The civilisation of India is also far later than the civilisation of the west, and seems to be more clearly due to borrowing from the west. The primitive peoples who live on the hills about India, or in the jungles, are fragments, apparently, of the Stone Age inhabitants of India, or their descendants. Their culture may have degenerated under the adverse conditions of dislodgement from their home, but we may fairly conclude that it was never high. On these primitive inhabitants of the plains of India there fell, somewhere about or before 1000 B.C., the Asiatic branch of the Aryan race. A very recent discovery (1908) has strongly confirmed and illumined this view of the origin of Indian civilisation. Explorers in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire (in North Syria and Cappadocia) found certain treaties which had been concluded, about 1300 B.C., between the Hittites and the king of the Aryans. The names of the deities which are mentioned in the treaties seem to show that the Persian and Indian branches of the Aryan race were not yet separated, but formed a united kingdom on the banks of the Euphrates. They seem to have come from Bactria (and possibly beyond), and introduced the horse (hitherto unknown to the Babylonians) about 1800 B.C. It is surmised by the experts that the Indian and Persian branches separated soon after 1300 B.C., possibly on account of religious quarrels, and the Sanscrit-speaking branch, with its Vedic hymns and its Hinduism, wandered eastward and northward until it discovered and took possession of the Indian peninsula. The long isolation of India, since the cessation of its commerce with Rome until modern times, explains the later stagnation of its civilisation. Thus the supposed "non-progressiveness" of the east, after once establishing civilisation, turns out to be a question of geography and history. We have now to see if the same intelligible principles will throw light on the "progressiveness" of the western branch of the Aryan race, and on the course of western civilisation generally. [*] * In speaking of Europeans as Aryans I am, of course, allowing for an absorption of the conquered non-Aryans. A European nation is no more Aryan, in strict truth, than the English are Anglo-Saxon.