Page 580 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION 361
expected to have made a good advance in civilisation. But we
have at present very few means by which we can ascertain the
exact degree of civilisation attained by the undivided Aryans
in their primitive home. Comparative Philology tells us that
primitive Aryans were familiar with the art of spinning and
weaving, knew and worked in metals, constructed boats and
chariots, founded and lived in cities, carried on buying and
selling, and had made considerable progress in agriculture. We
also know that important social or political institutions or orga-
nisations, as for instance marriage or the laws of property,
prevailed amongst the forefathers of our races in those early days;
and linguistic paleontology furnishes us with a long list of the
fauna and the flora known to the undivided Aryans. These are
important linguistic discoveries, and taking them as they are,
they evidently disclose a state of civilisation higher than that
of the savages of the Neolithic age. But in the light of the Arctic
theory we are naturally led to inquire if the culture of the primi-
tive Aryans was confined only to the level disclosed by Compa-
rative Philology, or whether it was of a higher type than the one
we can predicate of them simply on linguistic grounds. We
have seen above that in the case of the mythological deities and
their worship the Polar character of many of the deities at once
enables us to assign them to the primitive period even when
their names are not found in all the Aryan languages; and the
results of Comparative Philology regarding primitive Aryan
culture will have to be checked and revised in the same way.
The very fact that after compulsory dispersion from their
mother-land the surviving Aryans, despite the fragmentary
civilisation they carried with them, were able to establish their
supremacy over the races they came across in their migrations
from the original home at the beginning of the post-Glacial
period, and that they succeeded, by conquest or assimilation,
in Aryaoising the latter in language, thought and religion under
circumstances which could not be expected to be favourable to
them, is enough to prove that the original Aryan civilisation must
have been of a type far higher than that of the non-Aryan races,
or than the one found among the Aryan races that migrated
southward after the destruction of their home by the Ice Age.
So long as the Aryan races inhabiting the northern parts of
Europe in the beginning of the Neolithic age were believed to be