Sanskrit after a thousand years of unwritten development, for even in German thousands of Latin loan-words have long ago become completely unrecognizable. The ending “-ette” in “Henriette” is Etruscan--how many genuine Aryan and genuine Semitic endings, notwithstanding their thoroughly alien origin, defy us to prove them intruders? What is the explanation of the astounding similarity of many words in the Australian and the Indogermanic languages? The Indogermanic system is certainly the youngest, and therefore the most intellectual. The languages derived from it rule the earth to-day, but did it really exist at all in 2000 as a specific grammatical edifice? As is well known, a single initial form for Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic is nowadays assumed as probable. The oldest Indian texts preserve the linguistic conditions of (probably) before 1200, the oldest Greek those of (probably) 700. But Indian personal and divine names occur in Syria and Palestine,[204] simultaneously with the horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates.[205] May it be that about 1600 these land-Vikings, these first _Reiter_--men grown up inseparable from their horses, the terrifying originals of the Centaur-legend--established themselves more or less everywhere in the Northern plains as adventurer-chiefs, bringing with them the speech and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the same with the Aryan aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According to what has been said above on race, this would explain the race-ideal of Aryan-speaking regions without any necessity for “migrations” of a “primitive” folk. After all, it was in this way that the knightly Crusaders founded their states in the East--and in exactly the same locality as the heroes with Mitanni names had done so twenty-five hundred years before. Or was this system of about 3000 merely an unimportant dialect of a language that is lost? The Romanic language-family about A.D. 1600 dominated all the seas. About 400 B.C. the “original” language on the Tiber possessed a domain of little more than a thousand square miles. It is certain that the geographical picture of the grammatical families at about 4000 was still very variegated. The Semitic-Hamitic-Aryan group (_if_ it ever did form a unit) can hardly have been of much importance at that time. We stumble at every turn upon the relics of old speech-families--Etruscan, Basque, Sumerian, Ligurian, the ancient tongues of Asia Minor, and others--that in their day must have belonged to very extensive systems. In the archives of Boghaz-Keüi eight new languages have so far been identified, all of them in use about the year 1000. With the then prevailing tempo of modification, Aryan may in 2000 have formed a unit with languages that we should never dream of associating with it. VII