>>13913938Forgive me for writing this, but I follow Wells' definition:
Four thousand years ago, that is to say about 2000 B.C.,
central and south-eastern Europe and central Asia were
probably warmer, moister and better wooded than they are
now. In these regions of the earth wandered a group of tribes mainly
of the fair and blue-eyed Nordic race, sufficiently in touch with one
another to speak merely variations of one common language from the
Rhine to the Caspian Sea. At that time they may not have been a
very numerous people, and their existence was unsuspected by the
Babylonians to whom Hannnurabi was giving laws, or by the
already ancient and cultivated land of Egypt which was tasting in
those days for the first time the bitterness of foreign conquest.
These Nordic people were destined to play a very important part
indeed in the world's history. They were a people of the parklands
and the forest clearings; they had no horses at first but they had cattle ;
when they wandered they put their tents and other gear on rough ox
waggons ; when they settled for a time they may have made huts
of wattle and mud. They burnt their important dead ; they did not
bury them ceremoniously as the brunet peoples did. They put
the ashes of their greater leaders in urns and then made a great circular
mound about them. These mounds are the " round barrows "
that occur all over north Europe. The brunet people, their predecessors,
did not burn their dead but biu'ied them in a sitting
position in elongated mounds ; the " long barrows."
