I believe with many others that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is today southern Ukraine and Russia. The case for a steppe homeland is stronger today than in the past partly because of dramatic new archaeological discoveries in the steppes. To understand the significance of an Indo-European homeland in the steppes requires a leap into the complicated and fascinating world of steppe archaeology. Steppe means “wasteland” in the language of the Russian agricultural state. The steppes resembled the prairies of North America—a monotonous sea of grass framed under a huge, dramatic sky. A continuous belt of steppes extends from eastern Europe on the west (the belt ends between Odessa and Bucharest) to the Great Wall of China on the east, an arid corridor running seven thousand kilometers across the center of the Eurasian continent. This enormous grassland was an effective barrier to the transmission of ideas and technologies for thousands of years. Like the North American prairie, it was an unfriendly environment for people traveling on foot. And just as in North America, the key that opened the grasslands was the horse, combined in the Eurasian steppes with domesticated grazing animals—sheep and cattle—to process the grass and turn it into useful products for humans. Eventually people who rode horses and herded cattle and sheep acquired the wheel, and were then able to follow their herds almost anywhere, using heavy wagons to carry their tents and supplies. The isolated prehistoric societies of China and Europe became dimly aware of the possibility of one another’s existence only after the horse was domesticated and the covered wagon invented. Together, these two innovations in transportation made life predictable and productive for the people of the Eurasian steppes. The opening of the steppe—its transformation from a hostile ecological barrier to a corridor of transcontinental communication—forever changed the dynamics of Eurasian historical development, and, this author contends, played an important role in the first expansion of the Indo-European languages.
LINGUISTS AND CHAUVINISTS
The Indo-European problem was formulated in one famous sentence by Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, in 1786. Jones was already widely known before he made his discovery. Fifteen years earlier, in 1771, his Grammar of the Persian Language was the first English guide to the language of the Persian kings, and it earned him, at the age of twenty-five, the reputation as one of the most respected linguists in Europe. His translations of medieval Persian poems inspired Byron, Shelley, and the European Romantic movement. He rose from a respected barrister in Wales to a correspondent, tutor, and friend of some of the leading men of the kingdom. At age thirty-seven he was appointed one of the three justices of the first Supreme Court of Bengal. His arrival in Calcutta, a mythically alien place for an Englishman of his age, was the opening move in the imposition of royal government over a vital yet irresponsible merchant’s colony. Jones was to regulate both the excesses of the English merchants and the rights and duties of the Indians. But although the English merchants at least recognized his legal authority, the Indians obeyed an already functioning and ancient system of Hindu law, which was regularly cited in court by Hindu legal scholars, or pandits (the source of our term pundit). English judges could not determine if the laws the pandits cited really existed. Sanskrit was the ancient language of the Hindu legal texts, like Latin was for English law. If the two legal systems were to be integrated, one of the new Supreme Court justices had to learn Sanskrit. That was Jones.
He went to the ancient Hindu university at Nadiya, bought a vacation cottage, found a respected and willing pandit (Rāmalocana) on the faculty, and immersed himself in Hindu texts. Among these were the Vedas, the ancient religious compositions that lay at the root of Hindu religion. The Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedic texts, had been composed long before the Buddha’s lifetime and was more than two thousand years old, but no one knew its age exactly. As Jones pored over Sanskrit texts his mind made comparisons not just with Persian and English but also with Latin and Greek, the mainstays of an eighteenth-century university education; with Gothic, the oldest literary form of German, which he had also learned; and with Welsh, a Celtic tongue and his boyhood language which he had not forgotten. In 1786, three years after his arrival in Calcutta, Jones came to a startling conclusion, announced in his third annual discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he had founded when he first arrived. The key sentence is now quoted in every introductory textbook of historical linguistics (punctuation mine):
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
Jones had concluded that the Sanskrit language originated from the same source as Greek and Latin, the classical languages of European civilization. He added that Persian, Celtic, and German probably belonged to the same family. European scholars were astounded. The occupants of India, long regarded as the epitome of Asian exotics, turned out to be long-lost cousins. If Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were relatives, descended from the same ancient parent language, what was that language? Where had it been it spoken? And by whom? By what historical circumstances did it generate daughter tongues that became the dominant languages spoken from Scotland to India?
These questions resonated particularly deeply in Germany, where popular interest in the history of the German language and the roots of German traditions were growing into the Romantic movement. The Romantics wanted to discard the cold, artificial logic of the Enlightenment to return to the roots of a simple and authentic life based in direct experience and community. Thomas Mann once said of a Romantic philosopher (Schlegel) that his thought was contaminated too much by reason, and that he was therefore a poor Romantic. It was ironic that William Jones helped to inspire this movement, because his own philosophy was quite different: “The race of man… cannot long be happy without virtue, nor actively virtuous without freedom, nor securely free without rational knowledge.”3 But Jones had energized the study of ancient languages, and ancient language played a central role in Romantic theories of authentic experience. In the 1780s J. G. Herder proposed a theory later developed by von Humboldt and elaborated in the twentieth century by Wittgenstein, that language creates the categories and distinctions through which humans give meaning to the world. Each particular language, therefore, generates and is enmeshed in a closed social community, or “folk,” that is at its core meaningless to an outsider. Language was seen by Herder and von Humboldt as a vessel that molded community and national identities. The brothers Grimm went out to collect “authentic” German folk tales while at the same time studying the German language, pursuing the Romantic conviction that language and folk culture were deeply related. In this setting the mysterious mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European, was regarded not just as a language but as a crucible in which Western civilization had its earliest beginnings.
After the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the Romantic conviction that language was a defining factor in national identity was combined with new ideas about evolution and biology. Natural selection provided a scientific theory that was hijacked by nationalists and used to rationalize why some races or “folks” ruled others—some were more “fit” than others. Darwin himself never applied his theories of fitness and natural selection to such vague entities as races or languages, but this did not prevent unscientific opportunists from suggesting that the less “fit” races could be seen as a source of genetic weakness, a reservoir of barbarism that might contaminate and dilute the superior qualities of the races that were more “fit.” This toxic mixture of pseudo-science and Romanticism soon produced its own new ideologies. Language, culture, and a Darwinian interpretation o
f race were bundled together to explain the superior biological–spiritual–linguistic essence of the northern Europeans who conducted these self-congratulatory studies. Their writings and lectures encouraged people to think of themselves as members of long-established, biological–linguistic nations, and thus were promoted widely in the new national school systems and national newspapers of the emerging nation-states of Europe. The policies that forced the Welsh (including Sir William Jones) to speak English, and the Bretons to speak French, were rooted in politicians’ need for an ancient and “pure” national heritage for each new state. The ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European soon were molded into the distant progenitors of such racial–linguistic–national stereotypes.4
Proto-Indo-European, the linguistic problem, became “the Proto-Indo-Europeans,” a biological population with its own mentality and personality: “a slim, tall, light-complexioned, blonde race, superior to all other peoples, calm and firm in character, constantly striving, intellectually brilliant, with an almost ideal attitude towards the world and life in general”.5 The name Aryan began to be applied to them, because the authors of the oldest religious texts in Sanskrit and Persian, the Rig Veda and Avesta, called themselves Aryans. These Aryans lived in Iran and eastward into Afghanistan–Pakistan–India. The term Aryan should be confined only to this Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. But the Vedas were a newly discovered source of mystical fascination in the nineteenth century, and in Victorian parlors the name Aryan soon spread beyond its proper linguistic and geographic confines. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a best-seller in the U.S., was a virulent warning against the thinning of superior American “Aryan” blood (by which he meant the British–Scots–Irish–German settlers of the original thirteen colonies) through interbreeding with immigrant “inferior races,” which for him included Poles, Czechs, and Italians as well as Jews—all of whom spoke Indo-European languages (Yiddish is a Germanic language in its basic grammar and morphology).6
The gap through which the word Aryan escaped from Iran and the Indian subcontinent was provided by the Rig Veda itself: some scholars found passages in the Rig Veda that seemed to describe the Vedic Aryans as invaders who had conquered their way into the Punjab.7 But from where? A feverish search for the “Aryan homeland” began. Sir William Jones placed it in Iran. The Himalayan Mountains were a popular choice in the early nineteenth century, but other locations soon became the subject of animated debates. Amateurs and experts alike joined the search, many hoping to prove that their own nation had given birth to the Aryans. In the second decade of the twentieth century the German scholar Gustav Kossinna attempted to demonstrate on archaeological grounds that the Aryan homeland lay in northern Europe—in fact, in Germany. Kossinna illustrated the prehistoric migrations of the “Indo-Germanic” Aryans with neat black arrows that swept east, west, and south from his presumed Aryan homeland. Armies followed the pen of the prehistorian less than thirty years later.8
The problem of Indo-European origins was politicized almost from the beginning. It became enmeshed in nationalist and chauvinist causes, nurtured the murderous fantasy of Aryan racial superiority, and was actually pursued in archaeological excavations funded by the Nazi SS. Today the Indo-European past continues to be manipulated by causes and cults. In the books of the Goddess movement (Marija Gimbutas’s Civilization of the Goddess, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade) the ancient “Indo-Europeans” are cast in archaeological dramas not as blonde heroes but as patriarchal, warlike invaders who destroyed a utopian prehistoric world of feminine peace and beauty. In Russia some modern nationalist political groups and neo-Pagan movements claim a direct linkage between themselves, as Slavs, and the ancient “Aryans.” In the United States white supremacist groups refer to themselves as Aryans. There actually were Aryans in history—the composers of the Rig Veda and the Avesta—but they were Bronze Age tribal people who lived in Iran, Afghanistan, and the northern Indian subcontinent. It is highly doubtful that they were blonde or blue-eyed, and they had no connection with the competing racial fantasies of modern bigots.9
The mistakes that led an obscure linguistic mystery to erupt into racial genocide were distressingly simple and therefore can be avoided by anyone who cares to avoid them. They were the equation of race with language, and the assignment of superiority to some language-and-race groups. Prominent linguists have always pleaded against both these ideas. While Martin Heidegger argued that some languages—German and Greek—were unique vessels for a superior kind of thought, the linguistic anthropologist Franz Boas protested that no language could be said to be superior to any other on the basis of objective criteria. As early as 1872 the great linguist Max Müller observed that the notion of an Aryan skull was not just unscientific but anti-scientific; languages are not white-skinned or long-headed. But then how can the Sanskrit language be connected with a skull type? And how did the Aryans themselves define “Aryan”? According to their own texts, they conceived of “Aryan-ness” as a religious–linguistic category. Some Sanskrit-speaking chiefs, and even poets in the Rig Veda, had names such as Balbūtha and Bbu that were foreign to the Sanskrit language. These people were of non-Aryan origin and yet were leaders among the Aryans. So even the Aryans of the Rig Veda were not genetically “pure”—whatever that means. The Rig Veda was a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language, you were an Aryan; otherwise you were not. The Rig Veda made the ritual and linguistic barrier clear, but it did not require or even contemplate racial purity.10
Any attempt to solve the Indo-European problem has to begin with the realization that the term Proto-Indo-European refers to a language community, and then work outward. Race really cannot be linked in any predictable way with language, so we cannot work from language to race or from race to language. Race is poorly defined; the boundaries between races are defined differently by different groups of people, and, since these definitions are cultural, scientists cannot describe a “true” boundary between any two races. Also, archaeologists have their own, quite different definitions of race, based on traits of the skull and teeth that often are invisible in a living person. However race is defined, languages are not normally sorted by race—all racial groups speak a variety of different languages. So skull shapes are almost irrelevant to linguistic problems. Languages and genes are correlated only in exceptional circumstances, usually at clear geographic barriers such as significant mountain ranges or seas—and often not even there.11 A migrating population did not have to be genetically homogeneous even if it did recruit almost exclusively from a single dialect group. Anyone who assumes a simple connection between language and genes, without citing geographic isolation or other special circumstances, is wrong at the outset.
THE LURE OF THE MOTHER TONGUE
The only aspect of the Indo-European problem that has been answered to most peoples’ satisfaction is how to define the language family, how to determine which languages belong to the Indo-European family and which do not. The discipline of linguistics was created in the nineteenth century by people trying to solve this problem. Their principal interests were comparative grammar, sound systems, and syntax, which provided the basis for classifying languages, grouping them into types, and otherwise defining the relationships between the tongues of humanity. No one had done this before. They divided the Indo-European language family into twelve major branches, distinguished by innovations in phonology or pronunciation and in morphology or word form that appeared at the root of each branch and were maintained in all the languages of that branch (figure 1.1). The twelve branches of Indo-European included most of the languages of Europe (but not Basque, Finnish, Estonian, or Magyar); the Persian language of Iran; Sanskrit and its many modern daughters (most important, Hindi and Urdu); and a number of extinct languages including Hittite in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Tocharian in the deserts of Xinjiang (no
rthwestern China) (figure 1.2). Modern English, like Yiddish and Swedish, is assigned to the Germanic branch. The analytic methods invented by nineteenth-century philologists are today used to describe, classify, and explain language variation worldwide.
Figure 1.1 The twelve branches of the Indo-European language family. Baltic and Slavic are sometimes combined into one branch, like Indo-Iranian, and Phrygian is sometimes set aside because we know so little about it, like Illyrian and Thracian. With those two changes the number of branches would be ten, an acceptable alternative. A tree diagram is meant to be a sketch of broad relationships; it does not represent a complete history.
Historical linguistics gave us not just static classifications but also the ability to reconstruct at least parts of extinct languages for which no written evidence survives. The methods that made this possible rely on regularities in the way sounds change inside the human mouth. If you collect Indo-European words for hundred from different branches of the language family and compare them, you can apply the myriad rules of sound change to see if all of them can be derived by regular changes from a single hypothetical ancestral word at the root of all the branches. The proof that Latin kentum (hundred) in the Italic branch and Lithuanian shimtas (hundred) in the Baltic branch are genetically related cognates is the construction of the ancestral root *k’tom-. The daughter forms are compared sound by sound, going through each sound in each word in each branch, to see if they can converge on one unique sequence of sounds that could have evolved into all of them by known rules. (I explain how this is done in the next chapter.) That root sequence of sounds, if it can be found, is the proof that the terms being compared are genetically related cognates. A reconstructed root is the residue of a successful comparison.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 2