A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volumes 1 and 2, 3rd ed.: From the Earliest Times to the Present DayFergusson, James
History
A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volumes 1 and 2, 3rd ed.: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Fergusson, James
Architecture -- History
More than a thousand years afterwards we find them, in the age of the
Ramayana, occupying all the country north of the Vindya range, and
attempting the conquest of the southern country,—then, as now, occupied
by Turanians,—and penetrating as far as Ceylon.
Eight hundred years later we see them in the Mahabharata, having lost
much of their purity of blood, and adopting many of the customs and much
of the faith of the people they were settled amongst; and three
centuries before Christ we find they had so far degenerated as to
accept, almost without a struggle, the religion of Buddha; which, though
no doubt a reform, and an important one, on the Anthropic doctrines of
the pure Turanians, was still essentially a faith of a Turanian people;
congenial to them, and to them only.
Ten centuries after Christ, when the Moslems came in contact with India,
the Aryan was a myth. The religion of the earlier people was everywhere
supreme, and with only a nominal thread of Aryanism running through the
whole, just sufficient to bear testimony to the prior existence of a
purer faith, but not sufficient to leaven the mass to any appreciable
extent.
The fate of the western Aryans differed essentially from that of those
who wandered eastward. Theoretically we ought to assume, from their less
complex language and less pure faith, that they were an earlier
offshoot; but it may be that in the forests of Europe they lost for a
while the civilised forms which the happier climate of Arya Varta
enabled the others to retain; or it may be that the contact with the
more nearly equal Celtic races had mixed the language and the faith of
the western races, before they had the opportunity or the leisure to
record the knowledge they brought with them.
Be this as it may, they first appear prominently in the western world in
Greece, where, by a fortunate union with the Pelasgi, a people
apparently of Turanian race, they produced a civilisation not purely
Aryan, and somewhat evanescent in its character, but more brilliant,
while it lasted, than anything the world had seen before, and in certain
respects more beautiful than anything that has illumined it since their
time.
They next sprang forth in Rome, mixed with the Turanian Etruscans and
the powerful Celtic tribes of Italy; and lastly in Northern Europe,
where they are now working out their destiny, but to what issue the
future only can declare.
The essential difference between the eastern and western migration is
this—that in India the Aryans have sunk gradually into the arms of a
Turanian people till they have lost their identity, and with it all that
ennobled them when they went there, or could enable them now to
influence the world again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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