ANTIQUITY OF THE RACES OF MEN

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 2, 1 November 1883, Page 15

ANTIQUITY OF THE RACES OF MEN

(By S. M. Curl, M.D., F.L.S., &c.)

(Concluded from our last.) Another invasion of India by a Mogul chief named Oghuz Khan took place 200 years after this date, and between B.C. 1800 and B.C. 1600 several other Tartar hordes invaded India, Cashmere &c. Not only do we see how numerous these people were in India and the neighbouring countries four thousand years ago, but we can easily learn how advanced was their civilization at this date ; their literature was even then copious, their learned language had even then a most perfect inflectional, and precise form ; its grammar was well understood, and many treatises then existed upon grammar, astronomy, and there were several perfect poems. Its religious works then contained the Vedic hymns, and in the Big Veda alone there were 1028 hymns, each with an average of ten verses, and soon after the composition of the Brahamanas, and Sutras, and Upanashads, with the Puranas, were begun, and many other literary compositions completed. So great was the number of people in Babylon and India at the time of Ninus, who founded Nineveh, he being the son of Nimrod, that his wife Semiramis invaded India with an army of three millions and a half of men to attack the king of that country, Yirasena, sometimes called Stabrobates, who brought four million men into the field and conquered, and drove her back. Thus there were over seven millions of men engaged in this campaign. But we have to remember the date of 4000 years finds the Hindoos in India, where they had conquered the aboriginals of that country, whom we know as the Dravidian race, a black or dark brown people, speaking a tongue very different from the immigrating and colonizing Hindoos; but previous to this, 4000 years back, we find the Hindoos coming down very gradually during the preceding ages through the Punjaub, the passes of the Himalayas, and the Hindoo Coosh, by successive migrations from the highlands of Asia, where was their ancient home, in which place dwelt the Aryan ancestors from which they had come a thousand years before, and where, between five and six thousand years ago, these same Aryans were settled in civilized communities, spoke a language like the Sanscrit, and were sending out tribes of men who, known as Gauls, Celts, Creeks, Sclavs, Hindoos, were colonizing Europe and Asia and dispossessing the aboriginals of their lands. And not only are philologists able to trace up the roots of the words of the many Indo-germanic tongues into this ancient Aryan language, but ethnologists, from skulls, bones, Arc., can trace the relationships, while archaeologists can also prove the affinities. It would take up too much space to do this here, but in a work I am now engaged upon this will be all clearly set out and established. In Egypt, Menes established Monarchy B.C. 2,188, or 4,071 years ago, but before him many other monarchs had there reigned, and from this date exact histories show the state of the people to modern times ; and the more modern of their writings in hieroglyphics, or in the Hierarchic, or in the Demotic scripts, the more powerfully is forced upon our minds the enormous strides this people had made in the arts, manufactures, and general knowledge, while their political and domestic economies and systems of philosophy come out better the more we read and learn of them. And although we are only now beginning to discuss the rights of women, these were fully set out and established in Egyptian practice, and are written of in deeds thousands of years old. Having got back six thousand years among the civilized and partly civilized peoples, whose history has come down to us, we have to trace the history of men on the globe farther back without the aid of historians, either on the stone monuments, on clay tablets, or on written papyri, and have to take other kinds of evidence of how men lived before these dates, and what sort of men they were. But we find their bones preserved to us in the caves, in the peat-mosses, in the moraines and gravels, and clay beds, and petrified in the rocks, and we also find their tools, their weapons, their implements for sewing, spinning, digging, &c. Their canoes are there, and the seeds they sowed, the remnants of their houses, and their ornaments, and some of their drawings and paintings. In America, we see their burial places, their earthworks for defence, their pottery, their animals that they tamed or hunted, and other matters connected with them. And thus, with all the evidences presented to us so

abundantly, we are able to learn with certainty that for thousands of years before the light-brown, the white, or the yellow lived on this earth, a reddish-brown race preceded them j and anterior to this, a darker brown race lived, very much like the present Esquimaux, but that before all these the negro, or very dark brown, or black races lived, and moved, and hunted over the whole earth. These were the most ancient of all. They neither planted, nor built; they only hunted the wild animals, ate them for food and picked the wild fruits and roots, and lived upon these; had no settled homes, always roving about, savages pure and simple, using stones and chipped flints as weapons, with clubs and spears of wood. But even low as these were in the scale, they differed considerably, as do their descendants to this day, as we see them now in the aboriginals of Australia, the Andaman Islands, the Aheta of the Phillippines, the black hairy people of the forests or wilder parts af J apan, and the sort of people found in the densest forests of Malacca, Borneo, Siam, and Melanesia. But these more or less crossed with the lighter brown races, Polynesian, Bharatas, or Malays. Thus in the earliest times of man's being on the Earth we learn that he was a black man of the lowest type, and that he lived for thousands of years in the greatest barbarism,and also that the types and races were always improving, until we at last arrive at those races that are left where the era of written history begins.