Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a historian meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he owes it to these people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It is a matter of dignity for a people to have come from somewhere and to have an original home. The notion that it is at home in the place where we find it is almost an insulting assumption. Wandering is a cherished saga-motive of primitive mankind, but its employment in serious research also has become a sheer mania. _Whether_ the Chinese invaded China or the Egyptians Egypt no one inquires, the question being always _when_ and _whence_ they did so. It would be less of an effort to originate the Semites in Scandinavia or the Aryans in Canaan than to abandon the notion of an original home.

Now, the fact that all early populations were highly mobile is unquestionable. In it, for example, lies the secret of the Libyan problem. The Libyans or their predecessors spoke Hamitic, but, as shown even by old Egyptian reliefs, they were all blond and blue-eyed and, therefore, doubtless of North-European provenance.[224] In Asia Minor at least three migration-strata since 1300 have been determined, which are related probably to the attacks of the “Sea-peoples” in Egypt, and something similar has been shown in the Mexican Culture. But as to the nature of these movements we know nothing at all. In any case, there can be no question of migrations such as modern historians like to picture--movements of close-pressed peoples traversing the lands in great masses, pushing and being pushed till finally they come to rest somewhere or other. It is not the alterations in themselves, but the conceptions we have formed about them, that have spoilt our outlook upon the nature of the peoples. Peoples in the modern sense of the word do not wander, and that which of old _did_ wander needs to be very carefully examined before it is labelled, as the label will not always stand for the same thing. The motive, too, that is everlastingly assigned to these migrations is colourless and worthy of the century that invented it--material necessity. Hunger would normally lead to efforts of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been only the last of the motives that drove men of race out of their nests--although it is understandable that it would very frequently make itself felt when such bands suddenly encountered a military obstacle. It was doubtless, in this simple and strong kind of man, the primary microcosmic urgency to move in free space which sprang up out of the depths of his soul as love of adventure, daring, liking for power and booty; as a blazing desire, to us almost incomprehensible, for deeds, for joy of carnage, for the death of the hero. Often, too, no doubt, domestic strife or fear of the revenge of the stronger, was the motive, but again a strong and manly one. Motives like these are infectious--the “man who stays at home” is a coward. Was it common bodily hunger, again, that induced the Crusades, or the expeditions of Cortez and Pizarro, or in our time the ventures of “wild west” pioneers? Where, in history, we find the little handful invading wide lands, it is ever the voices of the blood, the longing for high destinies, that drive them.

Further, we have to consider the position in the country traversed by the invaders. Its characteristics are always modified more or less, but the modifications are due not merely to the influence of the immigrants, but more and more to the nature of the settled population, which in the end becomes numerically overwhelming.

Obviously, in spaces almost empty of men it is easy for the weaker simply to evade the onslaught, and as a rule he was able to do so. But in later and denser conditions, the inroad spelt dispossession for the weaker, who must either defend himself successfully or else win new lands for old. Already there is the out-thrust into space. No tribe lives without constant contacts on all sides and a mistrustful readiness to stand to arms. The hard necessity of war breeds men. Peoples grow by, and against, other peoples to inward greatness. Weapons become weapons against men and not beasts. And finally we have the only migration-form that counts in historic times--warrior bands sweep through thoroughly populated countries, whose inhabitants remain, undisturbed and upstanding, as an essential part of the spoils of victory. And then, the victors being in a minority, completely new situations arise. Peoples of strong inward form spread themselves on top of much larger but formless populations, and the further transformations of peoples, languages, and races depend upon very complicated factors of detail. Since the decisive investigations of Beloch[225] and Delbrück[226] we know that all migrant peoples--and the Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths and the “Sea-peoples” of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this sense--were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they occupied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior to the natives only in respect of their determination to _be_ a Destiny and not to submit to one. It was not inhabitable, but inhabited, land of which they took possession, and thus the relation between the two peoples became a question of status, the migration turned into the campaign, and the process of settling down became a political process. And here again, in presence of the fact that at a historic distance of time the successes of a small war-band, with the consequent spread of the victor’s names and language, may all too easily be taken for a “migration of peoples,” it is necessary to repeat our question, what, in fact, the men, things, and factors are that _can_ migrate.

Here are some of the answers--the name of a district or that of a collectivity (or of a hero, adopted by his followers), in that it spreads, becomes extinct here and is taken by or given to a totally different population there: in that it may pass from land to people and travel with the latter or vice versa--the language of the conqueror or that of the conquered, or even a third language, adopted for reciprocal understanding--the war-band of a chief which subdues whole countries and propagates itself through captive women, or some accidental group of heterogeneous adventurers, or a tribe with its women and children, like the Philistines of 1200, who quite in the Germanic fashion trekked with their ox-wagons along the Phœnician coast to Egypt.[227] In such conditions, we may again ask, can conclusions be drawn from the destinies of names and languages as to those of peoples and races? There is only one possible answer, a decided negative.

Amongst the “Sea-peoples” that repeatedly attacked Egypt in the thirteenth century appear the _names_ of Danai and Achæans--but in Homer both are almost mythical designations--the _name_ of the Lukka--which adhered later to Lycia, though the inhabitants of that country called themselves Tramilæ--and the _names_ of the Etruscans, the Sards, the Siculi--but this in no wise proved that these “Tursha” spoke the later Etruscan, nor that there was the slightest physical connexion with the like-named inhabitants of Italy or anything else entitling us to speak of “one and the same people.” Assuming that the Lemnos inscription is Etruscan, and Etruscan an Indogermanic language, much could be deduced therefrom in the domain of linguistic history, but in that of racial history nothing whatever. Rome was an Etruscan city, but is not the fact completely without bearing upon the _soul_ of the Roman people? Are the Romans Indogermanic because they happen to speak a Latin dialect? The ethnologists recognize a Mediterranean Race and an Alpine Race, and north and south of these an astonishing physical resemblance between North-Germans and Libyans; but the philologists know that the Basques are in virtue of their speech a “pre-Indogermanic”--Iberian--population. The two views are mutually exclusive. Were the builders of Mycenæ and Tiryns “Hellenes”?--it would be as pertinent to ask were the Ostrogoths Germans. I confess that I do not comprehend why such questions are formulated at all.

For me, the “people” is a _unit of the soul_. The great events of history were not really achieved by peoples; _they themselves created the peoples_. Every act alters the soul of the doer. Even when the event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. It was the fortunes of their migrations that made the Ostrogoths and the Osmanli what they afterwards were. The “Americans” did _not_ immigrate from Europe; the name of the Florentine geographer Amerigo Vespucci designates to-day not only a continent, but also a people in the true sense of the word, whose specific character was born in the spiritual upheavals of 1775 and, above all, 1861-5.

This is the one and only connotation of the word “people.” Neither unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which distinguishes the people from the population, raises it up out of the population, and will one day let it find its level again in the population is always the inwardly lived experience of the “we.” The deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the _vis viva_ of the people. There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human material of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal’s day meant a people, in Trajan’s time nothing more than a population.

Of course, it is often quite justifiable to align peoples with races, but “race” in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people was ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity even for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science--never for folk-consciousness--and that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for _this_ ideal of blood-purity. In race there is nothing material, but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being. It is inco-ordination of this (wholly metaphysical) beat that produces race-hatred, which is just as strong between Germans and Frenchmen as it is between Germans and Jews, and it is resonance on this beat that makes the true love--so akin to hate--between man and wife. He who has not race knows nothing of this perilous love. If a part of the human multitude that now speaks Indogermanic languages, cherishes a certain race-ideal, what is evidenced thereby is not the existence of the prototype-people so dear to the scholar, but the metaphysical force and power of the ideal. It is highly significant that this ideal is expressed, never in the whole population, but mainly in its warrior-element and pre-eminently in its genuine nobility--that is, in men who live entirely in a world of facts, under the spell of historical becoming, destiny-men who will and dare--and it was precisely in the early times (another significant point) that a born alien of quality and dignity could without particular difficulty gain admittance to the ruling class, and wives in particular were chosen for their “breed” and not their descent. Correspondingly, the impress of race-traits is weakest (as may be observed even to-day) in the true priestly and scholarly natures,[228] even though these often do stand in close blood-relationship to the others. A strong spirit trains up the body into a product of art. The Romans formed, in the midst of the confused and even heteroclite tribes of Italy, a race of the firmest and strictest inward unity that was neither Etruscan nor Latin nor merely “Classical,” but quite specifically Roman.[229] Nowhere is the force that cements a people set before us more plainly than in Roman busts of the late Republican period.

I will cite yet another example, than which none more clearly exhibits the errors that these scholars’ notions of people, language, and race inevitably entail, and in which lies the ultimate, perhaps the determining reason why the Arabian Culture has never yet been recognized as an organism. It is that of the Persians. Persian is an Aryan language, hence “the Persians” are an “Indogermanic people,” and hence Persian history and religion are the affair of “Iranian” philology.

To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian, derived from a common ancestor, _or is it merely an Indian dialect?_ Seven centuries of linguistic development, scriptless and therefore very rapid, lie between the Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the Behistun Inscription[230] of Darius. It is almost as great a gap as that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of the Strassburg Oath of 842.[231] Now the Tell-el-Amarna letters and the archives of Boghaz Keüi tell us many “Aryan” names of persons and gods of the middle of the second millennium B.C.--that is, the Vedic Age of Chivalry. It is Palestine and Syria that furnish these names. Nevertheless, Eduard Meyer observes[232] that they are Indian and not Persian, and the same holds good for the numerals that have now been discovered.[233] There is not a unit of Persians, or of any other “people” in the sense of our historical writers. They were Indian heroes, who rode westward and with their precious weapon the warhorse and their own ardent energy made themselves felt as a power far and wide in the ageing Babylonian Empire.

About 600 there appears in the middle of this world Persis, a little district with a politically united population of peasant barbarians. Herodotus says that of its tribes only three were of genuine Persian nationality. Had the language of these knights of old lived on in the hills, and is “Persians” really a land-name that passed to a people? The Medes, who were very similar, bear only the name of a land where an upper warrior-stratum had learned through great political successes to feel itself as a unit. In the Assyrian archives of Sargon and his successors (about 700) are found, along with the non-Aryan place-names, numerous “Aryan” names of persons, all leading figures, but Tiglath-Pileser IV (745-727) calls the people black-haired.[234] It can only have been later that the “Persian people” of Cyrus and Darius was formed, out of men of varied provenance, but forged to a strong inner unity of lived experience. But when, scarce two centuries later, the Macedonians put an end to their lordship--was it that the Persians in this form were _no longer in existence_? (Was there still a Lombard people at all in Italy in A.D. 900?) It is certain that the very wide diffusion of the empire-language of Persia, and the distribution of the few thousands of adult males from Persia over the immense system of military and administrative business, must long ago have led to the dissolution of the Persian nation and set up in its place, as carriers of the Persian name in upper-class conscious of itself as a _political_ unit, of whose members very few could have claimed descent from the invaders from Persia.[235] There is, indeed, not even a country that can be considered as the theatre of Persian history. The events of the period from Darius to Alexander took place partly in northern Mesopotamia (that is, in the midst of an Aramaic-speaking population), partly lower down in old Sinear, anywhere but in Persis, where the handsome buildings begun by Xerxes were never carried out. The Parthians of the succeeding Achæmenid period were a Mongol tribe which had adopted a Persian dialect and in the midst of this people sought to embody the Persian national feeling in themselves.

Here the Persian religion emerges as a problem no less difficult than those of race and language.[236] scholarship has associated it with these as though the association were self-evident, and has, therefore, treated it always with reference to India. But the religion of these land-Vikings was not related to, it was identical with the Vedic, as shown by the divine pairs Mitra-Varuna and Indra-Nasatya of the Boghaz Keüi texts. And within this religion which held up its head in the middle of the Babylonian world Zarathustra now appeared, from out of the lower ranks of the people, as reformer. It is known that he was not a Persian. That which he created (as I hope to show) was a transfer of _Vedic_ religion into the forms of the _Aramæan_ world-contemplation, in which already there were the faint beginnings of the Magian religiousness. The _dævas_, the gods of the old Indian beliefs, grew to be the demons of the Semitic and the jinn of the Arabian. Yahweh and Beelzebub are related to one another precisely as Ahuramazda and Ahriman in this peasant-religion, which was essentially Aramæan and, therefore, founded in an ethical-dualistic world-feeling. Eduard Meyer[237] has correctly established the difference between the Indian and the Iranian view of the world, but, owing to his erroneous premisses, has not recognized its origin. _Zarathustra is a travelling-companion of the prophets of Israel_, who like him, and at the same time, transformed the old (Mosaic-Canaanitish) beliefs of the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology is a common possession of the Persian and Jewish religions, and that the Avesta texts were originally written in Aramaic (in Parthian times) and only afterwards translated into Pehlevi.[238]

But already in Parthian times there occurred amongst both Persians and Jews that profoundly intimate change which makes no longer tribal attachment but orthodoxy the hall-mark of nationality.[239] A Jew who went over to the Mazda faith _became thereby a Persian_; a Persian who became a Christian belonged to the Nestorian “people.” The very dense population of northern Mesopotamia--the motherland of the Arabian Culture--is partly of Jewish and partly of Persian nationality in this sense of the word, which is not at all concerned with race and very little with language. Even before the birth of Christ, “Infidel” designates the non-Persian as it designates the non-Jew.

This nation is the “Persian people” of the Sassanid empire, and, connected with the fact, we find that Pehlevi and Hebrew die out simultaneously, Aramaic becoming the mother tongue of both communities. If we speak in terms of Aryans and Semites, the Persians in the time of the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence were Aryans, but no “people”: in that of Darius a people, but without race: in Sassanid times a community of believers, but of Semitic origin. There is no proto-Persian “people” branched off from the Aryan, nor a general history of the Persians, and for the three special histories, which are held together only by certain linguistic relations, there is not even a common historical theatre.