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. III With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a _morphology of peoples_. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic nor political nor zoölogical, but spiritual, units. And this leads at once to the further distinction between _peoples before, within, and after a Culture_. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all ages that Culture-peoples are _more distinct_ in character than the rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and the Germanic periods), phase by phase, becoming ever more definite in type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups, though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the stamp of man. Such a superposition of phases leads from the Cimbri and Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lombards, and Saxons. Instances of primitive peoples are the Jews and Persians of the Seleucid age, the “Sea-peoples,” the Egyptian Nomes of Menes’s time.[240] And that which follows a Culture we may call--from its best-known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times--fellah-peoples.