Indo-European

The Indo-European peoples and languages are one of the major families of humanity of prehistory, especially in the early Holocene after the End of the Last Ice Age until the Dawn of History, and onwards through Ancient History, Medieval History, and into the Modern Age.

Introduction

The Battle-Axe Culture are a group of people with a good claim to being among the earliest descendants of the original Indo-Europeans. However the Battle-Axe culture is known to have been a Germanic people who settled Norway, Sweden, and Finland. This means that they are probably centuries and millennia away from the original Indo-European homeland in the Near East and Anatolia.

First Indo-European migrations took various forms. Different countries were reached at different times. In some cases these migrations could have taken place gradually of decades, centuries, and millennia in periods of more gradual expansion. We can also imagine that this baseline state was punctuated by periodic phases of more intense, intentional, driven and wide-spread migrations.

We know from historical, archaeological, and genetic sources that around 2300 BCE peoples of the Yamnaya began to migrate in all directions from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (the area just north of the Caspian Sea and Black Sea). They moved north along the Volga and they moved westward accross the Polish and the German plains.

By 1600 BCE they had reached Denmark where the admixed with the local Beaker Folk (an ethnic group that was believed to have originated in Spain. Some scholars believe this to have been the proto-type of great Celtic people who flourish c.1250 BCE, in central Europe.

However before the Battle-Axe people had made it into Europe, copper had already made it to Europe, copper had already made it to Europe via artisans, merchants, and traders from Anatolia and the Caucasus. These travelling merchants from the Near East are believed to have arrived in Europe either through the Meditterannean or the Danube Valley.

In a largely Neolithic continent there were old “islands” of metal cultures — found in the Balkans, Spain, Greece, Crete, and Hungary. Greece – especially the island of Crete in deep Ancient History and late Prehistory – have always had ties to Egypt and the Near East.

The first Bronze Age cultures of Greece (the Early Helladic culture) seems to have been founded by immigrants from Anatolia who maintained commercial relations with the Near East, Cyclades, and Greece.

In 1900 BCE on the Greek mainland we see a radical shift in culture, architecture, burial customs, and ceramics. This is considered by many to be evidence of a large scale invasion. [3.1] Sizeable towns were built on the ruins of humble towns. A new type of grey wheel-made pottery emerged (replacing the cruder dark, hand-made pottery of the previous age). The graves of these new peoples were adorned with bronze weapons — sometimes battle-axes. It’s been suggested that the Middle Helladic culture…

The Late Helladic/Mycenaean Culture appears to have been a direct outgrowth of the Middle Helladic culture. This means that the Mycenaean’s were Greek ethnically, genetically, and culturally, speaking an Indo-European tongue that was a precursor to Classic Greek.

The language spoken by the Mycenaeans – Linear B – is known to us, having been deciphered by Ventris. One conclusion from this is that the Indo-Europeans reached mainland Greece c.1800 BCE.

Though long before even this occurred beginning c.3000 BCE/c.2700 BCE the great palatial culture of Minoan Crete flourished. They were a powerful culture at the helm of an extensive trading empire, concurrent with the early Sumerians and Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. Some assume that the vicilication of Crete was triggered by the emergence of high civilizations in Egypt and Sumer. Yet while the Cretan bronze industry was of Anatolian origin, the tholoi tombs and double-axe amulets of Early Minoan Culture c.2500-1850 BCE recall similar though older artifacts of Mesopotamia. [Roux, p.228]

Regardless of the influences upon the Minoan culture, the culture of this Indo-European people was unique. There was an eggshell color type Kamares Pottery. The palaces of Knossos, Mallia, and Phaistos resemble the layout of palaces at Mari, which makes sense as the international Minoan traders would have had close contact with a major trade city such as Mari.

The Middle Minoan Period (c.1850-1550 BCE) roughly corresponds to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, and to the Babylonian First Dynasty, exporting products and managing the products of other nations too, throughout the Mediterranean and possibly even beyond the Straight of Gibraltar. Destroyed in 1450 BCE, causes not fully known. The Mycenaeans landed on the island, impressed their mark and established an empire.

When the Indo-European’s migrated from their homeland near the Pontic-Caspian Steppe or Anatolia, each migration represents a unique branch from a common stem. In time these developed into unique genetic, ethnic, religious, and cultural identities, which nonetheless never lose their original Indo-European connection.

The unique development of each branch occurred due to a number of factors: the gene pools they admixed with, the cultures there was mutual influence with, and the unique direction the branch culture took over decades and centuries, as well as the environmental and societal challenges they faced.

Both branches penetrated in the Near East through the Caucasus or through the land of modern Iran c.2350 BCE. [3.1] One went to the massif (isolated mountains) of Armenia, to the foothills of the Taurus Mountains where they mingled with the ancient Asiatic Hurrians, and the eastern end of the Taurus. [3.1]

The second branch continued farther south. While the ancient land of Armenia lies to the NE of Mesopotamia, the other Indo-European branch continued on, skirting the Zagros on the east side, the side of the Iranian Plateau, where it appears that they seized control over an already extant tribe, the Kassites, who would one day rule Babylon. [3.1]

Yet the bulk of the Indo-Aryans / Aryans migrated from the Pontic Steppe and bypassed the Armenian massiff home of their cousins, and instead of moving south towards their brothers and sisters who mixed with the Kassites, they instead continued to the SE and ended up in the Indian provinces of Sind and Punjab, which are now in Pakistan.

There are two sites of particular importance in the region, that of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, which show us clearly that there flourished in the 3rd millennium BCE an unknown and thriving high civilization, now known as the Indus-Valley Civilization. These towns were pre-planned apparently, with brick houses and public baths, as well as an urban sewage drainage system. Painted pottery, delicately carved and inscribed seals. These are the marks of what is called Harappan Civilization (or the Indus-Valley Civilization).

Some point out similarities between the sites of Mohenjodaro/Harrapa and the cities and arts of the Sumerian civilization, and there is evidence of trade b/w proto-indians of the Harappa Culture and Mesopotamia during the Akkadian Period. The classical theory holds that the Harappa culture was destroyed by the Aryans c.1550 BCE. Others suggest other causes for the demise such as a great flood, or else an earlier date for their demise at the hands of Chalcolithic tribes of central and south India maybe c.1750 BCE.

Indo-European

Indo-European is a general name for the people speaking an Indo-European language, who are the lingusitic descendants of the Yamnaya (c.3600-2300 BCE) in Ukraine and southern Russia, settling western Europe, India, and the Near East in waves of migrations beginning c.5000 BCE (or earlier).

It has aways been known that many languages of Europe are related. Italian, Spanish, Romanian, French, and Portugese are descendantss from the ancient language of the Romans on the modern Italian Peninsula. Originally, though eventually conquering much of the Mediterranean, expanding their influences into Greece, up the Levantine Coast, where they so famously occupied Jerusalem, into Anatolia where they paid back the Galatian Celts for their occupation of Rome (the Celts of Galatia were originally from somewhere up the Danube, roughly Germany).

English, Dutch, Frisian, German, and the Scandinavian languages go back to the ancient Germans. The old languages of Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man where all derivative dialects of ancient Celtic.

In the late 18th century European scholars began to understand that these language families where not just related to one another, thus ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Latin languages where all related to one another, and all their children are distantly related. They were also related to ancient Persian and Indian languages also.

The existence of this ancient Indo-European language came as quite a surprise, remaining a marvelous discovery in the understanding the ancient unity and dispersion of ancient peoples discernible linguistically, by the language that they spoke.

Migration therefore of various groups off of this original Indo-European People and as these groups spending time in isolation and spending time apart, this completely brought out different traits in them. Varying culture, varying people, common roots but embellishment and development.

ANother possibility is that of absorbtion too. What one may call “native populations” or “local populations” were frequently absorbed by expanding/dominant cultures.

Contact itself is a possibility, although that usually accounts for loanwords, not entirely loaned languages. The 19th century thinkers believed that a long time ago there had been a single Indo-European nation who moved into Western Europe had moved to the British Isles c.5000 BCE.

Indo-European Homeland

The first evidence and indications of the homeland that we can look for are the shared vocabularies, the words that various cultures had in common. The words that were similar…

Indo-European languages often have similar words for bears, otters, vultures, cranes, salmons, beavers, oaks, junipers, and apples. Many of these are ubiquitous. However, otters and beavers suggest forest and wetland. Though also the coastal reions, perhaps oceanic in the case of otters.

This rules out a great deal of Eurasia (forest and wetland). Words such as king, wagon, and plow are also interesting. Archaeologists could therefore look for elite burials, perhaps elite residence, chariots/wagons, and agricultural tools.

Quest for Indo-European Peoples homeland had several false starts. [1.2] Though 20th century discovery of the Hittites, Luwians, and Tocharian languages has given us more clarity. Along with understaanding of the evolution large scale.

Linguists have discovered…

Indo-European Migrations

To the Balkans

One of the most interesting artistic objects associated with Usatovo Culture and Info-European migration into Lower Danube, is small stone stele depicting man or woman. [2]

These have been found along roads to copper location. Art taken from the Crimea and westward by migrants. [2] Although the area of western Black Sea and Lower Danube is fertile and abundant, a portion of pioneers continued west, some moving upstream along Danube, to the arc within the Carpathian Mountains. [2]

Commonly associated with Cotofeni culture. Moving even further they were carriers of the Corded Ware Culture, the ancestor of Italo-Celtic and Germanic branches of Indo-European languages, though there are alternative theories. [2]

To Greece

Recent research has added clarity to our understanding of Indo-European migrations, one puzzle is the origin and movement of the arrival of the Greek language into Greece, since there is little discontinuity in archaeological record, suggesting that first speakers were pastoralists – not warriors – though this makes them untraceable. [2]

Additional puzzle is the relationship between Armenian and Greek, since they are linguistically very similar, though geographically quite distant. Relation to Thracian and Macedonian languages (which are not well known) adds complexity. [2]

The custom of burying their dead in great funeral mounds lived on in Thrace well into the Roman age. The Mycenaean tholos graves and tumuli (mentioned by Homer) are “leaves from this tree”. [2]

The original Greek language broke into two branches: Mycenaean Greek written in Linear-B tablets in the Bronze Age, and living on as Ionic and Attic dialects of the classical age, and Doric surfaced a bit later. [2]

To the East

As we approached the year 2000 BCE and the third millennium comes to a close groups of Indo-Europeans began to migrate towards the east. The Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures had already been replaced by their successors. Archaeologist call them the Sintashta culture, and in a later phase the Andronovo culture. Linguists call them the Indo-Iranians. It is possible that this group called themselves ‘Aryans’ which comes from the early Persian arya- and Indian sources as árya-.

In Uzbekistan this group appears to have split up, and one of them ending up in the Punjab the other in Iran. [2] The movement of this second group documented by spread of simple grey ceramic type, found throughout Iran. [2]

Perhaps the division is religious dispute, as evidenced by the words for “demon” and “deity”, which are linguistically quite close, but opposite in meaning in each culture. Indian asura and deva. In Persian, daiva and ahura. [2]

Indo-European DNA

At the beginning of the 21st century scholars were becoming increasingly convinced of the Kurgan Hypothesis. In 2015 it was confirmed when two independent research groups discovered that Indo-European men shared a Y-DNA haplogroup called R1a. [2]

The Y-DNA haplogroup R1a is found in western Europe, Ukraine, southern Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran, and among the priestly caste on the Indian subcontinent. The related haplogroup R1b is more specific for western Indo-Europeans.

Another discovery was that Indo-Europeans shared a genetic modification that allowed them to drink milk of non-humans, such as that from goats and cows. [2] Lactase persistence gave the dairy pastoralists access to additional food, and a food source that was readily available wherever they went because they could take it with them. This is reflected in the respect and honour given cows by the Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and Indian peoples in their mythology and cultures.

However, their success was not always peaceful. We know that they had the propensity towards violence, aggression, and murder. In Western Europe there is continuity in mitochondrial DNA. However, in the same region, a typically male Y-DNA group G2a ended, indicating that the Indo-European immigrants potentially slaughtered the men and took the wives and daughters. [2]

Notes

An example of the link between Indo-European languages is the word “brother” in modern English. In Greek the term is phrater, in Sanskrit Bhrater, in Latin frater, and in Old Irish brathir. French frere. [1.3] The word sister also in French is soeur.

Indo-European languages span the entire world, and number more than 400 if dialects are included, though all are believed to stem back to a single language called PIE. [1.3] One hypothesis suggests that the steppe herders lived in the steppeland north of the Black Sea c.4000 BCE, leaving their genetic mark on most Europeans today.

A rival hypothesis suggests that the language began with early Anatolian farmers who lived in the region c.6000 BCE, and then migrated around.

Until the 1980’s the steppe hypothesis held sway among linguists and archaeologists in their search for the IE homeland, though in 1987 Colin Renfrew (a Cambridge archaeologist) proposed the idea that PIE spread with farming from Anatolia and the fertile crescent. Though many “traditional” linguists reconstructed PIE by extrapolating back from modern languages to ancient languages (from writing) and into the proto- phases. They disagreed with Renfrew’s idea of an Anatolian homeland because they believed this was too great a period for their divergence because the languages are so similar to have diverged 8000 years ago (c.6000 BCE). [1.3]

Though many archaeologists noted that genetic and archaeological studies did suggest massive migrations in ancient times from the Near East into Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe, which could have brought PIE and created conditions for language diversification. [1.3]

In 2003 evolutionary biologists Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson used computational methods from evolutionary biology to track the change of words over time, and tiehri models concluded that the Anatolian hypothesis was correct, publishing an analysis in 2012. [1.3]

Another genetic approach used ancient DNA from 69 Europeans who lived between 6000-1000 BCE in order to track the movement of populations genetically. Among the 69 were 9 individuals from the Yamnaya culture (6 men, 2 women, and 1 child sex undetermined) who lived north of the Black Sea 6000 years ago. They herded cattle and other animals, buried their dead in kurgans, and may have already created wheeled vehicles, many linguists thinking that PIE already had a term for wheel. [1.3]

Also used DNA from 4 skeletons of the Corded Ware culture of central Europe, who where known to herd cattle and had dairy farming skills, very close to Yamnaya.

The team found an astonishing similarity between the DNA of the Yamnaya and Corded Ware peoples, showing that 3/4 of the Corded Ware ancestry could be traced back to the Yamnaya, indicating a large migration into central Europe c.2500 BCE, spreading an early form of the IE language.

The Corded Ware culture soon spread accross north and central Europe, extending as far as modern Scandinavia. Thus “steppe ancestry” is found in most modern Europeans, who can trace their blood to the Yamnaya through the Corded Ware, and right back to Anatolia. These results show that the dispersion of farming out of the Near East that occurred c.6000 BCE was not the only major migration into Europe.

Another paper that address PIE origins led by Andrew Garrett and Will Chang employed language database and evolutionary methods used by Gray to create a family tree of Indo-European languages. Though they declared certain linguistic linages as certain that others (Gray included) did not consider as certain. For example, they assumed Latin ancestral to the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian…) and that Vedic Sanskrit was the ancestor of other later Indo-Aryan languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent. These changes and constraints changed the earlier results of Gray and his team, finding the origins of PIE to be about c.4000 BCE, consistent with the steppe hypothesis, but not the Anatolian.

For example, the second movement of the Corded Ware people c.2500 BCE may be the second infusion of Indo-European Language into Europe, the first occurring maybe c.6000 BCE with the spread of farming. [1.3] This means that the Yamnaya would have spoken a derived Indo-European tongue such as modern Balto-Slavic tongues, Russian and Polish for example. This would push back PIE further than previously thought.

—

Enriched ancient DNA libraries for target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms, enrichment which decreases sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by about 250-fold, which enabled a whole order of magnitude more individuals to be studied. [2.1] Show that populations of western and far eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago.

At the beginning of Neolithic period in Europe (8000-7000 BCE) closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary, and Spain who were different from indigenous hunter-gatherers. Though in Russia at this time (around the Black Sea and Caspian) their population had a high affinity to a Siberian individual who lived around 22,000 BCE. [2.1]

By 4,000-3,000 BCE a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry had occurred in much of Europe, yet at this time the Yamnaya culture’s steppeland herders where partially descended from preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, whose population also stemmed from Near Eastern peoples.

Around 2500 BCE the Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany (3/4 Yamnaya ancestry) migrated en masse into central Europe, being from Germany, from its eastern periphery. Steppe ancestry persisted until about 1000 BCE and is ubiquitous in modern Europeans.

Further Reading

1. Popular Reading
   1. a
   2. “Indo-Europeans” | Livius.org | Written by Jona Lendering | Accessed 11 Sept 2019
   3. Mysterious Indo-European homeland may have been in the steppes of Ukraine and Russia | Michael Balter | 13 Feb 2015 | www.sciencemag.org | Accessed 11 Sept 2019
2. Scholarly Articles
   1. Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe | Team led by Wolfgang Haak and Iosif Lazaridis | Nature | 10 Feb 2015 [biorxiv]
   2. E. Callaway, “Steppe Migration Rekindles Debate on Language Origin”, Nature, 18 February 2015.
   3. E. Callaway, “DNA Data Explosion Lights up the Bronze Age”, Nature, 10 June 2015
3. Books
   1. Georges Roux |
   2. In Search of the Indo-Europeans | J. P. Mallory | 1989
   3. B.W. Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture (2010²)
   4. D.A. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007)
   5. J. Manco, Ancestral journeys. The peopling of Europe from the first venturers to the Vikings (2014²),