Art. VII.—The Languages of the Caucasus

Abstract

There are two or three corners in the world's surface, in which a strange collection of diverse languages is found, the survivals of extinct races, once great and strong. The Central Provinces of India, the refuge of the Kolarian aboriginal tribes; the hills and valleys of Abyssinia, in which remnants of Hamitic, or even Pre-Hamitic, races, pushed aside by the advent of the powerful Semites, are still found: the plateau of Tibet, and the Eastern slopes of that plateau: all these three are instances of the phenomena, which I describe: but none is so noticeable as the Range of the Caucasus, one of the dividing lines of Europe and Asia. As after a great hunt animals of all descriptions and sizes take refuge in some secure copse, or some unapproachable mountain, so, when the great Procession of the Indo-European or Aryan, races from their primeval home on the Hindu Kúsh commenced, all the Pre-Aryan races, which were not destroyed, were pushed aside. In the West of Europe there is one solitary survival, the Basque in the Pyrenees: on the extreme East of Europe we find a cluster of languages in the Caucasus, which are neither Aryan, nor Semitic, nor Altaic.