The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
Page 12
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 Proto-Indo-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 off-shoot, 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 Indo-European 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 Proto-Uralic must have inherited these shared elements from some very ancient common linguistic parent—perhaps we might call it a “grandmother-tongue.” 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-Indo-European, 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 proto-languages; 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 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):
to give or to sell; P-U *mexe from PIE *h2mey-gw- ‘to change’, ‘exchange’
to bring, lead, or draw; P-U *wetä- from PIE *wedh-e/o- ‘to lead’, ‘to marry’, ‘to wed’
to wash; P-U *mośke- from PIE *mozg-eye/o- ‘to wash’, ‘to submerge’
to fear; P-U *pele- from PIE *pelh1- ‘to shake’, ‘cause to tremble’
to plait, to spin; P-U *puna- from PIE *pn.H-e/o- ‘to plait’, ‘to spin’
to walk, wander, go; P-U *kulke- from PIE *kwelH-e/o- ‘it/he/she walks around’, ‘wanders’
to drill, to bore; P-U *pura- from PIE *bhH- ‘to bore’, ‘to drill’
shall, must, to have to; P-U *kelke- from PIE *skelH- ‘to be guilty’, ‘shall’, ‘must’
long thin pole; P-U *śalka- from PIE *ghalgho- ‘well-pole’, ‘gallows’, ‘long pole’
merchandise, price; P-U *wosa from PIE *wosā ‘merchandise’, ‘to buy’
water; P-U *wete from PIE *wed-er/en, ‘water’, ‘river’
sinew; P-U *sōne from PIE *sneH(u)- ‘sinew’
name; P-U *nime- from PIE *h3neh3mn- ‘name’
Another thirty-six words were borrowed from differentiated Indo-European 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 Indo-European—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) *kwe/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 proto-languages 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 “quasistock.”16 Joseph Greenberg saw Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic as part
icularly 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-Indo-European 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 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 Proto-Indo-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-Indo-European 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 Proto-Indo-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 Proto-Indo-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 Proto-Kartvelian. 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 deposits 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 Proto-Uralic 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 Pontic-Caspian 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 st
riking and magnificent part of 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 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-Indo-European. 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.