The following pages, though complete in themselves, or intended to be bo, are yet a farther development of two previous essays of mine that will frequently be referred to in them : - The Asiatic Affinities of the Old Italians, published in 1870; and Numerals as Signs of Primeval Unity among Mankind, published in 1873. A supple- mentary portion at the end of the first of these volumes led to the second ; and the second has now led to a third, in which some additional light may be thrown back upon the chief subject of investigation in the first, - the Etruscan language. This is a question to which atten- tion has been recently drawn among us by the treatises of Lord Crawford and Mr. Isaac Taylor, which have been succeeded, in Germany, by the elaborate, though as yet unfinished, production of Corssen; so that I have been induced, in my last chapter, to re-state and re-examine, at greater length than I should otherwise have done in what is only a subordinate part of the present enquiry, those marks of linguistic affinity, presented to us by the monuments of Etruria, which seem decisive in my eyes.
IV PREFACE.
My own theory on the question, it will be seen, remains substantially unaltered; and any modification or addition that it may now receive separates me still more widely than before from those who have lately devoted them- selves to the solution of this problem. For it is not in Siberia, nor in Germany, nor yet in Italy beyond the Tiber, that I can recognise any language of the same family as the Etruscan, or as either of its two, if not three, component parts; but rather in Armenia, in the Cau- casus and the Pyrenees, and - what I should hardly have suspected till I discerned Ethiopian affinities in the Basque - in Trans-Saharic Africa. The Etruscans, in short, I believe to have been Thraciberians, if I may be allowed to coin a word after the model of CeUiberians. They were a Thracian, and therefore an Aryan, graft upon an Iberian stock ; the Iberians of Etruria, moreover, like the Iberians of Spain, having their language deeply tinged with an African hue, which may have been derived from the predecessors of the Iberians in the South of Europe, if it were not the common inheritance of both Iberians and Africans from their primeval ances- tors. It is through these, its Pre- Aryan inhabitants, that Etruria would be connected with Peru and the rest of the New World, as it was before the era of Columbus. For I consider the Iberians, with the Turanians and the Americans, as branches of one race, for which I have adopted Rask's title of ' Scythian 9 . It is possible that a better division than this tripartite one might be suggested
PREFACE. V
for the Scythian race, seeing that some Turanians are perhaps as nearly connected with some Iberians, if not even with some Americans, as they are with some other Turanians: for the Turanians of Southern Asia, with the Accadians, or Pre- Semitic Assyrians, exhibit certain pecu- liar marks of linguistic affinity to the Iberians, and espe- cially to the Lycians, as they do likewise to the South Americans ; thus favouring a hypothetical division of the Scythian race into Northern and Southern. 1 But such a question as this I must now leave undetermined, as well as another of much importance which awaits an answer; namely, the exact degree of affinity which unites the Scythians with the Africans. On this subject, however, and on the characteristics of the African languages, and of the Ancient Egyptian, we may confidently expect to know far more, when we possess the completion of Reinisch's great work, the fruit of fifty years' labour, upon the original unity of the languages of the Old World. What advantages I have derived from his first volume alone, may be perceived by anyone who may accompany me through the present investigation. The primeval affinity of the languages of Africa to those of Europe and Asia has likewise been recognised by Europaeus, in his Stammverwandschaft der meisten Sprccchen der alien WeU (St. Petersburg, 1870). Here, in his Zahlwortertabelle, he unites the Basque in one group with the African and the Semitic languages, making the 1 Compare Mr. Hyde Clarke, in the Journal of the Society of Arts, May 8th, 1874, p. 588.
VI PREFACE.
Caucasian languages to form a second branch, and the Aryan and Finnish languages a third branch, of a com- mon primitive tongue with other branches besides. This classification of the Basque, which only partly agrees with my own, has, however, as the reader of these pages will find, many points in its favour that are there adduced, and is to be estimated in especial connection with the African analogies presented by Etruscan numerals. But how far these, and other analogies between Iberian ancj African languages, are to be explained by intermixture, and how far by original affinity, remains a question for future decision, and one which I leave open when I speak of the Pre-Aryan population of Southern Europe as Ibero-African. Much that is collateral must be so left in a field of research which cannot be contracted within narrower limits than those of our whole earth, if its own special subject is to be viewed from all sides. It may be sufficient to have shown, in these prefatory re- xnarks, how this third publication of mine bears, with the second, upon the first - how a work relating to the Peru- vians includes in its scope the Basques, the Lycians, and the Etruscans. Some details of the evidence which I put forth five years ago concerning these last three nations, I have now been able to improve by extension and correction, and thus to afford, as I trust, additional confirmation of the views which that evidence was in- tended to support.
PREFACE. Vll
Of the following characters, which I have found it necessary or advisable to employ, 6, g and /, z and z, z, and z, correspond nearly in sound, respectively, to the English ch, j, ts, da, and 8 in such a word as measure : t corresponds usually to the Welsh 11, or the Polish t ; and n to the English ng, but in Quichua to the Italian gn.