Prehistoric antiquities of the Aryan peoples : a manual of comparative philology and the earliest culture : being the "Sprachvergleichung und urgeschichte" of Dr. O. Schrader / translated by Frank Byron Jevons from the second revised and enlarged German edition, with the sanction and co-operation of the author.

Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Prehistoric antiquities of the Aryan peoples : a manual of comparative philology and the earliest culture : being the "Sprachvergleichung und urgeschichte" of Dr. O. Schrader / translated by Frank Byron Jevons from the second revised and enlarged German edition, with the sanction and co-operation of the author. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    people related to the Greeks (the Siculi) must have been sub- jugated by a non-Greek but more warlike people (the Aborigines), just as in the case of a similar mixture in English, the old names for the common objects of life persisted in the countiy, while they received French names from the Normans of the ruling classes. The first to reconstruct a Grasco-Italian period of culture by means of the new Comparative Philology, and to contrast it with the Indo-Germanic period, was Th. Mommsen, as early as the first edition of his History of Rome (1854), pp. 12-21. The most important advance in culture made by the Grasco-Italians, according to Mommsen, was the transition from the nomad shepherd-life of the primeval period, in which only the wild kinds of grains were known, to the condition of a people cultivating grain and even the vine. In the later editions of his History of Rome, Mommsen does, indeed, approximate more and more to the view that agreement as to the words quoted as a rule extends' considerably beyond the limits of Greece and Italy, but from this he subsequently (c/. 3rd ed. i. p. 20, note) merely draws the iiaference that there can have been no time when the Greeks of every Greek district lived solely by cattle-breeding. Further we should here mention a work by B. Kneisel, Ueber den Kulturzustand der Indog. Vdlker vor ihrer Trennung ( On the Culture of the Indo-Europeans before their Dispersion) mit besonderer Hilcksicht auf die Grdco-Italiher, Programm, Naumburg, 1867, and the collection of a Grseco-Italian vocabulary in A. Fick's Vergleichenden Wdrterbuc/i, in Lottner's paper already quoted, and J. Schmidt's Die VerivandtschaftsverJuiltnisse der Indog. Spraclien, Weimar, 1872. Owing above all to the weighty voice of Th. Mommsen, the belief in the closer connection of the Greeks and Italians has taken deeper and deeper root amongst historians and ethnologists. Here I will only refer to the well-known works of Ernst Curtius, Max Duncker, Friederich MuUer,* and Heinrich Kiepert, and * In his Allgemeinen Uthnographie, 1873, Fr. Miiller sketches an Indo- germanic pedigree of his owu, which if drawn after the manner of Schleicher would be as follows :— Fig. 4.