The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c16.4

v1.c16.4

The advantage of such a term is clear, since all we know regarding the physical characteristics of the first people who spoke languages of this nature is that they were a white race. We cannot tell whether these Wiros were long-headed or short-headed, tall or of little stature, brunette or fair. It has been customary to imagine them as having something of the characteristics which Tacitus describes as belonging to the German of the end of the first century A.D. But all the evidence adduced in support of this is really imaginary. What, therefore, can we say that we know of this early people? From words preserved in their languages, particularly in languages far separated, and in circumstances where there is little likelihood of borrowing from the one language to the other, we may gather something as to the animals and the plants they knew, and perhaps a very little as to their industries. The close similarity between the various languages spoken by them would lead us to infer that they must have lived for long in a severely circumscribed area, so that their peculiarities developed for many generations in common. Since the study of prehistoric man developed, many views have been held as to the geographical position of this early community. Such a confined area must have been separated from the outer world either by great waters or by mountains. There are however, so far as we know, no rivers in the western half of the Old World which at any period have presented an impassable barrier to man. In the evidence for the early history of the speakers of these Indo-European or Indo-Germanic languages there is nothing which would lead us to suppose that they lived upon an island. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether they possessed a word for the sea at all. For the word *mare* which in Latin means ‘the sea,’ has its nearest relatives in other languages amongst words which mean ‘moor’ or ‘swamp.’ That the climate in which they lived belonged to the temperate zone is shown by the nature of the trees which a comparison of their languages leads us to believe they knew. To their habitat we may assign, with considerable certainty, the oak, the beech, the willow, and some coniferous trees. The birch seems to have been known to them and possibly the lime, less certainly the elm. The fruits they knew are more uncertain than the forest trees. Many species of fruit trees familiar to us have flourished in Europe since late geological times; but at all periods men have been anxious to improve the quality of their fruit, and in all probability the commoner cultivated forms became known in northern and north-western Europe only as introduced by the Romans in the period of their conquests beginning with the first century B.C. Cherries have grown in the West from a very early period, but the name itself supports the statement that the cultivated kind was introduced by the great Lucullus in the first half of the first century B.C. from Cerasus in Asia Minor, an area to which the Western world owes much of its fruit and flowering shrubs. The ancient kings of Persia encouraged their satraps to introduce new fruit trees and better kinds into the districts which they ruled. There still exists a late copy of an early inscription in Greek in which the King of Persia gives praise to one of his governors for his beneficent action in this respect.