XIV.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 547 



"illustrious 1 ." Both their language and mythologies, continues 

 M. Lefevre, point to the vast region near Irania as the primeval 

 home of the Slav, as of the Keltic and Germanic populations. 

 The Sauromatas or Sarmatae of Herodotus 2 , who had given their 

 name to the mass of Slav or Slavonised peoples, still dwelt north 

 of the Caucasus and south of the Budini between the Caspian, the 

 Don and Sea of Azov: "after crossing the Tanais (Don) we are 

 no longer in Scythia; we begin to enter the lands 

 of the Sauromatae, who, starting from the angle of mat ia ns a 

 the Palus Mceotis (Sea of Azov), occupy a space of 

 15 days' march, where are neither trees, fruit-trees, nor savages. 

 Above the tract fallen to them the Budini occupy another district, 

 which is overgrown with all kinds of trees 3 ." Then Herodotus 

 seems to identify these Sarmatians with the Scythians, whence all 

 the subsequent doubts and confusion. Both spoke the same 

 language, of which seven distinct dialects are mentioned, yet a 

 number of personal names preserved by the Greeks have a certain 

 Iranic look, so that these Scythian tongues seem to have been 

 really Aryan, forming a transition between the Asiatic and the 

 European branches of the family. It could scarcely be other- 

 wise, for the Scythians, that is, the still generalised Teuto-Slav 

 stock, had about IOOD years (probably we should now say 3000 or 

 4000) before the invasion of Darius been driven by the Massagetae 

 from the Oxus basin, where some place the home of Aryan 

 culture 4 . They claimed to be the youngest of nations, says 



1 Cf. Sanskrit fravas, Gr. /cAe'os (root kin, cm). By a sort of grim 

 irony the word has come to mean "slave" in the West, owing to the multi- 

 tudes of Slavs captured and enslaved during the medieval border warfare. 

 But the term is by many referred to the root slovo, word, speech, implying a 

 people of intelligible utterance, and this is supported by the form Slovene 

 occurring in Nestor and still borne by a southern Slav group. 



2 IV. 21. 



3 These Budini are described as a large nation with "remarkably blue eyes 

 and red hair," on which account Zaborowski thinks they may have been 

 ancestors of the present Finns. But they may also very well have been belated 

 proto-Germani left behind by the body of the nation en route for their new 

 Baltic homes. 



4 See especially R. von Ihring, The Evolution of the Aryan, 1897, on this 

 point. 



35 2 



