Ethnographical collections from East Greenland. 717 



not intended to mean, that I regard these central regions as the first 

 home of all the Eskimo. It was perhaps the common starting point 

 of the East Eskimo, from which they have become divided into one 

 stream eastwards to Labrador and one or several others northwards 

 to Greenland; but I still believe (like Rink), that the common Eskimo 

 mother-group has at one time lived to the west at the Bering Strait, 

 coming originally from the coasts of Siberia ^). In this way we should 

 best explain the striking agreement in those common archaic features of 

 the Greenland implements or other objects (eye-shades ornamented with 

 ivory reliefs etc.) and the Alaskan, which are absent from the inter- 

 mediate regions. The hunting culture of the inland Eskimo in the 

 central regions is probably only a continuation eastwards of an old 

 inland hunting culture in northern Alaska, secondary in these re- 

 gions to the sea-hunting of the marine animals, because these inland 

 hunters came originally over the sea to these coasts. The North- 

 East Siberian tribes (especially the Chukchee) have become subdi- 

 vided in the same manner into hunters on the sea and hunters of 

 inland animals (reindeer). The agreement between the old material 

 culture of the Greenlanders and a little older stage of the Alaskan 

 Eskimo's culture is striking. In a large number of points, further, 

 this common Eskimo culture agrees with the cultures in Asia of the 

 Chukchee and neighbouring coastal tribes^). In the points in which 

 the culture of the intervening or central Eskimo groups differs from 

 the main types of this common culture, in special or absent features, 



^) I may recall here Clement Markham's theory put forward as early as 1865, that 

 the primeval emigrants called Onkilon, of whom the Chukchee of North-East 

 Siberia narrated that they had wandered northwards out over the sea, were 

 possibly the first origins of the Eskimo people in America. More recently W. 

 Bogoras has brought us new information from the Chukchee; according to him 

 the Chukchee pronounce the name of the old maritime people as Ax^qalit, from 

 ax^qa "the sea". Both this name and Nimilit (probably the same as the Namollo 

 of earlier expeditions) are said to indicate "maritime settlers" and refer to the 

 Eskimo. Bogoras (1904) pp. 11 and 21. 



^) Bogoras (1904 p. 21) has a description of the old underground houses of the 

 Chukchee which would almost pass for the Eskimo's. He mentions (pp. 117 — 

 121) the kaiaks as used by them both on the arctic coast and on the Anadyr 

 River, in the Eskimo village Wuteen on the Pacific coast he observed a kaiak 

 15 feet long. The Koryakers (more to the south) also have kaiaks. The Chuk- 

 chee carry on seal-hunting on the winter ice by methods which greatly resemble 

 those of the Eskimo (luring and creeping; ice-sealing stools on which they sit 

 etc.). Cf. also other parallels mentioned by me here pp. 580, 652, 681, 685 etc. 

 In its origin the culture of a people is woven of many dissimilar threads. 

 Here I may give two telling witnesses from the language of the connection of 

 the Eskimo culture with the occident (or more correctly with the orient, since 

 the direction of migration was from west to east). The word for the Eskimo 

 kaiak (qajaq) agrees almost exactly with the word of the Turkish Yakuters for 

 boat (qajiq); we are tempted to regard this word as a loan from the Turkish 



