The pygmies

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Intboduction ix

I. — The Pygmies of the Ancients, according to Modern

Chapter I. The Pygmies Of The Ancients, According To Modern Science

Homer and Aristotle : Pygmies of the Nile.— The Marsh of the Nile. —Pliny : African and Asiatic Pygmies.— Buffon : The Apes.— Roulin : Northern Populations. — Beloochistan : Brahouis.— Ctesias : Asiatic Pygmies. — Pomponius Mela : Bast African Pygmies.— Herodotus : "West African Pygmies.— Voyage of the Nasamones. — The Niger. — Negritos and Negrillos.

There is probably no nation, not a human population, which has not believed in the existence of men of more or less dwarfed stature and has made them play a role in its legends.* One knows that the Greeks have not escaped the common law, and that Homer has borrowed from beliefs, which were without doubt much older than his time, the beginning of the third chant of the Iliad, " when under the orders of their chiefs they had arranged themselves in battle array, the Trojans advanced noisily like a cloud of birds, making their loud cries heard. So

* I have no intention of here examining all that has been said on the subject of the pygmies. It is understood that I shall not occupy myself with puerile traditions, nursery tales, which some aijcient authors have transmitted to us on the subject. ... 1 shall confine myself to discussing that which has been said which is nearest true. Readers who wish more may consult Banier."

2 THE PYGMIKS.

raises itself to heaven the outcry of storks when they flee from winter and the continual rains. They utter shrill cries, they fly over the ocean, they bear carnage and death to the men called pygmies ; and from high in the air they give them dreadful combat."

The country of the pygmies is not mentioned in this passage. Yet Homer certainly knew of the migration of the storks ; he knew that they passed each year from Europe into Africa and back again ; and as, according to him, these birds met their enemies only after having crossed the sea in order to escape the severity of the bad season, it is evident that it is somewhere in Africa that the poet located the home of these dwarfs, supposed too small and too feeble to resist their winged invaders.

Although he has spoken of the pygmies in connection with the natural history of storks, Aristotle said nothing of the pretended combats which furnished Homer his term of comparison. One may say that he did not believe in it. Behold how he expresses himself : " The storks pass from the plains of Scythia to the marsh of upper Egypt, toward the sources of the Nile. This is the district which the pygmies inhabit, whose existence is not a fable. There is really, as men say, a species of men of little stature, and their horses are little also. They pass their life in caverns."'

Without being as explicit as one might wish, Aristotle here corrects exaggerations relative to the claimed height of the pygmies. There is a great difference between men of little stature and those miniature human beings among whom storks could carry carnage and death. Upon the other points the founder of natural science is, one might say, upon the line of truth such as it appears to us to-day.

It is toward the sources of the Nile that he placed the home of the pygmies. It is, in fact, in proceeding almost in the general direction of this river that Schweinfurth discovered the little men of whom we shall speak farther on. But Aristotle placed these sources in the midst of swamps situated in upper Egypt. We know, but only very recently, that there the course of the Nile was singularly cut short. The swamps exist in fact. All explorers of these regions have insisted upon the difficulties which they have experienced in traversing the inextricable labyrinth of canals encumbered by islands now fixed, now floating, which form the Sett, a true vegetable barrier, of which papyrus * and herminisria \ form, so to speak, the framework, and which more humble plants, particularly the pistia, compared by travellers to a little cabbage which grows, in the manner of our water lentils, consolidate. But these swamps, which commence a little south of Khartoum, become pronounced at about the ninth degree of latitude." One knows that it is much farther to the south and beyond the equator that the sources of the Nile are found. It is in our hemisphere near the second degree of north latitude, two or three degrees of longitude west of the African river, and in a totally different basin — that of the Welle — that Scbweinfurth discovered the Akkas, which are apparently the little men of Aristotle."^ Aristotle speaks of the little horses of the pygmies, but no traveller mentions this quadruped as forming part of the fauna of the country. One might be tempted to see in this contradiction a motive for doubting the exactitude of the facts conveyed by travellers to the Greek philosopher. But it is easily explained. Baker tells us that

* Papyrus domesHca, L. This so justly celebrated plant appears formerly to have been very abundant over the whole of Egypt. However, Scbweinfurth saw it first on the banks of the Nile, at 9° 30' north latitude.'"

t Herminisria, Adanson ; JEdemone mirdbilis, Kotschy. This plant grows to a height of fifteen to twenty feet, with a diameter at base of five to six centimetres ; it is very light, more so than cork. 2 the animals of the Bari (a negro tribe of the neighbourhood of Gondokoro) are of very small size — "cows and ewes have dimensions truly Lilliputian."" Probably at the time of the Egyptian domination the horse had reached even into these districts ; and, if it had been so, he must also have suffered the degeneration reported^ by the English traveller in the cases of the other domestic mammals.

Thus Aristotle has been very definite ; that which he said is in part true, and in any case at least reasonable. With Pliny, we meet with uncertainties, exaggerations, and fables. He places the pygmies now in Thrace, not far from the shore of the Euxine Sea;^^* now in Asia Minor, in the interior of Caria. On two occasions he designates India as the country of these little beings ; elsewhere, in speaking of peoples of Africa, which live at the extremity of Ethiopia, he says, " Some authors have also reported that tlie nation of the pygmies was among the marshes which were the source of the Nile."

One has reproached Pliny for the multiplicity of, the habitats assigned by him to the pygmies ; one has wished to see in this fact one more example of the haste with which he took his notes, and of the conti'adictions into which his manner of working led him. But has one not been too severe in this, and have his words not been misunderstood? In placing pygmies upon geographic districts so separated from each other, and so distinct, Pliny could not have intended to speak of one single population. He has evidently believed in 'the existence of these little men upon different parts of the then known world, and admitted in particular Asiatic and African pygmies. Upon this point modern discoveries have shown that he was right.

Pliny reproduces, however, without any reservation, all that which was said upon the subject of the combats sustained by the pygmies against the storks. It is these, so

THE PYGMIES OF THE ANCIENTS. 5

the barbarians say, which have chased them from Thrace. Thanks to the annual migration of these birds, the little men enjoy each year an armistice. Finally he sums up all this ensemble of beliefs in the following terms : " In India, beyond the mountains, one speaks of the Trispithames and of the pygmies, who are no more than three spithames in height (twenty-seven inches, about 0-73 metres) ; they have a wholesome climate and perpetual springtime, protected as they are by the mountains against the north wind. Homer relates, on his part, that the storks make war against them. It is said that, borne upon the backs of rams and of goats and armed with arrows, they descend all together at springtime to the seacoast, and eat the eggs and the little ones of these birds ; that this expedition lasts three months ; that otherwise they could not resist the increasing multitudes of the storks ; that their cabins are constructed of mud, feathers, and eggshells. Aristotle says that the pygmies live in caverns ; as for the rest, he gives the same details as the others."

We have just seen how inexact this last assertion of Pliny is, and I need not emphasise the point. But the reports collected by the celebrated Eonian compiler suggest other remarks.

It is difficulc to understand what has caused him to locate the pygmies in Thrace or in Asia Minor. In these countries neither the history of man nor that of animals presents any fact which, twisted by ignorance nor by the love of the marvellous, could have served as a basis for the legends which are here considered. It may be, as M. Maury has pointed out, that one may find the explanation of these mistakes in a general fact. The habitation of beings more or less strange, whose existence was admitted by the ancients, was always placed by them at the borders of the then known world, without their troubling

Q THE PYGMIES.

themselves concerning the precise point or the exact direction. From thence resulted, when one concerned himself ■with this fantastic geography, the vagueness and contradictions so often observed, and of which the history of the pygmies furnishes a striking example.

Unlike the countries to which the preceding reflections are applied, Africa and tropical Asia present certain facts which permit explaining in various ways what the ancients have said of their pygmies, and these facts proceed from the history of animals as well as from that of men.

In his History of Birds, and a propos to that of storks, BufEon has discussed the whole of the facts which I have just recalled in order to find out how much of reality they contain. But he too much forgot Aristotle, and only really concerned himself with the assertions of Pliny. Comparing what this latter reports of the annual expeditions of the pygmies with some facts in the habits related of monkeys, he saw in these last the dwarf men so celebrated among the ancients. " One knows," said he, " that the monkeys, which go in large bands in the greater part of the regions of Africa and India, carry on continual warfare against birds ; they seek to surprise their nests, and without ceasing prepare ambushes for them. The storks, on their arrival, find these enemies, perhaps, assembled in great number to attack this new and rich prey with greater advantage. The storks, quite sure of their own powers, trained among themselves to battles, and naturally quite disposed to war, defend themselves vigorously. But the monkeys, anxious to carry off the eggs and the young birds, return constantly, and in bands, to the combat ; and as by their tricks, their feints, and move^ ments they seem to imitate human actions, they would appear to ignorant people to be a band of little men, . . . Behold the origin and the history of these fables ! " *^

This interpretation of the ancient legend is simple and natural; it must have presented itself to many minds. Supported by the authority of our great naturalist, it has been generally adopted. Perhaps one should consider it still to contain some truth. It may well be that, under the sway of general beliefs, voyagers have really taken some band of monkeys for a tribe of real pygmies.

But has not man himself supplied his share of facts, true at bottom and only distorted, to these legends, which have been ti-ansmitted since the time of Homer? Many men of science have replied affirmatively to this question, and proposed solutions quite diverse. One savant, whom all the world has loved for his character as much as it has esteemed him for his so varied and exact knowledge — Roulin — adopted upon this point the opinions of Olaus Magnus and of Paul Jove.^^ Unfortunately, the notes, traced by him on the margin of a copy of Pliny which formed part of the library of the Institute are evidently of very ancient date. They were written apparently long before the discoveries of which I shall speak farther on. The most precise and important information has come to us only after the death of my colleague. He could not then use them in order to explain the words of the author whom he was commentating. Although we cannot accept to-day the theory at which he arrived, it is desirable that I should refer to it. It is always interesting to know the thoughts of an ingenious and fine mind upon a difficult subject.

For Roulin, at the period when he wrote his reflections, the pygmies of the ancients were our circumpolar population. Although the notes say nothing of it, one could not doubt that the little stature recognised among several of these peoples has been the source of this interpretation. One knows, in fact, that the Lapps have long been regarded as the smallest human race. Certain Eskimo rival them in this respect, and even go further. Hence, to see in them the dwarfs of the ancient legends is but a step. Thfe question of country was no hindrance to the partisans of this theory. Have not the pygmies been placed in Thrace and in Scythia as well as in Asia and Africa? Some peculiarities of customs lend themselves to the identification. The author recalls the fact that certain northern populations inhabit alternately each year the interior and the seacoast just as Pliny said the pygmies did. It is also to eat the eggs of aquatic birds, of which they destroy an immense number, that these tribes go to the coast. That which the Latin author reports of the huts of the pygmies is explained, moreover, without much difficulty. Eoulin wrote : " Perhaps in the original tradition these huts, in place of being made of mud and of the shells of eggs, were made in the form of hemispheres (half eggshells) and of mud. Those of the Eskimos have this form, but are made of snow."

Finally, the tradition reports that the storks met their enemies in their annual journeys from north to south. Eoulin replies : " In placing the migration of the storks between these same two points, but making them proceed from the marshes of upper Egypt to Scythia — i. e., towards the frigid zone — it is there that the pygmies are found."

To discuss the ingenious corrections proposed by Eoulin is to-day useless. I will limit myself to observing that he has neglected another passage, of great importance — in that it permits determining with precision the point where the author places the Asiatic pygmies. One reads, in fact, the following phrase in his description of India : " Immediately beyond the nation of the Prusians, in whose mountains they say are the pygmies, one finds the Indus." The mountains here considered were then west of the river ; and as the pygmies betook themselves each year to the seacoast, from which they could not, therefore, be very far distant, one sees that we are here dealing with

THE PYGMIES OF THE ANCIENTS. 9

the most southern part of the mountainous district of Beloochistan.

This region is situated at about 35° or 26° north latitude and 63° or 64° east longitude. Travellers do not mention in this district any population of particularly small stature, but I hare elsewhere shown that the most ancient inhabitants of this country, the Brahouis, who speak a Dravidian language, belong to a great group of crossed races, of which the Negritos form the black element.'^" At the time of Pliny they were certainly less altered than to-day by the mixture of bloods, and must have resembled those Dravidians, properly called, whose height descends below 1"?50 and seldom rises to l^eS or IfeS. Perhaps even at the epoch when the facts were collected which were transmitted by the Eoman writer there existed yet in the province of Loos, just where Pliny places his pygmies, some tribe of Negritos similar to that of which we are about to speak. However that may be, the Brahouis present a peculiarity of customs which recalls exactly what Pliny atti'ibutes to the pygmies. They change their dwelling twice a year — at the beginning of summer and winter. These annual migrations are compelled by the necessity of procuring good pastures for their animals, which consist, as those of the pygmies did, of sheep and goats.

Everything concurs, then, to make us see in the Brahouis the descendants of the little men of whom Pliny spoke. But long before him Ctesias had spoken of Asiatic pygmies, and had referred their habitation much farther to the east. In. the midst of fables, which he accepts without reserve, he has given some important and true facts. Behold how he expresses himself : " There are in the midst of India black men whom one calls pygmies. They speak the same language as the Indians, and are very small. The largest are only two cubits (O'PQSi or 0?900, according to the value we give to this measure).

The greater part are only one cubit and a half high. Their hair is very long; it descends as far as to their knees, and even farther. They have a much heavier beard than all other men. When it has attained its growth they no longer wear any clothing ; their hair and their beard take the place of such. . . . They are flat-nosed and homely. They are skilful in using the bow."^'

Ctesias has no doubt diminished the height of his pygmies into fabulous proportions. Without doubt he was wrong in taking for hair or beard the mantles and other garments of long floating grasses which the women in the neighbourhood of Travancore still wear.'" But what he says of the geographical position, of the colour, and of the use of the bow, does not permit doubt that he had knowledge of the Negritos or of proto-Dravidian tribes preserving in high degree the characters of the primitive type. It is, in fact, in the heart of India, in the Vindhya Mountains, that M. Eousselet has found the Bandra- Loks}'^^' "*' ^^° The name of this tribe literally signifies man monkeys. They are true Negroes of very small stature, who, in the midst of populations more or less crossed, have preserved unmixed the characters of the type, and are one of the evidences left by the black race.

Neither Aristotle nor Pliny mention the black colour and the woolly hair, as characters of the dwarfs of whom they speak on hearsay. Ctesias alone is very precise upon the first point. The memory of these peculiarities is evidently lost in the long journey which the informants, probably very few in number, must have made from the heart of Africa and from the extremity of India to Greece and Eome. This omission is, moreover, less singular than one would at first be tempted to suppose. The ancients attributed the dark colour and the woolly appearance of the hair of the Negro to the action of the sun, whose heat burned the skin and crisped the hair. They have not.

THE PYGMIES OF THE ANCIENTS. H

then, been surprised to find in a hot country, by the side of other black men, such as their Indians and Ethiopians, tribes presenting these two characters. The diminution of the stature must have struck them much more strongly, and their very exaggerations show that it has been so. They have done in an opposite direction that which Pigafetti did with reference to the Patagonians.

Let us return now into Africa.

The contemporary of Pliny, Pomponius Mela, has also spoken of the pygmies. The very short passage which he has devoted to them has yet a decided interest. He places beyond the Arabic Gulf, at the head of a little bay of the Eed Sea, the Panchiens, surnamed OpJdophages, because they ate snakes. " In the interior of the land," he says, " one saw formerly pygmies, a race of men of very small stature, which has died out in the wars which it has sustained against the storks in order to preserve its fruits."

The translator of Pomponius Mela regards the little bend of the Eed Sea which is mentioned here as our Gulf of Aden. But it would seem to me strange that the Latin geographer should have employed this expression in order to designate the great expanse of sea which extends itself along the African coast from Cape Guardafui to the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. The Bay of Moscha, which almost buries itself in the lands southwest of the strait, seems to me to correspond much better and in every respect to the description of Pomponius. But this bay, situated at about the thirteenth degree of north latitude, lies consequently under the same parallel as the commencement of the grassy region of the Nile, but about four degrees farther north than the labyrinth, whence the river seems to proceed. Pomponious, moreover, does not speak of the Nile ; no more does he say anything regarding the Abyssinian plateau interposed between it and the sea.

He seems, then, to place his pygmies entirely to the east of this portion of the continent.

Here again modern discoveries appear to support the ■wisdom of the ancients. The tradition of the eastern African pygmies has never been lost among the Arabs. Always the geographers of that nation have placed their River of the Pygmies much farther to the south. It is in this region, a little to the north of the equator and about the thirty-second degree of east longitude, that the E. P. Leon des Avanchers has found the Wa-Berrihimos or Cincalles, whose stature is about I'fSO.* The facts collected by M. d'Abbadie place the Mallas or Maze-Malleas, with a stature of l'?50 at about the sixth degree of north latitude.^ Everything indicates that there exist to the south of the country of the Gallas various Negro tribes of very little stature. It seems to me difficult not to refer them to the pygmies of Pomponius Mela, only they have retreated more to the south. Probably this change had already been effected when the Eoman geographer wrote, and one understands how he might have regarded this race as having disappeared.

In sketching the history of these little men so celebrated in antiquity I have been obliged to insist first upon the traditions relative to those whose name Homer has immortalised, and to the populations located either in Asia or in the northeast regions of Africa, which one has connected with the pygmies of the Nile. But, about a century before Aristotle, Herodotus had also spoken of a kind of pygmies, without, however, using that name. Some one must have repeated to him the story of certain pilgrims of Cyrene, who had received their information from Etearchus, King of the Ammoniens. He had told them that a number of young Nasamones had conceived the idea of exploring the deserts of Libya. Pive of them, selected by lot, started out supplied with food and water. " They first traversed the inhabited country, then the wild region, and finally entered the desert, where they made their journey, directing their way towards the setting sun. After having marched several days in the deep sands, they perceived some trees which rose in the midst of a field. They approached them and ate some fruits which the trees bore. Scarcely had they commenced to taste them when they were surprised by a great number of men very much below the average height, who seized them and dragged them away with them. They spoke a language unknown to the Nasamones, and did not understand theirs. These men conducted the five young men across a country intersected by great marshes into a town whose inhabitants were black. Before this town flowed a considerable stream, whose course was from the west to the east, and there were crocodiles in it."

In spite of the brevity of this story it agrees too well with modern discoveries for one to doubt the reality of the facts which it relates. The geographical districts indicated by the Nasamones are identifiable still, and the river whose existence they made known is our Djoliba, or Niger, which was alternately believed to be the Nile itself, or a tributary from Lake Tchad, before Mungo Park, Caille, Olapperton, the Lander brotliers, and others made us know its true course. One knows to-day that this river, whose source was discovered very recently by two young Frenchmen, takes its rise in one of the caflons of the mountainous plateau which, in the interior of the country, follows almost parallel the north coast of the Gulf of Guinea. Although Zweifeld and Moustier were not able, on account of having no instruments, to determine exactly the location of Mount Tembi, whence the source of the Niger proceeds, and although they have been able to contemplate it only from a distance on account of local superstitions, oue may see, by the map which the Geographical Society of Marseilles has published, that this mountain is very close to 8° 35' north latitude and 13° 45' west longitude. The river, then a small streamlet, flows at first from south to north ; but soon its general direction is due northeast. It remains the same as far as to Timbuctoo, a little beyond 18° (18° 3' 45" north latitude and 40° 5' 10" west longitude). There the river bends abruptly and flows almost directly from west to east as far as Bourroum,* over a distance of more than three degrees of longitude, before turning towards the south-southeast to reach the Gulf of Guinea. It is, then, between the first and fourth degree of west longitude that the Nasamones reached the Niger. One can no longer locate the town inhabited by Negroes whither the bold travellers were conducted. We are only sure that it could not possibly be the celebrated Timbuctoo, the founding of which, according to the annalist of those countries, Ahmed Baba, would date only from the fifth century of the Hegira, or about 1100 A. d.

Herodotus informs us that the young Nasamones found crocodiles in the stream visited by them. This again is a perfectly correct statement, more so than one at first might think. A priori, one would reasonably suppose that the great reptiles inhabiting two rivers so widely separated as the Nile and the Niger would be of different species. It is not so. The question has been specially studied as the result of discussions which arose between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire— discussions to which the first of these great naturalists attached so much importance as to consecrate to it in his Regne animal a note of exceptional length. Cuvier admitted the specific identity of all the crocodiles of the great rivers of Africa. Geoffrey denied this identity, and admitted the existence

* Situated at the east bend of the River Niger (Barth).

THE PYGMIES OF THE ANCIENTS. 15

in the Nile aloue of four distinct species. Dameril and Bibrop restudied the subject with materials which were lacking to the two illustrious adversaries, and have proved that Cuvier was right.** The crocodile of the Niger, as that of Senegal, is the same as the crocodile of the Nile. -

Finally, the Nasamones declared that they were led into a town all of whoso inhabitants were blacks. Here also they have told the truth. Although Timbuctoo was founded by the Tuaregs ; although these, the Berbers and the Peuls, dispute in our days the control of this city and the countries which are bathed by the middle portion of the Niger, it is known that these people are foreigners and have arrived there at an epoch relatively recent. According to Barth, in the tenth century the country of the Negroes extended still, on an average, to the twentieth degree of latitude. At this epoch all the region of which we speak belonged to the black race, and more truly was it so at the time of Herodotus.

Prom this it results that the black men seen by the Nasamones were true Negroes, and certainly had woolly hair. This point is nevertheless neglected in the recital of the travellers. This fact justifies, as one sees, the interpretation which I have given above of the omission of this peculiarity in regard to the little Asiatic blacks.

Thus, as regards the soil, waters, animals, and men, everything up to this point in the report gathered by the Greek historian is true. What reason have we to doubt that which he reports of the little human race met with by the Nasamones ? None. And even if observation had not confirmed these reports, one should accept them. But modern discoveries have also, upon this point, confirmed the facts transmitted by Herodotus, at least in so far as relates to the existence of this race.

It is otherwise in regard to its geographical position. This position connects itself, as we have seen, with that of a well-determiiied portion of the river. But the most northern station of the western pygmies reported up to the present time is located in the heart of Senegambia, in the Tenda-Maid, near the tenth degree of north latitude and the fourteenth degree of west longitude, that is to say, about eight degrees farther west than the point where the Nasamones were captured by the little men."°