But though a pastoral, the ancient Aryans do not seem to have been a nomadic race, and in this respect they differed from the Shemites of the same period, and from the Turanians, by whom they were surrounded. For the Turanian _civilization_ had pretty well departed from Asia by that time, and having taught its lessons to Egypt and Chaldæa, lived on, if at all, in Europe only. There it faded before the advance of the Celts and other Aryan people, who came bringing with them the use of bronze weapons and the civilization which belonged to the bronze age. The stone age lingered in the lake dwellings of Switzerland, as we thought, till about two thousand years before Christ or perhaps later, and it may be that this date, B.C. 2000, which is also nearly that of Abraham, represents within a few hundred years the entry of the Aryans into Europe. The Greeks are generally believed to have appeared in Greece, or at least in Asia Minor, about the nineteenth century before our era, and they were probably preceded by the Latin branch of the Aryan family, as well as by the Celts in the north of Europe. So that the period of one thousand years which intervened between our starting-point and the call of Abraham, the starting-point of the Hebrew history, and which saw the growth and change of many great Asiatic monarchies, must for the Aryans be only darkly filled up by the gradual separation of the different nations, and their unknown life between this separation and the time when they again become vaguely known to history.
The general result, then, of our inquiries into the grouping of nations of the world in pre-historic times may be sketched in rough outline. At a very early date, say 4000 or 5000 B.C., arose an extensive Turanian half-civilization, which, flourishing probably in Central and Southern Asia, spread in time and through devious routes to India and China upon one side, on the other side to Europe. This was, at first at any rate, a stone age, and was especially distinguished by the raising of great stones and grave-mounds. This civilization was communicated to the Egyptians and Chaldæans, a mixed people--Semite, Turanian, Ethiopian--who were not strangers to the use of metals. As early as 3000 years before our era the civilization of Egypt had attained its full growth, and had probably even then a considerable past. Chaldæa, too, and the neighbouring Elam were both advanced out of their primitive state; possibly so also were China, Peru, and Mexico. But the pure Semite peoples, the ancestors of the Jews, and the Aryans, were still pastoral races, the one by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the other by the banks of the Jaxartes and the Oxus. The first of these continued pastoral and nomadic for hundreds of years, but about this time the Western Aryans separated from those of the East, and soon after added some use of agriculture to their shepherd life. Then between 3000 and 2000 B.C. came the separation of the various peoples of the Western Aryans and their migration towards Europe, where they began to appear at the latter date. After all the Western Aryans had left the East, the older Aryans seem to have lived on for some little time together, and at last to have separated into the nations of Iranians and Hindus, the first migrating southward, and the second crossing the Hindoo-Koosh and descending into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges. Thence they drove away or exterminated most of the older Turanian inhabitants, as their brethren had a short time before done to the Turanians whom they found in Europe. Such, so far as we can surmise, were in rough outline the doings of the different kindreds and nations and languages of the old world in times long before history.