The Swarmings of Peoples

IT BEGAN IN BABEL (444 pp.)--Herbert Wendt--Houghton Mifflin ($6.50).

Man has never been so busy studying himself--on the couch and in the laboratory, in ancient ruins and suburban rumpus rooms. Sociologists make bestsellers out of the abuses of the present, archaeologists fashion books-of-the-month out of the uses of the past, and German Writer Herbert Wendt, who has popularized natural science and prehistory in three previous books, now turns his hand to ethnology.

The study of people--their origins and swarmings, contacts and convolutions--is a wide net for strange fact and curious legend, educated guess and wild surmise. Author Wendt casts his ethnological net wide without bothering about deep analysis, and the resulting book is better for dipping than dredging.

Ethnologically speaking, it's a wise child indeed who knows his own father. Were the Greeks really the founders of Western civilization? The Greeks themselves looked to Crete, whose earlier Minoan civilization is newly being appreciated with the deciphering of the script called Linear B. As scholars, but few laymen, know, Crete, not Greece, was the land of the myths--of Zeus and the Titans, Prometheus, Hyperion, Orpheus and Hercules. It was on Crete that Daedalus built the labyrinth and Icarus took off for history's first air crash. The vast Palace of Minos, whose foundations were laid around 5000 B.C., grew to a colossal structure whose apartments were equipped with bathrooms and flush toilets

Where did these Cretans come from? Perhaps from Asia. What wiped them out? Perhaps a civil war. And what became of the refugees? Perhaps some of them were the Philistines--those enemies of the Jews whom Christianity condemned as the exponents of hard-nosed materialism.

Stringing these and other speculations on a roughly chronological chain, Author Wendt ranges the world in space and time. He examines the theories of the Diffusionists (who believe that all civilizations derive from a single mother culture, whose ruins have been found in Iraq. Crete, India and Egypt), but he favors the Convergents (who think that the countless cultural similarities in the development of widely separated peoples, such as South America's Incas and Asia's Cambodians, were caused not by physical contact but by the psychological similarity of all men everywhere). He denigrates racial purists' illusions of superiority by citing, among others, the case of the "Rehoboth bastards," in which marriage and inbreeding between 18th century Boers and Hottentots resulted, he says, in a new "race" of people who were more successful, in terms of time and place, than either progenitor strain. They still exist, healthy, hardworking and prolific farmers, in Southwest Africa. Naturally enough, the apartheid-minded South Africans call them "colored."

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