Colin Renfrew and Alexander Marshack were present at the IXème congrès de l’Union internationale des sciences préhistoriques et protohistoriques,75 which was held at Nice from 13–18 September 1976.
The World of the Indo-Europeans
Almost 450 million representatives of the species Homo sapiens currently live in Europe. Inheritors of the same culture, they possess a common origin. Their ancestors are known as the Indo-Europeans.
The term ‘Indo-European’ is a linguistic term. It has been used since the nineteenth century, an age which saw the publications of Franz Bopp, Alexander von Humboldt, and Jacob Grimm on the comparative study of the language systems of the principle European speakers (with exceptions made for Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, and Sami). Proceeding from a correlation of form, this comparative method derives (by means of a process of equivalence analogous to the calculations of arithmetical proportions) a lineage positing the logical necessity of a common origin. In other words, it allows the recovery of the ‘unknown’ that establishes, through its relationship to the current European ‘daughter-languages’, a lost ‘mother-language’: common Indo-European. A capital discovery that restores the most ancient past at the heart of the immediate present.
Thanks to the effort of linguists, we have been able to successively establish the grammar, the syntax, and the lexicon of common Indo-European. By convention, we distinguish three successive stages of this language: Proto-Indo-European, Middle-Indo-European (the phase preceding the first dispersions), and Old European or Late-Indo-European, probably spoken in the northern part of central Europe in the third millennia before our era. Besides certain languages that are no longer spoken today (Illyrian, Macedonian, Hittite, Luwian, Tokharian, Thraco-Phrygian, etc.), the family of languages derived from common Indo-European incorporates the ancestral forms of the Indo-Aryan languages (Sanskrit, Hindi, Old Persian), as well as Greek, Albanian, and all of the Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, and Romance languages.
Researchers have been very quick to preoccupy themselves with the origin of the people who used these languages emerging from prehistory.
‘We envisage therefore’, writes P. Borsch-Gimpera, ‘the existence of a primitive people (the Urvolk of the German school), whose cradle or homeland (Urheimat) could have been most likely situated in Asia, speaking an original language (Ursprache), source of the dialects from which the historical Indo-European languages derive’. (Les Indo-Européens. Payot, 1961).76
Two Theses on the Original Homeland
Countless controversies, from which ulterior political motives were not always absent, have been raised concerning the location of the original homeland.
Linguistics, fortunately, provides valuable indications. ‘Common Indo-European’, observes Nicolas Lahovary, ‘includes terms designating the fauna, flora, and climate of temperate regions, more humid than dry, and more cold than hot’ (Les peuples européens. La Baconnière, Neuchâtel, 1946).77 In the book that he contributed to the anthropology of Europe, John Geipel adds: ‘Numerous Indo-European languages use similar words to designate animals: bear, wolf, beaver, squirrel; trees: birch, beech, willow; or even for honey, bee, snow, winter, ice, cold. This strongly suggests to us that the Indo-European dialects were, before their dispersion, spoken by individuals living in a temperate, forested, continental region’.
The idea of an ‘Asiatic’ origin of the Indo-Europeans, advanced in 1888 by Max Müller, followed by H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, C. F. Keary, and William Ripley, is no longer defended today by anyone. Two theses remain current.
The Nordic or Germanic thesis relies first of all upon the physical characteristics attributed to the Indo-European populations by ancient texts. These characteristics (blonde hair, blue or light eyes, tallness of stature, slender hips, fine lips, prominent chin, dolicocephaly) are specific to the Nordic and Falic sub-races formed from a cromagnoid substrate in a territory comprising the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic as well as their hinterland. In 1878, Theodor Poesche situated the Urheimat in current Lithuania. Adding linguistic and archaeological arguments to the anthropological arguments, Karl Penka (Die Herkunft der Arier, 1886)78 expanded this localisation to northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. He was followed by Isaac Taylor (1888) and Herman Hirt (Die Urheimat des Indogermanen, 1892).79 In 1902, Gustaf Kossina, founder of the journal, Mannus, proposed a primordial homeland situated in central Germany. The same Nordic-Germanic thesis would be reprised by Harold Bender, Hans Seger, Schachermeyer, Gustav Neckel, Ernst Meyer, Julius Pokorny, Stuart Mann, etc. It has been renewed recently by Nicolas Lahovary (1946), Paul Thieme (Die Heimat der indogermanischen Gemeinsprache, 1953)80 and Ram Chandra Jain (The Most Ancient Aryan Society, 1964).
The second thesis is that of an Urheimat situated in central Europe or southern Russia. Otto Schrader supported it for the first time in 1890, followed by V. Gordon Childe (The Aryans, 1926), Georges Poisson (Les Aryens, 1934), Walter Schulz (1935), R. A. Crossland (1957), etc. In 1961, P. Bosch-Gimpera wrote: ‘The aggregation that would lead to the formation of the Indo-European peoples manifests itself in the Neolithic milieus, probably in the fifth millennium. This role is perhaps played by ethnic groups from the centre of Europe’. In 1962, Giacomo Devoto (Origini indeuropee)81 arrived at the same conclusions.
The idea of a primordial homeland in southern Russia has been defended in particular by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose principal works have appeared from 1956. According to Gimbutas, the ‘kurgan culture’, whose bearers came via the Danube valley, came to an end around −4,000 in the Old European Balkan civilisation (which was developed from around −7,000, independently from the cultures of the European northeast as well as from those of Arabia and Mesopotamia, ranging from Sicily, the Adriatic coasts, the basins of the Don, the Dniester, and the Dnieper, to the islands of the Aegean Sea), were of Indo-European nature and their representatives must be considered the first Indo-Europeans.
The two theses are not necessarily irreconcilable. Authors like Ward Goodenough (‘Evolution of Pastoralism and Indo-European Origins’, in G. Cardona, H. M. Hoenigswald and A. Senn, ed. Indo-European and Indo-Europeans. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1970) have proposed viewing the Kurgan people as a simple pastoral extension of an Indo-European culture which was first developed in northern Europe. It is one part of these people who, having destroyed the Old European civilisation, would have descended towards the south, diffusing on their way the techniques of bronze metallurgy, giving rise to the Luwians, the historical Hittites, and the Mycenaean Greeks. The other part, by mixing with the elements of the culture that remained in central Europe, would have furnished the constituents of a later diaspora. This theory, apparently very convincing, is reconcilable with that of Hans Krahe, who distinguished on the linguistic plane between Old European (alteuropäisch — not to be confused with the Old Europeans of which Gimbutas speaks) and Indo-European (indogermanisch) properly speaking. It is cited favourably by James P. Mallory, author of one of the most recent studies on the question (‘A Short History of the Indo-European Problem’, in The Journal of Indo-European Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1973, Hattiesburg, Miss.). The primordial homeland could thus be situated in a zone circumscribed by the Elbe and the Vistule, extending north to Jutland and south to the mountainous region terminating in the Carpathians.
Social Structures
‘Attested historically’ towards the second millennium before our era, the Indo-Europeans already have a long history behind them. ‘Archaeology has traced them back them to the beginning of the Neolithic’, elaborates P. Bosch Gimpera, ‘the roots of these ethnic formations are situated in the Mesolithic’. Authors such as Bulgare Georgiev even suggest of the end of the Paleolithic.
‘Around 8,000 years before our era’, recalls Geipel, ‘the Scandinavian glaciers retreated definitively towards the north. The British Isles separated themselves from the continent. The Baltic made its junction with the North Sea. The tundra was covered with den
se forests. From that point forward, Europe enjoyed a temperate climate’.
From the second Neolithic, groups of Indo-European had become semi-sedentary. Men dedicated themselves to raising animals, while women and the young practiced a rudimentary form of agriculture. This new type of economy succeeded another way of life, that of the great hunters who roamed nomadically over quite a large territory and whose members were principally assembled on the basis of their age groups. As a result, there was a demographic explosion which was accompanied by a complete transformation of the social life.
It is at this time, as a matter of fact, that the genos,82 the great families of an exogamous nature — the name comes from *eg-, a reconstructed Indo-European term designating the idea of ‘oneself’; cf. Latin ego — began to combine themselves in order to preserve common hereditary properties and to prevent the dispersion of young and able-bodied men. Each genos established or reinforced the exogamous rule and the patrilocal organisation that characterised it within the framework of a tribal association with other clans or genoi, with whom alliances were sealed by marriage according to a relatively rigid structure based on reciprocal benefits and obligations. Including only free men, ‘well-born’ (‘ingenu’ = in-genos),83 the genos thus becomes a ‘community of blood’. As such it is distinguished from the economic community, the *domos,84 which is the whole formed by the genos and the new class of non-proprietaries, slaves, or liberated serfs. At a higher level, a distinction seems to be established between the *wenos (a term derived from *we-, ‘we, us’; cf. German wir), or a community by alliance resulting from the association of three clans or genoi, and the corresponding economic community, the *weikos (cf. Latin vicus, French village, English ‘village’).
Subsequently, more complex social structures (independent cities, kingdoms, etc.) will be established on the same basis, the people defining themselves simply as a vaster ‘we’ — the ensemble of men and women linked together by alliance. Equally, the notion of ethnos (*sw-edh-nos) derives directly from *swe-, that is, from the community of blood whose exchange of women inside the *wenos assures and guarantees its maintenance.
At its basis, the social system is fundamentally patriarchal. The genos defines itself by identification with the paternal ego, representing a lineage that goes back to *deiwos-pèter (dieu-père, ‘divine-father’). Whereas in certain primitive societies of the agrarian type, a murder ritual, the ‘sacred murder of the king’ (cf. the murder of the father in Freud’s doctrine) signifies the destruction of the paternal lineage and assures the validity of the sole matrilineal descendants, among the Indo-Europeans, the ‘role of the father’ in the lineage is assured by a rite derived from the ‘couvade’.85 The father symbolically ‘engenders’ and acknowledges the child by taking it upon (that is between) his knees: a simulation of birth or delivery. In the vocabulary of common Indo-European, it is said of the mother that she ‘brings into the world’. Only the father en-genders, that is to say, brings into the genos. This explains how words that at first glance look so different — genos, knee,86 engender, etc. — are all derived from the same root: *gen.
Elected Sovereign
When the circumstances that bring about the genos endow it with a general authority, it is necessarily one of the peters or fathers, one of the leaders of the genos, that carries the decision. ‘The king is in the same relationship to his subjects as the head of a family is to his children’ (Aristotle). The leader is elected by his peers, in particular when he proceeds to appoint a *reg-s, that is, a king (Latin rex, Gallic rix, Sanskrit raja, French roi). It is only in the historical era that this delegation of power, which is provisional, will become permanent, thus implementing hereditary monarchy. Originally, the king submits to the control of the peters, the fathers, within an assembly analogous to the sabha of the Indo-Aryans, the Greek gerousia, the Roman senatus, the Germanic thing, the Icelandic althing, etc. Thus the elementary form of sovereignty among the Indo-Europeans is able to be defined as a sort of aristodemocracy, where the monarch exercises a function at once religious and political. All Indo-European society is therefore a sublimation of the genos, where the social cohesion is realised by the projection of this original structure upon a religious and political superstructure — the two terms are inseparable, since among the Indo-Europeans, the society of gods is a projection of human society, while the civic cult itself results from a projection of the domestic culture placed under the responsibility of the father.
Priests, farmers, and warriors, the Indo-Europeans worked pottery and practiced metallurgy. ‘Men rode wild horses and used cattle as beasts of burden’, writes Geipel. Herds of cattle were the symbol of prosperity. The Indo-European term *peku, which we rediscover in the Italic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian languages with the primary meaning of ‘personal wealth’ (cf. Latin pecunia, French pécule), has ultimately come to designate livestock: Latin pecus, Sanskrit pashu, French pécore. (Cf. Gothic faihu, ‘fortune’, and Old High Germanic fihu, ‘cattle, livestock’).
Worldview
The works of the Indo-Europeanists, especially those of Georges Dumézil, have demonstrated the existence — even before the first dispersions — of a common Indo-European ‘ideology’, that is to say, of a specific mental structure conformed to the same worldview and manifesting itself notably by a particular conception of the religious reality, of society, of sovereignty, and of the relationship between men and gods, as well as by a common theology, liturgy, poetry, and epic literature. This ‘ideology’, writes Dumézil, is the ‘work of thinkers, of whom the brahmans, the druids, and the sacerdotal Roman colleges, are, for a part, the heirs’ (L’idéologie tripartite des Indo-Européens. Latomus, Bruxelles, 1958).87
In the specific domain of poetry, the works of Antoine Meillet and Roman Jakobson, followed by Calvert Watkins and Donald Ward, have revealed structural analogies in the realm of Greek, Vedic, Slavic, and Irish that can only be explained by a common heritage, and which allow us to presume the existence, among the first Indo-European communities, of a body of ‘singer-poets’ very similar to the Irish fili and the ancient Scandinavian skalds.
In regards to Indo-European society, Donald Ward (‘On the Poets and Poetry of the Indo-Europeans’, in Journal of Indo-European Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 1973, Hattiesburg, Miss.) has taken up the fruitful distinction, introduced by Margaret Mead (Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples, New York, 1937), between shame cultures and guilt cultures. In shame cultures, the fundamental notion is that of honour: the ability to look someone in the face. This ethic of honour implies a direct link with the sociocultural milieu. By a despicable act, one can dishonour his name and as a consequence the ancestors and descendants of his lineage. In guilt cultures, the guilt is objectified by recourse to a third party, which interiorises and individualises the sanction; its revealed dogmas define a morality of sin. According to Ward, the notion of ‘shame’ common to the Greeks, Romans, Irish, and Scandinavians is typically Indo-European, in contrast to the notion of ‘guilt’ characteristic of the great universalist metaphysical systems.
Specific Characteristics
The entire ancient history of Europe is formed around two great waves of Indo-European migrations: one around −2,200–2,000, the other around 1250 BCE. From here proceed the Iranian and Vedic societies, the Hittite empire and the kingdoms of the Anatolian plateau, the historic civilisations of the Greeks and Romans, and of the Celts and Germanic peoples. To the west, the Indo-Europeans populated Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, England, and Scandinavia. To the south, according to traditional chronology, the city of Rome was founded in April 753. In the east, the Indo-European peoples advanced as far as China, where their influence would be felt in the ‘barbarian kingdoms’ of the country’s north. According to Hans Jansen, the Chinese words mi, ‘honey’,88 ch’yan ‘dog’,89 yen, ‘goose’, ma, ‘horse’, among others, were originally Indo-European.
Thanks to horse-breeding, the use of metals, and war c
hariots, the Indo-European peoples therefore spread, in successive waves, to conquer the world. (For a long time, one of the characteristic traits of a well-born man would be the possession of the horse, as testified by the respect accorded to the Roman or Gallic equus; cf. the words cavalier and chevalier, Reiter and Ritter, etc.90 ‘However’, writes Nicolas Lahovary, ‘these conquests should be considered the result of greater energy and superior military virtue. Here again it would not be in the material considerations, but in certain psychological qualities, in the force of character of the individuals and as a consequence their ethnic group, that the secret to the prodigious success of the Indo-Europeans should first be sought, including their upper hand over intelligent people whose civilisation was much more developed than theirs’.
After having traced the history of these migrations in a quite cursory and at times confusing manner, John Geipel examines the distribution of some of the physical characteristics proper to the ancient Europeans: stature, eye and hair colour, cephalic and facial indications, etc.
Some of his observations lead to unexpected survivals. ‘It is perhaps significant, for example, that the only parts of Europe where the vertical superposition of the jaws still exists, and which have only been recently supplanted by the advancement of the upper jawbone, are precisely those regions where the dental sibilants (the English ‘th’ sound) are still used in the phonetics of the local language’.
The ethnological kinship of the European people is further confirmed by the specific distribution of blood types O (45–75% of subjects), A (5–40%) and B (4–18%).
John Geipel also studied the physiognomy of Europeans today before launching himself into ‘research on the races of Europe’, a task to which he resigned himself with very little scientific reticence.
‘The man who arrived in Europe long ago was a mixed breed’, he reminds us at every instant, ‘and we, his descendants, are no different’. But every individual is a ‘mixed breed’ to the extent that he issues from a certain number of cross-breedings, beginning with those of his parents. And Geipel overestimates the naivety of his audience if he believes that he can confuse them by revealing that racial characteristics are always relative.
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