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
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    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-