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

by David W. Anthony

  The first three clusters near Varna, Ezero, and the Cotsofeni territory seem to have been chosen for their proximity to settled areas, perhaps by ambitious men seeking clients, whereas the last two clusters seem to have been chosen for their pastures, perhaps by others who wanted to increase their herds. In all places the Yamnaya funeral ritual was similar, and it was not native but intrusive. Kurgans were 15–60 m in diameter. The grave pit floors often had traces of organic mats, some painted with designs, as in the steppes (figure 14.6). The central graves contained an adult (80% are males in Bulgaria) buried supine with raised knees (some were contracted on the side), with the head oriented toward the west (or, in Bulgaria, sometimes to the south). Most had Proto–Europoid skull–face shapes, like the predominant element in the Pontic steppe Yamnaya population. Most graves contained no grave goods. A few contained a flint tool, beads of pierced dog teeth, or a temple ring with one and a half twists of copper, silver, or gold. In Hungary a lump of red ochre was placed near the head; in Romania and Bulgaria, in addition to a lump placed near the head, red ochre covered the floor or stained the skull, feet, legs, and hands. At Kétegyháza, where there was no local source of hematite from which to make red ochre, a lump of clay was painted red to imitate true ochre, a clear indication of a cult practice imported from a region with different minerals. One grave at Gurbaneşti in Romania contained a clay vessel with carbonized hemp seeds, the earliest evidence for the burning of Cannabis. Sherrat suggested that Cannabis smoking was introduced to the Danube valley by the Yamnaya immigrants. In northeast Bulgaria at Plachidol, one Yamnaya grave (k. 1, gr. 1) had four wooden wagon wheels placed at the corners just as in many wagon graves in the steppes (figure 14.6). Cemeteries in this cluster near Varna contained anthropomorphic stone stelae like the Yamnaya and Kemi–Oba stelae in the steppes.

  Figure 14.6 Kurgan graves and ceramics from Bulgaria and eastern Hungary associated with the Yamnaya migration about 3000 BCE. The graves under Tarnava kurgan 1 in northwestern Bulgaria contained principally Cotsofeni pottery, but one grave under kurgan 2 contained a typical Yamnaya beaker. After Ecsedy 1979; Panaiotov 1989; and Sherratt 1986.

  The source of the Yamnaya migration is commonly said to have been in the lower Dniester steppes, where Yamnaya graves also were consistently oriented to the west. But the lower Dniester steppes were occupied by the Usatovo culture between 3100 and 2800 BCE. Yamnaya graves in the Dniester steppes are consistently stratified above Usatovo graves, and most of them are radiocarbon dated between 2800 and 2400 BCE, so most of them postdated the Danube valley migration. The Dniester variant of Yamnaya might instead represent a return migration from the Danube valley back into the steppes, since almost all significant migration streams produce a flow back of return migration. The Yamnaya wagon graves (Kholmskoe, Vishnevoe, and others) located in the steppes just north of the Danube delta are stratified above Usatovo graves, so probably were made later than the Yamnaya wagon grave in Bulgaria at Plachidol. The Danube valley migration probably originated east of the Usatovo area, in the steppes around the South Bug, Ingul, and Dnieper valleys. Western–oriented Yamnaya graves are found as a minor variant in Yamnaya cemeteries in the Dnieper–South Bug region. The oldest dated Yamnaya wagon grave (ca. 3000 BCE) at Bal’ki (k. 1 gr. 57) on the lower Dnieper was oriented to the west.22

  What started this movement? A popular candidate has been a shortage of pasture in the steppes, but I find it hard to believe that there was any absolute shortage of pasture during the initial expansion of a new wagon–based economy. If the migration into the Danube valley began with raiding that then developed into a migration, we have to ask what caused the raiding. In the discussion of the causes of steppe warfare, in chapter 11, I mentioned the Proto–Indo–European Trito myth, which legitimized the cattle raid; the likelihood that competition between high–status families would lead to escalating bride–prices calculated in livestock, which might create a consumer shortage of animals and pastures in places where no absolute shortage existed; and the Proto–Indo–European initiation ritual that sent all young men out raiding.

  The institution of the Männerbünde or korios, the warrior brotherhood of young men bound by oath to one another and to their ancestors during a ritually mandated raid, has been reconstructed as a central part of Proto–Indo–European initiation rituals.23 One material trait linked to these ceremonies was the dog or wolf; the young initiates were symbolized by the dog or wolf and in some Indo–European traditions wore dog or wolf skins during their initiation. The canine teeth of dogs were frequently worn as pendants in Yamnaya graves in the western Pontic steppes, particularly in the Ingul valley, one probable region of origin for the Yamnaya migration.24 A second material trait linked to the korios was the belt. The korios raiders wore a belt and little else (like the warrior figures in some later Germanic and Celtic art, e.g., the Anglo–Saxon Finglesham belt buckle). The initiates on a raid wore two belts, their leader one, symbolizing that the leader was bound by a single oath to the god of war/ancestors, and the initiates were double–bound to the god/ancestors and to the leader. Stone anthropomorphic stelae were erected over hundreds of Yamnaya graves between the Ingul and the South Bug valleys, in the same region where dog–canine pendants were common. The most common clothing element carved or painted on the stelae was a belt, often with an axe or a pair of sandals attached to it. Usually it was a single belt, perhaps symbolizing the leader of a raid. That stone stelae with belts were erected also by the Yamnaya migrants in Bulgaria near Plachidol provides another link between the migrants and the symbolism of the korios raid.25

  There must also have been other pulls, positive rumors about opportunities in the Danube valley, because the migrants did not just raid but decided to live in the target region. These attractions are difficult to identify now, although the opportunity to acquire clients might have been a powerful pull.

  Language Shift and the Yamnaya Migration

  The Yamnaya migration occurred at a time of great fluidity and change throughout southeastern Europe. In Bulgaria, the tells in the upland plains of the Balkans at Ezero, Yunatsite, and Dubene–Sarovka were reoccupied about 3300–3200 BCE at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age (EBI) after almost a millennium of abandonment. The reoccupied tell settlements were fortified with substantial stone walls or ditches and palisades. One target of the Yamnaya migration was precisely this region. Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries could be seen for many miles; visually, they dominated the landscapes around them. In contrast, local cemeteries in the lower Danube valley and the Balkans, like the EBI cemetery at the Bereket tell settlement near Stara Zagora, usually had no visible surface monuments.26

  A series of new artifact types diffused very widely across the lower and middle Danube valleys in connection with the Yamnaya migration. Concave–based arrowheads similar to steppe arrowheads appeared in the newly occupied tell sites in Bulgaria (Ezero) and in Aegean Macedonia (Dikili–Tash IIIB). These possibly were a sign of warfare with intrusive Yamnaya raiding groups. A new ceramic style spread across the entire middle and lower Danube, including the Morava and Struma valleys leading to Greece and the Aegean, and in Aegean Macedonia. The defining trait of this style was cord–impressed pottery encrusted with white paint.27 White–encrusted, cord–impressed pottery appeared also in the Yamnaya graves. The Yamnaya immigrants could, perhaps, have played a role in joining one region to another and helping to spread this new style. But the pottery styles they spread were not their own. The Yamnaya immigrants usually deposited no pottery in their graves, and, when they did, they borrowed local ceramic styles, so their ceramic footprint is almost invisible.

  Many Yamnaya kurgans in the lower Danube valley contained Cotsofeni ceramic vessels. The Cotsofeni culture evolved in mountain refuges in western Romania and Transylvania beginning about 3500 BCE, probably from Old European roots. Cotsofeni settlements were small agricultural hamlets of a few houses. Their owners cremated their dead and buried the ashes in flat graves, some of which contained ri
veted daggers like Usatovo daggers.28 When Yamnaya herders reached the plains around Craiova, they probably realized that control over this region was the key to movement up and down the Danube valley through the mountain passes around the Iron Gates. They established alliances or patron–client contracts with the leaders of the Cotsofeni communities, through which they obtained Cotsofeni pottery (and probably other less visible Cotsofeni products), as Usatovo patrons obtained Tripolye pottery. Cotsofeni pottery then was carried into other regions by Yamnaya people. A Cotsofeni vessel was found in a Yamnaya kurgan as far afield as Tarakliya, Moldova, probably in the grave of a returned migrant. In northwestern Bulgaria, kurgan 1 at Tarnava (figure 14.6) contained an unusual concentration of six Cotsofeni pots in six Yamnaya graves.29 Most of the Yamnaya kurgans in Bulgaria contained no ceramics, but, when they did, they were often Cotsofeni ceramics.

  The situation of the Yamnaya chiefs might have been similar to that described by Barth in his account of the Yusufai Pathan invasion of the Swat valley in Pakistan in the sixteenth century. The invader, “faced with the sea of politically undifferentiated villagers proceeds to organize a central island of authority, and from this island he attempts to exercise authority over the surrounding sea. Other landowners establish similar islands, some with overlapping spheres of influence, others having unadministered gaps between them.30 The mechanism through which the immigrant chief made himself indispensable to the villagers and tied them to him was the creation of a contract in which he guaranteed protection, hospitality, and the recognition of the villagers’ rights to agricultural production in exchange for their loyalty, service, and best land. Yamnaya herding groups needed more land for pastures than did farming groups of equal population, and this could have provided a rationale for the Yamnaya people to claim use–rights over most of the available pasture lands and the migration routes that linked them, eventually creating a web of landownership that covered much of southeastern Europe. The reestablishment of tell settlements in the Balkans might have been part of a newly bifurcated economy in which farmers settled on fortified tells and increased grain production in response to reductions in their pastures, taken by their Yamnaya patrons.

  The widely separated pockets of Yamnaya settlement in the lower Danube valley and the Balkans established speakers of late Proto–Indo–European dialects in scattered islands where, if they remained isolated from one another, they could have differentiated over centuries into various Indo–European languages. The many thousands of Yamnaya kurgans in eastern Hungary suggest a more continuous occupation of the landscape by a larger population of immigrants, one that could have acquired power and prestige partly just through its numerical weight. This regional group could have spawned both pre–Italic and pre–Celtic. Bell Beaker sites of the Csepel type around Budapest, west of the Yamnaya settlement region, are dated about 2800–2600 BCE. They could have been a bridge between Yamnaya on their east and Austria/Southern Germany to their west, through which Yamnaya dialects spread from Hungary into Austria and Bavaria, where they later developed into Proto–Celtic.31 Pre–Italic could have developed among the dialects that remained in Hungary, ultimately spreading into Italy through the Urnfield and Villanovan cultures. Eric Hamp and others have revived the argument that Italic and Celtic shared a common parent, so a single migration stream could have contained dialects that later were ancestral to both.32 Archaeologically, however, the Yamnaya immigrants here, as elsewhere, left no lasting material impression except their kurgans.

  YAMNAYA CONTACTS WITH THE CORDED WARE HORIZON

  The Corded Ware horizon is often invoked as the archaeological manifestation of the cultures that introduced the northern Indo–European languages to Europe: Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic. The Corded Ware horizon spread across most of northern Europe, from Ukraine to Belgium, after 3000 BCE, with the initial rapid spread happening mainly between 2900 and 2700 BCE. The defining traits of the Corded Ware horizon were a pastoral, mobile economy that resulted in the near disappearance of settlement sites (much like Yamnaya in the steppes), the almost universal adoption of funeral rituals involving single graves under mounds (like Yamnaya), the diffusion of stone hammer–axes probably derived from Polish TRB styles, and the spread of a drinking culture linked to particular kinds of cord–decorated cups and beakers, many of which had local stylistic prototypes in variants of TRB ceramics. The material culture of the Corded Ware horizon was mostly native to northern Europe, but the underlying behaviors were very similar to those of the Yamnaya horizon—the broad adoption of a herding economy based on mobility (using ox–drawn wagons and horses), and a corresponding rise in the ritual prestige and value of livestock.33 The economy and political structure of the Corded Ware horizon certainly was influenced by what had emerged earlier in the steppes, and, as I just argued, some Corded Ware groups in southeastern Poland might have evolved from Indo–European–speaking late TRB societies through connections with Usatovo and late Tripolye. The Corded Ware horizon established the material foundation for the evolution of most of the Bronze Age cultures of the northern European plain, so most discussions of Germanic, Baltic, or Slavic origins look back to the Corded Ware horizon.

  The Yamnaya and Corded Ware horizons bordered each other in the hills between Lvov and Ivano–Frankovsk, Ukraine, in the upper Dniester piedmont around 2800–2600 BCE (see figure 14.1). At that time early Corded Ware cemeteries were confined to the uppermost headwaters of the Dniester west of Lvov, the same territory that had earlier been occupied by the late TRB communities infiltrated by late Tripolye groups. If Corded Ware societies in this region evolved from local late TRB origins, as many believe, they might already have spoken an Indo–European language. Between 2700 and 2600 BCE Corded Ware and late Yamnaya herders met each other on the upper Dniester over cups of mead or beer.34 This meeting was another opportunity for language shift, and it is possible that Pre- Germanic dialects either originated here or were enriched by this additional contact.

  The wide–ranging pattern of interaction that the Corded Ware horizon inaugurated across northern Europe provided an optimal medium for language spread. Late Proto–Indo–European languages penetrated the eastern end of this medium, either through the incorporation of Indo–European dialects in the TRB base population before the Corded Ware horizon evolved, or through Corded Ware–Yamnaya contacts later, or both. Indo–European speech probably was emulated because the chiefs who spoke it had larger herds of cattle and sheep and more horses than could be raised in northern Europe, and they had a politico–religious culture already adapted to territorial expansion. The dialects that were ancestral to Germanic probably were initially adopted in a small territory between the Dniester and the Vistula and then spread slowly. As we will see in the next chapter, Slavic and Baltic probably evolved from dialects spoken on the middle Dnieper.35

  THE ORIGINS OF GREEK

  The only major post–Anatolian branch that is difficult to derive from the steppes is Greek. One reason for this is chronological: Pre–Greek probably split away from a later set of developing Indo–European dialects and languages, not from Proto–Indo–European itself. Greek shared traits with Armenian and Phrygian, both of which probably descended from languages spoken in southeastern Europe before 1200 BCE, so Greek shared a common background with some southeastern European languages that might have evolved from the speech of the Yamnaya immigrants in Bulgaria. As noted in chapter 3, Pre–Greek also shared many traits with pre–Indo–Iranian. This linguistic evidence suggests that Pre–Greek should have been spoken on the eastern border of southeastern Europe, where it could have shared some traits with Pre–Armenian and Pre–Phrygian on the west and pre–Indo–Iranian on the east. The early western Catacomb culture would fit these requirements (see figure 15.5), as it was in touch with southeastern Europe on one side and with the developing Indo–Iranian world of the east on the other. But it is impossible, as far as I know, to identify a Catacomb–culture migration that moved directly from the western steppes into Gre
ece.

  A number of artifact types and customs connect the Mycenaean Shaft Grave princes, the first definite Greek speakers at about 1650 BCE, with steppe or southeastern European cultures. These parallels included specific types of cheekpieces for chariot horses, specific types of socketed spearheads, and even the custom of making masks for the dead, which was common on the Ingul River during the late Catacomb culture, between about 2500 and 2000 BCE. It is very difficult, however, to define the specific source of the migration stream that brought the Shaft Grave princes into Greece. The people who imported Greek or Proto–Greek to Greece might have moved several times, perhaps by sea, from the western Pontic steppes to southeastern Europe to western Anatolia to Greece, making their trail hard to find. The EHII/III transition about 2400–2200 BCE has long been seen as a time of radical change in Greece when new people might have arrived, but the resolution of this problem is outside the scope of this book.36