and their ori inal home 88 Outlines of European History line themselves, as first the Persians, then the Greeks, and finally the Romans, gained control of the Mediterranean and oriental world. The great civilized peoples of Europe at the present day are, as we have said, the offspring of the victorious Indo-European line. These Indo-European peoples are also the forefathers of the American colonists, who with later immigrants now make up the people of the United States.-^ The indo- Let US now turn back to a time before the Indo-European parerSji"pie peoplc had left their grasslands and see if we can find their original home. Modern study has not yet determined with cer- tainty the exact region where the parent people of the Indo- European nomads had their home. The indications now are that this original home was on the great grassy steppe in the region east and northeast of the Caspian Sea.^ Here, then, probably lived the parent people of all the later Indo-European race. At the time when they were still one people, they were, speaking one and the same tongue. From this tongue have descended all the languages later spoken by the civilized peoples of modern Europe, including, of course, our own English, as we shall see. The parent people were still in the Stone Age for the most part, though copper was beginning to come in, and the time 1 Although our Indo-European ancestors gained full control of the Mediter- ranean world, we shall find that the final result was nevertheless a mixed civil- ization, containing many things of Semitic and oriental origin. Especially was this true in religion, for the great religions of the modern world, especially Christianity, are of oriental origin. 2 There has been great difference of opinion regarding the original home of this parent people, from whom we ourselves have descended. The whole ques- tion was opened only fifty years ago, when scholars mostly maintained that the central Asiatic plateau was the earliest home of the parent people. Later re- searches led most scholars to believe in a central or northern Etiropean home of these people. This is still the prevailing opinion. But the recent discovery of documents in the Tokhar language, spoken by the tribes of old Tokharistan along the upper valley of the Jaxartes River far east of the Caspian Sea, has shown that Tokhar was an Indo-European language. This discovery of an Indo- European language so far east has made the theory of a European home of the parent people almost impossible and an Asiatic home much more probable. Its exact situation in Asia is, however, still uncertain,
