and its tributaries, of which they are soon to become the masters; and we know that India, at least, is not the first home, but one of the latest conquests, of the family. The epoch, however, early as it appears to us, is far from the beginning of Indo-European migrations; the general separation of the branches had taken place long before: and who shall say which of them has wandered widest, in the search after a permanent dwelling-place? The joint home of Indians and Persians was doubtless in north-eastern Iran, the scene of the oldest Persian religious and heroic legend and tradition; but there is no evidence whatever to prove that they were the aborigines of that region, and that all migration had been westward from thence.[1] Greek history and tradition also penetrate a little way into the second thousand years before Christ; but the Greeks are then already in quiet possession of that little peninsula, with the neighbouring islands and Asiatic shores, whence the glory of their genius afterward irradiated the world; and, for aught that they are able to tell us of their origin, they might have sprung out of the ground there—born, according to their own story, of the stones which Deucalion and Pyrrha threw
- ↑ Some authorities incline to regard the geographical reminiscences of the Zend-avesta (in the first chapter of the Vendidad) as indicating the course of the joint Aryan migration from the original family home; but the claim appears to me so wholly baseless, and even preposterous, that I find it difficult to understand how any man should seriously put it forward.
