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skulls of two other pure Roman officers from Bath and Gloucester are the same, as is one from Lincoln.⁵⁸

A group of eight male Roman crania from Rheinzafrern on the Rhine,⁶⁴ belonging to real Romans from Italy, are the same as the individuals from Britain, and almost identical with the eight males from Rome itself of the Christian period, and the early Roman from Corneto Tarquinia. These scattered references from various quarters, although few, are so alike that we must conclude that the Romans, however mixed, had formed a charac­teristic local or national physical type, which was mainly of Italic origin, and closely related originally to the Keltic.

The Italici, however, were not the only Indo-European speakers to in­vade Italy from the north. The Ligurians, of whom we have no certain skeletal remains, probably entered from Gaul, and may have been earlier than the Italici. On the eastern watershed of the Italian peninsula and in the Po Valley lived, in early protohistoric and historic times, various tribes of Illyrian speakers, notably the Veneti. To the Illyrian group may have belonged the people who buried in the cemetery of Novilara, on the cen­tral Adriatic coast,⁶⁵ about the eighth century B.C., contemporaneously with the Villanova people. The site belonged to a tribe called the Piceni, who in the seventh and sixth centuries developed a high culture and later declined, becoming subjects of Rome.

The doubt as to their ethnic origin may be partiy dispelled by a knowl­edge of their physical remains. A series of eighteen male and thirteen female skulls is homogeneously dolichocephalic, with the low mean male cranial index of 71.2; the skulls are high-vaulted, narrow-faced, and leptor­rhine. The series is very similar to those of Hallstatt Illyrians farther north, and the stature, 165.5 cm. for males, is tall enough to support this. Whether or not they spoke Illyrian, they were of Illyrian racial type, and the Illyrian invasion of northeastern Italy was undoubtedly a real one in the racial sense.

5. The scythians

What the Kelts were to western Europe, the Scythians and their rela­tives became, at about the same time, to the treeless plains to the east. Riding astride, wearing trousers, and sleeping in covered wagons, they spread rapidly over the grasslands of eastern Europe and western central Asia, shifting so adroitly that Darius with his army could not catch them, and disappearing almost as rapidly from the face of eastern Europe as they had appeared. Like the Kelts, they were both dazzling and ephemeral.

88 Browne, c. R., pria, vol. 2, ser. 3, 1899, pp. 649—654.

m Probstl, L., AFA, vol. 45, 1919, pp. 80-81.

88 Whatmough is in doubt as to their linguistic affiliation. Whatmough, j., op. Cit., pp. 202-205.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

But unlike the Kelts, their way of living, perfectly adapted to the grass­lands on which they roamed, was destined long to survive their identity as a people. _#

About 700 b.c. the Scyths were first noticed in the lands to the north of the Black Sea.⁶⁶ Their domain reached from north of the Danube and east of the Carpathians across the fertile plains of eastern central Europe and southern Russia to the River Don. From this country they were sup­posed to have ousted the somewhat mysterious Cimmerians. Although the Don formed their eastern boundary, beyond it lived other groups of nomadic peoples culturally similar to the Scythians. These included the Sarmatians, their immediate neighbors to the east, who were, according to Herodotus, the result of a mass marriage of Scythian youths and Ama­zon maidens. The speech of the Sarmatians was said to be somewhat dif­ferent from that of the Scythians, owing to the inclusion of Amazon words and an Amazonian manner of pronunciation. Beyond the Sarmatians lived the Massagetae, and beyond them the Saka. The word Saka, how­ever, was used by the Persians as a general term, to include all of the no­madic peoples to the north of the Iranian plateau, in the two Turkestans.

In costume, in weapons, in methods of transportation, in living quarters, and in the totality of material culture, these people formed a continuous cultural zone from the Carpathians to China. It has been the custom to consider the Scythians a people of Asiatic origin who developed this high and specialized form of pastoral nomadism in central Asia and brought it with them to eastern Europe. Proponents of this school have suggested that the Scythians were a mongoloid people, and that they employed some Altaic form of speech. Another school holds that they were Euro­pean in physical type, and spoke Iranian, while their cultural breed­ing ground lay somewhere to the east of the Caspian.

We do not know what language the Scythians spoke, nor is it likely that its exact affiliation will ever be definitely established. Their geographical position, however, and their association with the ancient Persians, makes the Iranian hypothesis very likely. This theory is further strengthened by the study of the language of the Ossetes, a living people of the Caucasus, who are supposed, on historical grounds, to be descendants of the Alans, a branch of the Sarmatians. Their language is definitely Iranian.

Although the general manner of living enjoyed by the Scythians does resemble in a remarkable degree that of the later Huns, Turks, and Mon­gols, one looks in vain for some of the cultural traits of these later Altaic

^M The sources for the historical and cultural portions of this section include Herodo­tus, book iv, ch. 59-75; Hippocrates, de Am; Minns, E. H., Scythians and Greeks; Junge, J. ZFRK, vol. 3, 1936, pp. 68-77; and Wm. M. McGovern’s work, The Early Empires of Central Asia, which was consulted in advance of publication.

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speakers which may be ascribed to a relatively recent Siberian origin. These include the yurt or collapsible felt-domed house, and the Turko- Mongol type of shamanism. The Turks and the Mongols, without ques­tion, took over almost completely the whole Scythian style of culture, but they added to it elements of their own which reflected their former habitat and manner of life. A few traits connect the Scythians with their neighbors to the north, the Finns; among these might be cited the sweat bath.

The Scythians proper possessed a type of feudal organization headed by a king, who ruled over four provinces each of which had local governors. These Scythian kings were all buried in a royal burial ground in the region called by the Greeks the Land of the Gerrhi, which was situated in the bend of the Dnieper River near Nicopol. No matter where the Scyth­ian monarch died, his remains would be deposited, in a funeral chamber, with great ceremony and with an extravagant quantity of human sacri­fice, underneath a huge mound erected for that purpose. The richness of the burials, and the wholesale suttee, are reminiscent of the ancient Sume­rians, and of the early Egyptians. The eventual Sumerian origin of this Scythian custom is not unlikely.

This region of the Royal Scythian burying ground has been a source of great activity for both treasure hunters and archaeologists. The Scythians had a definite idea that this was the place in which their kings were natu­rally at home, and while it may not be wise to stress this point too much, it would seem that this location may have reflected their notions as to their original dwelling place, or at least that of their royal clan. Similarly, the Mongols in later times buried their dead in a restricted area in the Altai Mountains, which they considered holy ground.

During the first century B.C., the Sarmatians penetrated westward, crossing the Don, and driving the Scythians from their former homes. About 200 a.d., the Goths took the Scythian country from the Sarmatians, and in turn adopted much of the Scytho-Sarmatian culture, becoming great horsemen and learning to live in wagons. The Alans were the only branch of the Sarmatians to retain their integrity in face of this Germanic onslaught. They built up a great kingdom between the Don and the Volga, reaching as far as the Caucasus, including in it most of northwestern Turkestan. Between 350 and 374 a.d., the Huns destroyed the Alan king­dom. Some of the Alans went westward with the Huns, others accom­panied the Vandals to North Africa, and a few, as previously mentioned, survive in the Caucasus as Ossetes.

Although these Iranians (if the Scythians and Sarmatians really were Iranians) were replaced by Altaic speakers in southern Russia, and throughout the breadth of their Asiatic domain, this process took some