Words as factors in prehistoric reconstruction.

Neither space nor the scope of the present work allow of our taking up the above sketch and justifying every feature of it by a thorough study of each of the words that suggest it. That would be simply embarking on a treatise of comparative philology. Still, as words have of late acquired such immense importance in the study of what may be called “ prehistoric history ”—an importance as great as the things found in the caves, mounds, and barrows that sheltered primitive humanity in life and death, or, in geology, the fossils and imprints which reveal the meaning of the various rocks andstrata,—it will not be an unnecessarv digression, if we pause awhile to trace a few of the words which are our only key, and by no means an insufficient one, to the material and intellectual life of the early Aryan world. This brief review will at the same time serve to indicate and illustrate the processes of philological research in their special bearings on historical reconstruction.

We have already had a hint of the great importance which attached to the cow as a factor in the life of early Aryan communities. Indeed we may safely proclaim the cow the characteristic animal of the Aryan race. We find it the companion of every Aryan people, one of the chief conditions of their existence ; it stands to the Aryas in exactly the same relation that the sheep does to the Turanians. The very fact of the cow’s predominance in a people’s life is sufficient proof of that people’s having reached the settled stage of existence—the pastoral-farming, because the cow, unlike the sheep, is unfit for a nomadic life and incapable of bearing the hardship of continual change and marching. Those who use oxen as beasts of burden and draught know very well that they have to be driven at an easy pace, by short stages, and moreover positively require one full day of rest at least in seven or eight, if they are to be kept in anything like tolerable condition. They are also very fastidious as to their food, and the least neglect in the care of them, the least pressure of overwork, cause loss of flesh and spirits, agonizingly sore hoofs, then illness and death in a very short time.

The Cow

The Sanskrit name of the cow is GO, plural  GAVAS, and this short radical we find running, with the modifications consequent on the character of each, through most of our languages : Old German chuo, modern German kuh, English cow. The Slavi branch has preserved it, like a great many others, in the form most resembling the original. Thus, Old Slavic has govycido, a herd ; modern Servian govedar , a cow-herd ; Russian, govyadzna,—beef, the flesh of cows and oxen ; then gospod\n, maste gosp'od (i), the Lord ; gospodar, the title given to South Slavic rulers ; all meaning originally “ master of cows,” and corresponding to the Old Sanskrit gopa, which first means a herdsman, and later a chieftain, a king. 1 By the same evolution of compound words from a simple radical, following on the evolution of various more or less subtle shades of meaning from the plain meaning of the original radical, the Sanskrit word gotra, literally “ the enclosure which protects a herd from thieves and keeps it from straying,” gradually comes to designate a family, then a tribe, i. e., the people who live behind the same walls.

Mistaken notions concerning remote antiquity.

Let us linger awhile on a few of the names expressing the closest of domestic ties, for they will give us a precious insight into the Aryas’ moral life,and help us realize what we cannot sufficiently impress on our minds—that, contrary to all first (priori) impressions and plausible prejudice born of faulty training, in adjusting our historical glasses to an unhistorical,—otherwise prehistorical, i. e., unmonumental, undocumented—antiquity, the race we have to deal with was far from being a primitive — or, better, primary—block of humanity, unshaped, save to the lowest uses of material service to the one instinct of preserving life, with none as yet of the refining, ennobling stirrings of the spirit which come from experience, length of days, and leisure from bodily toil,—leisure to look and listen, to think, remember, feel. Rough-hewn they surely were, but they were the finest material ever provided for chisel to work upon, and the work had been going on for more years—nay, centuries, than we at first feel at all willing to concede. Whenever we address our thoughts to the human race of a few thousand years back, we pucker our lips into a superciliously condescending smile, and admire how many fine things our race could do and say when it was so very young and, naturally, ignorant. We should know better by this time ; for has not Chaldea—to take but one branch—taught us that as far as six or seven thousand years ago great civilizations had not only dawned or begun to bloom, but some had reached and even passed their maturity and were declining into that inevitable doom of decay into which others were to follow them and some, to a certainty, had preceded them. A very little calculation of probabilities will show us that mankind, at the very earliest point at which our eager grasp can secure the first slight hold of it, was not young, and when it had reached, say, the cave-dwelling stage, had probably existed, in the dignity of speaking, fire-using Man,more centuries than separate it from ourselves. To stand out at all where the long slim ray from the prying bull’s-eye of modern research, historic or prehistoric, can, however feebly, reach it, the race—or n race must have emerged out of the colorless past of tentative groping, into a stage of positive achievement of some kind—for without that, without something to hold to, our most pressing questionings must have been eluded and have been met by nought but the silence of the grave.