Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
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Small size is sometimes coupled with monarchical rule, degenerating occasionally into despotism among aggressive robber tribes. The inaccessible Hunza Valley is occupied on opposite sides of its deep gorge by two rival states, the Hunzas and the Nagaris, whose combined population amounts to scarcely 25,000 souls. Hostile to each other, they unite only to resist an invading force. While the Hunza Thum is a tyrant, the Nagari ruler has little voice in the government. The Tibeto-Burman hill folk of the eastern Himalayas are divided into clans, and concede a mild authority to a chief who rules a group of clan villages, but only rarely is able to secure power over a larger district. The Khasia Hills of Assam are broken up into twenty-three petty states, each under its own Rajah or chief, who has, however, little authority beyond the administration of justice.1389
Everywhere in mountain regions appears this repugnance to centralized authority. Protection by environment obviates the necessity of protection through combination. The spirit of clan exclusiveness, the absence of a common national sentiment, characterize equally the tribesmen of mountainous Albania, of Persian Luristan,1390 and highland Kurdistan. Along the rugged upheaved area which forms the western boundary of India from the Khaibar Pass to the sea, British officials have had to negotiate with the native Pathan and Baluch "jirgahs," assemblies of the chief men of the countless clans into which the tribes are divided, as the only visible form of authority tolerated.1391 Combination must be voluntary and of a type to exact a modicum of submission. These requirements are best answered by the confederation, which may gradually assume a stable and elaborate form among an advanced people like the Swiss; or it may constitute a loose yet effective union, as in the famous Samnite confederacy of the central Apennines; or a temporary league like that of the ancient Arcadians, or the group of confederated sheiks of Bellad el Kobail, the "Country of the Highlanders" in mountainous Yemen, who in 1790 established a republican form of union for defense against their more powerful neighbors.1392
The power of mountains to protect makes them asylums of refuge for displaced peoples. This fact explains the confused ethnology which often characterizes these isolated regions, especially when they lie near or across natural highways of human migration. As a tide of humanity sweeps around or across the mountains, a branch stream turns into a side valley, where it is caught and held. There it remains unaltered, crystallizing in its seclusion, subjected for ages to few modifying influences from without. Its people keep their own language and customs, little affected by a totally different race stock similarly placed in a neighboring alcove of the mountains. Lack of communication engenders an endless multiplication of dialects, as we find them in the Alps, the Caucasus, in Kafirstan of the Hindu Kush and in Nepal. Diversity of speech, itself a product of isolation, reacts upon that political and social aloofness of mountain folk, to emphasize and fix it.
From this principle it follows that the same highland region shows strong differentiation and marked social individuality from one district to another, and from one valley to the next, despite a prevailing similarity of local geographic conditions. In fact, the very similarity of those conditions, strong in their power to isolate, present the conditions for inevitable variation. A mountain region gets its population from diverse sources, or, which is quite as important, at different times from the same source. For instance, Nepal received contingents of Rajput conquerors, dislodged from the Punjab, in the seventh century, the eleventh, and finally the dominant Gurkhas at the end of the eighteenth. To-day these represent different degrees of amalgamation with the local Tibetan stock of Nepal. They are distinguished from each other by a diversity of languages, and a multiplicity of dialects, while the whole piedmont of the country shows a yet different blend with the Aryan Hindus of the Ganges valley, who have seeped into the Terai and been drawn up, as if by capillary attraction, into the hill valleys of the outer range. The Vindhyan Range and its associated highlands, long before the dawn of Indian history, caught and held in their careful embrace some of the fragile aboriginal tribes like the Kolarian Ho, Santals and Korkus. Centuries later the Dravidian Bhils and Gonds sought refuge here before the advancing Indo-Aryans, and found asylums in the secluded valleys.1393 Finally those same northern plains whence the Dravidians had come, after the Mohammedan conquest of central India in the sixteenth century, sent flying to the refuge of the hills a large contingent of Hindus of mingled Dravidian and Aryan stocks, but stamped with the culture of the Ganges basin. These occupied the richer valleys and the more accessible plateaus of the highlands, driving the primitive Gonds and Bhils back into the remoter recesses of the mountains.1394 Dravidians and aboriginal Kolarians survive in their purity in the wilder and more inaccessible regions, but in the lower valleys their upper classes show signs of mixtures with the Rajput invaders, while the lower classes betray little Aryan blood.1395
Afghanistan, of disordered relief, set as a transit region between the plains of Mesopotamia, the Oxus and the Indus, has a confused ethnology in keeping with the tangle of dissected plateaus and mountain systems which constitute its surface. Here we find three distinct branches of the Indo-European race, divided up into various peoples of diverse tongues and subdivided further into countless tribes; and two branches of Mongol-Tartars scattered, as if out of a pepper box, from the Helmund to the Oxus, tossed in among diverse peoples of Iranic and Galcha origin in hopeless confusion. The various Afghan tribes, separated from each other by natural barriers and intervening alien stocks, though similar in physical type, speech, religion and culture, have no sense of unity, no common political aims, while the appalling list of tribes constituting the population of the country1396 offers little hope of Afghanistan ever developing national cohesion. Kafiristan alone, which lies in the Hindu Kush range for the most part at an altitude of 12,000 feet or more, harbors in its recesses many remnants of primitive peoples, speaking various languages and dialects, strangers alike to any native affinity or political union. It is a mere agglomeration of ethnic fragments, in which the people of one village are often unable to converse with those of the next.1397 Relief has fashioned the ethnology of the Caucasus in the same way. No other equally small area in the world contains such a variety of peoples and tongues, differing from one another in race, language, and customs so fundamentally as the Caucasus. From the heterogeneous survivals of extremely old ethnic stocks, lodged in the high valleys, to the intrusive Russians of the lower piedmont, the Caucasus might be called an ethnographical sample card.1398
The rugged configuration of the Alps, from the Rhone to the Danube, has preserved the broad-headed Alpine race, which was perhaps the primitive stock of Central Europe. The great river valleys leading into this massive highland, like the Rhine, Aar, Inn and Adige, show the intrusion of a long-headed race from both north and south; but lofty and remote valleys off the main routes of travel, like the Hither Rhine about Dissentis, the little Stanzerthal of the upper Inn, and the Passierthal of the upper Adige above Meran, show the race preserved in its purity by the isolating environment.1399 Here each segregated lateral valley becomes an area of marked linguistic and social differentiation; only where it opens into the wider longitudinal valleys are its peculiarities of speech and custom diluted by the intrusive current of another race. Switzerland has received three different streams of language, and broken them up into numerous rivulets of dialect. On its small area of 16,125 square miles (41,346 square kilometers) thirty-five dialects of German are spoken, sixteen of French, eight of Italian and five of Romansch, a primitive and degenerate Latin tongue, surviving from the ancestral days of Roman occupation.1400 The yet smaller territory of the Tyrol has all these languages except French, whose place is taken by various forms of Slavonic speech, which have entered by the western tributaries of the Danube.1401
Rarely is a polyglot mountain population able to work out its own political salvation, as the Swiss have done. More often political union must be forced upon them from without. Oftener still, when the highlanders are primitive survivals, ill-matched against the superior invaders from the plain, they are doomed to a process of constriction of territory and deterioration of numbers, which proceeds slowly or rapidly according to the inaccessibility of their environment and the energy of the intruders. Deliberate, unenterprising nations, like the Chinese, Turks and Indo-Aryans long tolerate the presence of alien mountain tribes, who remain like enemies brought to bay in their isolated fortresses. The conquerors throw around them at their leisure a cordon of settlement, which, slowly ascending the piedmont, draws closer and closer about the mountaineers. The situation of many mountain tribes reminds one of a besieged stronghold. Russian wars against the Caucasus have rightly been described as protracted sieges. The heroic history of Switzerland in relation to its neighbors has been that of a skillfully conducted defense, both military and diplomatic. The territory of China is dotted over with detached groups of aborigines, who have survived wherever a friendly mountain has offered them an asylum. Variously known as Lolos, Mantze or Miaotse, they have preserved everywhere a semi-independence in pathless mountains, whither Chinese troops do not dare to follow them;1402 but the more numerous and patient Chinese agriculturalists are in many sections slowly encroaching upon their territories, driving them farther and farther into the recesses of their highlands. The same process goes on in Formosa, where the Chinese have gradually forced the native Malays into mountain
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