Figure 16.16 Andronovo pots that are described as typical Alkakul (A) or Alakul with Federovo traits (A + F) from the Priplodyi Log kurgan cemetery I on the Ui River, Chelyabinsk oblast, Russia. Traits of both styles can appear on the same pot. After Maliutina 1984, figure 4.
The spread of the Andronovo horizon represented the maturation and consolidation of an economy based on cattle and sheep herding almost everywhere in the grasslands east of the Urals. Permanent settlements appeared in every region, occupied by 50 to 250 people who lived in large houses. Wells provided water through the winter. Some settlements had elaborate copper-smelting ovens. Small-scale agriculture might have played a minor role in some places, but there is no direct evidence for it. In the northern steppes cattle were more important than sheep (cattle 40% of bones, sheep/goat 37%, horses 17% in the Ishim steppes), whereas in central Kazakhstan there were more sheep than cattle, and more horses as well (sheep/goat 46%, cattle 29%, horse 24%).33
Although it is common in long-established tribal culture areas for a relatively homogeneous material culture to mask multiple languages, the link between language and material culture often is strong among the early generations of long-distance migrants. The source of the Andronovo horizon can be identified in an extraordinary burst of economic, military, and ritual innovations by a single culture—the Sintashta culture. Many of its customs were retained by its eastern daughter, the Petrovka culture. The language spoken in Sintashta strongholds very likely was an older form of the language spoken by the Petrovka and Andronovo people. Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian dialects probably spread with Andronovo material culture.
Most Andronovo metals, like Petrovka metals, were tin-bronzes. Andronovo miners mined tin in the Zeravshan and probably on the upper Irtysh. Andronovo copper mines were active in two principal regions: one was south of Karaganda near Uspenskyi, working malachite and azurite oxide ores; and the other was to the west in the southern Ulutau Hills near Dzhezkazgan, working sulfide ores. (Marked on figure 15.9.) One mine of at least seven known in the Dzhezkazgan region was 1,500 m long, 500 m wide, and 15 m deep. Ore was transported from the Uspenskyi mine to copper-smelting settlements such as Atasu 1, where excavation revealed three key-shaped smelting ovens with 4 m-long stone-lined air shafts feeding into two-level circular ovens. The Karaganda-region copper mines are estimated to have produced 30 to 50,000 metric tons of smelted copper during the Bronze Age.34 The labor and facilities at these places suggest enterprises organized for export.
Trade with and perhaps looting raids into Central Asia left clear evidence surprisingly far north in the steppes. Wheel-made Namamzga VI pottery was found in the Andronovo settlement of Pavlovka, in northern Kazkahstan near Kokchetav, 2,000 km north of Bactria. It was 12% of the pottery on two house floors. The remainder was Andronovo pottery of the Federovo type.35 The imported Central Asian pots were made with very fine white or red clay fabrics, largely undecorated, and in forms such as pedestaled dishes that were typical of Namazaga VI (figure 16.17). Pavlovka was a settlement of about 5 ha with both Petrovka and Federovo pottery. The Central Asian pottery is said to have been associated with the Federovo component.
Figure 16.17 Pavlovka, an Alakul-Federovo settlement in the Kokchetav region of northern Kazakhstan, with imported Namazga VI pottery constituting more than 10% of the sherds on two house floors. After Maliutina 1991, figures 4 and 5.
PROTO-VEDIC CULTURES IN THE CENTRAL ASIAN CONTACT ZONE
By about 1900 BCE Petrovka migrants had started to mine copper in the Zeravshan valley at Tugai. They were followed by larger contingents of Andronovo people who mined tin at Karnab and Mushiston. After 1800 BCE Andronovo mining camps, kurgan cemeteries, and pastoral camps spread into the middle and upper Zeravshan valley. Other Andronovo groups moved into the lower Zeravshan and the delta of the lower Amu Darya (now located in the desert east of the modern delta) and became settled irrigation farmers, known as the Tazabagyab variant of the Andronovo culture. They lived in small settlements of a few large dug-out houses, much like Andronovo houses; used Andronovo pottery and Andronovo-style curved bronze knives and twisted earrings; conducted in-settlement copper smelting as at many Andronovo settlements; but buried their dead in large flat-grave cemeteries like the one at Kokcha 3, with more than 120 graves, rather than in kurgan cemeteries (figure 16.18).36
About 1800 BCE the walled BMAC centers decreased sharply in size, each oasis developed its own types of pottery and other objects, and Andronovo-Tazabagyab pottery appeared widely in the Bactrian and Margian countryside. Fred Hiebert termed this the post-BMAC period to emphasize the scale of the change, although occupation continued at many BMAC strongholds and Namazga VI—style pottery still was made inside them.37 But Andronovo-Tazabagyab coarse incised pottery occurred both within post-BMAC fortifications and in occasional pastoral camps located outside the mudbrick walls. Italian survey teams exposed a small Andronovo-Tazabagyab dug-out house southeast of the post-BMAC walled fortress at Takhirbai 3, and American excavations found a similar occupation outside the walls of a partly abandoned Gonur. By this time the people living just outside the crumbling walls and at least some of those now living inside were probably closely related. To the east, in Bactria, people making similar incised coarse ware camped atop the vast ruins (100 ha) of the Djarkutan city. Some walled centers such as Mollali-Tepe continued to be occupied but at a smaller scale. In the highlands above the Bactrian oases in modern Tajikistan, kurgan cemeteries of the Vaksh and Bishkent type appeared with pottery that mixed elements of the late BMAC and Andronovo-Tazabagyab traditions.38
Between about 1800 and 1600 BCE, control over the trade in minerals (copper, tin, turquoise) and pastoral products (horses, dairy, leather) gave the Andronovo-Tazabagyab pastoralists great economic power in the old BMAC oasis towns and strongholds, and chariot warfare gave them military control. Social, political, and even military integration probably followed. Eventually the simple incised pottery of the steppes gave way to new ceramic traditions, principally gray polished wares in Margiana and the Kopet Dag, and painted wares in Bactria and eastward into Tajikistan.
Figure 16.18 Graves of the Tazabagyab-Andronovo culture at the Kokcha 3 cemetery on the old course of the lower Amu-Darya River. Pottery like this was widespread in the final phase of occupation in the declining BMAC walled towns of Central Asia, 1700–1500 BCE. After Tolstov and Kes’ 1960, figure 55.
By 1600 BCE all the old trading towns, cities, and brick-built fortified estates of eastern Iran and the former BMAC region in Central Asia were abandoned. Malyan, the largest city on the Iranian plateau, was reduced to a small walled compound and tower occupied within a vast ruin, where elite administrators, probably representatives of the Elamite kings, still resided atop the former city. Pastoral economies spread across Iran and into Baluchistan, where clay images of riders on horseback appeared at Pirak about 1700 BCE. Chariot corps appeared across the Near East as a new military technology. An Old Indic-speaking group of chariot warriors took control of a Hurrian-speaking kingdom in north Syria about 1500 BCE. Their oaths referred to deites (Indra, Varuna, Mithra, and the Nasatyas) and concepts (r’ta) that were the central deities and concepts in the Rig Veda, and the language they spoke was a dialect of the Old Indic Sanskrit of the Rig Veda.39 The Mitanni dynasts came from the same ethnolinguistic population as the more famous Old Indic-speakers who simultaneously pushed eastward into the Punjab, where, according to many Vedic scholars, the Rig Veda was compiled about 1500–1300 BCE. Both groups probably originated in the hybrid cultures of the Andronovo/Tazabagyab/coarse-incised-ware type in Bactria and Margiana.40
The language of the Rig Veda contained many traces of its syncretic origins. The deity name Indra and the drug-deity name Soma, the two central elements of the religion of the Rig Veda, were non-Indo-Iranian words borrowed in the contact zone. Many of the qualities of the Indo-Iranian god of might/victory, Verethraghna, were transferred to the adopted god Indra, who became the central deity of the developing Old Indic culture.41 Indra wa
s the subject of 250 hymns, a quarter of the Rig Veda. He was associated more than any other deity with Soma, a stimulant drug (perhaps derived from Ephedra) probably borrowed from the BMAC religion. His rise to prominence was a peculiar trait of the Old Indic speakers. Indra was regarded in later Avestan Iranian texts as a minor demon. Iranian dialects probably developed in the northern steppes among Andronovo and Srubnaya people who had kept their distance from the southern civilizations. Old Indic languages and rituals developed in the contact zone of Central Asia.42
Loan Words Borrowed into Indo-Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit
The Old Indic of the Rig Veda contained at least 383 non—Indo-European words borrowed from a source belonging to a different language family. Alexander Lubotsky has shown that common Indo-Iranian, the parent of both Old Indic and Iranian, probably had already borrowed words from the same non—Indo-European language that later enriched Old Indic. He compiled a list of 55 non—Indo-European words that were borrowed into common Indo-Iranian before Old Indic or Avestan evolved, and then later were inherited into one or both of the daughters from common Indo-Iranian. The speakers of common Indo-Iranian were in touch with and borrowed terms from the same foreign language group that later was the source from which Old Indic speakers borrowed even more terms. This discovery carries significant implications for the geographic locations of common Indo-Iranian and formative Old Indic—they must have been able to interact with the same foreign-language group.
Among the fifty-five terms borrowed into common Indo-Iranian were the words for bread (*nagna-), ploughshare (sphāra), canal (*iavīā), brick (*išt(i)a-, camel (*Huštra-), ass (*khara-) sacrificing priest (*ućig-), soma (*anću-), and Indra (*indra-). The BMAC fortresses and cities are an excellent source for the vocabulary related to irrigation agriculture, bricks, camels, and donkeys; and the phonology of the religious terms is the same, so probably came from the same source. The religious loans suggest a close cultural relationship between some people who spoke common Indo-Iranian and the occupants of the BMAC fortresses. These borrowed southern cults might possibly have been one of the features that distinguished the Petrovka culture from Sintashta. Petrovka people were the first to migrate from the northern steppes to Tugai on the northern edge of Central Asia.
Lubotsky suggested that Old Indic developed as a vanguard language south of Indo-Iranian, closer to the source of the loans. The archaeological evidence supports Lubotsky’s suggestion. The earliest Old Indic dialects probably developed about 1800–1600 BCE in the contact zone south of the Zeravshan among northern-derived immigrants who were integrated with and perhaps ruled over the declining fortunes of the post-BMAC citadels. They retained a decidedly pastoral set of values. In the Rig Veda the clouds were compared to dappled cows full of milk; milk and butter were the symbols of prosperity; milk, butter, cattle, and horses were the proper offerings to the gods; Indra was compared to a mighty bull; and wealth was counted in fat cattle and swift horses. Agricultural products were never offered to the gods. The people of the Rig Veda did not live in brick houses and had no cities, although their enemies, the Dasyus, did live in walled strongholds. Chariots were used in races and war; the gods drove chariots across the sky. Almost all important deities were masculine. The only important female deity was Dawn, and she was less powerful than Indra, Varuna, Mithra, Agni, or the Divine Twins. Funerals included both cremation (as in Federovo graves) and inhumation (as in Andronovo and Tazabagyab graves). Steppe cultures are an acceptable source for all these details of belief and practice, whereas the culture of the BMAC, with its female deity in a flounced skirt, brick fortresses, and irrigation agriculture, clearly is not.
During the initial phase of contact, the Sintashta or the Petrovka cultures or both borrowed some vocabulary and rituals from the BMAC, accounting for the fifty-five terms in common Indo-Iranian. These included the drug soma, which remained in Iranian ritual usage as haoma. In the second phase of contact, the speakers of Old Indic borrowed much more heavily from the same language when they lived in the shadows of the old BMAC settlements and began to explore southward into Afghanistan and Iran. Archaeology shows a pattern quite compatible with that suggested by the linguistic evidence.
THE STEPPES BECOME A BRIDGE ACROSS EURASIA
The Eurasian steppe is often regarded as a remote and austere place, poor in resources and far from the centers of the civilized world. But during the Late Bronze Age the steppes became a bridge between the civilizations that developed on the edges of the continent in Greece, the Near East, Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and China. Chariot technology, horses and horseback riding, bronze metallurgy, and a strategic location gave steppe societies an importance they never before had possessed. Nephrite from Lake Baikal appeared in the Carpathian foothills in the Borodino hoard; horses and tin from the steppes appeared in Iran; pottery from Bactria appeared in a Federovo settlement in northern Kazakhstan; and chariots appeared across the ancient world from Greece to China. The road from the steppes to China led through the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, where desert-edge cemeteries preserved the dessicated mummies of brown-haired, white-skinned, wool-wearing people dated as early as 1800 BCE. In Gansu, on the border between China and the Tarim Basin, the Qijia culture acquired horses, trumpet-shaped earrings, cast bronze ring-pommel single-edged knives and axes in steppe styles between about 2000 and 1600 BCE.45 By the time the first Chinese state emerged, beginning about 1800 BCE, it was exchanging innovations with the West. The Srubnaya and Andronovo horizons had transformed the steppes from a series of isolated cultural ponds to a corridor of communication. That transformation permanently altered the dynamics of Eurasian history.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Words and Deeds
The Indo-European problem can be solved today because archaeological discoveries and advances in linguistics have eaten away at problems that remained insoluble as recently as fifteen years ago. The lifting of the Iron Curtain after 1991 made the results of steppe research more easily available to Western scholars and created new cooperative archaeological projects and radiocarbon dating programs. Linguists like Johanna Nichols, Sarah Thomason, and Terrence Kaufman came up with new ways of understanding language spread and convergence. The publication of the Khvalynsk cemetery and the Sintashta chariot burials revealed unsuspected richness in steppe prehistory. Linguistic and archaeological discoveries now converge on the probability that Proto-Indo-European was spoken in the Pontic-Caspian steppes between 4500 and 2500 BCE, and alternative possibilities are increasingly difficult to square with new evidence. Gimbutas and Mallory preceded me in arguing this case. I began this book by trying to answer questions that still bothered many reasonable observers.
One question was whether prehistoric language borders could be detected in prehistoric material culture. I suggested that they were correlated at persistent frontiers, a generally rare phenomenon that was surprisingly common among the prehistoric cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Another problem was the reluctance of Western archaeologists and the overenthusiasm of Eastern European archaeologists to use migration as an explanation for prehistoric culture change, a divergence in approach that produced Eastern interpretations that Western archaeologists would not take seriously. I introduced models from demographics, sociology, and anthropology that describe how migration works as a predictable, regular human behavior in an attempt to bring both sides to the middle. The most divisive problem was the absence of convincing evidence indicating when horse domestication and horseback riding began. Bit wear might settle the issue through the presence or absence of a clear riding-related pathology on horse teeth. A separate but related debate swirled around the question of whether pastoral nomadism was possible as early as the Yamnaya horizon, or if it depended on later horseback riding, which in this argument only began in the Iron Age; or perhaps it depended on state economies, which also appeared on the steppe border during the Iron Age. The Samara Valley Project examined the botanical and seasonal aspects of a Bronze Age steppe pastor
al economy and found that it did not rely on cultivated grain even in year-round permanent settlements. Steppe pastoralism was entirely self-sustaining and independent in the Bronze Age; wild seed plants were plentiful, and wild seeds were eaten where grain was not cultivated. Pastoral nomadism did not depend for its food supply on Iron Age states. Finally, the narrative culture history of the western steppes was impenetrable to most Western linguists and archaeologists. Much of this book is devoted to my efforts to cut a path through the tangle of arguments about chronology, culture groups, origins, migrations, and influences. I have tried to reduce my areas of ignorance about steppe archaeology, but am mindful of the few years I spent doing federally funded archaeology in Massachusetts, less than half the size of the single Samara oblast on the Volga, and how we all thought it an impossible task to try to learn the archaeology of Massachusetts and neighboring Rhode Island—one-tenth the size of Samara oblast. Nevertheless, I have found a path that makes sense through what I have read and seen. Debate will continue on all these subjects, but I sense that a chord is emerging from the different notes.
THE HORSE AND THE WHEEL
Innovations in transportation technology are among the most powerful causes of change in human social and political life. The introduction of the private automobile created suburbs, malls, and superhighways; transformed heavy industry; generated a vast market for oil; polluted the atmosphere; scattered families across the map; provided a rolling, heated space in which young people could escape and have sex; and fashioned a powerful new way to express personal status and identity. The beginning of horseback riding, the invention of the heavy wagon and cart, and the development of the spoke-wheeled chariot had cumulative effects that unfolded more slowly but eventually were equally profound. One of those effects was to transform Eurasia from a series of unconnected cultures into a single interacting system. How that happened is a principal focus of this book.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 48
