Page 583 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

364 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME
results of Comparative Philology in forming our estimate of the
degree of culture reached by the primitive Aryans and show
·that when the primitive Aryan culture is carried back to the inter-
Glacial age, the hypothesis that primitive Aryans were hardly
better than the savage races of the present day at once falls to
the ground. If the civilisation of some Aryan races in the
Neolithic age appears to be inferior or imperfect it must,
therefore, be, as observed above, ascribed to relapse or retro-
gression after the destruction of the ancient civilisation by the
Ice Age, and the necessarily hard and nomadic life led by the
people who survived the cataclysm. The Asiatic Aryans, it is
true, were able to preserve a good deal more of the original
religion and culture, but it seems to be mainly due to their having
incorporated the old traditions into their religious hymns or
songs; and made it the exclusive business of a few to preserve
and hand down with religious scrupulosity these prayers and
songs to future generations by means of memory specially trained
and cultivated for the purpose. But even then how difficult the
task was can be very well seen from the fact that a greater portion
of the hymns and songs originally comprised in the A vesta has
been lost; and though the Veda is better preserved, still what we
have at present is only a portion of the literature which is believed
on good grounds to have once been in existence. It may seem
passing strange that these books should disclose to us the existence
of an original Arctic home so many centuries after, the traditions
were incorporated into them. But the evidence in the foregoing
pages shows that it is a fact; and if so, we must hold that the
Neolithic Aryan people in Europe were not, as Prof. Max Muller
thinks, progressive, but, for the time at least, necessarily retro-
gressive savages working only with such residue of the ante-dilu-
vian civilisation as were saved from its general wreck.*
But though the Vedic or Aryan people and their religion
and culture can thus be traced to the last inter·Glacial period,
and though we know that the degree of culture attained by the
primitive Aryans was of a higher type than some scholars seem
to be willing to assign to them, yet there are many points in the
primitive Aryan history which still remain unsolved. For instance,
when and where the Aryan race was differentiated from other

• Max Muller's Last Essays, PF· I7Z.ff.