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THE IRON AGE

233

included Slavs and Germans, among older elements, but made them tax- paying vassals. Furthermore, in the days of Attila, the richness of the Huns had attracted many craftsmen and adventurers to the royal court, among whom were many Italians. Priscus’s account makes it very evident 17 that Attila’s capital contained a very heterogeneous population.

The great migration to Hungary, that which brought the ancestors of the present-day Magyars, took place at the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth century, when the Hungarian national hero Arpad led the Magyars into Hungary, where many Slavs had settled in the interim after the collapse of Hunnish power. We have already seen (p. 220) that these Slavs had partially taken over Hunnish physical traits. By 906 a.d., the Magyars were at home in Hungary; in the two centuries which followed, they adopted Christianity, and invited settlers of many nationalities, including Moslems and Jews, to help them occupy the land. These newcomers, along with the pre-Magyar Slavs, formed a tax-paying peas­antry.

The Magyars were Ugrians from the region between the Volga and the Urals, who had been partially Turkicized by the Petchenegs and others, but had retained their Finno-Ugrian language, albeit strongly shot with Turkish. In this respect, they resembled the ancestral Bulgarians, semi- Turkicized Finns, who had, a few decades earlier, crossed the lower Danube and settled Bulgaria, implanting themselves on a population of Slavs who had themselves been but a short while in occupancy. In Bulgaria, the Slavic language seeped through and replaced the Finnish; in Hungary, the Ugrian became dominant and the Slavic speech to a large extent disappeared. Nevertheless, Slavic culture blended with the Ugrian and Turkish, to produce modern Hungarian forms.

We have no physical remains of the early Finnic invaders of Bulgaria, but those of the Ugri of the land-taking period, as the Hungarians call it, are adequate. As is to be expected, these ancestral Magyars, led into Hungary by Arpad, were only mongoloid to a minor degree.18 Some of the crania which are found in wealthy graves do show definite mongoloid characteristics, but the others for the most part lack them. The majority of the Magyars were of the same Finnish types expected from our previous study of Finns in Russia, while smaller minorities included Dinarics or Armenoids.19

At any rate, it was a very mixed population that lived in Hungary dur­ing the early Magyar period. On the whole, throwing all elements to­gether, the stature was short and the mean head form mesocephalic.

  1. Brion, M., Attila, the Scourge of God.

  2. Bartucz, L., ZFRK, 1935.

I® Ibid.

G&spir, J., MAGW, vol. 58, 1928, pp. 129-140.

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THE RACES OF EUROPE

Since then, the Hungarians have grown rounder headed, as have Rus­sians and southern Germans.

During all the turmoil of the Magyar and Bolgar migrations, the Ugrians who remained in eastern Russia passed relatively unnoticed, but in the thirteenth century or thereabouts they, for some reason, probably new Turkish .pressure, crossed the Urals en masse, and established themselves in the western drainage of the Obi. Here they were divided into two tribes, the Voguls, on the immediate slopes of the Urals, and the Ostiaks, in the lower courses of the tributaries and along the Obi itself. In their new home their culture was modified to stiit a more rigorous environment, and only those in the southern Obi drainage, at the time of the Russian conquest, still practiced agriculture.

An adequate series of skulls from the time between this eastward migra­tion and the arrival of the Russians about three centuries later shows a mixture between the original Finnish type, with which we have already acquainted ourselves, and Siberian and central Asiatic mongoloids, of the two types already found in the early Hunnish and Avar cemeteries.20 How much of the mongoloid blood was acquired in Europe, and how much later in Siberia, cannot be determined.

In the Hungarian period of settlement we already become aware of the presence of a new physical type associated with the Turks, who formed a minority in the ranks of the Magyars. When we examine the crania of the Petchenegs and Kumans, in both Hungary and Russia21 we see that this new type has become the dominant one among these later Turks to arrive in eastern Europe. In it mongoloid features are sometimes present, but in abeyance. The skulls are very large, of moderate height, extremely brachy­cephalic, and planoccipital. The foreheads are sloping, browridges some­times heavy, the faces are very broad, and also very long. The orbits are of moderate height. The noses are narrow, and although often low at the root, frequently project at the bridge, giving indication of a convex profile in the living.

These Kuman skulls, as best represented by Debetz’s series which in­cludes fourteen adult males, are much longer and broader than historic Armenian skulls,22 and both longer and broader faced. In height, nose and orbit dimensions, and the tendency to occipital flattening, these two groups are the same. They are also larger than Alpine skulls from central Europe, and far greater in facial dimensions; larger too, than the type B mon­goloid crania as represented by a large series of central Asiatic Telengets;

  1. Zaborowski, M., BSAP, ser. 4, vol. 9, 1898, pp. 73-111.

Ssilinitsch, J. P., AFA, vol. 34, 1903, p. 233, etc.

  1. Bartucz, L., AF, vol. 1, 1923, pp. 97-99.

Debetz, G., AntrM, vol. 3, 1929, pp. 89-95.

  1. Bunak, V. V., Crania Armenica.

THE IRON AGE

235

much higher vaulted and broader of forehead than the latter, and even a little larger faced.

Thus, the type under consideration, which has become in many regions the characteristic Turkish form, is one which cannot be disposed of by the simple expedient of placing it in an Armenoid or Dinaric category. In size and proportions of the vault, the closest parallel to these skulls is with the British Bronze Age crania; but the resemblance here is far from an identity, for the British faces, although equally broad, are much shorter. In the same sense, the Turkish skulls are reminiscent of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic brachycephalic types from Europe and North Africa.

Since we know almost nothing of the early skeletal history of central Asia, east of Anau and south of the Minussinsk district, it would be worth­less to spend too much time at this point speculating on the immediate origin of this type. As with so many other problems, we must defer its seri­ous consideration to the section on the living, except to point out that in a small series of ten skulls from eastern Russian Turkestan, dated between 600 and 900 a.d., similar but somewhat smaller vault forms are in evi­dence.23 At the same time, a few isolated Turkish skulls, from central Siberia, attributed to from the seventh or eighth centuries a.d.,24 are not unlike the Kuman crania.

After the Huns and Turks came the Mongols, who had been later to adopt the horse culture of the Asiatic plains. Their homeland was around the southern end of Lake Baikal, and they were hunters and fishermen before they became plainsmen. The earliest mention of them in Chinese history occurs in the seventh century a.d., at which time they camped in the country from Urga northward to the forest edge. They are supposed to have sprung from a blue wolf, and from this animal to Genghis Khan was a span of but eight generations.

Their conquest of most of the known world began in the first half of the thirteenth century, and ended two generations later with the death of Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan. The Mongols were not numer­ous enough to do all of their conquering alone, and incorporated most of the central Asiatic Turks into their armies. Hence there arose a perplexing welter of Mongolized Turks and Turkicized Mongols, and no doubt of Mongolized as well as Turkicized Iranians. We have no skeletal material adequate to untangle this snarl, but must rely on Mongol and Buryat crania from Mongolia itself to determine their racial type. This was simply the type B of the Huns, in a relatively pure form, as found today particularly among Buryats. Hence the settlement of the Mongols on the

23 Vishnevsky, B. N., KMV, 1921, #1-2.

24 Gromov, V. I., ESA, vol. 1, 1926, pp. 94-99.

Kazantsev, A. I., RAT, No. 1-2, 1934, pp. 129-133.

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THE RACES OF EUROPE

Kalmuck steppe brought the pure, brachycephalic Mongol type to the country around the northern shore of the Black Sea, and into the lower Volga plains, where whole encampments of normal Mongols may still be seen today.

On the whole, the Mongols proper did not influence the racial composi­tion of Europe in the sense that the Turks did. Their influence was sporadic in most of the regions which they crossed, and strong only in southeastern Russia, and in the isolated colonies still living in the Caucasus. Elsewhere it merely served to freshen elements already brought by the Huns and Avars.

Lest this survey of Uralic and Altaic-speaking peoples be incomplete, we must mention still another group, the Samoyeds, who live east of the Osti- aks in the Obi country, and wander along the Arctic shore of Russia as far as the Kola Peninsula, where they meet the Lapps.

The modern Samoyeds, despite their proximity to the Siberian Ugrians, belong for the most part to the central, brachycephalic, mongoloid type; Bartucz’s B group, the classical Buryat-mongoloid.25 Except in modern times, they have had no influence upon the racial composition of northern Europe.

  1. SPEAKERS OF URALIC AND ALTAIC, AND OLD WORLD RACIAL ORIGINS

Before indulging in the speculation which the present study of the Uralic- and Altaic-speaking peoples in antiquity inspires, a brief review of our present knowledge will be in order. Uralic is a linguistic stock or sub­stock which includes Finnic and Ugrian, as well as Samoyedic; Altaic in­cludes Mongolian, Turkish, Tungusic, and possibly Korean.

The Finns and the Ugrians were a united people, in the geographical sense, until the arrival of the Slavs from the west, and Huns and Avars from the east, forced some of them to migrate, and caused the absorption of others. Judging by a series of small samples taken from the heart of their forest abode, they were members of the general Nordic sub-group, most closely related to the Minussinsk people in Siberia, but showing relation­ships likewise with Scythians and peoples of known Indo-European lin­guistic affiliation. Thus, since the Finns and Ugrians were not Indo- European speakers, there is no reason to suppose that all of the nomads of central Asia who belonged to this same racial type were Iranians. The Samoyeds, distant linguistic relatives of the Finno-Ugrians, are not rep­resented by early skeletal material, and their racial position in antiquity cannot be established.

26 Sommier, S., APA, vol. 17, 1887, pp. 71-222.

Klimek, S., APA, vol. 59, 1929, pp. 13-31.

THE IRON AGE

237

Of the known Altaic speakers, three branches, the Tungus, Mongols, and the Koreans, were and still are almost purely mongoloid. The fourth branch, that of the Turks, is the only one the racial origin of which is in question. Today most of the Turks are racially European, but in the old days the Huns and Avars, who were intimately concerned with the Turkish expansion, were as mongoloid as the others, with both Tungus and Buryat-Mongol elements represented.

We are at this point squarely faced with the problem of the origin of the living Finns and Turks, and with that of the rdle played by speakers of their linguistic stock or stocks in the formation of European and Asiatic peoples. These problems may not be finally solved with the evidence in our possession. Yet there is enough material, historical, linguistic, and somatological, to make speculation legitimate.

In the foregoing chapter we have seen that the earliest Indo-European languages probably moved westward into central Europe as the speech of the Danubian immigrants as early as 3000 b.c. These Danubian farmers were racially the relatives or descendants of Anatolian and South Russian peoples of a special physical type, a branch of the Mediterranean stock to which we have given the name Danubian. This type was reasonably homogeneous, but the number of skulls upon which its identification is based is slight, and it is possible that a minor increment of longer-headed, narrower-nosed Mediterranean forms accompanied it, since the two vari­ants seem long to have been associated in South Russia.

Now since Indo-European speech was a mixture of B, or Caucasic, with

  1. or Finno-Ugrian, and since, as we have seen, the earliest known Finno- Ugrians were Nordics with a very strong Danubian tendency, it therefore becomes likely that the Danubian farmers owed their racial type to a mix­ture of two linguistically different ethnic groups who were physically much the same, and both predominantly Danubian.

If we are correct in identifying the Corded people with the introduction of Altaic speech into Europe, then the further identification of the Corded racial type with (a) the non-mongoloid modern Turks and (b) the Afgha- nian racial type of the Irano-Afghan plateau, makes it seem possible that there was, in remote food-producing times, an ancestral bloc of peoples living on that plateau who spoke languages ancestral to Altaic, and per­haps remotely related to Uralic, Sumerian, or both. Some of the peoples who formed that bloc presumably moved northward onto the central Asiatic grasslands. This change of scene on the part of these early agricul­turalists may have had two effects: the introduction of agriculture into the oases of Turkestan and into Mongolia, and the development of pastoral nomadism by some of the immigrants, with the subsequent rise of the horse culture.

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THE RACES OF EUROPE

This step in our speculative structure leads logically to the question of the origin of the Turks. Having placed Ural-Altaic-speaking white men, of a special Mediterranean type still found in Iran and Afghanistan, in Turkestan and Mongolia,26 it is not difficult to suppose that mongoloid peoples, originally hunters, were attracted to the plains from their forests and rivers by the advantages of the new economy, and that they assim­ilated, in adopting it, those of the white immigrants with whom they were in immediate contact.

In the meanwhile, some of the Altaic-speaking plainsmen, related to the ancestors of the Corded people, may have mixed with smaller Mediter­raneans such as were found at Anau, to produce Nordics of the type found in the Minussinsk kurgans, although it is possible that these Nordics do not antedate the arrival of the Iranians. An inruption of relatively unmixed Corded invaders from their eastern center, about 2200 B.C., brought the Altaic linguistic element noted by Nehring in Indo-European speech into central Europe, and produced, by a blending of these Corded invaders with European Danubian racial elements, the European Nordics, who, during the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age, spread Indo-European speech over a wide area.

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., during the full Bronze Age, one branch of these Indo-European speakers, the Iranians, spread east­ward from their home in southern Russia across the country north of the Black Sea into Turkestan, and thence some of them went southward into Afghanistan and India, bearing with them their original cattle and farm­ing culture which they had brought from their earlier home, with a min­imum of horse culture elements.

Other Iranians remained on the plains, and took over the horse nomad­ism which the Altaic speakers had already developed. That they mixed with Altaic speakers, as the legend of the Scythian youths and Amazon maidens would suggest, is probable, owing to their acquisition of a low cranial vault and a wide face, eastern Nordic traits which at this time were foreign to western Europe. The importance of Altaic god names in what is known of the Scythian language would support this contention. These Iranians spread the horse culture westward to the Danube and eastward to China, and pushed those of their Altaic-speaking predecessors whom they had failed to absorb northward and eastward into Siberia and Mongolia.

In Mongolia, about 400 B.C., the horse culture was taken over com­

26 This is substantiated by the fact that some of the Neolithic skulls from Lake Baikal studied by Debetz are of Mediterranean type, while others resemble those of modern Tungus.

Debetz, G., RAJ, vol. 19, 1930, pp. 7-50; AZM, vol. 2, 1932, pp. 26-48.

THE IRON AGE

239

pletely by the fully mongoloid Hiung-Nu, as indicated by Chinese his­torical documents. The royal and noble families of the Huns and Avars remained purely mongoloid, but their followers in their march to Europe consisted in large measure of these Altaic-speaking white men who accom­panied them. The historic Turks are descended in large measure from these Altaic-speaking whites. Some, such as the Kirghiz and the Tatars whose ancestors invaded eastern Russia in historic times, are half mon­goloid; others, including the Turkomans, the Azerbaijani Turks, and the truly Turkish element among the Seljuks and Osmanlis, are fully white, since their ancestors had never been subjected to this mixture. A third group, represented today by the Uzbegs and Sarts of Russian Turkestan, and by the pseudo-Armenoid crania found in late Turkish graves in Europe, were a mixture of the old long-headed white strain with central Asiatic Alpines, such as the Tajiks, and to a lesser extent with mongoloids.

Mongols, Turks, and Tungus, living today in the forested northern part of Asia, that is in Siberia, are historically recent intruders who, in response to their new environment, have partially taken over the culture of Palae- asiatic aborigines. Their dispersions may be traced from the Altai Moun­tains and Mongolia as a center. Their linguistic relationship with each other may be due to varying degrees of acquisition of the speech of the nomadic white peoples who brought the horse culture to Mongolia, or to an earlier diffusion from whites, bringing agriculture to Mongolia, from the same source, or to both. The reindeer-milking complex of the Tungus and Samoyeds, and the reindeer riding of the former, are borrowings from the central Asiatic horse culture.

The two most important steps in the foregoing reconstruction are:

  1. the tentative identification of the Corded people with Altaic speech; and (2) the identification of the Corded skeletal type with (a) an element in the Nordic racial complex of Europe, (b) the living as well as ancient inhabitants of Iran and Afghanistan, and (c) the modern Turkomans, Azerbaijani Turks, and the true Turkish strain among living Osmanlis. The induction of the Sumerians into this argument is helpful if true, but not necessary. Some of the Corded cultural paraphernalia had a Sumerian appearance, but this may have been caused by diffusion alone rather than by common ethnic ancestry.

The foregoing hypothesis, in reference to the origin of the Corded peo­ple, of the Turks, of the modern Altaic-speaking mongoloids, and of the Sumerians, is pure hypothesis and should not be quoted without the in­clusion of a statement that it is offered as speculation only. It is not intended to form a part of the serious contribution of the present study to white racial history. It is included, however, because in the light of existing evidence it seems more likely than any other hypothesis known to the

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THE RACES OF EUROPE

author which is of equal scope and which purports to explain the same phenomena.

In any case, the question of Uralic and Altaic origins is a part of the white racial problem, and it is intimately connected with the history of Indo-European languages and of the Nordic race. Of two elements in this reconstruction we are reasonably sure; that the ancestors of some of the living Turks, including the Turkomans, Azerbaijanis, and Osmanlis, were always white men, and that the Corded people were racially related to the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau in antiquity.

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