Bearing in mind these various sources of information, what tribes, about which we have sufficient knowledge, could fairly be considered as examples of primitive conditions?
Beginning with those remotest in time, I believe we know enough about the early Aryans to claim it for them. The acute researches of recent scholars, so admirably summed up in the work of Professor Schrader, have thrown a flood of light on the domestic, cultural, and religious condition of the pristine epoch of Aryan society from the side of language; while the tireless prosecution of prehistoric archæology in Europe has put us into possession of thousands of objects illustrating the religious arts and usages then in vogue. Classical mythology and ritual, as well as modern folk-lore, lend further efficient aid toward reconstructing the modes and expressions of their sacred thought.
A very ancient people, possibly of Aryan blood, but more likely, I believe, to have come from North Africa and to be of Libyan affinities, were the Etruscans. They were extremely religious, and their theological opinions deeply coloured the worship of the Romans. We know the general outlines of their doctrine of the gods, and its simplicity and grandeur bespeak our admiration. I shall draw from this venerable “Etruscan discipline” from time to time for illustrations.
Quite as much may be said of the diligence of the explorers and scholars in the field of Semitic antiquity. We can without room for doubt trace the stream of Semitic religious thought through the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets to a possibly non-Semitic source among the Accadian or Sumerian population, which ten thousand years ago had already begun to develop an artistic and agricultural life on the Babylonian plain. Numerous students have restored the outlines and motives of this ancient faith, whose forms and doctrines bind and shape our lives in America to-day.
Of the possibly still older culture of Egypt, so much cannot be said. The original creeds of its religion have been less successfully divined. Like its early inscriptions, they were erased and overlaid so often by the caprice or prejudice of successive dynasties, and so profoundly modified by foreign influences, that with our present knowledge they are no longer legible.[18]