The Rhind lectures in Archaeology in connection with the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland : delivered in December, 1889, on the early ethnology of the British Isles / by John Rhys.

  • Rhys, John, Sir, 1840-1915.
Date:
1890-91
    taken possession of by Aryans of the P group would form a smaller area within a larger one belonging to populations of the Q group of the same stock, and the descent of the Dorians into the Balkan peninsula becomes a part of a larger movement of the P Aryans, that is to say, of a movement whieh resulted in giving new inhabitants to Italy and Gaul, and through the latter to Spain and Britain. Granted this, we are provided with a key to a variety of difficulties presented by the Celtic, Italian, and Hellenic tongues; and we are brought back to the other question, namely, that of the fusion of the two groups of Aryans in the lands here in point. Here language must again serve as our guide, for to understand the extent of any such fusion of lan- guage of the Q and P groups, we have to help us those Aryan languages which have been submitted to no influence of the P group — such, for instance, as Teutonic, Slavonic, and Sanskrit. Now, of the Western groups showing the influence of the P group, the least affected by it may be said to be decidedly Latin. The case of Latin is a very remarkable one : after being pressed within a small area, it began to conquer all the dialects around it, nor stopped till it became one of the great languages of civilization. The point to be specially noticed is the fact, that the antagonism between the ancient Romans and the Osco-Umbrian peoples in then* neighbourhood was so intense, that the Latin language preserved itself comparatively free from the influence of the P dialects up to the period of its classical literature. Thus does Latin not only agree with the rest of the Q dialects in retaining the surd guttural of the com- bination qu, but also in not labializing the corresponding gu into b, as one finds done in Irish and in Greek. Latin either retains the combination or simplifies it more frequently into v by dropping the g. Take, for instance, the Latin unguo ‘I smear,’Alemannic anche ‘butter,’ and contrast with them the Irish imh ‘butter’ and Welsh ymenyn, from an early form imben; take also the Latin venio ‘ I come,’ for guenio, of the same origin as the English word come, and contrast the Greek form galvui. ‘ I walk.’ A remarkable exception to the usual homogeneity of the Latin vocabulary is the word bos ‘ an ox,’
    which is probably a loan-word from Oscan : in Latin it would have been vos, or at any rate begin with a v. To leave the subject of exceptions, another point on which Latin has remained on the old level is that of long u, which in the P dialects tends to be narrowed in its pronunciation in varying extent from that of a French u to that of i. Thus, while Latin had sus, in English ‘sow,’ Umbrian had sim and si/correspond- ing to Latin suern and sues respectively, also pir and frif to the Greek irOp ‘fire,’ and the Jjatin fruges ‘crops.’ The first-men- tioned word in Greek was 5s, with an u more narrow than a French u, and the French u itself is one of the products of the same phonological tendencies of Gauls of the P group. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that such a Goidelic word as cu, ‘hound,’ is pronounced cl in the Brythonic dialects, and a strong tendency in the same direction is to be noticed in the case of other classes of words : take the Goidelic tuath, ‘ a tribe or a people,’ which in North Wales becomes tud, with a narrow it, which in parts of South Wales becomes i. The tendency to make qu and gu into p and h respectively, and to narrow or unround the it (sometimes also the it), I should ascribe to the Neo-aryan invaders of the P group, but these inherited tendencies of their pronunciation spread themselves in very different proportions in the different lands seized by them. In Italy, not one of them was to any considerable extent imprinted on the language of the Q group, while in Greece it was otherwise. There u was regularly made into v with a decided inclination towards i which is the ordinary modern pronunciation, while only such dialects of ancient Greece as that of Crete, retained the long u. Similarly the labializing of gu and ghu into g and <t> became the rule in Greek, though here and there the guttural held its own as in ywfi, genitive ywawSs, though not universally; witness Boeotian plural /Sav^Kes. On the other hand the b forms became the rule among the Celts of both groups, yw-fj is in Goidelic ben ‘ woman,’ English queen and quean. Without going into very troublesome details, one may say that the fusion of the dialects of the two groups was very considerable in the Hellenic world, while it was comparatively small in Italy.
    Among the Celts it was far greater than in Italy, but not so great, perhaps, as among the Greeks. With regard to the mutual attitude of Gaulish and Celtican, we are without data; but as regards the British Isles, we have for our use the facts of Goidelic and Brythonic : the former has resisted the tendency of the P dialects to unround the f( into i, as well as to labialize the qu into p. On the other hand it has like the latter made gu into b, and there are other important points of similarity between Goidelic and Brythonic, which are to be accounted for by the influence of the latter. How then is this complica- tion to be interpreted ethnologically ? Geography comes to our aid to a certain extent: we have to suppose Aryans of the Q group in possession of most of the south of Britain, and to have extended their dominion sooner or later to the shore of the Irish Sea; then Aryans of the P group arrived and robbed them of portions of the south and east of their territory. Fresh arrivals of P Aryans would cause fresh encroachments on the Q Aryans, until at last the latter would be confined to tracts of the west, and even there they would probably come under the yoke of the conqueror. Thus we should have side by side a P lan- guage preserved on the whole free from the influence of the other language, and a Q language subjected more and more to the influence of the P language. Then hordes sail from the west to conquer Ireland, and they settle probably in Meath —I mean ancient Meath as approximately represented by the diocese of that name. Numerically speaking, they consist mainly of those whose language was the modified Q language alluded to. Thus there would be a people speaking that Q language in the western portion of Britain and in Meath in Ireland; but in the course of time the Q language this side of the Channel would give way wholly to the P language of the later Celtic comers. From that moment the only representative of that Q language would be the dialect transplanted to Meath and spread thence in the course of time to the whole of Ireland, and to Argyle, together with other parts of Britain. This theory leaves the Goidels in the main nearly related to the ancient Romans, just as the striking similarity between Latin and Goidelic irrefragably prove; at the same time it
    makes the Goidel and the Brython inseparably related by reason of manifold race amalgamation, so that we are justified in speaking of the Neoceltic nations collectively as such, and not simply as Goidels and Brythons consisting of groups only distantly related with one another, which is the utmost one could have said of them before their fusion, as the case would also have been with the Romans and the Italians of the P group previous to the conquests of Rome and her sending forth her colonists to different parts of the peninsula. The rise of the peoples of the Neo-aryan or P group with- in the Aryan world of prehistoric antiquity profoundly modified a portion of it, that is to say, what may be loosely termed its south-western half. Among other consequences it had probably that of driving the Q peoples further from their original point of dispersion, into Ireland and the corners of Gaul, into Spain, into Italy and Sicily, into Greece, into Asia Minor and possibly Ar- menia. The other half, so far as one can guess, was left un- affected, that is to say, the north-eastern half occupied by the Teutons, the Litu-Slaves, and the ancestors of the Aryan con- querors of Persia and Hindustan, who were probably helped to their homes in the East by the mighty current of the Volga and the waters of the Caspian Sea. If I were asked to define more exactly what I mean by Q peoples and P peoples, I should say that the Q peoples who have occupied us in this lecture, the Goidels, the Latins, and the others in point, were simply Aryans, and all that is vaguely connoted by that term, just as in the case of the Teutons, the Slaves, and the Aryans of the East in so far as they are not merely Aryanized races of non-Aryan blood. On the other hand the Aryan of the P group is the ancient Aryan plus something else, in other words the term Aryan is here modified by an unknown quantity, which unknown quantity makes itself felt linguistically in such changes from original Aryan speech as have already been specified, together doubtless with many others which the glottological telescope, so to say, fails to make perceptible to us at this distance of time. What does this mean when translated into ethnology? I cannot exactly say, but one could hardly be far wrong in assuming it to imply
    a mixture of race, whatever else it may have involved. The Aryans conquered or assimilated and subdued another race in the neighbourhood of the Alps : the subject race learned the language of the conquerors while retaining its own inherited habits of pronunciation, and those habits of pronunciation in some cases prevailed and brought with them, among other things, the modifications of pronunciation which have occupied us in this lecture. Thus arose a modified form of Aryan lan- guage spoken by a Neo-aryan people of mixed origin, partly Aryan and partly something else. What race that other was I cannot say, and its physical characteristics would have to be collected to some extent from a study of the P peoples of this country, of Gaul, Italy, and other lands once possessed by them. Short of that it may be worth the while to mention that ethnologists seem to be fairly well agreed that the purely Aryan man had a long skull, whereas the builder of the Round Barrows of England was in the main a short-skulled man. Now those barrows were probably the work of the later Celtic comers, that is to say, of the Celts of the P group ; so here at least a difference of bodily shape seems to combine with a modification of speech, to point to a difference of race be- tween the P Aryans and the purer Aryans of the Q group. It has already been suggested that this mixed race had its home somewhere in the region of the Alps, and one is tempted to ascribe to it the Alpine lake-dwellings which archaeology has of late years been attempting to examine and reconstruct for the benefit of the student of prehistoric history, if I may venture so to call it. To illustrate the capacity of Alpine Europe, one has only to recall a few well known facts: consider for instance the southward advance of the Alpine Gauls, who seized on the rich lands of north Italy, and once on a time sacked Rome; think also of the Gauls who swarmed from the region of the Alps to overrun the East, and to plant the name Galatia in Asia Minor. Even in the time of Julius Caesar we find the same sort of movements going on. Thus the whole people of the Helvetii leave their country to take forcible possession of another territory, namely that of the Santones in the west of Gaul. Had it not been for the inter-