itive Asiatic home to the east. Powerful bands found their way
through the passes of the Himalayas into the Punjab, and spread
themselves, chiefly as Brahmans and Rajputs, over India.

The Aryan offshoots, alike to the east and to the west, asserted their
superiority over the earlier peoples whom they found in possession of
the soil. The history of ancient Europe is the story of the Aryan
settlements around the shores of the Mediterranean; and that wide term,
modern civilization, merely means the civilization of the western
branches of the same race. The history of India consists in like manner
of the history of the eastern offshoots of the Aryan stock who settled
in that land.

We know little regarding these noble Aryan tribes in their early
camping-ground in Western Asia. From words preserved in the languages of
their long-separated descendants in Europe and India, scholars infer
that they roamed over the grassy steppes with their cattle, making long
halts to raise crops of grain. They had tamed most of the domestic
animals; were acquainted with iron; understood the arts of weaving and
sewing; wore clothes, and ate cooked food. They lived the hardy life of
the comparatively temperate zone; and the feeling of cold seems to be
one of the earliest common remembrances of the eastern and the western
branches of the race.

The forefathers of the Greek and the Roman, of the English and the
Hindu, dwelt together in Western Asia, spoke the same tongue, worshipped
the same gods. The languages of Europe and India, although at first
sight they seem wide apart, are merely different growths from the
original Aryan speech. This is especially true of the common words of
family life. The names for _father, mother, brother, sister_, and
_widow_ are the same in most of the Aryan languages, whether spoken on
the banks of the Ganges, of the Tiber, or of the Thames. Thus the word
_daughter_, which occurs in nearly all of them, has been derived from
the Aryan root _dugh_, which in Sanscrit has the form of _duh_, to milk;
and perhaps preserves the memory of the time when the daughter was the
little milkmaid in the primitive Aryan household.

The ancient religions of Europe and India had a common origin. They were
to some extent made up of the sacred stories or myths which our joint
ancestors had learned while dwelling together in Asia. Several of the
Vedic gods were also the gods of Greece and Rome; and to this day the
Divinity is adored