Figure 1.2 The approximate geographic locations of the major Indo-European branches at about 400 BCE.
Linguists have reconstructed the sounds of more than fifteen hundred Proto-Indo-European roots.12 The reconstructions vary in reliability, because they depend on the surviving linguistic evidence. On the other hand, archeological excavations have revealed inscriptions in Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, and archaic German that contained words, never seen before, displaying precisely the sounds previously reconstructed by comparative linguists. That linguists accurately predicted the sounds and letters later found in ancient inscriptions confirms that their reconstructions are not entirely theoretical. If we cannot regard reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as literally “real,” it is at least a close approximation of a prehistoric reality.
The recovery of even fragments of the Proto-Indo-European language is a remarkable accomplishment, considering that it was spoken by nonliterate people many thousands of years ago and never was written down. Although the grammar and morphology of Proto-Indo-European are most important in typological studies, it is the reconstructed vocabulary, or lexicon, that holds out the most promise for archaeologists. The reconstructed lexicon is a window onto the environment, social life, and beliefs of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.
For example, reasonably solid lexical reconstructions indicate that Proto-Indo-European contained words for otter, beaver, wolf, lynx, elk, red deer, horse, mouse, hare, and hedgehog, among wild animals; goose, crane, duck, and eagle, among birds; bee and honey; and cattle (also cow, ox, and steer), sheep (also wool and weaving), pig (also boar, sow, and piglet), and dog among the domestic animals. The horse was certainly known to the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, but the lexical evidence alone is insufficient to determine if it was domesticated. All this lexical evidence might also be attested in, and compared against, archaeological remains to reconstruct the environment, economy, and ecology of the Proto-Indo-European world.
But the proto-lexicon contains much more, including clusters of words, suggesting that the speakers of PIE inherited their rights and duties through the father’s bloodline only (patrilineal descent); probably lived with the husband’s family after marriage (patrilocal residence); recognized the authority of chiefs who acted as patrons and givers of hospitality for their clients; likely had formally instituted warrior bands; practiced ritual sacrifices of cattle and horses; drove wagons; recognized a male sky deity; probably avoided speaking the name of the bear for ritual reasons; and recognized two senses of the sacred (“that which is imbued with holiness” and “that which is forbidden”). Many of these practices and beliefs are simply unrecoverable through archaeology. The proto-lexicon offers the hope of recovering some of the details of daily ritual and custom that archaeological evidence alone usually fails to deliver. That is what makes the solution of the Indo-European problem important for archaeologists, and for all of us who are interested in knowing our ancestors a little better.
A NEW SOLUTION FOR AN OLD PROBLEM
Linguists have been working on cultural-lexical reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European for almost two hundred years. Archaeologists have argued about the archaeological identity of the Proto-Indo-European language community for at least a century, probably with less progress than the linguists. The problem of Indo-European origins has been intertwined with European intellectual and political history for considerably more than a century. Why hasn’t a broadly acceptable union between archaeological and linguistic evidence been achieved?
Six major problems stand in the way. One is that the recent intellectual climate in Western academia has led many serious people to question the entire idea of proto-languages. The modern world has witnessed increasing cultural fusion in music (Black Ladysmith Mombasa and Paul Simon, Pavarotti and Sting), in art (Post-Modern eclecticism), in information services (News-Gossip), in the mixing of populations (international migration is at an all-time high), and in language (most of the people in the world are now bilingual or trilingual). As interest in the phenomenon of cultural convergence increased during the 1980s, thoughtful academics began to reconsider languages and cultures that had once been interpreted as individual, distinct entities. Even standard languages began to be seen as creoles, mixed tongues with multiple origins. In Indo-European studies this movement sowed doubt about the very concept of language families and the branching tree models that illustrated them, and some declared the search for any proto-language a delusion. Many ascribed the similarities between the Indo-European languages to convergence between neighboring languages that had distinct historical origins, implying that there never was a single proto-language.13
Much of this was creative but vague speculation. Linguists have now established that the similarities between the Indo-European languages are not the kinds of similarities produced by creolization and convergence. None of the Indo-European languages looks at all like a creole. The Indo-European languages must have replaced non–Indo-European languages rather than creolizing with them. Of course, there was inter-language borrowing, but it did not reach the extreme level of mixing and structural simplification seen in all creoles. The similarities that Sir William Jones noted among the Indo–European languages can only have been produced by descent from a common proto-language. On that point most linguists agree.
So we should be able to use the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary as a source of clues about where it was spoken and when. But then the second problem arises: many archaeologists, apparently, do not believe that it is possible to reliably reconstruct any portion of the Proto-Indo-European lexicon. They do not accept the reconstructed vocabulary as real. This removes the principal reason for pursuing Indo-European origins and one of the most valuable tools in the search. In the next chapter I offer a defense of comparative linguistics, a brief explanation of how it works, and a guide to interpreting the reconstructed vocabulary.
The third problem is that archaeologists cannot agree about the antiquity of Proto-Indo-European. Some say it was spoken in 8000 BCE, others say as late as 2000 BCE, and still others regard it as an abstract idea that exists only in linguists’ heads and therefore cannot be assigned to any one time. This makes it impossible, of course, to focus on a specific era. But the principal reason for this state of chronic disagreement is that most archaeologists do not pay much attention to linguistics. Some have proposed solutions that are contradicted by large bodies of linguistic evidence. By solving the second problem, regarding the question of reliability and reality, we will advance significantly toward solving problem number 3—the question of when—which occupies chapter 3 and chapter 4.
The fourth problem is that archaeological methods are underdeveloped in precisely those areas that are most critical for Indo-European origin studies. Most archaeologists believe it is impossible to equate prehistoric language groups with archaeological artifacts, as language is not reflected in any consistent way in material culture. People who speak different languages might use similar houses or pots, and people who speak the same language can make pots or houses in different ways. But it seems to me that language and culture are predictably correlated under some circumstances. Where we see a very clear material-culture frontier—not just different pots but also different houses, graves, cemeteries, town patterns, icons, diets, and dress designs—that persists for centuries or millennia, it tends also to be a linguistic frontier. This does not happen everywhere. In fact, such ethno–linguistic frontiers seem to occur rarely. But where a robust material-culture frontier does persist for hundreds, even thousands of years, language tends to be correlated with it. This insight permits us to identify at least some linguistic frontiers on a map of purely archaeological cultures, which is a critical step in finding the Proto-Indo-European homeland.
Another weak aspect of contemporary archaeological theory is that archaeologists generally do not understand migration very well, and migration is an important vector of language change—certainly not the only cause but an important o
ne. Migration was used by archaeologists before World War II as a simple explanation for any kind of change observed in prehistoric cultures: if pot type A in level one was replaced by pot type B in level two, then it was a migration of B-people that had caused the change. That simple assumption was proven to be grossly inadequate by a later generation of archaeologists who recognized the myriad internal catalysts of change. Shifts in artifact types were shown to be caused by changes in the size and complexity of social gatherings, shifts in economics, reorganization in the way crafts were managed, changes in the social function of crafts, innovations in technology, the introduction of new trade and exchange commodities, and so on. “Pots are not people” is a rule taught to every Western archaeology student since the 1960s. Migration disappeared entirely from the explanatory toolkit of Western archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s. But migration is a hugely important human behavior, and you cannot understand the Indo-European problem if you ignore migration or pretend it was unimportant in the past. I have tried to use modern migration theory to understand prehistoric migrations and their probable role in language change, problems discussed in chapter 6.
Problem 5 relates to the specific homeland I defend in this book, located in the steppe grasslands of Russia and Ukraine. The recent prehistoric archaeology of the steppes has been published in obscure journals and books, in languages understood by relatively few Western archaeologists, and in a narrative form that often reminds Western archaeologists of the old “pots are people” archaeology of fifty years ago. I have tried to understand this literature for twenty-five years with limited success, but I can say that Soviet and post-Soviet archaeology is not a simple repetition of any phase of Western archaeology; it has its own unique history and guiding assumptions. In the second half of this book I present a selective and unavoidably imperfect synthesis of archaeology from the Neolithic, Copper, and Bronze Ages in the steppe zone of Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, bearing directly on the nature and identity of early speakers of Indo-European languages.
Horses gallop onstage to introduce the final, sixth problem. Scholars noticed more than a hundred years ago that the oldest well-documented Indo-European languages—Imperial Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, and the most ancient form of Sanskrit, or Old Indic—were spoken by militaristic societies that seemed to erupt into the ancient world driving chariots pulled by swift horses. Maybe Indo-European speakers invented the chariot. Maybe they were the first to domesticate horses. Could this explain the initial spread of the Indo-European languages? For about a thousand years, between 1700 and 700 BCE, chariots were the favored weapons of pharaohs and kings throughout the ancient world, from Greece to China. Large numbers of chariots, in the dozens or even hundreds, are mentioned in palace inventories of military equipment, in descriptions of battles, and in proud boasts of loot taken in warfare. After 800 BCE chariots were gradually abandoned as they became vulnerable to a new kind of warfare conducted by disciplined troops of mounted archers, the earliest cavalry. If Indo-European speakers were the first to have chariots, this could explain their early expansion; if they were the first to domesticate horses, then this could explain the central role horses played as symbols of strength and power in the rituals of the Old Indic Aryans, Greeks, Hittites, and other Indo-European speakers.
But until recently it has been difficult or impossible to determine when and where horses were domesticated. Early horse domestication left very few marks on the equine skeleton, and all we have left of ancient horses is their bones. For more than ten years I have worked on this problem with my research partner, and also my wife, Dorcas Brown, and we believe we now know where and when people began to keep herds of tamed horses. We also think that horseback riding began in the steppes long before chariots were invented, in spite of the fact that chariotry preceded cavalry in the warfare of the organized states and kingdoms of the ancient world.
LANGUAGE EXTINCTION AND THOUGHT
The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language lived at a critical time in a strategic place. They were positioned to benefit from innovations in transport, most important of these the beginning of horseback riding and the invention of wheeled vehicles. They were in no way superior to their neighbors; indeed, the surviving evidence suggests that their economy, domestic technology, and social organization were simpler than those of their western and southern neighbors. The expansion of their language was not a single event, nor did it have only one cause.
Nevertheless, that language did expand and diversify, and its daughters—including English—continue to expand today. Many other language families have become extinct as Indo-European languages spread. It is possible that the resultant loss of linguistic diversity has narrowed and channeled habits of perception in the modern world. For example, all Indo-European languages force the speaker to pay attention to tense and number when talking about an action: you must specify whether the action is past, present, or future; and you must specify whether the actor is singular or plural. It is impossible to use an Indo-European verb without deciding on these categories. Consequently speakers of Indo-European languages habitually frame all events in terms of when they occurred and whether they involved multiple actors. Many other language families do not require the speaker to address these categories when speaking of an action, so tense and number can remain unspecified.
On the other hand, other language families require that other aspects of reality be constantly used and recognized. For example, when describing an event or condition in Hopi you must use grammatical markers that specify whether you witnessed the event yourself, heard about it from someone else, or consider it to be an unchanging truth. Hopi speakers are forced by Hopi grammar to habitually frame all descriptions of reality in terms of the source and reliability of their information. The constant and automatic use of such categories generates habits in the perception and framing of the world that probably differ between people who use fundamentally different grammars.14 In that sense, the spread of Indo-European grammars has perhaps reduced the diversity of human perceptual habits. It might also have caused this author, as I write this book, to frame my observations in a way that repeats the perceptual habits and categories of a small group of people who lived in the western Eurasian steppes more than five thousand years ago.
CHAPTER TWO
How to Reconstruct a Dead Language
Proto-Indo-European has been dead as a spoken language for at least forty-five hundred years. The people who spoke it were nonliterate, so there are no inscriptions. Yet, in 1868, August Schleicher was able to tell a story in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, called “The Sheep and the Horses,” or Avis akvasas ka. A rewrite in 1939 by Herman Hirt incorporated new interpretations of Proto-Indo-European phonology, and the title became Owis ek’woses-kwe. In 1979 Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav Zgusta suggested only minor new changes in their version, Owis ekwoskwe. While linguists debate increasingly minute details of pronunciation in exercises like these, most people are amazed that anything can be said about a language that died without written records. Amazement, of course, is a close cousin of suspicion. Might the linguists be arguing over a fantasy? In the absence of corroborative evidence from documents, how can linguists be sure about the accuracy of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European?1
Many archaeologists, accustomed to digging up real things, have a low opinion of those who merely reconstruct hypothetical phonemes—what is called “linguistic prehistory.” There are reasons for this skepticism. Both linguists and archaeologists have made communication across the disciplines almost impossible by speaking in dense jargons that are virtually impenetrable to anyone but themselves. Neither discipline is at all simple, and both are riddled with factions on many key questions of interpretation. Healthy disagreement can resemble confusion to an outsider, and most archaeologists, including this author, are outsiders in linguistics. Historical linguistics is not taught regularly in graduate archaeology programs, so most archaeologists know very little about the subject. Sometimes we ma
ke this quite clear to linguists. Nor is archaeology taught to graduate students in linguistics. Linguists’ occasional remarks about archaeology can sound simplistic and naïve to archaeologists, making some of us suspect that the entire field of historical linguistics may be riddled with simplistic and naïve assumptions.
The purpose of these first few chapters is to clear a path across the no-man’s land that separates archaeology and historical linguistics. I do this with considerable uncertainty—I have no more formal training in linguistics than most archaeologists. I am fortunate that a partial way has already been charted by Jim Mallory, perhaps the only doubly qualified linguist-archaeologist in Indo-European studies. The questions surrounding Indo-European origins are, at their core, about linguistic evidence. The most basic linguistic problem is to understand how language changes with time.2
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 3