October 1989, Page 56

Archeology

The Mysterious Indo-Europeans: Central Asian Warriors or Advancing Anatolian Agriculturalists?

By Kurt Holden

Humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists in the "Fertile Crescent," arching from Iran's Zagros mountains across the Taurus foothills and plains of northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey to the coasts of Syria and Lebanon.

Parts of the record are still in place, from stone foundations of houses in ancient villages like Jarmo and Tel Hassuna in Northern Iraq, to the walls of what may be the world's oldest city, in Jericho, next to a permanent spring which made year-round agriculture possible.

It is not such excavated late neolithic sites which clinch the argument, however. Certainty is provided by the array of domesticated plants and animals which have developed from ancestors native to this region.

While the Near Eastern origins of European agriculture are generally accepted by archeologists and historians, mystery and controversy surround the origins of the Indo-European languages spoken by most Europeans, and others in the Middle East and Asia. Among descendents of the original Indo-European language are all of the Celtic languages, the Germanic languages including English, Latin and its descendents, the Slavic languages, Greek, Kurdish, Armenian, Farsi (Iranian), and Sanskrit, the language of ancient India.

Earliest Written Records Are From Turkey

The earliest written versions of Indo-European languages occur in eastern Turkey and northern Syria, where Indo-European-speaking peoples assumed dominant roles in previously existing city states. The result was a chaos of religions and languages, with clay tablets in Indo-European as well as Semitic languages, written in the cuneiform characters originally developed for the Sumerian language (which was neither Semitic nor Indo-European), in the same archives.

These Indo-Europeans also developed their own "Hittite" hieroglyphics, and early Indo-Europeans in Greece and its islands also seem to have created their own versions of existing "linear" writing, just as their descendents a millenium later adapted the alphabet of the Semitic Phoenicians into the Greek and Roman alphabets for the Indo-European languages of their eras.

Modern reconstruction of the earliest Indo-European languages, however, has proceeded largely from the cuneiform texts whose phonetic values were already known from the study of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian languages of ancient Iraq, all of which were also written in cuneiform characters.

For generations, philologists have sought to reconstruct the "original" Indo-European language, working largely from commonalities in the vocabularies of these first written records of the Indo-European dialects spoken in Anatolia and in later Indo-European languages as distant geographically as Gaelic and Sanskrit.

They postulate, for example, that "owis" was the original Indo-European word for sheep, giving rise to "hawi" in Luvian, the language of the Trojans in western Turkey, "avis" in ancient Sanskrit and modern Lithuanian, and "ovis" in Latin. In English the word manifests itself as "ewe."

Scholars have constructed a "family tree" of Indo-European languages, including both extinct and existing tongues, presenting a rough idea of when each branch of the tree separated from the others.

There is disagreement, however, concerning the ancestral homeland of the hypothetical "original" speakers of Indo-European. One scholar, J.P. Mallory, author of "In Search of the Indo-Europeans," published by W.W. Norton, believes that they were descendents of hunters and fishers who, before any of the linguistic branches separated, had learned how to string bows, grind grain, breed cattle and yoke oxen. All this is inferred from the existence of cognates, related words, for each of these activities in all of the far-flung branches of the Indo-European linguistic family.

Mallory believes that between 4,000 and 2,500 B.C., the Indo-Europeans burst out of their homeland to spread westward as far as Ireland, and east to the deserts of Chinese Turkestan. Attempts to pinpoint that homeland include a survey of the trees and animals for which there are common vocabulary words in all Indo-European languages.

The steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian was once occupied by warlike pastoralists known to modern archeologists as the Kurgan culture. Mallory associates the people who created this culture with the original Indo-European speakers, but there are no confirming written records.

Of special interest to Middle East scholars is a very different theory expounded by Colin Renfrew in "Archeology and Language," published by Cambridge University Press. He relates the spread of Indo-European languages across the Middle East and Europe directly to the development in the Middle East of agriculture.

The Spread of Agriculture

Renfrew notes the presence of agricultural settlements in Eastern Turkey at the end of the neolithic era. According to radio-carbon dating, farming had spread to Greece as early as 6,500 B.C., and had reached the Orkney Islands, off Scotland, by 3,500 B.C.

It spread, Renfrew postulates, because once the techniques of breeding and caring for domestic animals and planting and harvesting crops were developed, they radiated outward 20 or 30 miles per generation as the agriculturalists occupied new land.

Since farming could support far more people per acre than could hunting and gathering, the agriculturalists from the Middle East gradually filled areas hospitable to farming, bringing their Indo-European language with them. They both displaced and absorbed existing populations. In a few cases, they flowed around isolated pockets of earlier people, such as the Basques of Spain, who speak a language unrelated to any Indo-European tongue.

Because early fascination with the Indo-Europeans gave rise to racist ideologies, students in the field today are careful to point out that languages and races may spread independently.

Nevertheless, the idea that the original Indo-European speakers may have originated in the Middle East, and that the agricultural technology developed there at the end of the neolithic age was their passport to the conquest of Europe and much of Asia, adds a new dimension to the archeology of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent.

Kurt Holden is a writer and documentary filmmaker from California who divides his time between the US and the Middle East.