The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

by David W. Anthony

  The ultimate age of the Anatolian branch is based partly on objective external evidence (dated documents at Kanesh), partly on presumed rates of language change over time, and partly on internal evidence within the Anatolian languages. The Anatolian languages are quite different phonologically and grammatically from all the other known Indo-European daughter languages. They are so peculiar that many specialists think they do not really belong with the other daughters.

  Many of the peculiar features of Anatolian look like archaisms, characteristics thought to have existed in an extremely early stage of Proto-Indo-European. For example, Hittite had a kind of consonant that has become famous in Indo-European linguistics (yes, consonants can be famous): h2, a guttural sound or laryngeal. In 1879 a Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, realized that several seemingly random differences in vowel pronunciation between the Indo-European languages could be brought under one explanatory rule if he assumed that the pronunciation of these vowels had been affected by a “lost” consonant that no longer existed in any Indo-European language. He proposed that such a lost sound had existed in Proto-Indo-European. It was the first time a linguist had been so bold as to reconstruct a feature for Proto-Indo-European that no longer existed in any Indo-European language. The discovery and decipherment of Hittite forty years later proved Saussure right. In a stunning confirmation of the predictive power of comparative linguistics, the Hittite laryngeal h2 (and traces of a slightly different laryngeal, h3) appeared in Hittite inscriptions in just those positions Saussure had predicted for his “lost” consonant. Most Indo-Europeanists now accept that archaic Proto-Indo-European contained laryngeal sounds (probably three different ones, usually transcribed as *h1, *h2, *h3,) that were preserved clearly only in the Anatolian branch.10 The best explanation for why Anatolian has laryngeals is that Pre-Anatolian speakers became separated from the Proto-Indo-European language community at a very early date, when a laryngeal-rich phonology was still characteristic of archaic Proto-Indo-European. But then what does archaic mean? What, exactly, did Pre-Anatolian separate from?

  The Indo-Hittite Hypothesis

  The Anatolian branch either lost or never possessed other features that were present in all other Indo-European branches. In verbs, for example, the Anatolian languages had only two tenses, a present and a past, whereas the other ancient Indo-European languages had as many as six tenses. In nouns, Anatolian had just animate and neuter; it had no feminine case. The other ancient Indo-European languages had feminine, masculine, and neuter cases. The Anatolian languages also lacked the dual, a form that was used in other early Indo-European languages for objects that were doubled like eyes or ears. (Example: Sanskrit dēvas ‘one god’, but dēvau ‘double gods’.) Alexander Lehrman identified ten such traits that probably were innovations in Proto-Indo-European after Pre-Anatolian split away.11

  For some Indo-Europeanists these traits suggest that the Anatolian branch did not develop from Proto-Indo-European at all but rather evolved from an older Pre-Proto-Indo-European ancestor. This ancestral language was called Indo-Hittite by William Sturtevant. According to the Indo–Hittite hypothesis, Anatolian is an Indo-European language only in the broadest sense, as it did not develop from Proto-Indo-European. But it did preserve, uniquely, features of an earlier language community from which they both evolved. I cannot solve the debate over the categorization of Anatolian here, although it is obviously true that Proto-Indo-European must have evolved from an earlier language community, and we can use Indo-Hittite to refer to that hypothetical earlier stage. The Proto-Indo-European language community was a chain of dialects with both geographic and chronological differences. The Anatolian branch seems to have separated from an archaic chronological stage in the evolution of Proto-Indo-European, and it probably separated from a different geographic dialect as well, but I will call it archaic Proto-Indo-European rather than Indo-Hittite.12

  A substantial period of time is needed for the Pre-Anatolian phase. Craig Melchert and Alexander Lehrman agreed that a separation date of about 4000 BCE between Pre-Anatolian and the archaic Proto-Indo-European language community seems reasonable. The millennium or so around 4000 BCE, say 4500 to 3500 BCE, constitutes the latest window within which Pre-Anatolian is likely to have separated.

  Unfortunately the oldest daughter of Proto-Indo-European looks so peculiar that we cannot be certain she is a daughter rather than a cousin. Pre-Anatolian could have emerged from Indo-Hittite, not from Proto-Indo-European. So we cannot confidently assign a terminal date to Proto-Indo-European based on the birth of Anatolian.

  THE NEXT OLDEST INSCRIPTIONS: GREEK AND OLD INDIC

  Luckily we have well-dated inscriptions in two other Indo-European languages from the same era as the Hittite empire. The first was Greek, the language of the palace-centered Bronze Age warrior kings who ruled at Mycenae, Pylos, and other strongholds in Greece beginning about 1650 BCE. The Mycenaean civilization appeared rather suddenly with the construction of the spectacular royal Shaft Graves at Mycenae, dated about 1650 BCE, about the same time as the rise of the Hittite empire in Anatolia. The Shaft Graves, with their golden death masks, swords, spears, and images of men in chariots, signified the elevation of a new Greek-speaking dynasty of unprecedented wealth whose economic power depended on long-distance sea trade. The Mycenaean kingdoms were destroyed during the same period of unrest and pillage that brought down the Hittite Empire about 1150 BCE. Mycenaean Greek, the language of palace administration as recorded in the Linear B tablets, was clearly Greek, not Proto-Greek, by 1450 BCE, the date of the oldest preserved inscriptions. The people who spoke it were the models for Nestor and Agamemnon, whose deeds, dimly remembered and elevated to epic, were celebrated centuries later by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. We do not know when Greek speakers appeared in Greece, but it happened no later than 1650 BCE. As with Anatolian, there are numerous indications that Mycenaean Greek was an intrusive language in a land where non-Greek languages had been spoken before the Mycenaean age.13 The Mycenaeans almost certainly were unaware that another Indo-European language was being used in palaces not far away.

  Old Indic, the language of the Rig Veda, was recorded in inscriptions not long after 1500 BCE but in a puzzling place. Most Vedic specialists agree that the 1,028 hymns of the Rig Veda were compiled into what became the sacred form in the Punjab, in northwestern India and Pakistan, probably between about 1500 and 1300 BCE. But the deities, moral concepts, and Old Indic language of the Rig Veda first appeared in written documents not in India but in northern Syria.14

  The Mitanni dynasty ruled over what is today northern Syria between 1500 and 1350 BCE. The Mitanni kings regularly spoke a non–Indo-European language, Hurrian, then the dominant local language in much of northern Syria and eastern Turkey. Like Hattic, Hurrian was a native language of the Anatolian uplands, related to the Caucasian languages. But all the Mitanni kings, first to last, took Old Indic throne names, even if they had Hurrian names before being crowned. Tus’ratta I was Old Indic Tvesa-ratha ‘having an attacking chariot’, Artatama I was Rta-dhaaman ‘having the abode of r’ta’, Artas’s’umara was Rta-smara ‘remembering r’ta’, and S’attuara I was Satvar ‘warrior’.15 The name of the Mitanni capital city, Waššukanni, was Old Indic vasu-khani, literally “wealth-mine.” The Mitanni were famous as charioteers, and, in the oldest surviving horse-training manual in the world, a Mitanni horse trainer named Kikkuli (a Hurrian name) used many Old Indic terms for technical details, including horse colors and numbers of laps. The Mitanni military aristocracy was composed of chariot warriors called maryanna, probably from an Indic term márya meaning “young man,” employed in the Rig Veda to refer to the heavenly war-band assembled around Indra. Several royal Mitanni names contained the Old Indic term r’ta, which meant “cosmic order and truth,” the central moral concept of the Rig Veda. The Mitanni king Kurtiwaza explicitly named four Old Indic gods (Indra, Varuna, Mithra, and the Nāsatyas), among many native Hurrian deities, to witness his treaty with the Hi
ttite monarch around 1380 BCE. And these were not just any Old Indic gods. Three of them—Indra, Varuna, and the Nāsatyas or Divine Twins—were the three most important deities in the Rig Veda. So the Mitanni texts prove not only that the Old Indic language existed by 1500 BCE but also that the central religious pantheon and moral beliefs enshrined in the Rig Veda existed equally early.

  Why did Hurrian-speaking kings in Syria use Old Indic names, words, and religious terms in these ways? A good guess is that the Mitanni kingdom was founded by Old Indic-speaking mercenaries, perhaps charioteers, who regularly recited the kinds of hymns and prayers that were collected at about the same time far to the east by the compilers of the Rig Veda. Hired by a Hurrian king about 1500 BCE, they usurped his throne and founded a dynasty, a very common pattern in Near Eastern and Iranian dynastic histories. The dynasty quickly became Hurrian in almost every sense but clung to a tradition of using Old Indic royal names, some Vedic deity names, and Old Indic technical terms related to chariotry long after its founders faded into history. This is, of course, a guess, but something like it seems almost necessary to explain the distribution and usage of Old Indic by the Mitanni.

  The Mitanni inscriptions establish that Old Indic was being spoken before 1500 BCE in the Near East. By 1500 BCE Proto-Indo-European had differentiated into at least Old Indic, Mycenaean Greek, and the three known daughters of Proto-Anatolian. What does this suggest about the terminal date for Proto-Indo-European?

  COUNTING THE RELATIVES: HOW MANY IN 1500 BCE?

  To answer this question we first have to understand where Greek and Old Indic are placed among the known branches of the Indo-European family. Mycenaean Greek is the oldest recorded language in the Greek branch. It is an isolated language; it has no recorded close relatives or sister languages. It probably had unrecorded sisters, but none survived in written records. The appearance of the Shaft-Grave princes about 1650 BCE represents the latest possible arrival of Greek speakers in Greece. The Shaft-Grave princes probably already spoke an early form of Greek, not Proto-Greek, since their descendants’ oldest preserved inscriptions at about 1450 BCE were in Greek. Proto-Greek might be dated at the latest between about 2000 and 1650 BCE. Pre-Greek, the phase that preceded Proto-Greek, probably originated as a dialect of late Proto-Indo-European at least five hundred to seven hundred years before the appearance of Mycenaean Greek, and very probably earlier—minimally about 2400–2200 BCE. The terminal date for Proto-Indo-European can be set at about 2400–2200 BCE—it could not have been later than this—from the perspective of the Greek branch. What about Old Indic?

  Unlike Mycenaean Greek, Old Indic does have a known sister language, Avestan Iranian, which we must take into account. Avestan is the oldest of the Iranian languages that would later be spoken by Persian emperors and Scythian nomads alike, and today are spoken in Iran and Tajikistan. Avestan Iranian was the language of the Avesta, the holiest text of Zorastrianism. The oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, probably were composed by Zoroaster (the Greek form of the name) or by Zarathustra (the original Iranian form) himself. Zarathustra was a religious reformer who lived in eastern Iran, judging from the places he named, probably between 1200 and 1000 BCE.16 His theology was partly a reaction against the glorification of war and blood sacrifice by the poets of the Rig Veda. One of the oldest Gathas was “the lament of the cow,” a protest against cattle stealing from the cow’s point of view. But the Avesta and the Rig Veda were closely related in both language and thought. They used the same deity names (although Old Indic gods were demonized in the Avesta), employed the same poetic conventions, and shared specific rituals. For example, they used a cognate term for the ritual of spreading straw for the seat of the attending god before a sacrifice (Vedic barhis, Avestan bares–man); and both traditions termed a pious man “one who spread the straw.” In many small details they revealed their kinship in a shared Indo-Iranian past. The two languages, Avestan Iranian and Old Indic, developed from a shared parent language, Indo-Iranian, which is not documented.

  The Mitanni inscriptions establish that Old Indic had appeared as a distinct language by 1500 BCE. Common Indo-Iranian must be earlier. It probably dates back at least to 1700 BCE. Proto-Indo-Iranian—a dialect that had some of the innovations of Indo-Iranian but not yet all of them—has to be placed earlier still, at or before 2000 BCE. Pre-Indo-Iranian was an eastern dialect of Proto-Indo-European, and must then have existed at the latest around 2500–2300 BCE. As with Greek, the period from 2500 to 2300 BCE, give or take a few centuries, is the minimal age for the separation of Pre-Indo-Iranian from Proto-Indo-European.

  So the terminal date for Proto-Indo-European—the date after which our reconstructed form of the language becomes an anachronism—can be set around 2500 BCE, more or less, from the perspective of Greek and Old Indic. It might be extended a century or two later, but, as far as these two languages are concerned, a terminal date much later than 2500 BCE—say, as late as 2000 BCE—is impossible. And, of course, Anatolian must have separated long before 2500 BCE. By about 2500 BCE Proto-Indo-European had changed and fragmented into a variety of late dialects and daughter languages—including at least the Anatolian group, Pre-Greek and Pre-Indo-Iranian. Can other daughters be dated to the same period? How many other daughters existed by 2500 BCE?

  More Help from the Other Daughters: Who’s the Oldest of Them All?

  In fact, some other daughters not only can be placed this early—they must be. Again, to understand why, we have to understand where Greek and Old Indic stand within the known branches of the Indo-European language family. Neither Greek nor Indo-Iranian can be placed among the very oldest Indo-European daughter branches. They are the oldest daughters to survive in inscriptions (along with Anatolian), but that is an accident of history (table 3.1). From the perspective of historical linguistics, Old Indic and Greek must be classified as late Indo-European daughters. Why?

  Linguists distinguish older daughter branches from younger ones on the basis of shared innovations and archaisms. Older branches seem to have separated earlier because they lack innovations characteristic of the later branches, and they retain archaic features. Anatolian is a good example; it retains some phonetic traits that definitely are archaic (laryngeals) and lacks other features that probably represent innovations. Indo-Iranian, on the other hand, exhibits three innovations that identify it as a later branch.

  Indo-Iranian shared one innovation with a group of languages that linguists labeled the sat∂m group: Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, Albanian, Armenian, and perhaps Phrygian. Among the sat∂m languages, Proto-Indo-European *k– before a front vowel (like *k’mtom ‘hundred’) was regularly shifted to š– or s– (like Avestan Iranian sat∂m). This same group of languages exhibited a second shared innovation: Proto-Indo-European *kw- (called a labiovelar, pronounced like the first sound in queen) changed to k-. The third innovation was shared between just a subgroup within the sat∂m languages: Indo-Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic. It is called the ruki-rule: the original sound [*-s] in Proto-Indo-European was shifted to [*-sh] after the consonants r, u, k, and i. Language branches that do not share these innovations are assumed to have split away and lost regular contact with the sat∂m and ruki groups before they occurred.

  TABLE 3.1

  The First Appearance in Written Records of the Twelve Branches of Indo-European

  The Celtic and Italic branches do not display the sat∂m innovations or the ruki rule; both exhibit a number of archaic features and also share a few innovations. Celtic languages, today limited to the British Isles and nearby coastal France, were spoken over much of central and western Europe, from Austria to Spain, around 600–300 BCE, when the earliest records of Celtic appeared. Italic languages were spoken in the Italian peninsula at about 600–500 BCE, but today, of course, Latin has many daughters—the Romance languages. In most comparative studies of the Indo-European languages, Italic and Celtic would be placed among the earliest branches to separate from the main trunk. The people who spoke Pre-
Celtic and Pre-Italic lost contact with the eastern and northern groups of Indo-European speakers before the sat∂m and ruki innovations occurred. We cannot yet discuss where the boundaries of these linguistic regions were, but we can say that Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic departed to form a western regional–chronological block, whereas the ancestors of Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, and Armenian stayed behind and shared a set of later innovations. Tocharian, the easternmost Indo-European language, spoken in the Silk Road caravan cities of the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, also lacked the sat∂m and ruki innovations, so it seems to have departed equally early to form an eastern branch.

  Greek shared a series of linguistic features uniquely with the Indo-Iranian languages, but it did not adopt the sat∂m innovation or the ruki rule.17 Pre-Greek and Pre-Indo-Iranian must have developed in neighboring regions, but the speakers of Pre-Greek departed before the sat∂m or the ruki innovations appeared. The shared features included morphological innovations, conventions in heroic poetry, and vocabulary. In morphology, Greek and Indo-Iranian shared two important innovations: the augment, a prefix e– before past tenses (although, because it is not well attested in the earliest forms of Greek and Indo-Iranian, the augment might have developed independently in each branch much later); and a mediopassive verb form with a suffixed –i. In weapon vocabulary they shared common terms for bow (*taksos), arrow (*eis-), bowstring (*jya-), and club (*uágros), or cudgel, the weapon specifically associated with Indra and his Greek counterpart Herakles. In ritual they shared a unique term for a specific ritual, the hecatomb, or sacrifice of a hundred cows; and they referred to the gods with the same shared epithet, those who give riches. They retained shared cognate names for at least three deities: (1) Erinys/Sara yū, a horse-goddess in both traditions, born of a primeval creator-god and the mother of a winged horse in Greek or of the Divine Twins in Indo-Iranian, who are often represented as horses; (2) Kérberos/Śárvara, the multiheaded dog that guarded the entrance to the Otherworld; and (3) Pan/Pūán, a pastoral god that guarded the flocks, symbolically associated in both traditions with the goat. In both traditions, goat entrails were the specific funeral offering made to the hell-hound Kérberos/Śárvara during a funeral ceremony. In poetry, ancient Greek, like Indo-Iranian, had two kinds of verse: one with a twelve-syllable line (the Sapphic/Alcaic line) and another with an eight-syllable line. No other Indo-European poetic tradition shared both these forms. They also shared a specific poetic formula, meaning “fame everlasting,” applied to heroes, found in this exact form only in the Rig Veda and Homer. Both Greek and Indo-Iranian used a specific verb tense, the imperfect, in poetic narratives about past events.18