About the Book
CHAPTER I. THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE. It was not only in the lower valley of the Nile, on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and along the coast and on the heights of Syria that independent forms of intellectual and civic life grew up in antiquity. By the side of the early civilisation of Egypt, and the hardly later civilisation of that unknown people from which Elam, Babylon, and Asshur borrowed such important factors in the development of their own capacities; along with the civilisation of the Semites of the East and West, who here observed the heavens, there busily explored the shores of the sea; here erected massive buildings, and there were so earnestly occupied with the study of their own inward nature, are found forms of culture later in their origin, and represented by a different family of nations. This family, the Indo-European, extends over a far larger area than the Semitic. We find branches of it in the wide districts to the east of the Semitic nations, on the table-land of Iran, in the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges. Other branches we have already encountered on the heights of Armenia, and the table-land of Asia Minor (I. 512, 524). Others again obtained possession of the plains above the Black Sea; others, of the peninsulas of Greece and Italy. Nations of this stock have forced their way to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean; we find them settled on the western coast of the Spanish peninsula, from the mouth of the Garonne to the Channel, in Britain and Ireland no less than in Scandinavia, on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic. Those branches of the family which took up their abodes the farthest to the East exhibit the most independent and peculiar form of civilisation. The mutual relationship of the Arian, Greek, Italian, Letto-Sclavonian, Germanic, and Celtic languages proves the relationship of the nations who have spoken and still speak them; it proves that all these nations have a common origin and descent. The words, of which the roots in these languages exhibit complete phonetic agreement, must be considered as a common possession, acquired before the separation; and from this we can discover at what stage of life the nation from which these languages derive their origin stood at the time when it was not yet divided into these six great branches, and separated into the nations which subsequently occupied abodes so extensive and remote from each other. We find common terms for members of the family, for house, yard, garden, and citadel; common words for horses, cattle, dogs, swine, sheep, goats, mice, geese, ducks; common roots for wool, hemp or flax, corn (i. e. wheat, spelt, or barley), for ploughing, grinding, and weaving, for certain metals (copper or iron), for some weapons and tools, for waggon, boat and rudder, for the elementary numbers, and the division of the year according to the moon.[1] Hence the stock, whose branches and shoots have spread over the whole continent of Europe and Asia from Ceylon to Britain and Scandinavia, cannot, even before the separation, have been without a certain degree of civilisation. On the contrary, this common fund of words proves that even in that early time it tilled the field, and reared cattle; that it could build waggons and boats, and forge weapons, and if the general name for the gods and some names of special deities are the same in widely remote branches of this stock, -in India, Iran, Greece, and Italy, and even on the plains of Lithuania, -it follows that the notions which lie at the base of these names must also be counted among the common possessions existing before the separation....
About the Author: Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker (* October 15, 1811 in Berlin, + July 21, 1886 in Ansbach) was a German historian and politician. Maximilian Duncker was a son of Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Publisher bookseller Duncker (1781-1869), founder of the publishing house Duncker & Humblot, and his wife Fanny Auguste Babette nee Wolff. His brothers were the publisher Alexander Duncker (1813-1897), the Berlin politician Hermann Carl Rudolf Duncker (1817-1892), member of the Prussian National Assembly, and the publisher and publicist Franz Duncker (1822-1888), co-founder of the Hirsch-Duncker associations, Maximilian Duncker married 1842 Charlotte Guticke. After visiting the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin studied Maximilian Duncker history, philosophy and philology in Berlin and Bonn. He received his doctorate in 1834 for Dr. phil. After his military service as a one-year volunteer, he was in 1834 at the Royal Library in Berlin worked. In the same year began investigations against Maximilian Duncker because of his membership in the fraternity Marcomannia Bonn [1], which he had joined in 1832. This led in 1837 to the sentencing to six years imprisonment and the prohibition of the acquisition of public office. After half a year in prison in Köpenick he was pardoned and received in 1838 permission for Habilitation. This took place one year later at the University of Halle. He was until 1842 a lecturer in history and at the same time worked in a leading position in his father's publishing house. From 1842 to 1857 he was an associate professor of history at Halle. In 1851, a criminal case against him was initiated on the basis of his writing four months of foreign policy. 1855 would Duncker thanks to the support of university lecturers in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Johannes Schulze (1786-1869), almost made the leap to a proper history professor at the University of Greifswald. The conservative
