For more than two
thousand years, however, they have been enclosed in their walls
and mountains and seas, while the nations of the remote west
clashed unceasingly against each other. We need no other
explanation of their stagnation. To speak of the
"unprogressiveness" of the Chinese is pure mysticism. The next
generation will see.
The civilisation of India is also far later than the civilisation
of the west, and seems to be more clearly due to borrowing from
the west. The primitive peoples who live on the hills about
India, or in the jungles, are fragments, apparently, of the Stone
Age inhabitants of India, or their descendants. Their culture may
have degenerated under the adverse conditions of dislodgement
from their home, but we may fairly conclude that it was never
high. On these primitive inhabitants of the plains of India there
fell, somewhere about or before 1000 B.C., the Asiatic branch of
the Aryan race.
A very recent discovery (1908) has strongly confirmed and
illumined this view of the origin of Indian civilisation.
Explorers in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite
Empire (in North Syria and Cappadocia) found certain treaties
which had been concluded, about 1300 B.
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