The science of Comparative Philology, one of the great triumphs of modern scholarship, has enabled us now, for the first time, to answer this question.  What no Greek knew, what neither Herodotus, Plato, nor Aristotle could tell us, we are now able to state with certainty.  The Greek language, both in its grammar and its vocabulary, belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, of which the Sanskrit is the elder sister.  Out of eleven thousand six hundred and thirty-three Greek words, some two thousand are found to be Sanskrit, and three thousand more to belong to other branches of the Indo-European tongues.  As the words common to the Greek and the Sanskrit must have been in use by both races before their separation, while living together in Central Asia, we have a clew to the degree of civilization attained by the Greeks before they arrived in Europe.  Thus it appears that they brought from Asia a familiarity with oxen and cows, horses, dogs, swine, goats, geese; that they could work in metals; that they built houses, and were acquainted with the elements of agriculture, especially with farinaceous grains; they used salt; they had boats propelled by oars, but not sails; they divided the year by moons, and had a decimal notation.[206]

The Greeks, as a race, came from Asia later than the Latin races.  They belonged to that powerful Indo-European race, to which Europe owes its civilization, and whose chief branches are the Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks, the Latins, the Kelts, the Teutonic tribes, and the Slavi.  The original site of the race was, as we have seen in our chapter on Brahmanism, in Bactria; and the earliest division of this people could not have been later than three thousand or four thousand years before the Christian era.  When the Hellenic branch entered Europe we have now no means of saying.  It was so long anterior to Greek history that all knowledge of the time was lost, and only the faintest traditions of an Asiatic origin of their nation are to be found in Greek writers.

The Hellenic tribes, at the beginning of the seventh century before Christ, were divided into four groups,—­the Achaians, AEolians, Dorians, and Ionians,—­with outlying tribes more or less akin.  But this Hellenic people had been preceded in Greece by another race known as Pelasgians.  It is so difficult to say who these were, that Mr. Grote, in despair, pronounces them unknowable, and relinquishes the problem.  Some facts concerning them may, however, be considered as established.  Their existence in Greece is pronounced by Thirwall to be “the first unquestionable fact in Greek history.”  Homer speaks (Iliad, II. 681) of “Pelasgian Argos,” and of “spear-skilled Pelasgians,” “noble Pelasgians,” “Pelasgians inhabiting fertile Larissa” (II. 840; X. 429).  Herodotus frequently speaks of the Pelasgians.  He says that the Dorians were a Hellenic nation, the Ionians were Pelasgic; he does not profess to know what language the Pelasgians