104 A Short History of The World round the Mediterranean, and their chief men were leaders rather than priests. They had an aristocratic social order rather than a divine and regal order ; from a very early stage they distinguished certain families as leaderly and noble. They were a very vocal people. They enlivened their wanderings by feasts, at which there was much drunkenness and at which a special sort of man, the bards, would sing and recite. They had no writing until they had come into contact with civilization, and the memories of these bards were their living literature. This use of recited language as an entertainment did much to make it a fine and beautiful instrument of expression, and to that no doubt the subse- quent predominance of the languages derived from Aryan is, in part, to be ascribed. Every Aryan people had its legendary history crys- tallized in bardic recitations, epics, sagas and vedas, as they were variously called. The social life of these people centred about the households of their leading men. The hall of the chief where they settled for a time was often a very capacious timber building. There were no doubt huts for herds and outlying farm buildings; but with most of the Aryan peoples this hall was the general centre, everyone went there to feast and hear the bards and take part in games and discussions. Cow- sheds and stabling surrounded it. The chief and his wife and so forth would sleep on a dais or in an upper gallery ; the commoner sort slept about anywhere as people still do in Indian households. Except for weapons, ornaments, tools and suchlike personal possessions there was a sort of patriarchal communism in the tribe. The chief oMTied the cattle and grazing lands in the common interest ; forest and rivers were the wild. This was the fashion of the people who were increasing and multi- plying over the great spaces of central Europe and west central Asia during the growth of the great civilization of Mesopotamia and the Nile, and whom we find pressing upon the heliolithic peoples every- where in the second millennium before Christ. They were coming into France and Britain and into Spain. They pushed westward in two waves. The first of these people who reached Britain and Ireland were armed with bronze weapons. They exterminated or subjugated the people who had made the great stone monuments of Carnac in Brittany and Stonehenge and Avebury in England. They reached Ireland. They are called the GoideHc Celts. The second wave of a closely kindred people,perhaps intermixed with other racial elements,
