36 General History of Europe remote date. Some of them invaded India, and some of them got as far west as Britain. They are therefore commonly called the Indo-European peoples. The Indo-European races were destined to conquer the older kingdoms of the Semites and raise civilization to a far higher point than it had previously reached. The parent people sometimes called the Aryans from which these races sprang seems to have been occupying the pasture lands to the east and northeast of the Caspian about 2500 B.C. Some of them had adopted an agricultural life, but they were still in the Stone Age except for some little use of copper. Besides cattle and sheep they had horses, which they rode and employed to pull their wheeled carts. They could not write. 51. The Indo-European Languages. As the Aryan tribes dis- persed east and west and south they lost all contact with one an- other. While they originally spoke the same language, differences in speech gradually arose and finally became so great that the widely scattered tribes, even if they happened to meet, could no longer make themselves understood. At last they lost all knowl- edge of their original relationship. But the languages of modern civilized Europe, having sprung from the same Indo-European parent language, are therefore related to each other; so that, beginning with our own language in the West and going eastward across Europe into northern India, we can trace more than one common word from people to people. Note the following: WEST > EAST ENGLISH GERMAN LATIN GREEK OLD PERSIAN A lanskrit) AN brother bruder frater phrater brata bhrata mother mutter mater meter matar mata father vater pater pater pitar pita 52. Medes and Persians. Of the Aryan peoples settled east of the Caspian Sea some wandered into India. In their sacred books, which we call the Vedas, written in Sanskrit, we find many allusions to their earlier less civilized life. Other tribes pushed southwestward toward the Fertile Crescent. Of these the most
