What is the current theory of the origin of the Indo European people before they spread into Europe and the Indus valley? I seem to recall reading somewhere that the best theory thus far, based on linguistic evidence, is Anatolia. Also, roughly speaking, when did they migrate into said areas?
I think you're a little behind the information curve; the Anatolian hypothesis has been discarded. For many years the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans has been identified as the Pontic Steppe or Pontic-Caspian Steppe, the region north of the Black and Caspian Seas extending west to the Dniepr River, east to the Kazakh Steppe, and north to the edge of the temperate zone; roughly corresponding geographically to ancient Scythia and Sarmatia. The first archeological evidence of their existence dates back to the 5th or 4th Millennium BCE, placing them in the Copper Age which briefly preceded the Bronze Age, although some scholars push that back into the Neolithic Era (agricultural Stone Age). Their expansion into Anatolia (the Armenian Branch of the Indo-European language family), the Aegean (Hellenic), western Europe (Celtic) and the Iranian Plateau (the Eastern Branch which eventually divided into Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian) is dated quite a bit later, in the 2nd Millennium. By the 1st Millennium the Germanic tribes had marched northwest into Scandinavia, the Albanians had managed to find their way into central Europe, and it's not clear where the Italic people came from; some linguists think they may be an offshoot of the Celts rather than a separate migration from the east. It is customary to define a Western Branch of the family (the Hellenic, Celtic, Italic and Germanic sub-branches) but the relationships are rather vague and we don't know when or where the various tribes separated from each other. Some scholars dispute the entire concept, insisting that the Kentum/Satem split is not definitive. Evidence in their vocabulary supports the generally accepted notions that the PIE people had a fully developed Neolithic culture (farming and animal husbandry, the twin technologies that comprise agriculture, both permitting and requiring seasonal or year-round settlment in permanent villages), solid wheels and carts (but not spoked wheels and chariots), a snowy climate, water transportation, patrilineal kinship, a sky god, and heroic poetry (possibly set to music). It was the Proto-Indo-Europeans who first domesticated the horse. This key transportation technology facilitated the evolution of Afro-Eurasian Neolithic societies into trading networks which became the first civilizations, and the absence of the species is one of the many reasons that civilization arose so much later in the New World. (The Olmecs should be counted as heroes for building their cities with no draft animals at all.)
Such theories have been shifting, like moveable goal posts. By now they are changelings not theories. ** The Invention of the Aryan race The Europeans invented the notion of an Aryan race to counter the Jewish mystic tradition known as the Kabbalah or (Quabbalah) which scholars believe is in turn a rehash of older Babylonian, Persian , Indian Greek and Celtic stories. The Kabbalah holds that just before the Great Flood secret wisdom was taught by the Sons of God who descended from the heavens and intermarried the descendents of Cain. The Kabbalah subscribes to the notion of a superior or a root race which received this divine wisdom. In the prevalent anti Semitic environment, the European occultist thought this to be a great embarrassment that this superior race was not them but the Jewish people. William Jones' (1783) pronouncement of the relationship between languages of Europe and India came at the most opportune time. If there was a proto language then there must be a proto race who spoke this proto language, the "Aryans." The Aryan race was offered as the European answer for Kabbalah. According to Robert Drews (1988) "It is an unfortunate coincidence that studies of the Indo European language community flourished at a time when nationalism, and a tendency to see history in racial terms, was on the rise in Europe. There was no blinking the fact , in the nineteenth century, that most of the world was dominated by Europeans or people of European descent. The easiest explanation for this was that Europeans, or at least most members of the European family, were genetically superior to people's of darker complexion. It was thus a welcome discovery that the ancient Greeks and the Persians were linguistically, and therefore one could assume biologically, "related" to the modern Europeans. The same racial stock, it appeared had been in control of the world since Cyrus conquered Babylon. This stock was obviously the white race. INDIA, IT IS TRUE, PRESENTED A PROBLEM, AND REQUIRED A SEPARATE EXPLANATION. ARYANS HAD INVADED INDIA NO LATER THATN THE SECOND MILINNUM BC, AND SUCCEFULLY IMPOSED THEIR LANGUAGE ON THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION, BUT THE ARYAN RACE HAD EVIDENTLY BECOME STERILE IN THAT SOUTHERN CLIME AND WAS EVENTUALLY SUBNMERGED BY THE ABORIGINAL AND INFERUIR STIOCK OF THE SUBCONTINENT (emphasis added, Drews 1988 in Livingston 2003, p. 8)." "Nevertheless fueled by an obstinate nationalism , Europeans denied their essential absence from history , and by grossly misrepresenting the facts, artistically created an ancient past, placing themselves far back in time, as far back as the beginning of human history and in the ranks of the great civilizations (Livingston 2002, p. xi). Such ideas are commonplace even today even though the rhetoric is much milder. After quoting two very contemporary mainstream scholars McNeil (1986) and Roberts (1995) as examples, Livingston (2002) concludes, " it is difficult to fathom that, in a society that considers itself as liberal and as morally progressive as our own, modern scholars present ideas as blatantly offensive as these. These theories are not the rabid ravings of neo-Nazi fanatics. These are the purported sober theories of mainstream intellectuals. However, their claims are no different than the lunacies formerly upheld by Hitler (p. 16)." The concept of an IE language family originating in Europe is absolutely critical to the very existence of the West. Livingston, David (2002), "the Dying God: The Hidden History of the Western Civilization," New York: Writers Club Press.
Yeah this kind of reminds Me of the Merovingian Kings . The long Haired Kings . They would hire a scribe and have the scribe do there genealogy and if the scribe didn't connect them back to Adam and Eve off with there heads . So the scribes would get damn creative in making up genealogies. I saw a few of them on the Internet. My own family connection to the Ridgely Family use to have one posted . Dagolbert the 2nd and those guys . Yeah seen em go all the way back to Adam and Eve. They would go back to like Helen of troy or Hercules, Things like that , or Hercules would be Nimrod in the bible, cross over genealogies was the name of the game . It is all in line with conversion methodology . You know , you see it all the time in History , Cortes and the Mesoamerican conquests . Hell just regular old Christianity and the conversion of all kinds of people . Steal there festivals and change the imagery into Christian imagery
Perhaps everyone is a little behind the information curve: Gobekli Tepe, at least 12,000 years old is now only 5% excavated. It was intentionaly burried under at least 20 feet of sand. It is in what is now SE Turkey and reflects a large, well organized pre-agricultural society with complex language needed for command and control of a project impossible for us to do today without any, even simple, machines. They could haul huge well cut stones (many dozens of 19 foot tall / 15 ton carved columns!) up hill, long before man had horses to help. One 50 ton obelisk seems to have been too much for them – it was left in the quarry. Here is video on it: http://www.wimp.com/unexplainedstructure/ No one knows who these people were, what the massive buildings were for, or why they were buried. Just for reference, these massive circular engraved stone structures were built during the last ice age and are more than 7,000 years older than any other structure we have yet discovered on our planet. Watch link above and be in awe of what is shown and discussed. This is truly amazing - beyond words to describe - must see to belief it could have been created way back then. Also Google, etc. to learn more about Gobekli Tepe. I would like to hear what Fraggle knows and thinks about all this. - The Gobekli Tepe discovery.
I had not heard of this, so thanks for the info. Nonetheless, we've known for a long time that although the Neolithic Revolution (the transition from small, extended-family units of nomadic hunter-gatherers into larger, permanent settlements of farmers and herders) happened in multiple places at different times, the very first instance appears to have been in the Anatolia-Mespotamia region. (It also happened, most notably, in India, China, Egypt, Mesoamerica and the Andes, all of which ultimately evolved into civilizations). Since (according to Wikipedia) the people at Göbekli Tepe had not actually invented the technology of agriculture, this is one of the rare Mesolithic communities that are discovered from time to time. Although the term "Mesolithic" (literally the Middle Stone Age) implies a transitional phase between the Paleolithic (the Early Stone Age) and Neolithic (the Late Stone Age) Eras, in actuality all Mesolithic archeological finds to date appear to have been dead-ends. They did not develop farming or animal husbandry, and did not make the cultural leap into the Neolithic Era, in which economies of scale and division of labor lead to more specialized occupations and a larger economic surplus, and eventually require a formal government. The typical circumstance that permitted Paleolithic people to become more-or-less sedentary without inventing agriculture was the accident of stumbling into a natural bounty of food: a river or seashore teeming with fish, a savannah teeming with game and/or grain, or a forest teeming with protein-rich nuts and seeds and calorie-rich fruits. And of course the typical reason for a Mesolithic community to collapse was their own success, leading to overpopulation and the need to make ever-longer hunting and gathering excursions to keep themselves fed. Personally I find it odd that none of these people ever stumbled onto the concepts of cultivating plants and domesticating animals. Especially the latter, since every permanent settlement eventually builds middens (trash dumps) so large that dogs, pigs, goats and other scavengers can smell them from miles away, beckoning them to move in, become companions, and then be slaughtered for their meat. So if an archeologist ever finally discovers a site where a Mesolithic community evolved into a Neolithic community, I will rest easy. But it hasn't happened yet. But back on topic. The first Neolithic settlement was built in the Middle East, and in fact so were the first cities: Jericho and Damascus are noteworthy. But they were not built by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. They were probably built by Afroasiatic tribes. (The Afroasiatic language family includes the Semitic, Chadic, Egyptian, Omotic, Cushitic and Berber branches and all of the first written records are in Afroasiatic languages.) When Sumer and Egypt were thriving civilizations, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were still nomads on the Pontic Steppe. The Indo-Europeans did not truly undergo the Neolithic Revolution. As I have noted before, almost every technology is 99% ideas and only 1% artifacts. As Mesopotamian civilization spread northward, the tribes on their outskirts copied their farming and animal husbandry, sometimes becoming pastoral nomads. For example, it was the Indo-Europeans who domesticated the horse. Pastoral nomadism is sort of the mirror image of Mesolithic culture: instead of permanent villages with no agriculture, it's animal husbandry with no permanent villages.
It's still an active area of scholarly debate. In other words, there's more than one theory still contending out there. I'm increasingly leaning towards the Anatolian theory myself, for a variety of reasons. I'm inclined to imagine that the earliest proto-Indo-Europeans might have been one of the linguistic groups (not the only one obviously) that spread out of the Middle East with the neolithic revolution and the spread of farming and animal grazing. But probably the majority of scholars adhere to the competing theory that the Indo-Europeans originated thousands of years later than that, up on the Eurasian steppes, from Ukraine east to around the southern end of the Urals. (I agree that the 'kurgan tradition' of the steppes were probably Indo-European, but am inclined to suspect that these steppe people with their distinctive burials may represent just one branch of a more widely dispersed linguistic grouping.) The earliest written evidence for the Indo-European languages comes from the ancient Hittites. They flourished in the second millenium BCE and were contemporaries of the Egyptian new kingdom. The Hittites lived in and erected their bronze age empire in Anatolia, but it's debatable whether they were intrusive in the area, and if so, from where. If they were intrusive (as I suspect they were), that doesn't necessarily imply that the ancestors of the proto-Indo-Europeans couldn't have lived in the same general area as many as 5,000 years earlier. Lots can happen in that amount of time and doubtless many linguistic groups moved through and lived in the Anatolian area over the many centuries. Information about movements elsewhere is even hazier (if that's possible). Unfortunately most of these movements happened before writing appeared among the peoples involved, so there's no direct evidence of what languages various neolithic, chalcolithic and bronze age cultures spoke. It's obviously possible to speculate about that (and many scholars have made their careers doing just that), but those guesses usually depend on associations between types of archaeological remains (pottery, burials etc.) and cultural-linguistic groups. And that evidence, unfortunately, is often very speculative, inconclusive and sometimes even contradictory. The historical picture is clearer about some of the later movements. The ancestors of the Mycenean Greeks seem to have entered Greece from the north around 2,000 BCE. (That doesn't necessarily imply that they were the first Indo-Europeans to ever set foot there, or that a whole variety of peoples hadn't already been moving through the Balkans area for millenia. The Balkans were kind of the crossroads of prehistoric Europe and my guess is that the region was ethnically complex, even then.) The Indo-Europeans seem to have first entered India in the 1,500-1,200 BCE area.
The riddle is artificially conjured up. It cannot never be "solved", and definitely not through philology alone. As long as you keep on ignoring the grammar and literature, you will not get anywhere. Lols. Taking these account you SHALL never get anywhere.
