The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
David W. Anthony
Published by Princeton University Press
Anthony, W..
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
For additional information about this book
Access provided by Harvard University (15 Oct 2018 21:59 GMT)
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/36661
83
Chapter Five
Language and Place
The Location of the Proto-Indo-European Homeland
The Indo-European homeland is like the Lost Dutchman’s Mine, a legend
of the American West, discovered almost everywhere but confirmed nowhere.
Anyone who claims to know its real location is thought to be just a
little odd—or worse. Indo-European homelands have been identified in
India, Pakistan, the Himalayas, the Altai Mountains, Kazakhstan, Russia,
Ukraine, the Balkans, Turkey, Armenia, the North Caucasus, Syria/Lebanon,
Germany, Scandinavia, the North Pole, and (of course) Atlantis. Some
homelands seem to have been advanced just to provide a historical precedent
for nationalist or racist claims to privileges and territory. Others are enthusiastically
zany. The debate, alternately dryly academic, comically absurd,
and brutally political, has continued for almost two hundred years.1
This chapter lays out the linguistic evidence for the location of the
Proto-Indo-European homeland. The evidence will take us down a wellworn
path to a familiar destination: the grasslands north of the Black and
Caspian Seas in what is today Ukraine and southern Russia, also known
as the Pontic-Caspian steppes (figure 5.1). Certain scholars, notably Marija
Gimbutas and Jim Mallory, have argued persuasively for this homeland
for the last thirty years, each using criteria that differ in some significant
details but reaching the same end point for many of the same reasons.2
Recent discoveries have strengthened the Pontic-Caspian hypothesis so
significantly, in my opinion, that we can reasonably go forward on the assumption
that this was the homeland.
Problems with the Concept of “the Homeland”
At the start I should acknowledge some fundamental problems. Many of my
colleagues believe that it is impossible to identify any homeland for ProtoIndo-European,
and the following are their three most serious concerns.
B L A C K S E A
CASPIAN
SEA
SEA
OF
AZOV
Danube
CARPATHIAN
M
ts.Prut
Dniester
S.Bug
Dnieper
Donets
Don
Volga
UralR.
Samara
Kama
Volga
URALMts.
Tobol
Ui
Emba
Kura
Araxes
CAUCASUS Mts.
Halys 500 km
Steppe
boundary PIE homeland
L E G E N D
TRIPOLY
E
MAIKOP
FORAGERS
FO
RAG
ERS
PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN
HOM
ELAND
Figure 5.1 The Proto-Indo-European homeland between about 3500–3000 BCE.
Problem #1. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is merely a linguistic
hypothesis, and hypotheses do not have homelands.
This criticism concerns the “reality” of reconstructed Proto-IndoEuropean,
a subject on which linguists disagree. We should not imagine,
some remind us, that reconstructed Proto-Indo-European was ever actually
84 Chapter 5
Language and Place 85
spoken anywhere. R.M.W. Dixon commented that if we cannot have “absolute
certainty” about the grammatical type of a reconstructed language, it
throws doubt over “every detail of the putative reconstruction.”3
But this is
an extreme demand. The only field in which we can find absolute certainty
is religion. In all other activities we must be content with the best (meaning
both the simplest and the most data-inclusive) interpretation we can advance,
given the data as they now stand. After we accept that this is true in
all secular inquiries, the question of whether Proto-Indo-European can be
thought of as “real” boils down to three sharper criticisms:
a. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is fragmentary (most of the
language it represents never will be known).
b. The part that is reconstructed is homogenized, stripped of many of
the peculiar sounds of its individual dialects, by the comparative
method (although in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European some
evidence of dialect survives).
c. Proto-Indo-European is not a snapshot of a moment in time but
rather is “timeless”: it averages together centuries or even millennia of
development. In that sense, it is an accurate picture of no single era
in language history.
These seem to be serious criticisms. But if their effect is to make ProtoIndo-European
a mere fantasy, then the English language as presented
in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a fantasy, too. My dictionary contains
the English word ombre (a card game popular in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries) as well as hard disk (a phrase that first appeared
in the 1978 edition). So its vocabulary averages together at least three
hundred years of the language. And its phonology, the “proper” pronuciation
it describes, is quite restricted. Only one pronunciation is given for
hard disk, and it is not the Bostonian hard [haahd]. The English of
Merriam-Webster has never been spoken in its entirety by any one person.
Nevertheless we all find it useful as a guide to real spoken English.
Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is similar, a dictionary version of a
language. It is not, in itself, a real language, but it certainly refers to one.
And we should remember that Sumerian cuneiform documents and
Egyptian hieroglyphs present exactly the same problems as reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European: the written scripts do not clearly indicate every
sound, so their phonology is uncertain; they contain only royal or priestly
dialects; and they might preserve archaic linguistic forms, like Church
Latin. They are not, in themselves, real languages; they only refer to real
languages. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is not so different from
cuneiform Sumerian.
If Proto-Indo-European is like a dictionary, then it cannot be “timeless.”
A dictionary is easily dated by its most recent entries. A dictionary
containing the term hard disk is dated after 1978 in just the way that the
wagon terminology in Proto-Indo-European dates it to a time after about
4000–3500 BCE. It is more dangerous to use negative information as a
dating tool, since many words that really existed in Proto-Indo-European
will never be reconstructed, but it is at least interesting that Proto-IndoEuropean
does not contain roots for items like spoke, iron, cotton, chariot,
glass, or coffee—things that were invented after the evolution and dispersal
of the daughter languages, or, in the metaphor we are using, after the
dictionary was printed.
Of course, the dictionary of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is much
more tattered than my copy of Merriam-Webster’s. Many pages have been
torn out, and those that survive are obscured by the passage of time. The
problem of the missing pages bothers some linguists the most. A reconstructed
proto-language can seem a disappointing skeleton with a lot of
bones missing and the placement of others debated between experts. The
complete language the skeleton once supported certainly is a theoretical
construct. So is the flesh-and-blood image of any dinosaur. Nevertheless,
like the paleontologist, I am happy to have even a fragmentary skeleton. I
think of Proto-Indo-European as a partial grammar and a partial set of
pronunciation rules attached to the abundant fragments of a very ancient
dictionary. To some linguists, that might not add up to a “real” language.
But to an archaeologist it is more valuable than a roomful of potsherds.
Problem #2. The entire concept of “reconstructed Proto-Indo-European” is
a fantasy: the similarities between the Indo-European languages could just
as well have come about by gradual convergence over thousands of years
between languages that had very different origins.
This is a more radical criticism then the first one. It proposes that the
comparative method is a rigged game that automatically produces a protolanguage
as its outcome. The comparative method is said to ignore the
linguistic changes that result from inter-language borrowing and convergence.
Gradual convergence between originally diverse tongues, these
scholars claim, might have produced the similarities between the IndoEuropean
languages.4
If this were true or even probable there would
indeed be no reason to pursue a single parent of the Indo-European languages.
But the Russian linguist who inspired this line of questioning,
Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy, worked in the 1930s before linguists really had the
tools to investigate his startling suggestion.
86 Chapter 5
Language and Place 87
Since then, quite a few linguists have taken up the problem of convergence
between languages. They have greatly increased our understanding
of how convergence happens and what its linguistic effects are. Although
they disagree strongly with one another on some subjects, all recent studies
of convergence accept that the Indo-European languages owe their
essential similarities to descent from a common ancestral language, and
not to convergence.5
Of course, some convergence has occurred between
neighboring Indo-European languages—it is not a question of all or
nothing—but specialists agree that the basic structures that define the
Indo-European language family can only be explained by common descent
from a mother tongue.
There are three reasons for this unanimity. First, the Indo-European
languages are the most thoroughly studied languages in the world—simply
put, we know a lot about them. Second, linguists know of no language
where bundled similarities of the kinds seen among the Indo-European
languages have come about through borrowing or convergence between
languages that were originally distinct. And, finally, the features known
to typify creole languages—languages that are the product of convergence
between two or more originally distinct languages—are not seen among
the Indo-European languages. Creole languages are characterized by
greatly reduced noun and pronoun inflections (no case or even single/plural
markings); the use of pre-verbal particles to replace verb tenses (“we bin
get” for “we got”); the general absence of tense, gender, and person inflections
in verbs; a severely reduced set of prepositions; and the use of repeated
forms to intensify adverbs and adjectives. In each of these features
Proto-Indo-European was the opposite of a typical creole. It is not possible
to classify Proto-Indo-European as a creole by any of the standards normally
applied to creole languages.6
Nor do the Indo-European daughter languages display the telltale signs
of creoles. This means that the Indo-European vocabularies and grammars
replaced competing languages rather than creolizing with them. Of course,
some back-and-forth borrowing occurred—it always does in cases of language
contact—but superficial borrowing and creolization are very different
things. Convergence simply cannot explain the similarities between the
Indo-European languages. If we discard the mother tongue, we are left
with no explanation for the regular correspondences in sound, morphology,
and meaning that define the Indo-European language family.
Problem #3. Even if there was a homeland where Proto-Indo-European
was spoken, you cannot use the reconstructed vocabulary to find it because
the reconstructed vocabulary is full of anachronisms that never existed in
Proto-Indo-European.
This criticism, like the last one, reflects concerns about recent interlanguage
borrowing, focused here on just the vocabulary. Of course, many
borrowed words are known to have spread through the Indo-European
daughter languages long after the period of the proto-language—recent
examples are coffee (borrowed from Arabic through Turkish) and tobacco
(from Carib). The words for these items sound alike and have the same
meanings in the different Indo-European languages, but few linguists
would mistake them for ancient inherited words. Their phonetics are non–
Indo-European, and their forms in the daughter branches do not represent
what would be expected from inherited roots.7
Terms like coffee are not
a significant source of contamination.
Historical linguists do not ignore borrowing between languages. An
understanding of borrowing is essential. For example, subtle inconsistencies
embedded within German, Greek, Celtic, and other languages, including
such fleeting sounds as the word-initial [kn-] (knob) can be
identified as phonetically uncharacteristic of Indo-European. These fragments
from extinct non–Indo-European languages are preserved only be-
causetheywereborrowed.Theycanhelpuscreatemapsofpre–Indo-European
place-names, like the places ending with [-ssos] or [-nthos] (Corinthos,
Knossos, Parnassos), borrowed into Greek and thought to show the geographic
distribution of the pre-Greek language(s) of the Aegean and western
Anatolia. Borrowed non–Indo-European sounds also were used to
reconstruct some aspects of the long-extinct non–Indo-European languages
of northern and eastern Europe. All that is left of these tongues is
an occasional word or sound in the Indo-European languages that replaced
them. Yet we can still identify their fragments in words borrowed thousands
of years ago.8
Another regular use of borrowing is the study of “areal” features like
Sprachbunds. A Sprachbund is a region where several different languages
are spoken interchangeably in different situations, leading to their extensive
borrowing of features. The most famous Sprachbund is in southeastern
Europe, where Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat, and Greek share many
features, with Greek as the dominant element, probably because of its association
with the Greek Orthodox Church. Finally, borrowing is an everpresent
factor in any study of “genetic” relatedness. Whenever a linguist
tries to decide whether cognate terms in two daughter languages are
88 Chapter 5
Language and Place 89
inherited from a common source, one alternative that must be excluded is
that one language borrowed the term from the other. Many of the methods
of comparative linguistics depend on the accurate identification of borrowed
words, sounds, and morphologies.
When a root of similar sound and similar meaning shows up in widely
separated Indo-European languages (including an ancient language), and
phonological comparison of its forms yields a single ancestral root, that
root term can be assigned with some confidence to the Proto-IndoEuropean
vocabulary. No single reconstructed root should be used as the
basis for an elaborate theory about Proto-Indo-European culture, but we
do not need to work with single roots; we have clusters of terms with related
meanings. At least fifteen hundred unique Proto-Indo-European
roots have been reconstructed, and many of these unique roots appear in
multiple reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words, so the total count of
reconstructed Proto-Indo-European terms is much greater than fifteen
hundred. Borrowing is a specific problem that affects specific reconstructed
roots, but it does not cancel the usefulness of a reconstructed vocabulary
containing thousands of terms.
The Proto-Indo-European homeland is not a racist myth or a purely
theoretical fantasy. A real language lies behind reconstructed Proto-IndoEuropean,
just as a real language lies behind any dictionary. And that
language is a guide to the thoughts, concerns, and material culture of real
people who lived in a definite region between about 4500 and 2500 bce.
But where was that region?
Finding the Homeland: Ecology and Environment
Regardless of where they ended up, most investigators of the IndoEuropean
problem all started out the same way. The first step is to identify
roots in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary referring
to animal and plant species or technologies that existed only in certain
places at particular times. The vocabulary itself should point to a homeland,
at least within broad limits. For example, imagine that you were
asked to identify the home of a group of people based only on the knowledge
that a linguist had recorded these words in their normal daily
speech:
armadillo sagebrush cactus
stampede steer heifer
calf branding-iron chuck-wagon
stockyard rail-head six-gun
saddle lasso horse
You could identify them fairly confidently as residents of the American
southwest, probably during the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries
(six-gun and the absence of words for trucks, cars, and highways are
the best chronological indicators). They probably were cowboys—or pretending
to be. Looking closer, the combination of armadillo, sagebrush,
and cactus would place them in west Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.
Linguists have long tried to find animal or plant names in the reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European vocabulary referring to species that lived
in just one part of the world. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European
term for salmon, *lók*s, was once famous as definite proof that the “Aryan”
homeland lay in northern Europe. But animal and tree names seem to
narrow and broaden in meaning easily. They are even reused and recycled
when people move to a new environment, as English colonists used robin
for a bird in the Americas that was a different species from the robin of
England. The most specific meaning most linguists would now feel comfortable
ascribing to the reconstructed term *lók*s- is “trout-like fish.” There
are fish like that in the rivers across much of northern Eurasia, including
the rivers flowing into the Black and Caspian Seas. The reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European root for beech has a similar history. Because the copper
beech, Fagus silvatica, did not grow east of Poland, the Proto-IndoEuropean
root *bháģo- was once used to support a northern or western
European homeland. But in some Indo-European languages the same
root refers to other tree species (oak or elder), and in any case the common
beech (Fagus orientalis) grows also in the Caucasus, so its original meaning
is unclear. Most linguists at least agree that the fauna and flora designated
by the reconstructed vocabulary are temperate-zone types (birch,
otter, beaver, lynx, bear, horse), not Mediterranean (no cypress, olive, or laurel)
and not tropical (no monkey, elephant, palm, or papyrus). The roots for
horse and bee are most helpful.
Bee and honey are very strong reconstructions based on cognates in
most Indo-European languages. A derivative of the term for honey,
*medhu-, was also used for an intoxicating drink, mead, that probably
played a prominent role in Proto-Indo-European rituals. Honeybees
were not native east of the Ural Mountains, in Siberia, because the hardwood
trees (lime and oak, particularly) that wild honeybees prefer as
Language and Place 91
nesting sites were rare or absent east of the Urals. If bees and honey did
not exist in Siberia, the homeland could not have been there. That removes
all of Siberia and much of northeastern Eurasia from contention,
including the Central Asian steppes of Kazakhstan. The horse, *ek*wo-,
is solidly reconstructed and seems also to have been a potent symbol of
divine power for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Although horses
lived in small, isolated pockets throughout prehistoric Europe, the Caucasus,
and Anatolia between 4500 and 2500 BCE, they were rare or
absent in the Near East, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent. They were
numerous and economically important only in the Eurasian steppes. The
term for horse removes the Near East, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent
from serious contention, and encourages us to look closely at the Eurasian
steppes. This leaves temperate Europe, including the steppes west
of the Urals, and the temperate parts of Anatolia and the Caucasus
Mountains.9
Finding the Homeland: The Economic and Social Setting
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were farmers and stockbreeders:
we can reconstruct words for bull, cow, ox, ram, ewe, lamb, pig, and piglet.
They had many terms for milk and dairy foods, including sour milk, whey,
and curds. When they led their cattle and sheep out to the field they
walked with a faithful dog. They knew how to shear wool, which they used
to weave textiles (probably on a horizontal band loom). They tilled the
earth (or they knew people who did) with a scratch-plow, or ard, which
was pulled by oxen wearing a yoke. There are terms for grain and chaff, and
perhaps for furrow. They turned their grain into flour by grinding it with
a hand pestle, and cooked their food in clay pots (the root is actually for
cauldron, but that word in English has been narrowed to refer to a metal
cooking vessel). They divided their possessions into two categories: movables
and immovables; and the root for movable wealth (*peku-, the ancestor
of such English words as pecuniary) became the term for herds in
general.10
Finally, they were not averse to increasing their herds at their
neighbors’ expense, as we can reconstruct verbs that meant “to drive cattle,”
used in Celtic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian with the sense of cattle raiding
or “rustling.”
What was social life like? The speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived
in a world of tribal politics and social groups united through kinship and
marriage. They lived in households (*dómha
), containing one or more
families (*génh1
es-) organized into clans (*weik -), which were led by clan
leaders, or chiefs (*weik-potis). They had no word for city. Households appear
to have been male-centered. Judging from the reconstructed kin
terms, the important named kin were predominantly on the father’s side,
which suggests patrilocal marriages (brides moved into the husband’s
household). A group identity above the level of the clan was probably
tribe (*h4
erós), a root that developed into Aryan in the Indo-Iranian
branch.11
The most famous definition of the basic divisions in Proto-IndoEuropean
society was the tripartite scheme of Georges Dumézil, who
suggested that there was a fundamental three-part division between the
ritual specialist or priest, the warrior, and the ordinary herder/cultivator.
Colors might have been associated with these three roles: white for
the priest, red for the warrior, and black or blue for the herder/cultivator;
and each role might have been assigned a specific type of ritual/legal
death: strangulation for the priest, cutting/stabbing for the warrior,
and drowning for the herder/cultivator. A variety of other legal and
ritual distinctions seem to have applied to these three identities. It is
unlikely that Dumézil’s three divisions were groups with a limited
membership. Probably they were something much less defined, like
three age grades through which all males were expected to pass—perhaps
herders (young), warriors (older), and lineage elders/ritual leaders
(oldest), as among the Maasai in east Africa. The warrior category was
regarded with considerable ambivalence, often represented in myth by a
figure who alternated between a protector and a berserk murderer who
killed his own father (Hercules, Indra, Thor). Poets occupied another
respected social category. Spoken words, whether poems or oaths, were
thought to have tremendous power. The poet’s praise was a mortal’s
only hope for immortality.
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were tribal farmers and stockbreeders.
Societies like this lived across much of Europe, Anatolia, and
the Caucasus Mountains after 6000 BCE. But regions where hunting and
gathering economies persisted until after 2500 BCE are eliminated as
possible homelands, because Proto-Indo-European was a dead language
by 2500 BCE. The northern temperate forests of Europe and Siberia are
excluded by this stockbreeders-before-2500 BCE rule, which cuts away
one more piece of the map. The Kazakh steppes east of the Ural Mountains
are excluded as well. In fact, this rule, combined with the exclusion
of tropical regions and the presence of honeybees, makes a homeland anywhere
east of the Ural Mountains unlikely.
92 Chapter 5
Language and Place 93
Finding the Homeland: Uralic and Caucasian Connections
The possible homeland locations can be narrowed further by identifying
the neighbors. The neighbors of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European can
be identified through words and morphologies borrowed between ProtoIndo-European
and other language families. It is a bit risky to discuss
borrowing between reconstructed proto-languages—first, we have to reconstruct
a phonological system for each of the proto-languages, then
identify roots of similar form and meaning in both proto-languages, and
finally see if the root in one proto-language meets all the expectations of
a root borrowed from the other. If neighboring proto-languages have the
same roots, reconstructed independently, and one root can be explained as
a predictable outcome of borrowing from the other, then we have a strong
case for borrowing. So who borrowed words from, or loaned words into,
Proto-Indo-European? Which language families exhibit evidence of early
contact and interchange with Proto-Indo-European?
Uralic Contacts
By far the strongest linkages can be seen with Uralic. The Uralic languages
are spoken today in northern Europe and Siberia, with one southern offshoot,
Magyar, in Hungary, which was conquered by Magyar-speaking
invaders in the tenth century. Uralic, like Indo-European, is a broad language
family; its daughter languages are spoken across the northern forests
of Eurasia from the Pacific shores of northeastern Siberia (Nganasan,
spoken by tundra reindeer herders) to the Atlantic and Baltic coasts (Finnish,
Estonian, Saami, Karelian, Vepsian, and Votian). Most linguists divide
the family at the root into two super-branches, Finno-Ugric (the
western branch) and Samoyedic (the eastern), although Salminen has argued
that this binary division is based more on tradition than on solid
linguistic evidence. His alternative is a “flat” division of the language family
into nine branches, with Samoyedic just one of the nine.12
The homeland of Proto-Uralic probably was in the forest zone centered
on the southern flanks of the Ural Mountains. Many argue for a homeland
west of the Urals and others argue for the east side, but almost all Uralic
linguists and Ural-region archaeologists would agree that Proto-Uralic
was spoken somewhere in the birch-pine forests between the Oka River
on the west (around modern Gorky) and the Irtysh River on the east
(around modern Omsk). Today the Uralic languages spoken in this core
region include, from west to east, Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt, Komi, and
Mansi, of which two (Udmurt and Komi) are stems on the same branch
(Permian). Some linguists have proposed homelands located farther east
(the Yenisei River) or farther west (the Baltic), but the evidence for these
extremes has not convinced many.13
The reconstructed Proto-Uralic vocabulary suggests that its speakers
lived far from the sea in a forest environment. They were foragers who
hunted and fished but possessed no domesticated plants or animals except
the dog. This correlates well with the archaeological evidence. In the region
between the Oka and the Urals, the Lyalovo culture was a center of cultural
influences and interchanges among forest-zone forager cultures, with
inter-cultural connections extending from the Baltic to the eastern slopes
of the Urals during approximately the right period, 4500–3000 BCE.
The Uralic languages show evidence of very early contact with IndoEuropean
languages. How that contact is interpreted is a subject of debate.
There are three basic positions. First, the Indo-Uralic hypothesis
suggests that the morphological linkages between the two families are so
deep (shared pronouns), and the kinds of shared vocabulary so fundamental
(words for water and name), that Proto-Indo-European and ProtoUralic
must have inherited these shared elements from some very ancient
common linguistic parent—perhaps we might call it a “grandmothertongue.”
The second position, the early loan hypothesis, argues that the
forms of the shared proto-roots for terms like name and water, as reconstructed
in the vocabularies of both Proto-Uralic and Proto-IndoEuropean,
are much too similar to reflect such an ancient inheritance.
Inherited roots should have undergone sound shifts in each developing
family over a long period, but these roots are so similar that they can only
be explained as loans from one proto-language into the other—and, in all
cases, the loans went from Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Uralic.14
The
third position, the late loan hypothesis, is the one perhaps encountered
most frequently in the general literature. It claims that there is little or no
convincing evidence for borrowings even as old as the respective protolanguages;
instead, the oldest well-documented loans should be assigned
to contacts between Indo-Iranian and late Proto-Uralic, long after the
Proto-Indo-European period. Contacts with Indo-Iranian could not be
used to locate the Proto-Indo-European homeland.
At a conference dedicated to these subjects held at the University of Helsinki
in 1999, not one linguist argued for a strong version of the late-loan
hypothesis. Recent research on the earliest loans has reinforced the case for
94 Chapter 5
Language and Place 95
an early period of contact at least as early as the level of the proto-languages.
This is well reflected in vocabulary loans. Koivulehto discussed at least
thirteen words that are probable loans from Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
into Proto-Uralic (P-U):
1. to give or to sell; P-U *mexe from PIE *h2
mey-gw
- ‘to change’, ‘ex-
change’
2. to bring, lead, or draw; P-U *wetä- from PIE *wedh
-e/o- ‘to lead’,
‘to marry’, ‘to wed’
3. to wash; P-U *mośke- from PIE *mozg-eye/o- ‘to wash’, ‘to sub-
merge’
4. to fear; P-U *pele- from PIE *pelh1
- ‘to shake’, ‘cause to tremble’
5. to plait, to spin; P-U *puna- from PIE *pn.H-e/o- ‘to plait’, ‘to
spin’
6. to walk, wander, go; P-U *kulke- from PIE *kw
elH-e/o- ‘it/he/she
walks around’, ‘wanders’
7. to drill, to bore; P-U *pura- from PIE *bhr.H- ‘to bore’, ‘to drill’
8. shall, must, to have to; P-U *kelke- from PIE *skelH- ‘to be guilty’,
‘shall’, ‘must’
9. long thin pole; P-U *śalka- from PIE *gh
algh
o- ‘well-pole’, ‘gallows’,
‘long pole’
10. merchandise, price; P-U *wosa from PIE *wosā ‘merchandise’, ‘to
buy’
11. water; P-U *wete from PIE *wed-er/en, ‘water’, ‘river’
12. sinew; P-U *sōne from PIE *sneH(u)- ‘sinew’
13. name; P-U *nime- from PIE *h3
neh3
mn- ‘name’
Another thirty-six words were borrowed from differentiated IndoEuropean
daughter tongues into early forms of Uralic prior to the emergence
of differentiated Indic and Iranian—before 1700–1500 BCE at
the latest. These later words included such terms as bread, dough, beer, to
winnow, and piglet, which might have been borrowed when the speakers
of Uralic languages began to adopt agriculture from neighboring IndoEuropean–speaking
farmers and herders. But the loans between the
proto-languages are the important ones bearing on the location of the
Proto-Indo-European homeland. And that they are so similar in form
does suggest that they were loans rather than inheritances from some
very ancient common ancestor.
This does not mean that there is no evidence for an older level of shared
ancestry. Inherited similarities, reflected in shared pronoun forms and
some noun endings, might have been retained from such a common
ancestor. The pronoun and inflection forms shared by Indo-European and
Uralic are the following:
Proto-Uralic Proto-Indo-European
*te-nä (thou) *ti (?)
*te (you) *ti (clitic dative)
*me-nä (I ) *mi
*tä-/to- (this/that) *te-/to*ke-,
ku- (who, what) *kw
e/o*-m
(accusative sing.) *-m
*-n (genitive plural) *-om
These parallels suggest that Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic
shared two kinds of linkages.15
One kind, revealed in pronouns, noun
endings, and shared basic vocabulary, could be ancestral: the two protolanguages
shared some quite ancient common ancestor, perhaps a broadly
related set of intergrading dialects spoken by hunters roaming between
the Carpathians and the Urals at the end of the last Ice Age. The relationship
is so remote, however, that it can barely be detected. Johanna Nichols
has called this kind of very deep, apparently genetic grouping a “quasi-
stock.”16
Joseph Greenberg saw Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic as
particularly close cousins within a broader set of such language stocks that
he called “Eurasiatic.”
The other link between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic seems
cultural: some Proto-Indo-European words were borrowed by the speakers
of Proto-Uralic. Although they seem odd words to borrow, the terms to
wash, price, and to give or to sell might have been borrowed through a trade
jargon used between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European speakers.
These two kinds of linguistic relationship—a possible common ancestral
origin and inter-language borrowings—suggest that the Proto-IndoEuropean
homeland was situated near the homeland of Proto-Uralic, in
the vicinty of the southern Ural Mountains. We also know that the speakers
of Proto-Indo-European were farmers and herders whose language
had disappeared by 2500 BCE. The people living east of the Urals did not
adopt domesticated animals until after 2500 BC. Proto-Indo-European
96 Chapter 5
Language and Place 97
must therefore have been spoken somewhere to the south and west of the
Urals, the only region close to the Urals where farming and herding was
regularly practiced before 2500 BCE.
Caucasian Contacts and the Anatolian Homeland
Proto-Indo-European also had contact with the languages of the Caucasus
Mountains, primarily those now classified as South Caucasian or
Kartvelian, the family that produced modern Georgian. These connections
have suggested to some that the Proto-Indo-European homeland
should be placed in the Caucasus near Armenia or perhaps in nearby eastern
Anatolia. The links between Proto-Indo-European and Kartvelian are
said to appear in both phonetics and vocabulary, although the phonetic
link is controversial. It depends on a brilliant but still problematic revision
of the phonology of Proto-Indo-European proposed by the linguists
T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov, known as the glottalic theory.17
The glottalic
theory made Proto-Indo-European phonology sound somewhat similar
to that of Kartvelian, and even to the Semitic languages (Assyrian,
Hebrew, Arabic) of the ancient Near East. This opened the possibility that
Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Kartvelian, and Proto-Semitic might have
evolved in a region where they shared certain areal phonological features.
But by itself the glottalic phonology cannot prove a homeland in the Caucasus,
even if it is accepted. And the glottalic phonology still has failed to
convince many Indo-European linguists.18
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have also suggested that Proto-Indo-European
contained terms for panther, lion, and elephant, and for southern tree species.
These animals and trees could be used to exclude a northern homeland.
They also compiled an impressive list of loan words which they said
were borrowed from Proto-Kartvelian and the Semitic languages into
Proto-Indo-European. These relationships suggested to them that ProtoIndo-European
had evolved in a place where it was in close contact with
both the Semitic languages and the languages of the Southern Caucasus.
They suggested Armenia as the most probable Indo-European homeland.
Several archaeologists, prominently Colin Renfrew and Robert Drews,
have followed their general lead, borrowing some of their linguistic arguments
but placing the Indo-European homeland a little farther west, in
central or western Anatolia.
But the evidence for a Caucasian or Anatolian homeland is weak. Many
of the terms suggested as loans from Semitic into Proto-Indo-European
have been rejected by other linguists. The few Semitic-to-Proto-IndoEuropean
loan words that are widely accepted, words for items like silver
and bull, might be words that were carried along trade and migration
routes far from the Semites’ Near Eastern homeland. Johanna Nichols has
shown from the phonology of the loans that the Proto-Indo-European/
Proto-Kartvelian/Proto-Semitic contacts were indirect—all the loan
words passed through unknown intermediaries between the known three.
One intermediary is required by chronology, as Proto-Kartvelian is generally
thought to have existed after Proto-Indo-European and Proto-
Semitic.19
The Semitic and Caucasian vocabulary that was borrowed into ProtoIndo-European
through Kartvelian therefore contains roots that belonged
to some Pre-Kartvelian or Proto-Kartvelian language in the Caucasus. This
language had relations, through unrecorded intermediaries, with ProtoIndo-European
on one side and Proto-Semitic on the other. That is not a
particularly close lexical relationship. If Proto-Kartvelian was spoken on
the south side of the North Caucasus Mountain range, as seems likely, it
might have been spoken by people associated with the Early Transcaucasian
Culture (also known as the Kura-Araxes culture), dated about 3500–
2200 BCE. They could have had indirect relations with the speakers of
Proto-Indo-European through the Maikop culture of the North Caucasus
region. Many experts agree that Proto-Indo-European shared some features
with a language ancestral to Kartvelian but not necessarily through a
direct face-to-face link. Relations with the speakers of Proto-Uralic were
closer.
So who were the neighbors? Proto-Indo-European exhibits strong links
with Proto-Uralic and weaker links with a language ancestral to ProtoKartvelian.
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived somewhere between
the Caucasus and Ural Mountains but had deeper linguistic
relationships with the people who lived around the Urals.
The Location of the Proto-Indo-European Homeland
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were tribal farmers who cultivated
grain, herded cattle and sheep, collected honey from honeybees, drove
wagons, made wool or felt textiles, plowed fields at least occasionally or
knew people who did, sacrificed sheep, cattle, and horses to a troublesome
array of sky gods, and fully expected the gods to reciprocate the favor.
These traits guide us to a specific kind of material culture—one with wagons,
domesticated sheep and cattle, cultivated grains, and sacrificial de-
98 Chapter 5
Language and Place 99
posits with the bones of sheep, cattle, and horses. We should also look for
a specific kind of ideology. In the reciprocal exchange of gifts and favors
between their patrons, the gods, and human clients, humans offered a
portion of their herds through sacrifice, accompanied by well-crafted
verses of praise; and the gods in return provided protection from disease
and misfortune, and the blessings of power and prosperity. Patron-client
reciprocity of this kind is common among chiefdoms, societies with institutionalized
differences in prestige and power, where some clans or lineages
claim a right of patronage over others, usually on grounds of holiness
or historical priority in a given territory.
Knowing that we are looking for a society with a specific list of material
culture items and institutionalized power distinctions is a great help in locating
the Proto-Indo-European homeland. We can exclude all regions
where hunter-gatherer economies survived up to 2500 BCE. That eliminates
the northern forest zone of Eurasia and the Kazakh steppes east of
the Ural Mountains. The absence of honeybees east of the Urals eliminates
any part of Siberia. The temperate-zone flora and fauna in the reconstructed
vocabulary, and the absence of shared roots for Mediterranean or
tropical flora and fauna, eliminate the tropics, the Mediterranean, and the
Near East. Proto-Indo-European exhibits some very ancient links with the
Uralic languages, overlaid by more recent lexical borrowings into ProtoUralic
from Proto-Indo-European; and it exhibits less clear linkages to
some Pre- or Proto-Kartvelian language of the Caucasus region. All these
requirements would be met by a Proto-Indo-European homeland placed
west of the Ural Mountains, between the Urals and the Caucasus, in the
steppes of eastern Ukraine and Russia. The internal coherence of reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European—the absence of evidence for radical internal
variation in grammar and phonology—indicates that the period of
language history it reflects was less than two thousand years, probably less
than one thousand. The heart of the Proto-Indo-European period probably
fell between 4000 and 3000 BCE, with an early phase that might go back
to 4500 BCE and a late phase that ended by 2500 BCE.
What does archaeology tell us about the steppe region between the Caucasus
and the Urals, north of the Black and Caspian Seas—the PonticCaspian
region—during this period? First, archaeology reveals a set of
cultures that fits all the requirements of the reconstructed vocabulary: they
sacrificed domesticated horses, cattle, and sheep, cultivated grain at least
occasionally, drove wagons, and expressed institutionalized status distinctions
in their funeral rituals. They occupied a part of the world—the
steppes—where the sky is by far the most striking and magnificent part of
maximalPIEperiod
largely isolated
after separation
occasional but
significant borrowing
frequent
significant borrowing
end of
proto-language
Key
Italic Celtic
Germanic 3300
3700
2800
1800
2200
4200
Anatolian
Armenian
Tocharian
Greek
Slavic Baltic
IndicIranian
1000 BCE
2000 BCE
2500
3000 BCE
4000 BCE
4500
5000 BCE
West
Central
East
Steppe Regions
Figure 5.2 A diagram of the sequence and approximate dates of splits in early
Indo-European as proposed in this book, with the maximal window for ProtoIndo-European
indicated by the dashed lines. The dates of splits are determined
by archaeological events described in chapters 11 (Anatolian) through16
(Iranian and Indic).
the landscape, a fitting environment for people who believed that all their
most important deities lived in the sky. Archaeological evidence for migrations
from this region into neighboring regions, both to the west and to the
east, is well established. The sequence and direction of these movements
matches the sequence and direction suggested by Indo-European linguistics
and geography (figure 5.2). The first identifiable migration out of the
Pontic-Caspian steppes was a movement toward the west about 4200–3900
BCE that could represent the detachment of the Pre-Anatolian branch, at
a time before wheeled vehicles were introduced to the steppes (see chapter
100 Chapter 5
Language and Place 101
4). This was followed by a movement toward the east (about 3700–3300
BCE) that could represent the detachment of the Tocharian branch. The
next visible migration out of the steppes flowed toward the west. Its earliest
phase might have separated the Pre-Germanic branch, and its later, more
visible phase detached the Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic dialects. This was followed
by movements to the north and east that probably established the
Baltic-Slavic and Indo-Iranian tongues. The remarkable match between
the archaeologically documented pattern of movements out of the steppes
and that expected from linguistics is fascinating, but it has absorbed, for
too long, most of the attention and debate that is directed at the archaeology
of Indo-European origins. Archaeology also adds substantially to our
cultural and economic understanding of the speakers of Proto-IndoEuropean.
Once the homeland has been located with linguistic evidence,
the archaeology of that region provides a wholly new kind of information,
a new window onto the lives of the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European
and the process by which it became established and began to spread.
Before we step into the archaeology, however, we should pause and
think for a moment about the gap we are stepping across, the void between
linguistics and archaeology, a chasm most Western archaeologists feel
cannot be crossed. Many would say that language and material culture are
completely unrelated, or are related in such changeable and complicated
ways that it is impossible to use material culture to identify language
groups or boundaries. If that is true, then even if we can identify the place
and time of the Indo-European homeland using the reconstructed vocabulary,
the link to archaeology is impossible. We cannot expect any correlation
with material culture. But is such pessimism warranted? Is there no
predictable, regular link between language and material culture?