The bronze age and the Celtic world / by Harold Peake.

  • Harold John Edward Peake
Date:
1922
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The bronze age and the Celtic world / by Harold Peake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and the Cromagnon type only seems to be missing or at any rate relatively scarce. The main element, however, which has gone to make up the Mediterranean race as we now know it, seems to be that which entered Europe through Spain, with Capsian culture, during the closing years of the Magdalenian period. These people have left in the west, not only considerable vestiges of their blood, but no small amount of their language, or to state the matter more accurately the language of these people has left a marked effect upon the tongues which succeeded it in the west. More than twenty years ago Mr., now Sir John Morris Jones60 pointed out that “ the syntax of Welsh and Irish differs in some important respects from that of the languages belonging to the other branches of the Aryan family,” and suggested that these points, in which too the neo-celtic tongues differed from ancient Gaulish, were due to the influence of a language which had been spoken in these lands before the introduction of the Celtic tongue. He pointed out that many of these peculiarities, which occur also sometimes when the English tongue is spoken by Irishmen, were similar to the syntactical arrangements in force in the language of ancient Egypt and among the Berber dialects spoken by the natives of Algeria, the Kabyles, Shawiya and Tuaregs. Now the Egyptians and other peoples of North Africa are considered by all anthropologists as typical members of the Mediterranean race, though the inhabitants of the western part seem, as we have seen, to have incorporated no small amount of Grimaldi blood; it would seem then that we may accept the suggestion of Sir John Morris Jones that the syntax of Welsh and Irish is a legacy from the language spoken by these Mediterranean invaders, who reached Spain about 7000 b.c. and formed the bulk of the population of the British Isles about 5000 b.c. So far we have been dealing with the early inhabitants of the Celtic lands of the west, but a word must be said of some fresh arrivals into the Celtic cradle in Central Europe. It was during the Azilian period, about 6000 b.c., that a new race appeared in Central Europe, coming from the east. Of their earlier abode we know nothing positively, but there are reasons for inferring that their line of approach was by the Kopet Dagh and the Armenian highlands, and that they came ultimately from the slopes of the Hindu Kush and the western side of the Himalayan massif. This race, 60 Jones, Morris (1900).