Part 72

"At the time when Roman history begins, we find that a powerful and warlike race, far superior to the Latins in civilisation and in the arts of life, hemmed in the rising Roman dominion in the north. The Greeks called them Turrhenoi, the Romans called them Etrusci, they called themselves the Rasenna. Who they were and whence they came has ever been regarded as one of the most doubtful and difficult problems in ethnology. One conclusion only can be said to have been universally accepted both in ancient and in modern times. It is agreed on every hand that in all essential points, in language, in religion, in customs, and in appearance, the Etruscans were a race wholly different from the Latins. There is also an absolute agreement of all ancient tradition to the effect that the Etruscans were not the original inhabitants of Etruria, but that they were an intrusive race of conquerors. ... It has been usually supposed that the Rasenna made their appearance in Italy some ten or twelve centuries before the Christian era. ... For some six or seven centuries, the Etruscan power and territory continued steadily to increase, and ultimately stretched far south of the Tiber, Rome itself being included in the Etruscan dominion, and being ruled by an Etruscan dynasty. The early history of Rome is to a great extent the history of the uprising of the Latin race, and its long struggle for Italian supremacy with its Etruscan foe. It took Rome some six centuries of conflict to break through the obstinate barrier of the Etruscan power. The final conquest of Etruria by Rome was effected in the year 281 B. C. ... The Rasennic people were collected mainly in the twelve great cities of Etruria proper, between the Arno and the Tiber. [Modern Tuscany takes its name from the ancient Etruscan inhabitants of the region.] This region was the real seat of the Etruscan power. ... From the 'Shah-nameh,' the great Persian epic, we learn that the Aryan Persians called their nearest non-Aryan neighbours--the Turkic or Turcoman tribes to the north of them--by the name Turan, a word from which we derive the familiar ethnologic term Turanian. The Aryan Greeks, on the other hand, called the Turkic tribe of the Rasenna, the nearest non-Aryan race, by the name of Turrhenoi. The argument of this book is to prove that the Tyrrhenians of Italy were of kindred race with the Turanians of Turkestan. Is it too much to conjecture that the Greek form Turrhene may be identically the same word as the Persian form Turan?"

_I. Taylor, Etruscan Researches, chapter 2._

"The utmost we can say is that several traces, apparently reliable, point to the conclusion that the Etruscans may be on the whole included among the Indo-Germans. ... But even granting those points of connection, the Etruscan people appears withal scarcely less isolated. 'The Etruscans,' Dionysius said long ago, 'are like no other nation in language and manners'; and we have nothing to add to his statement. ... Reliable traces of any advance of the Etruscans beyond the Tiber, by land, are altogether wanting. ... South of the Tiber no Etruscan settlement can be pointed out as having owed its origin to founders who came by land; and that no indication whatever is discernible of any serious pressure by the Etruscans upon the Latin nation."

_T. Mommsen, History of Rome, book 1, chapter 9._

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EUBŒA.

"The island of Eubœa, long and narrow like Krête, and exhibiting a continuous backbone of lofty mountains from northwest to southeast, is separated from Bœotia at one point by a strait so narrow (celebrated in antiquity under the name of the Eurīpus) that the two were connected by a bridge for a large portion of the historical period of Greece, erected during the later times of the Peloponnesian war by the inhabitants of Chalkis [Chalcis]. Its general want of breadth leaves little room for plains. The area of the island consists principally of mountain, rock, dell, and ravine, suited in many parts for pasture, but rarely convenient for grain-culture or town habitations. Some plains there were, however, of great fertility, especially that of Lelantum, bordering on the sea near Chalkis, and continuing from that city in a southerly direction towards Eretria. Chalkis and Eretria, both situated on the western coast, and both occupying parts of this fertile plain, were the two principal places in the island: the domain of each seems to have extended across the island from sea to sea. ... Both were in early times governed by an oligarchy, which among the Chalcidians was called the Hippobotæ, or Horse feeders,-- proprietors probably of most part of the plain called Lelantum."

_G. Grote, History of Greece, part 2, chapter 12._

See, also, NEGROPONT.

EUBOIC TALENT.

See TALENT.

EUCHITES, The.

See MYSTICISM.

EUDES, King of France (in partition with Charles the Simple), A. D. 887-898.

EUDOSES, The.

See AVIONES.

EUGENE (Prince) of Savoy, Campaigns of.

See HUNGARY: A. D. 1699-1718; GERMANY: A. D. 1704; ITALY (SAVOY AND PIEDMONT): A. D. 1701-1713; NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1708-1709, and 1710-1712.

EUGENE I., Pope, A. D. 655-657. Eugene II., Pope, A. D. 824-827. Eugene III., Pope, A. D. 1145-1153. Eugene IV., Pope, A. D. 1431-1447.

EUGENIANS, The.

See HY-NIALS.

EUMENES, and the wars of the Diadochi.

See MACEDONIA: B. C. 323-316.

EUMOLPHIDÆ, The.

See PHYLÆ.

EUPATRIDÆ, The.

"The Eupatridæ [in ancient Athens] are the wealthy and powerful men, belonging to the most distinguished families in all the various gentes, and principally living in the city of Athens, after the consolidation of Attica: from them are distinguished the middling and lower people, roughly classified into husbandmen and artisans. To the Eupatridæ is ascribed a religious as well as a political and social ascendency. They are represented as the source of all authority on matters both sacred and profane,"

_G. Grote, History of Greece, part 2, chapter 10._

EUROKS, OR YUROKS.

See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: MODOCS.

EUROPE.

A HISTORICAL SKETCH.

A general sketch of the history of Europe at large cannot, for obvious reasons, be constructed of quotations from the historians, on the plan followed in other parts of this work. The editor has found it necessary, therefore, to introduce here an essay of his own.

The first inhabitants of the continent of Europe have left no trace of their existence on the surface of the land. The little that we know of them has been learned by the discovery of deeply buried remains, including a few bones and skulls, many weapons and tools which they had fashioned out of stone and bone, and some other rude marks of their hands which time has not destroyed. The places in which these remains are found--under deposits that formed slowly in ancient river beds and in caves--have convinced geologists that the people whose existence they reveal lived many thousands of years ago, and that the continent of Europe in their time was very different from the Europe of the present day, in its climate, in its aspect, and in its form. They find reason to suppose that the peninsula of Italy, as well as that of Spain, was then an isthmus which joined Europe to Africa; and this helps to explain the fact that remains of such animals as the elephant, the lion, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, and the hyena, as well as the mammoth, are found with the remains of these early men. They all seem to have belonged, together, to a state of things, on the surface of the earth, which was greatly changed before the men and the animals that we have historical knowledge of appeared.

The Stone Age.

These primitive Europeans were evidently quite at the bottom of the savage state. They had learned no use of metals, since every relic of their workmanship that can be found is of stone, or bone, or wood. It is thought possible that they shaped rough vessels out of unbaked clay; but that is uncertain. There is nothing to show that they had domesticated any animals. It is plain that they dwelt in caves, wherever nature provided such dwellings; but what shelters they may have built elsewhere for themselves is unknown.

In one direction, only, did these ancient people exhibit a faculty finer than we see in the lowest savages of the present day: they were artists, in a way. They have left carvings and drawings of animals--the latter etched with a sharp point on horns, bones, and stones--which are remarkable for uncultured men.

The period in man's life on the earth at which these people lived--the period before metals were known--has been named by archæologists the Stone Age. But the Stone Age covers two stages of human culture--one in which stone implements were fashioned unskilfully, and a second in which they were finished with expert and careful hands. The first is called the Palæolithic or Old Stone Age, the second the Neolithic or New Stone Age. Between the two periods in Europe there seems to have been a long interval of time, and a considerable change in the condition of the country, as well as in that of its people. {990} In fact, the Europe of the Neolithic Age was probably not very different in form and climate from the Europe of our own day. Relics of the human life of that time are abundantly scattered over the face of the continent. There are notable deposits of them in the so-called "kitchen-middens" of Denmark, which are great mounds of shells,--shells of oysters and other molluscs,--which these ancient fishermen had opened and emptied, and then cast upon a refuse heap. Buried in those mounds, many bits of their workmanship have been preserved, and many hints of their manner of life are gleaned from the signs and tokens which these afford. They had evidently risen some degrees above the state of the men of the Palæolithic or Old Stone Age; but they were inferior in art.

The Bronze Age.

The discovery and use of copper--the metal most easily worked, and most frequently found in the metallic state--is the event by which archæologists mark the beginning of a second state in early civilizations. The period during which copper, and copper hardened by an alloy of tin, are the only metals found in use, they call the Bronze Age. There is no line of positive division between this and the Neolithic period which it followed. The same races appear to have advanced from the one stage to the other, and probably some were in possession of tools and weapons of bronze, while others were still contenting themselves with implements of stone.

Lake Dwellings.

In many parts of Europe, especially in Switzerland and northern Italy, plain traces of some curious habitations of people who lived through the later Stone Age into the Bronze Age, and even after it, have been brought to light. These are the "lake dwellings," or "lacustrine habitations," as they have been called, which have excited interest in late years. They were generally built on piles, driven into a lake-bottom, at such distance from shore as would make them easy of defence against enemies. The foundations of whole villages of these dwellings have been found in the Swiss and North Italian lakes, and less numerously elsewhere. From the lake-mud under and around them, a great quantity of relics of the lake-dwellers have been taken, and many facts about their arts and mode of life have been learned. It is known that, even before a single metal had come into their hands, they had begun to cultivate the earth; had raised wheat and barley and flax; had domesticated the horse, the ox, the sheep, the goat, the pig and the dog; had become fairly skilful in weaving, in rope-making, and in the art of the potter, but without the potter's wheel.

Gradually copper and bronze made their appearance among the implements of these people, as modern search discovers them imbedded, layer upon layer, in the old ooze of the lake-beds where they were dropped. In time, iron, too, reveals itself among their possessions, showing that they lived in their lake-villages from the later Stone Age into that third period of the early process of civilization which is named the Iron Age--when men first acquired the use of the most useful of all the metals. It appears, in fact, that the lake-dwellings were occupied even down to Roman times, since articles of Roman make have been found in the ruins of them.

Barrows.

In nearly all parts of Europe there are found burial mounds, called barrows, which contain buried relics of people who lived at one or the other of the three periods named. For the most part, they represent inhabitants of the Neolithic and of the Bronze Ages. In Great Britain some of these barrows are long, some are round; and the skulls found in the long barrows are different in shape from those in the round ones, showing a difference of race. The people to whom the first belonged are called "long-headed," or "dolichocephalic"; the others are called "broad-headed," or "brachycephalic." In the opinion of some ethnologists, who study this subject of the distinctions of race in the human family, the broad-headed people were ancestors of the Celtic or Keltic tribes, whom the Romans subdued in Gaul and Britain; while the long-headed men were of a preceding race, which the Celts, when they came, either drove out of all parts of Europe, except two or three mountainous corners, or else absorbed by intermarriage. The Basques of northwestern Spain, and some of their neighbors on the French side of the Pyrenees, are supposed to be survivals of this very ancient people; and there are suspected to be traces of their existence seen in the dark-haired and dark-skinned people of parts of Wales, Ireland, Corsica, North Africa, and elsewhere.

The Aryan Nations.

At least one part of this conjecture has much to rest upon. The inhabitants of western Europe when our historical knowledge of them--that is, our recorded and reported knowledge of them--begins, were, certainly, for the most part, Celtic peoples, and it is extremely probable that they had been occupying the country as long as the period represented by the round barrows. It is no less probable that they were the lake-dwellers of Switzerland, North Italy, and other regions; and that they did, in fact, displace some earlier people in most parts of Western Europe.

The Celts--whose nearly pure descendants are found now in the Bretons of France, the Welsh, the Highland Scotch and the Celtic Irish, and who formed the main stock of the larger part of the French nation--were one branch of the great family of nations called Aryan or Indo-European. The Aryan peoples are assumed to be akin to one another--shoots from one stem--because their languages are alike in grammatical structure and contain great numbers of words that are manifestly formed from the same original "root"; and because they differ in these respects from all other languages. The nations thus identified as Aryan are the nations that have acted the most important parts in all human history except the history of extremely ancient times. Besides the Celtic peoples already mentioned, they include the English, the Dutch, the Germans, and the Scandinavians, forming the Teutonic race; the Russians, Poles, and others of the Slavonic group; the ancient Greeks and Romans, with their modern representatives, and the Persians and Hindus in Asia. According to the evidence of their languages, there must have been a time and a place, in the remote past, when and where a primitive Aryan race, which was ancestral to all these nations, lived and multiplied until it outgrew its original country and began to send forth successive "swarms," or migrating hordes, as many unsettled races have been seen to do within the historic age. {991} It is hopeless, perhaps, to think of determining the time when such a dispersion of the Aryan peoples began; but many scholars believe it possible to trace, by various marks and indications, in language and elsewhere, the lines of movement in the migration, so far as to guess with some assurance the region of the primitive Aryan home; but thus far there are great disagreements in the guessing. Until recent years, the prevailing judgment pointed to that highland district in Central Asia which lies north of the Hindoo-Koosh range of mountains, and between the upper waters of the Oxus and Jaxartes. But later studies have discredited this first theory and started many opposing ones. The strong tendency now is to believe that the cradle of all the peoples of Aryan speech was somewhere in Europe, rather than in Asia, and in the north of Europe rather than in the center or the south. At the same time, there seems to be a growing opinion that the language of the Aryans was communicated to conquered peoples so extensively that its spread is not a true measure of the existing diffusion of the race.

The Celtic Branch.

Whatever may have been the starting-point of the Aryan migrations, it is supposed that the branch now distinguished as Celtic was the first to separate from the parent stem and to acquire for itself a new domain. It occupied southwestern Europe, from northern Spain to the Rhine, and across the Channel to the British islands, extending eastward into Switzerland, North It&ly and the Tyrol. But little of what the tribes and nations forming this Celtic race did is known, until the time when another Aryan people, better civilized, came into collision with them, and drew them into the written history of the world by conquering them and making them its subjects.

The people who did this were the Romans, and the Romans and the Greeks are believed to have been carried into the two peninsulas which they inhabited, respectively, by one and the same movement in the Aryan dispersion. Their languages show more affinity to one another than to the other Aryan tongues, and there are other evidences of a near relationship between them; though they separated, it is quite certain, long before the appearance of either in history.

The Hellenes, or Greeks.

The Greeks, or Hellenes, as they called themselves, were the first among the Aryan peoples in Europe to make themselves historically known, and the first to write the record which transmits history from generation to generation. The peninsula in which they settled themselves is a very peculiar one in its formation. It is crossed in different directions by mountain ranges, which divide the land into parts naturally separated from one another, and which form barriers easily defended against invading foes. Between the mountains lie numerous fertile valleys. The coast is ragged with gulfs and bays, which notch it deeply on all sides, making the whole main peninsula a cluster of minor peninsulas, and supplying the people with harbors which invite them to a life of seafaring and trade. It is surrounded, moreover, with islands, which repeat the invitation.

Almost necessarily, in a country marked with such features so strongly, the Greeks became divided politically into small independent states--city-states they have been named--and those on the sea-coast became engaged very early in trade with other countries of the Mediterranean Sea. Every city of importance in Greece was entirely sovereign in the government of itself and of the surrounding territory which formed its domain. The stronger among them extended their dominion over some of the weaker or less valiant ones; but even then the subject cities kept a considerable measure of independence. There was no organization of national government to embrace the whole, nor any large part, of Greece. Certain among the states were sometimes united in temporary leagues, or confederacies, for common action in war; but these were unstable alliances, rather than political unions. In their earliest form, the Greek city-states were governed by kings, whose power appears to have been quite limited, and who were leaders rather than sovereigns. But kingship disappeared from most of the states in Greece proper before they reached the period of distinct and accepted history. The kings were first displaced by aristocracies--ruling families, which took all political rights and privileges to themselves, and allowed their fellows (whom they usually oppressed) no part or voice in public affairs. In most instances these aristocracies, or oligarchies, were overthrown, after a time, by bold agitators who stirred up a revolution, and then contrived, while confusion prevailed, to gather power into their own hands. Almost every Greek city had its time of being ruled by one or more of these Tyrants, as they were called. Some of them, like Pisistratus of Athens, ruled wisely and justly for the most part, and were not "tyrants" in the modern sense of the term; but all who gained and held a princely power unlawfully were so named by the Greeks. The reign of the Tyrants was nowhere lasting. They were driven out of one city after another until they disappeared. Then the old aristocracies came uppermost again in some cities, and ruled as before. But some, like Athens, had trained the whole body of their citizens to such intelligence and spirit that neither kingship nor oligarchy would be endured any longer, and the people undertook to govern themselves. These were the first democracies--the first experiments in popular government--that history gives any account of. "The little commonwealths of Greece," says a great historian, "were the first states at once free and civilized which the world ever saw. They were the first states which gave birth to great statesmen, orators, and generals who did great deeds, and to great historians who set down those great deeds in writing. It was in the Greek commonwealths, in short, that the political and intellectual life of the world began."

In the belief of the Greeks, or of most men among them, their early history was embodied with truth in the numerous legends and ancient poems which they religiously preserved; but people in modern times look differently upon those wonderful myths and epics, studying them with deep interest, but under more critical views. They throw much light on the primitive life of the Hellenes, and more light upon the development of the remarkable genius and spirit of those thoughtful and imaginative people; but of actual history there are only glimpses and guesses to be got from them.

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