Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/180

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164
THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

formless populations, and the further transformations of peoples, languages, and races depend upon very complicated factors of detail. Since the decisive investigations of Beloch[1] and Delbrück[2] we know that all migrant peoples — and the Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths and the "Sea-peoples" of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this sense — were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they occupied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior to the natives only in respect of their determination to be a Destiny and not to submit to one. It was not inhabitable, but inhabited, land of which they took possession, and thus the relation between the two peoples became a question of status, the migration turned into the campaign, and the process of settling down became a political process. And here again, in presence of the fact that at a historic distance of time the successes of a small war-band, with the consequent spread of the victor's names and language, may all too easily be taken for a "migration of peoples," it is necessary to repeat our question, what, in fact, the men, things, and factors are that can migrate.

Here are some of the answers — the name of a district or that of a collectivity (or of a hero, adopted by his followers), in that it spreads, becomes extinct here and is taken by or given to a totally different population there: in that it may pass from land to people and travel with the latter or vice versa — the language of the conqueror or that of the conquered, or even a third language, adopted for reciprocal understanding — the war-band of a chief which subdues whole countries and propagates itself through captive women, or some accidental group of heterogeneous adventurers, or a tribe with its women and children, like the Philistines of 1200, who quite in the Germanic fashion trekked with their ox-wagons along the Phœnician coast to Egypt.[3] In such conditions, we may again ask, can conclusions be drawn from the destinies of names and languages as to those of peoples and races? There is only one possible answer, a decided negative.

Amongst the "Sea-peoples" that repeatedly attacked Egypt in the thirteenth century appear the names of Danai and Achæans — but in Homer both are almost mythical designations — the name of the Lukka — which adhered later to Lycia, though the inhabitants of that country called themselves Tramilæ — and the names of the Etruscans, the Sards, the Siculi — but this in nowise proved that these "Tursha" spoke the later Etruscan, nor that there was the slightest physical connexion with the like-named inhabitants of Italy or anything else entitling us to speak of "one and the same people." Assuming that the Lemnos inscription is Etruscan, and Etruscan an Indogermanic language, much could be deduced therefrom in the domain of linguis-

  1. Die Bevölkertung der griechisch-römischen Welt (1886).
  2. Geschichte der Kriegskunst (from 1900).
  3. Rameses III, who defeated them, portrayed their expedition in the relief of Medinet Habet. W. M. Müller, Asien und Europa, p. 366.