In the 2,000 years before the IndoEuropeans who remained in the
homeland began to write history, the success of the agricultural
revolution brought a population explosion to the Indo-European
community. The pressure of population, we may surmise, compelled the
migration of successive waves of Indo-Europeans to fertile areas that
were not yet cultivated.
The linguistic translocation of the Indo-European homeland from
northern Europe to Asia Minor requires drastic revisions in theories
about the migratory paths along which the IndoEuropean languages must
have spread across Eurasia. Thus, the hypothetical Aryans who were said
to have borne the so-called Aryan, or Indo-lranian, language from Europe
to India—and who were conscripted into service as the Nordic supermen
of Nazi mythology—turn out to be the real Indoiranians who made the
more plausible migration from Asia Minor around the northern slopes of
the Himalaya Mountains and down through modern Afghanistan to settle in
India. Europe is seen, therefore, as the destination, rather than the
source, of Indo-European migration.
Speakers of the Hittite, Luwian and other Anatolian languages made
relatively small migrations within the homeland, and their languages
died there with them. The more extensive migrations of speakers of the
Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian dialects began with the breakup of the main
Indo-European language community in the third millennium B.C. Two groups
of Indo-Iranian speakers made their way East during the second
millennium B.C. One of them, speakers of the Kafiri languages, survives
to this day in Nuristan, on the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush in
northeast Afghanistan. In Five Continents, a posthumous book
recounting his many botanical expeditions between 1916 and 1933, Vavilov
speculated that the Kafirs might perpetuate some "original
relics" of Indo-lranian.
The second group of Indo-Iranians, who followed a more southerly path
into the Indus Valley, spoke a dialect from which the historical
languages of India are descended. Their earliest literary ancestor is
embodied in the Rig Veda hymns, written in an ancient variant of
Sanskrit. The indigenous peoples of the Indus Valley, known from the
archaeological discoveries at their capital Mohenjo-Daro, were
apparently displaced by the Indo-Iranians. After the separation of the
Indo-Iranians and their departure for the east, the Greek-Armenian
community remained for a time in the homeland. There, judging by the
numbers of loan words, they had contact with speakers of Kartvelian,
Tocharian and the ancient Indo-European languages that later evolved
into the historical European languages. One such borrowing from the
Kartvelian became the Homeric koas, "fleece."
A bilingual cuneiform tablet found in the Hattusas archives records
the mythological tale of a hunter in the then already dead Hurrian
language along with a translation into Hittite. This remarkable
discovery gave us the Hurrian word ashi from which Homer's askos,
for "hide" or"fur," apparently stemmed. Before
their migration to the Aegean, the Greeks borrowed the Hittite word kursa,
which by a familiar phonological shift became bursa, another
synonym for "fleece." These words seem to confirm the Greeks'
belief that their ancestors had come from western Asia, as recounted in
the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, who sought the Golden Fleece in
Colchis, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. The evidence that the
Greeks came thence to their historical homeland puts the Greek
"colonies" on the northern shore of the Black Sea in a new
light. The colonies may now be considered as very early settlements that
were established when the Greeks began migrating to their final home in
the Aegean.
The historical European languages—those that left literary
remains— provide evidence that the dialects from which they descended
had found their way into central Asia along with the Tocharians. These
languages have many words in common. An example is the word for
"salmon," once regarded as a weighty argument for a homeland
in northern Europe. Salmon abounded in the Baltic rivers of Europe, and
the word lax (German Lachs) in the Germanic languages is
perhaps echoed by lak- in Hindu, for a lacquer of a pink color
that evokes the color of salmon flesh. One species of salmon, Salmo
trutta, is found in the streams of the Caucasus, and the lak-s- root
denotes "fish" in earlier and later forms of Tocharian as well
as in the ancient European languages.
The migration of the speakers of some of the early Indo-European
dialects into central Asia is established by loan words from the
Finno-Ugric language family, which gave rise to modern Finnish and
Hungarian. Under the influence of Finno -Ugric, Tocharian underwent a
complete transformation of its system of consonants. Words in the
ancient European languages that are clearly borrowed from the Altaic and
other languages of central Asia give further testimony to the sojourn of
their speakers there.
Circling back to the west, the ancient Europeans settled for a time
north of the Black Sea in a loosely federated community. Thus, it is not
entirely wrong to think of this region as a second homeland for these
peoples. From the end of the third through the first millennium B.C.,
speakers of ancient European languages spread gradually into Europe.
Their coming is demonstrated archaeologically by the arrival of the
seminomadic "pit grave" culture, which buried its dead in
shafts, or barrows.
A anthropometry, which is the scientific measurement of the human
body, has begun to chart the imposition of the Hittite physiognomy,
typified in Hittite reliefs, on certain European populations. The
blueeyed, blond-haired Nordic must still be regarded as the product of
interbreeding between the Indo-European invaders and their predecessors
in the settlement of Europe. The culture of the indigenous populations
of Europe is memorialized by the megalithic structures, such as
Stonehenge, which they built near the periphery of the continent.
The languages of the previous inhabitants of Europe, with the
exception of Basque—a non-lndo-European language with possible remote
relatives in the Caucasus—were crowded out by the Indo-European
dialects. Nonetheless, those languages made contributions to the
historical European language families that account for certain
differences among them. In his study of the megalithic cultures and
their disappearance, as well as of the spread of farming from the
ancient Near East, the British archaeologist Colin Renfrew has reached
conclusions about the coming of the IndoEuropeans that agree well with
ours [see "The Origins of Indo-European Languages," by Colin
Renfrew; SCIENTIFIC AMERlCAN, October, 1989 ].
Our deductions, resting so preponderantly on linguistic evidence,
must find confirmation in archaeological investigations that remain to
be done. Undoubtedly, the counting of basepair substitutions in the DNA
of human cells will contribute to the family tree of the speakers of the
Indo-European languages and to the mapping of their migrations.
Anthropometry and history also will contribute to the ultimate picture.
Pending the elaboration and correction of our work, we may state with a
high order of certainty that the homeland of the Indo-Europeans,
the cradle of much of the world's civilization the
cradle of much of the world's civilization, was in the ancient Near
East: "Ex oriente lux!"
1 INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-EUROPEANS: A RECONSTRUCTION AND
HISTORICAL TYPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF A PROTOLANGUAGE AND PROTOCULTURE.
Parts I and 11. Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjacheslav V. Ivanov. Tbilisi
State University, 1984.
2. ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE: THE PUZZLE OF INDO-EUROPEAN
ORIGlNS. Colin Renfrew. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
3. RECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGES AND CULTURES: ABSTRACTS AND
MATERlALS FROM THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL INTERDISC1PLlNARY SYMPOSIUM ON
LANGUAGE AND PREHISTORY, ANN ARBOR, NOVEMBER 8-12, 1988. Edited by
Vitaly Shevoroshkin. Studienverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeier, 1989.
4. IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS: LANGUAGE, ARCHAEOLOGY AND
MYTH. J. P. Mallory. Thames and Hudson, 1989.
5. WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE: INDO-EUROPEANS AND
PRE-INDO-EUROPEANS. Edited by John Greppin and T. L. Markey. Karoma
Publishers, Inc., 1990.
