Part THREE. Review according to Ethnography(Here, first of all, attention will be focused on the origin of peoples, when and from where the ancestors of this or that people came. Moreover, it is clear to the author that if we trace back thousands of years, the ancestors of all peoples turn out to be nomadic hunters of the Stone Age). Chapter first. Europe. Indo-Europeans (carriers of haplogroup R) 1.1 Prehistoric times- initial area of haplogroups R. - Division into subgroups R1a and R1b. "Aesir" and "Vanir". Watershed across the Volga. - "Vans" in the Black Sea region and the Middle Volga. - "Country of Cities" on southern Urals, distribution up to Mongolia. 1.2 Three waves of migration of Indo-Europeans to Europe The first wave, 3000-2250 BC, from the steppes of the Black Sea region (Yamskaya culture) or, even somewhat more likely, from the forest zone of the Central Russian plain (Upper Volga culture) or perhaps together. I give preference to the carriers of the Upper Volga culture for the following reasons. Firstly, the Yamniki were a poor nomadic tribe inhabiting the steppe zone; the culture of the Upper Volga was widespread to the north of them in the forest and forest-steppe zone. The sharp deterioration of the climate at the end of the fourth millennium BC equally influenced both of them, but from the north there was also pressure from the ancestors of the Finno-Ugric tribes (Lyala tribe). And subsequently, newcomers from the east clearly preferred to settle in the forest zone, and finally, several centuries later, their descendants from the Baltic states returned to the Central Russian Plain (Fatyanovo region). So, whatever their origin, in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC, the so-called culture of battle axes or corded ceramics appeared on the territory of Poland, Belarus and the Baltic states to the north of the powerful mass of Trypillian culture. Soon, the carriers of this completely new culture for Europe actively spread to the West and, along the way, begin to break up into local variants of the culture. They are considered the first Indo-Europeans (Aryans) in Europe. They brought new technologies such as horse breeding and bronze weapons to the North and West of Europe. Probably these tribes had a patriarchate, a cult of fire and war chariots. Before their appearance, matriarchy and the cult of the mother goddess flourished in Europe. Copper and bronze are known only in the Balkans and possibly the Pyrenees. Probably the aliens were much more warlike and passionate, which allowed them to capture a vast territory right up to the Pyrenees over several centuries. Autochronous population, at least the majority male lines were completely destroyed or conquered. The remnants of one tribe of megalith builders (subgroup I1) were able to retreat to Scandinavia, and in some places traces of the ancient hunters of Central Europe remained (subgroup I2b). Then battle axes appeared in the British Isles and the same thing happened there. Total genocide of the gene pool of old lines. Probably the last relics (the Pictish people) were exterminated already in historical times. The final act apparently was the formation of the ancestors of the Basque people and the resettlement small group first wave of Indo-Europeans to Scaninavia. Although the latter may have happened later. The second wave, 2000-1750 BC, of the Indo-European movement apparently also began from the Black Sea lands. In Eastern Europe, after the final collapse of the Trypillian culture, the path to the Balkans opened, but the nomads of the Black Sea region limited themselves to settling the steppes west of the Black Sea (the mouth of the Danube, Thrace). The remnants of the Trypillians apparently retreated to the Carpathians, and some of the nomads penetrated to the Middle Danube (Hungary, Czech Republic). These were apparently the common ancestors of the Celts, Italics and Veneti. This time the tribal movement apparently began from steppe zone, where by this time the Yamnaya culture was replaced by the Catacomb culture, as well as from the forest-steppe territories of southern Poland and the Dnieper region. Most likely, most of the peoples living in these territories at that time also had the R1b marker. For the second wave, two main routes are observed: the first through the Danube lands to the Balkans, to Italy, to the center of Europe and to the west of Asia Minor; the second through the Caucasus to Transcaucasia, Syria and Western Asia. The reason was probably again some kind of climate change and probably pressure from the east of the tribes of the eastern branch of the Indo-Europeans, the so-called Andronovo type. In the Black Sea region this leads to a change from the catacomb culture to the closely related Timber culture. The Western path for the ancestors of the Achaeans, Italics and Illyrians was made easier by the fact that the Trypillian culture had practically disintegrated and was no longer a restraining factor. It is difficult to say why now there is not a single people where the markers I2a1b (probable ancestors of the Trypillians) and R1b (ancestors of the Western Indo-Europeans) were mixed on equal terms; perhaps they existed, but have now disappeared, or it is more likely that the remnants of the Trypillians chose to take refuge in the Carpathians. The Indo-European peoples were probably not interested in mountains at that time. They undoubtedly knew how to overcome them, but they did not settle there. Probably the Indo-Europeans of the second wave were already much less aggressive than during the first wave. In both Italy and Greece, and especially in Illyria (former Yugoslavia), a significant (in some places up to 60%) contribution of pre-Indo-European markers has remained to this day. In Greece, new settlers Achaeans are added to the ancient Perioci. The eastern route through the Caucasus left much less evidence from the point of view of the genetics of modern peoples (Anterior Asia is generally a passageway, no one has ever walked here!), but it left a lot of historical evidence. First of all, these are the Hittites, a people who created one of the most powerful states in the second half of the second millennium BC, and the Hyksos, for some time this tribe stopped in Northern Syria, and then came to Egypt and put an end there Ancient Kingdom. Judging by the study of Tutankhamun's mummy, some of the Hyksos mixed with the indigenous Egyptians and became the elite of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. Probably some peoples of Asia Minor, Transcaucasia and Syria could also originate from the Black Sea steppes. The state of Mitanni, the sworn enemy of the Hittites and Assyrians, was apparently founded by immigrants from Central Asia. It is the Mitannians who are called the first to use horse-drawn chariots. It is likely that they were the first to come from the South Ural “country of cities”; later they would be followed by the Scythians, Medes and Parthians. Third wave, 1500-1100 BC. Now real nomads bearing the R1a marker appear in Europe. This period in historiography was called the Bronze Age crisis or the “Sea Peoples” movement. The reasons given are varied, from the depletion of tin mines (in my opinion, a rather dubious version) to climate change due to the eruption on the island of Santorini. The last reason quite realistic for the death of the Minoan culture on Crete and the islands of the Aegean Sea. It could also lead to the decline of Mycenae and the “plagues of Egypt” described in the Bible. It probably could have somehow influenced the nomads of the Black Sea steppes. Be that as it may, we know the result: in the last centuries of the second millennium, real chaos reigned in the Mediterranean. Tribes and peoples moved in all directions, mixing in the most bizarre ways, and almost all the strongest states of the West are disappearing or are in deep decline. Mycenae fell under the onslaught of the Dorians, Troy was burned and abandoned, the Phrygians destroyed the Hittite power, the Libyans and Kushites rule in Egypt. It is difficult to say to which root these or those “peoples of the sea” belong; the Philistines apparently arrived from Crete, the Phrygians are undoubtedly steppe dwellers related to the Thracians, some peoples who moved west to Italy and Sicily are most likely descendants of ancient agricultural peoples similar to the Mycenaean culture. Thus, the most people took part in the migration of peoples at the end of the second millennium BC different peoples. At the same time, it was then that the ancestors of the Slavs, Balts and Goths came to the Danube lands and the Black Sea region. As well as the Phrygians, Thracians, Dorians and many other lesser-known peoples who had the main marker R1a. 1.3 Early Iron Age, Celtsand Cimmerians - New wave expansion. - On the question of why the Basques are Indo-European in genetics, but have a language different from Celtic and Germanic. - Cimmerians and Scythians. The collapse and death of the conventional Cimmerian superethnos. Cimmerians in Asia Minor and Thrace. Mixing of the ancestors of the Slavs with the remnants of the Trypillians. The ancestors of the Balts go to Prussia and Lithuania. Cimbri among the Celts, Goths at the mouth of the Danube and in Scandinavia.
One of characteristic features pre-Roman and partly Roman history of Spain is its linguistic duality, in to a large extent corresponding to the socio-political duality. It has already been noted that the country was divided into two main zones - Indo-European and non-Indo-European. The first covered the interior, northern and western parts of the Iberian Peninsula. It formed gradually, but its appearance dates back to the end of the 2nd millennium BC. e.The first peoples who spoke Indo-European languages began to penetrate the Pyrenees, most likely at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. e. They were ultimately associated with the Bronze Age cultures that developed in Central Europe, most notably the so-called Urnfield culture 1 . The general changes taking place throughout the Old World also affected this culture. Under the influence of internal impulses, and perhaps under the pressure of other peoples who came from the East, some of the peoples - carriers of this culture - began to move in various directions, including to the southwest. The result was the spread of this culture over vast areas of Europe. The question of the linguistic and ethnic affiliation of the carriers of the culture of the burial urn fields is complex and has not yet been resolved. It is believed that in the vast area of settlement of the carriers of the burial urn field culture, an as yet undifferentiated “ancient European” language developed, from which Celtic, Illyrian, Italic and Germanic (possibly Ligurian) languages were later isolated 2 . But it is possible that at this time, within the framework of the earliest stages of the Hallstatt culture (the so-called Hallstatt A and B), dating back to the Bronze Age and associated with the culture of the burial urn fields, the Celtic ethnos was already being formed 3.
More recently, the penetration of Indo-Europeans into the Iberian Peninsula was attributed to the first centuries of the 1st millennium BC. e. 4 However, new methods of analysis and new finds have made it possible to date some sites that clearly belong to the burial urn field culture to the beginning of the 11th and even the 12th century. BC e. 5 Therefore, we can date the beginning of the appearance of Indo-Europeans in Spain to ca. 1200 BC e. 6 Relatively quickly, the newcomers occupied the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula (modern Catalonia) 7, from where already in the 10th-9th centuries. BC e. penetrated to the south, west and southwest of this area. However, in the northeast the old population also remained. Archaeologists note the coexistence of two funeral rites in this area: the old - inhumation in caves and the new - cremation in urns placed under very low mounds. Perhaps the preservation of the old population was the reason that later in present-day Catalonia there was a secondary absorption of Indo-European newcomers by the old population and the Iberization of this territory 8.
In other areas of Spain, Indo-Europeanization turned out to be much more durable. The Indo-Europeans gradually occupied vast areas of the Iberian Peninsula. For some time, almost all of it turned out to be Indo-Europeanized. At least in the 4th century. BC e. Ephorus (Fr. Gr. Hist., fr. 131) asserted that Celtica extends as far as Hades. It is possible that this account reflects an earlier state of ethnic relations in southern Spain, 9 but it does indicate a time when the Celtic presence was indeed quite felt in the extreme south of the Iberian Peninsula. Later, the Indo-Europeans were largely displaced from there or assimilated by non-Indo-Europeans.
Studies of the few traces of Indo-European languages on Spanish territory show that they contain significant Illyrian and Ligurian features 10 . Does this mean that the early Indo-Europeans on the peninsula were Ligurians and Illyrians, or that we have before us the remnants of that linguistic state when there was an ancient European community that preceded the separation of separate languages and ethnic groups? It is still impossible to answer this question unambiguously. In any case, we can confidently say that the later invasions of Indo-Europeans into Spain were undoubtedly Celtic, although they may have also brought with them part of the pre-Celtic population of the Atlantic coast of Gaul 11 . However, the term “invasion” is hardly applicable unconditionally to these events. Rather, we should be talking about infiltration, the penetration of ethnic groups through the Pyrenees into the territory of the peninsula 12. Of course, such groups had to be relatively significant, quite strong and active enough to either displace or subjugate and assimilate the former “Mediterranean” population, imposing on them their language, material culture, religious and other ideas, best expressed in funeral rites. It is now difficult to decide whether we should talk about several waves of such infiltrations or about the constant penetration of Indo-Europeans, in particular the Celts, through the Pyrenees.
The Celts were generally a mobile people. During their great movements they spread over a vast territory - from Ireland in the northwest to the interior of Asia Minor in the southeast. However, the Spanish Celts have nothing to do with these great migrations. Their appearance and settlement on the Iberian Peninsula dates back to an earlier time. Although individual groups of Celts from Gaul probably appeared on the peninsula at the end of the 1st millennium BC. e., in general, the penetration along the Pyrenean passes and the settlement of Spain from continental Europe was completed around 500 BC. e. 13 By this time important changes were taking place in the Celtic world. The first culture of the Western European Iron Age - Hallstatt - is replaced by La Tène. Some researchers even consider it possible to speak about the Celts themselves only as carriers of the La Tène culture 14 . This, of course, is an exaggeration, since the Celtic ethnos emerged much earlier. And although in Spain some traces of La Tène influence are felt, for example in weapons, explained by the preservation of trade relations through the Pyrenees, in general there is no La Tène culture there, and the material culture of the Spanish Indo-Europeans continues from Hallstatt (the so-called post-Hallstatt culture) 15. Of the three types of Celtic place names (ending in -briga, -dunum and -magus) only the first is attested in Spain, which belongs to an earlier layer of Celtic place names 16 . Similar place names, as well as some theonyms (for example, the name of the god Lugh) are attested in Gaul, but are not found elsewhere in the Celtic world. Apparently, we can talk about a closer ethnic relationship with the Celts of Gaul, while ties with the Celts of other countries, including the British Isles, were weaker and, probably, indirect.
Although traces of Ligurians and Illyrians have been found in Spain, the bulk of the Indo-Europeans in it were Celtic. Therefore, the Indo-European zone of the Iberian Peninsula can be called Celtic, with some reservations. It did not form immediately. Various movements took place inside it. Thus, Strabo (III, 3.5) speaks of the movement of the Celts initially together with the Turduli, who, having quarreled with whom, then settled North-Western Spain. At the same time, the geographer notes that the northwestern Celts are related to those who live around the Anas River (modern Guadiana). This suggests a movement of the future inhabitants of Gallaecia from south to north along the Atlantic front of the Iberian Peninsula. If this is not the scientific construction of Strabo himself or his source (most likely Poseidonia), then we have before us a reflection of movements already within the Celtic world. In principle, there is nothing unnatural about this, especially since this path was already mastered at one time by the bearers of the megalithic culture of the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic.
Ultimately, by the time Spain came to the attention of ancient historians and geographers, most of the country was inhabited by Indo-European peoples, mainly Celts. Their range covered the inner, northern (except for the extreme northeast), northwestern and western parts of the peninsula. Non-Indo-Europeans probably also lived within this zone. Perhaps these included the Varduls (or Barduls) and, perhaps, some other tribes close to them, who inhabited the eastern part of Cantabria and the adjacent eastern regions with their narrow and closed valleys, preventing the penetration of strangers 17. If this is so, then in these tribes we must see the ancestors of modern Basques 18. On the other hand, Pliny (III, 13-14) and Ptolemy (I, 5.5) mention the Celtics living near the Sturdetans, and for the second time Pliny (IV, 111) mentions the Celtics in the north-west of the peninsula, where they still have a special nickname Nera. Perhaps we have before us the remains of one ethnic group (and is this not a trace of this or a similar movement of the Celts that Strabo speaks of?). Some of the Oretans (obviously non-Indo-Europeans), according to Pliny (III, 25), are also called Germans, in which, undoubtedly, one must see traces of their mixing with Indo-Europeans 19. And yet, in general, two zones of the Iberian Peninsula stand out quite clearly, and this began around 1200 BC. e., when the bearers of the culture of the burial urn fields began to penetrate through the passes of the Pyrenees into Spain.
1 Montenegro A. Historiade Espana. Madrid, 1972. T. 1. P. 469-485; ibid. Introduction//HE. Madrid, 1989.T. 11. P. 21-22; Lomas F.J. Origen y desarrollo de la cultura de los campos de urnas // Historia de Espana antigua. T. 1. P. 13-27; Daniel C, Evans J. L The Western Mediterranean // SAN. 1975. Vol. 11, 2. P. 765; Cerdeno L., Vega G. La Espanade Altamira. Madrid, 1995. P. 120-124; Atvar J. De Argantonio a los romanos. Madrid, 1995. P. 70-71; Savory H. N. Spain and Portugal. London, 1968, pp. 227-232.
2 History of Europe. M., 1988. T. 1. P. 123-124.
3 Piggot S. Ancient Europe. Edinburgh, 1965. P. 173; Crossland R. A. Immigrants from the North // SAN. 1971. Vol. 1, 2. P. 853; Shirokova N. S. Ancient Celts at the turn of the old and new eras. L., 1989. pp. 81-84.
4 Philip Y. Celtic civilization and its heritage. Prague, 1961. P. 20; Piggot S. Ancient Europe. P. 173; Daniel S, Evans J. D. The Western Mediterranien. P. 765; Savory H. N. Ancient Europe P. 227.
5 Cerdeno M. L., Vega C. Espana de Altamira. P. 122.
6 Montenegro A. Introduction. P. 22; idem. Las invasiones indoeuropeas en la Peninsula Iberica // HE. T. II. P. 219-221.
7 Sanmarti J. From local groups in early states: the development of complexity in protohis-loric Catalonia // Pyrenae. 2004. No. 35, I. P. 13. However, some archaeologists believe that despite the attractiveness of this theory, there is not sufficient archaeological evidence to confirm it (ibid.).
8 Montenegro A. Las invasiones... P. 220-221.
9 Lomas F. J. Las fuentes historicas mas antiguos para el conocimiento de los celtos peninsularcs // Historia de Espana antigua. P. 56.
10 Ibid. P. 59-63,77-78.
11 Piggot S. Ancient Europe. P. 188.
12 Cerdeno M. L., Vega C. Espana de Altamira. P. 122.
13 Montenegro A. Las invasiones... P. 229-230.
14 Wed: Archeology of France: Exhibition Catalog. L., 1982. P. 46.
15 James S. Exploring the World of the Celts. London, 1993. P. 72; Savory H. N. Spain and Portugal. P. 246-252.
16 Piggot S. Ancient Europe. P. 173-174; Savory H. N. Spain and Portugal. P. 240; Sangmeister E. Die Kelten in Spanien//MM. I960. Bd. 1. S. 95.
17 Lomas F. J. Pueblos celtasde la Peninsula Iberica // Historia de Espana antigua. P. 96-98.
18 Alvar J. De Argantonio... P. 71.
19 Iniesta A. Pueblos del cuadrante sudoriental de la Peninsula Iberica // HE. T. II. P. 339.
Formation of nations. The end of the former equality of people. As a result, the previous, mostly uniform, development of human society across vast areas of Europe, Asia, and Africa is disrupted. The new opportunities that appeared then to people allowed them to better and more effectively use the natural advantages of the area in which they lived. Conversely, where nature and climate were harsh, it was more difficult for people to take advantage of new wonderful achievements.
From now on, the pace of development of individual regions of the world becomes different. The areas that developed most quickly were those with a mild climate and fertile soils, where farmers could obtain huge harvests. This happened in Western Asia, North Africa (Nile Valley), the Mediterranean, India, and China. Almost simultaneously in the steppe regions of Eastern Europe, Siberia, and the Far East, nomadic pastoral societies were being formed.
Both farmers and nomads grew rapidly in population and accumulated wealth. There is an opportunity to separate from tribal communities individual families who could provide for their own existence. The former equality of people from the times of the tribal system was becoming a thing of the past.
Tribal leaders, elders, warriors had the opportunity to get their hands on best lands for plowing and pasture, collect great wealth in their hands, hire people to protect and increase these wealth, organize their seizures in foreign territories. Things were moving towards the creation of states.
Back in the Neolithic period, they originated in the fertile valleys of the rivers of Western Asia (Euphrates and Tigris), Egypt (Nile), and India (Indus). Later, already in the Bronze Age, states arose in China, the Mediterranean, and among some nomadic peoples of Europe and Asia.
Development proceeded more slowly in the south of Europe and very slowly in the north and east of this continent, in the vast expanses of Asia. Several thousand years later, there was a transition from hunting, fishing, and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding. The inhabitants of these places lagged behind the inhabitants of the south in everything: in the type of tools and weapons, utensils, dwellings, religious rituals and even decorations.
The folding of nations . Differences in the development of mankind also influenced the formation of separate large groups of people who spoke their own languages. special languages who had their own special customs and even external differences.
So, in the northeast of Europe, in the Trans-Urals, Western Siberia a type of people began to emerge who began to ancestors of the Finno-Ugric peoples.
IN Eastern Siberia on the undivided steppe spaces of Asia, in the zone where shepherd tribes appeared, ancestors of future Mongolian and Turkic peoples.
In the southeast of Europe and adjacent territories, agricultural and pastoral tribes formed, which became ancestors of future Indo-Europeans.
In the Caucasus region began to form Caucasian peoples.
In all these tribal groups of Eurasia there was rapid population growth. They felt cramped in their former territories, but the land was large, abundant and beautiful. People understood this a long time ago. They continued to move from place to place in search of a better life. And this means that already in those days not only the isolation of large groups of the Earth’s population began, but also their mixing.
This process was facilitated by the exchange of food products, tools, weapons, and familiarization with each other’s production experience. War and peace continued to march side by side across our planet.
Scientists call Indo-Europeans the ancient population of vast territories of Europe and Asia, which gave rise to many modern peoples of the world, including Russians and others.
Where was the ancient ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans? And why are the ancient ancestors of most European peoples, including the Slavs, called Indo-Europeans? Most scientists believe that such an ancestral home was a large region of Southeast and Central Europe, in particular the Balkan Peninsula and the foothills of the Carpathians, and probably southern Russia and Ukraine. Here, in parts of Europe washed by warm seas, on fertile soils, in sun-warmed forests, on mountain slopes and valleys covered with soft emerald grass, where shallow transparent rivers flowed, the ancient Indo-European community of people took shape. There are other points of view on the place of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans.
Once upon a time, people belonging to this community spoke the same language. Traces of this common origin are still preserved in many languages of the peoples of Europe and Asia. So, in all these languages there is the word “birch”, which means either a tree in general or the name of the birch itself. There are many other common names and terms in these languages.
The Indo-Europeans were engaged in cattle breeding and agriculture, and later began to smelt bronze.
An example of Indo-European settlements were the remains of an ancient village in the area of the middle reaches of the Dnieper near the village of Tripolie, dating back to the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e.
“Trypillians” no longer lived in dugouts, but in large wooden houses, the walls of which were coated with clay for warmth. The floor was also clay. The area of such houses reached 100-150 m2. Large groups lived in them, perhaps tribal communities, divided into families. Each family lived in a separate, fenced-off compartment with a baked clay stove for heating and cooking.
In the center of the house there was a small elevation - an altar, where the “Trypillians” performed their religious rituals and sacrifices to the gods. One of the main ones was considered the mother goddess, the patroness of fertility. Houses in the village were often located in a circle. The settlement consisted of dozens of dwellings. In its center there was a corral for cattle, and it itself was fenced from attacks by people and predatory animals by a rampart and a palisade. But it is surprising that no remains of weapons were found in the settlements of the Trypillians - battle axes, daggers and other means of defense and attack. This means that mostly peaceful tribes lived here, for whom war had not yet become a part of life.
The main occupation of the Trypillians was farming and breeding domestic animals. They sowed large areas of land with wheat, barley, millet, and peas; they cultivated the field with hoes and harvested the crops using wooden sickles with silicon inserts inserted into them. “Trypillians” raised cattle, pigs, goats, and sheep.
The transition to agriculture and cattle breeding significantly advanced the economic power of the Indo-European tribes and contributed to the growth of their population. And the domestication of the horse, the development of bronze tools and weapons made the Indo-Europeans in the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. e. easier to rise in search of new lands, more daring in the development of new territories.
Settlement of Indo-Europeans. The spread of Indo-Europeans across the expanses of Eurasia began from the southeast of Europe. They moved west and southwest and occupied all of Europe to the Atlantic. Another part of the Indo-European tribes spread to the north and east. They settled in northern Europe. The wedge of Indo-European settlements crashed into the environment of the Finno-Ugric peoples and buried itself in the Ural Mountains, beyond which the Indo-Europeans did not go. In the south and southeast they advanced into Asia Minor, the North Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia, settled in India.
The myths and fairy tales of the peoples of India preserve memories of their ancient northern ancestral home, while in the north of Russia there are still names of rivers and lakes that go back to Sanskrit, the ancient language of India.
During the migrations of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. Indo-European community that occupied vast lands from Western Europe to India (hence the name), began to disintegrate. In conditions constant movement, the development of new territories, the Indo-European tribes became increasingly distant from each other.
Militant, energetic Indo-Europeans they came to where other peoples already lived. These invasions were far from peaceful. Long before the first states, armies appeared on the territory of Eurasia, wars began, our ancient ancestors fought for convenient lands, generous fishing grounds, forests rich in animals. At the sites of many ancient sites, traces of fire and heated battles are visible: skulls and bones, pierced by arrows and broken by battle axes, were found there.
Indo-Europeans and the ancestors of other peoples. Already during the period of settlement of the Indo-Europeans, their interaction and mixing with other tribes began. Thus, in the north-east of Europe they neighbored the ancestors of the Ugro-Finns (now they include many Russian peoples - Mordovians, Udmurts, Mari, Komi, as well as Hungarians, Estonians and Finns).
In Asia and Europe, the Indo-Europeans encountered the ancestors of the Turks and Mongols (their descendants from Russian peoples are Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashs, Kalmyks, Buryats, etc.).
The ancestors of the Ural peoples were located in the region of the Northern Urals. The ancient Altaians formed in Southern Siberia.
Stormy processes took place in the Caucasus, where a population was formed that spoke Caucasian languages (the ancient inhabitants of Dagestan, Adygea, Abkhazia).
Settled in the forest area Indo-Europeans together with other local inhabitants, they mastered cattle breeding and forest farming, and continued to develop hunting and fishing. The local population, living in the harsh conditions of the forest and forest-steppe, lagged behind the rapidly developing peoples of the Mediterranean, southern Europe, Western Asia, and Egypt. Nature at this time was the main regulator of human development, and it was not in favor of the north.
Early ethnic history of the peoples of Europe is one of the issues that gives rise to lively discussions. The question of what the population of Europe was like in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages is related to the problem of the formation of the Indo-European linguistic community and its localization.
In the Indo-European languages that spread throughout Europe, elements of clearly non-Indo-European origin are found. This is the so-called substrate vocabulary - relics of extinct languages, supplanted by Indo-European languages. The substrate leaves traces, sometimes very noticeable, not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar.
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ical structure of the dialects of tribes that moved to new places of residence. IN last decades Research by L. A. Gindin established the presence of several substrate layers in the south Balkan Peninsula, islands of the Aegean Sea. Among them, the Aegean substrate stands out - a conglomerate of heterogeneous and multi-temporal toponymic and onomastic formations. Much more homogeneous, according to researchers, is Minoan - the language of Linear A, which existed on Crete already in the 3rd millennium. A certain structural similarity of Minoan with the languages of the North-West Caucasus circle has been noted, the oldest representative of which - Hutt - is chronologically comparable to Minoan.
Several chronologically different substrate layers can be traced in the Apennines. The most ancient layer is probably of Iberian-Caucasian origin (traces of it are found in the west of the peninsula and especially on the island of Sardinia). To a later time, M. Pallottino attributes the “Aegean-Asian” substrate, which is also found throughout the Aegean.
In the Western Mediterranean, an autochthonous substrate was identified, to which Iberian probably belonged; Caucasian parallels are also allowed for it. According to archaeological reconstructions and some (so far isolated) linguistic facts, we can assume the presence of analogies, defined as Proto-North Caucasian, in a number of Late Neolithic cultures of the Carpathian-Danube region.
The extreme west of Europe, before the appearance of the Indo-Europeans there (the arrival of the Celts in Ireland dates back to the second quarter of the 1st millennium BC), was inhabited by peoples whose anthropological type was close to the Mediterranean; the population of the northern regions of Ireland is believed to be of the Eskimoid type. The substratum vocabulary of this area has not yet been studied.
In northeastern Europe, an analysis of ancient hydronymy indicates the presence in these areas of a population belonging to the Finno-Ugric family. The western border of this range in the 4th millennium passed in Finland between the Torne and Kemi rivers and along the Aland Islands. As for Central Europe - the area of distribution of the so-called ancient European hydronymy - the ethnolinguistic characteristics of this area are difficult.
Subsequently, speakers of Indo-European dialects superimposed on the ancient local cultures of Europe, gradually assimilating them, but islands of these ancient cultures remained throughout the Early Bronze Age. Their material traces, preserved to this day in Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, include, in particular, special megalithic structures - dolmens, cromlechs, menhirs, which supposedly had a cult purpose.
In historical times, Indo-European peoples and languages gradually spread over a vast territory from the extreme west of Europe to Hindustan; It is obvious that as we move deeper into history we will come to the period of their existence in some territorially more limited area, which is conventionally defined as the Indo-European ancestral home. Since the emergence of Indo-European studies in the first half of the 19th century. the question of the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans has repeatedly been the focus of attention of researchers who, in addition to linguistic material, used data from those related sciences that in the corresponding period reached the required level of development, in particular archeology and anthropology.
The first researchers (the middle of the last century), relying in their constructions on linguistic evidence and early written sources, placed the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans in the East. A. Pictet
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he considered ancient Bactria to be the place - the region between the Hindu Kush, Oxus (Amu Darya) and the Caspian Sea. The idea of the Asian ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans was supported by V. Hen, G. Kipert, I. Moore. The latter examined ancient Indian texts showing the special attitude of the Indo-Aryans to winter and to the peoples living in the north - on the other side of the Himalayas (i.e. in Central Asia).
R. Latham was the first to speak out against the Asian ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans (60s of the 19th century). According to Latham, it should have been sought where most Indo-European languages are attested in historical times, that is, in Europe. He was supported by V. Benfey, according to which the fact that the common Indo-European names of tiger, camel, and lion were not found speaks against the eastern ancestral home (although even then it was obvious that the argument based on the absence, possibly accidental, of some designation in the languages is not may be considered decisive).
The theory of a European ancestral home has been positively received by archaeologists and anthropologists. L. Lindenschmit, like Benfey, proceeded from the fact that the designations of the pan-Indo-European fauna do not have an eastern character. Moreover, he believed that the main direction of movement of the Indo-Europeans was to the east and south, both in prehistoric times and in historical times.
According to the point of view of F. Spiegel, Eastern Europe from 45° latitude in its climatic conditions most favorable for population growth and, as we would now say, for demographic leaps. Spiegel's merit was that he was the first to express the position of the existence of border zones, zones of contacts, where both the “drawing” of other peoples into the mass and the spread, along with elements of material culture, also linguistic phenomena, views and other manifestations of spiritual culture.
At the same time (second half of the 19th century), a hypothesis was put forward that the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans was in the southeast of Europe, in the areas north of the Black Sea, from the mouth of the Danube to the Caspian Sea (Benfey, Hommel).
Thus, throughout the second half of the 19th century V. Numerous hypotheses were put forward regarding the ethnic composition of certain regions of ancient Europe and the place of the Indo-Europeans in it. With the flourishing of archeology, it seemed that the prerequisites appeared for expanding the scientific base of Indo-European research. However, until recent decades, positive results were minimal. The main methodological drawback of the hypotheses put forward and the concepts created on their basis was the following: usually a single feature was selected (for example, ceramics or an anthropological type), which was defined as specifically Indo-European, and those cultures where this feature was present were also declared Indo-European. It is quite obvious that such “theories” could not but encounter serious difficulties. For example, from the beginning of the 20th century. Corded ceramics began to be considered an integral feature of “Indo-Europeanism”, and accordingly, all cultures in which it was found were immediately classified as Indo-European; at the same time, it remained unclear what to do, for example, with the cultures of the Aegean, where painted vessels were common since the early Neolithic; the traditions of painted ceramics persisted here until late times, when the Indo-European identity of the corresponding peoples was no longer in doubt. On the other hand, archaeologists noted that painted pottery is one of the main features of Western Asian cultures, whose speakers spoke languages that were genetically unrelated, including Indo-European (Hittites, Sumerians, etc.).
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Already in pre-war period and in the 40s, the opinion began to be expressed more and more decisively about the absence of a straightforward connection between archaeological culture, anthropological type and a specific ethnic group. It was rightly noted that archaeological cultures, starting at least from the Eneolithic, are multi-ethnic; Moreover, the existence of a causal connection between language and physical type, physical type and culture, etc. was denied. It was pointed out that each of the listed characteristics has an independent history and paths of development, which usually do not coincide among different ethnic groups, and the only thing that can be done with It is safe to say that the tribes who spoke Indo-European languages were not alien to, for example, the traditions of the cultures of Shyur ceramics or spherical amphorae.
A turning point in the approach to Indo-European issues emerged in the late 50s - early 60s, when an expanded study of both the archeology of Central and Eastern Europe and adjacent areas, and the relationships between Indo-European language family and other families and numerous related studies have led to the development of new methodological foundations to solve the problem of localizing the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans. In turn, the comparative historical study of Indo-European vocabulary and ancient written sources, dating back more than a century and a half, made it possible to identify the most ancient layers of the vocabulary fund that characterize the social level of the Indo-Europeans, their economy, geographical environment, everyday realities, culture, and religion. As the analysis procedure improves, the degree of reliability of the reconstructions increases. This should also be facilitated by closer contacts of Indo-European studies with related disciplines - archaeology, paleogeography, paleozoology, etc. To illustrate the need for such cooperation, we cite one good famous example. For Vedic asi-, Avest. ar]hü- “(iron) sword” the original form *nsis is reconstructed with the same meaning. However, archaeological data indicate that this restored form is neither pan-Indo-European, nor even Indo-Iranian, since the spread of iron as a material for weapons dates back no earlier than the 9th-8th centuries, when not only Indo-European, but also Indo-Iranian unity had long been didn't exist. Therefore, the semantic reconstruction of this stem as “a weapon (sword?) made of copper/bronze” is more likely.
In recent decades, it has been possible to achieve a relative unity of views on the chronological boundaries of the common Indo-European period, which dates back to the 5th-4th millennium. The 4th millennium (or, as some believe, the turn of the 4th and 3rd millennium) was probably the time when individual Indo-European dialect groups began to diverge. Of fundamental importance in solving these problems were the facts obtained through the analysis of linguistic data, on certain aspects of which it is advisable to dwell in more detail.
It is now generally accepted that linguistic evidence can and should be used in historical reconstructions, since language is in a broad sense an exponent of the culture of its carriers. First of all, this concerns the vocabulary of the languages in question. Comparative historical linguistics has developed a reconstruction procedure that allows us to determine whether a given vocabulary unit dates back to the common Indo-European era or to the time of the isolated existence of a particular dialect group.
What material does the analysis of historically attested vocabulary provide for the problem of the Indo-European ancestral home?
For common Indo-European, a fairly ramified terminology is being restored, associated with cattle breeding and including the designations
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main domestic animals, often differentiated by sex and age: *houi- “sheep, ram” (the presence of common words with the meaning “wool” - *hul-n-, “to comb wool” - *kes-/*pek- suggests that we are talking about domestic sheep), *qog- “goat”, *guoy- “bull, cow”, *uit-l-/s- “calf”, *ekuo- “horse, horse”, *sü- “pig” , *horn - “pig”. In Indo-European languages, the verb *pah- “to guard (cattle), herd” is widespread. Among the food products associated with livestock breeding, we should name *mëms-o- “meat”, *kreu- “raw meat”; the name “milk” is limited to certain areas (its absence in some ancient Indo-European dialects is explained by researchers by the taboo of the designation “milk”, which in the ideas of the ancient Indo-Europeans was associated with the magical sphere), on the other hand, it is interesting to note some general designations of milk processing products, for example: *sör-, *s 9 ro- “curdled milk; cheese".
General agricultural terms include designations of actions and tools for cultivating land and agricultural products: *har- “cultivate the land, plow”, *seH(i)- “sow”, *mel- “grind”, *serp- “sickle”, * sheN- “ripen, harvest”, *pe(i)s- “pound, grind (grain)”. From common names cultivated plants should be called *ieuo- “barley”, *Had- “grain”, *prig- “wheat”, *lïno- “flax”, *uo/eino~ “grapes, wine”^ *(s)amlu- “apple” and etc.
Common Indo-European designations environmental conditions and representatives flora: *Hegr- “mountain, peak”, *kel- “hill, hill”, *hap- “river, ποτδκ”, *tek- “to flow, run”, *seu-/*su- “rain”, *( s)neigh- “snow”, *gheim- “winter”, *tep- “heat, warmth”; Along with the general name “tree” *de/oru-, the following species are distinguished: *bhergh- “birch”^ *bhaHgo- “beech”, *perk-u- “oak”, *e/oi- “yew”, *( s)grôbho- “hornbeam”, etc.
The Indo-European fauna is represented by the following common names: *hrtko- “bear”, *uiko-/*uip- “wolf”, *1еу- “lion”, *ylopek- “fox, jackal”, *el(e)n-/* elk- “deer; elk", *leuk- "lynx", *eghi-(*oghi-, *anghi-) !<<змея», *mûs- «мышь», *he/or- «орел», *ger- «журавль», *ghans- «водяная птица, гусь, лебедь», *dhghü- «рыба», *karkar- «краб» и др.
The common Indo-European designations j *ke/ol-, *ke/oklo- “wheel;” are associated with the range of ideas about wheeled transport; wheeled cart", *rot(h)o- "wheel; chariot", *his-/*hojs- "drawbar", *iugom- "yoke", *dhur- "to harness", *uegh- "to ride, carry", *iaH- "to ride in a cart". For the chronological correlation of the complex of data on wheeled transport, the restored Indo-European name for the metal *(II)aio-, which could be used along with wood in the manufacture of carts, is very important. As for metals such as gold, silver, iron, then; although there are no common Indo-European forms, one should not take literally the words of O. Schrader that “before their separation, the Indo-Europeans did not know a single metal except copper.” The acquaintance of Indo-Europeans, like other peoples, with metals began long before the emergence of metallurgy. Among the metals known since ancient times were gold, copper, and iron (meteoric). The attitude towards metals at an early stage was more aesthetic and sacred than utilitarian in nature, which is why gold and silver are often referred to as “shiny”, “shining”.
In connection with metals, it is necessary to touch upon the issue of the names of various types of weapons. According to the literature (especially of past decades), one may get the idea that the Indo-European warrior was armed no worse than a medieval knight, that he had an iron sword and spear, bow, and arrows. shield and much more. However, despite the fact that war, judging by the common Indo-European military terminology, was one of the important types of action
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The existence of the ancient Indo-Europeans, data on weapons is difficult to reduce to a common source (as opposed to such concepts as “wound”, “kill”, etc.). Some of the restored forms are limited to a particular area, the designations of others often arise as a result of metaphorical transfer. Researchers see an explanation for the instability of the ancient vocabulary denoting types of weapons in the frequent replacement of its names, associated with changes in production technology. In any case, when restoring this or that designation of a weapon, the results obtained should be correlated with what is known from the history of metals for a chronologically and territorially limited ethnic community.
It is significant that for the Indo-Europeans the vocabulary associated with movement along waterways is reconstructed: *panz- “boat, vessel”, *rH- “swim, row”, *pley- “sail (on a ship)”. Items associated with this range of concepts are not attested archaeologically, but this is not surprising, since the preservation of wooden objects requires special conditions.
These are the basic linguistic facts that can be used to characterize the ecological habitat of the ancient Indo-Europeans, their economic structure, and material life. Of great interest, although not directly related to the problem of the ancestral homeland, are studies of Indo-European social organization, family relations, religious and legal institutions 1.
One of the most significant aspects of the Indo-European problem is the question of the absolute chronology of the processes that took place in the preliterate era. Discrepancies in determining the chronological boundaries of Indo-European unity, as well as the period of division of the Indo-European community and the identification of individual dialect groups, sometimes reach one or two millennia in different constructions. That is why the method of dating linguistic events (moments of the collapse of proto-linguistic communities), developed in comparative historical linguistics, is especially important, the so-called “glottochronology method, based on the fact of the presence of basic vocabulary in languages (including such universal human concepts as numerals, parts of the body, the most common phenomena environment, universal human states or actions), which, usually not borrowed from one language to another, is nevertheless subject to changes due to intralingual reasons. It has been established that over 10 thousand years, about 15% of the original vocabulary is replaced by a new one; As the reconstruction deepens, the percentage shifts slightly: for example, over 2 thousand years, about 28% of the words of the main fund change, over 4 thousand - about 48%, etc. Despite the real difficulties facing glottochronology (for example, it does not takes into account the possibility of sudden changes in the vocabulary of the language; moreover, one must constantly keep in mind that it will give an “underestimated” chronology as the reconstruction deepens), it can be used in calculations that are partly comparable to radiocarbon dating in archaeology. Prerequisites are created for correlating the reconstructed data with archaeological complexes specific in place and time.
The role of vocabulary in the study of the preliterate history of peoples is not limited to the above. Along with the study of the main vocabulary fund, no less important is the analysis of cultural vocabulary - the designation of objects and concepts that are borrowed during various types of language contacts. Knowledge of the patterns of phonetic development of languages in contact makes it possible to determine the relative chronology of these contacts and thus narrow the probable boundaries of their localization.
Thus, a number of cultural terms are known that are common to Indo-European (or some part of its dialects), on the one hand, and Semitic il maps
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Velsky - on the other. Even at the end of the last century, individual Indo-European-Semitic convergences such as the Indo-European *tauro-“(wild) bull ~ Semitic were noted. *tawr- “bull”; At the same time, the idea was expressed about the possible contiguity of the Indo-European and Semitic ancestral homeland. Contact words in the language families under consideration include Indo-European (Italian-Germanic) *ghaid- “kid, goat” with common Semitic. *gadj- “the same” (Afroasiatic *gdj-), I.-e. (“ancient European”) *bhar(s) - “grain, cereal” with common emith. *ba/urr- “threshed grain”, Indo-European *niedhu- “honey, honey drink” from Semitic. *mVtk- “sweet”, etc. Indo-European-Kartvelian contact vocabulary includes designations of animals, representatives of the plant world, as well as names of body parts, some elementary actions, etc.: Indo-European “sö-“pig” from Kartvelian. *e-sw- “boar, pig”, I.-e. (dial.) *digh- “goat” from Kartv.
*dqa- “goat”, I.-e. *dheH- “put” from kartv. *d(e)w- “to lie, put”, Indo-European (dial.) *seks “six” from Kartv. *eksw- and many others.
It should be noted a number of lexical borrowings into Indo-European languages from the ancient languages of Western Asia - Sumerian, Hutt, for example, Indo-European *r(e)ud(h) - “ore, copper; red” from Sumerian, urud, Indo-European *pars-/*part- “leopard, leopard” from the Hutts. ha-pras- “leopard”, etc. Indo-European borrowings have also been identified in the languages of ancient Western Asia - Elamite, Hurrito-Urartian: Indo-European *pah-s- “to protect; shepherd" with Elam. baha “protection, defender”, Indo-European *ag-“news” from Khur.-Urart. *ag- “to lead”, Indo-European *guhen- “to break, to strike” from Urart. gunu-se “battle, battle, war”, I.-e. *Hat- “grain” from Hutt. kait "grain; Goddess of grain", Hurrian. kad/te “barley, grain”, etc. Regardless of the direction of these borrowings, the fact of the presence of linguistic (and therefore ethnic) contacts is important, which prevents the identification of most regions of Central and Western Europe with the Indo-European ancestral home.
As an illustration of long-term contacts with individual groups of Indo-European languages, one can cite the Finno-Ugric languages, where, along with vocabulary of common Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, East Iranian origin, a whole layer of proto-Iranian (according to some researchers, early East Iranian) borrowings related to cattle breeding, agriculture, and the designation of tools was discovered , social terminology, etc., cf. *porsa “pig”, *oga “drill”, *sasar “sister, daughter-in-law”, etc. The collapse of the Finno-Ugric linguistic unity dates back to no later than the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e.; this is, therefore, a terminun ante quem for the isolation of an Iranian dialect group that was in contact with the Finno-Ugrians somewhere in the region of Central Asia.
In matters of localization of the Indo-European ancestral home, another class of lexical units must be taken into account - various geographical names, primarily hydronyms (river names), which can often be several thousand years old. At the same time, it should be remembered that the presence of hydronyms of a particular linguistic affiliation in a certain territory does not exclude the possibility of an earlier presence of other ethno-linguistic groups there, therefore onomastic argumentation acquires, in a sense, an auxiliary character.
About the preliterate period of Indo-European history, indirect evidence is preserved at other linguistic levels. Knowledge of phonetic patterns and the establishment of grammatical isoglosses make it possible to trace the sequential separation of dialect groups from a certain community: parallel language development observed in a group of separated dialects indicates their entry into a relatively closed zone and stay in it for a certain time. Taking into account phonetic changes is fundamentally important when analyzing borrowing
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vaniya (this is the only way to determine the nature of the latter - pan-Indo-European, or Indo-Iranian, or East Iranian, etc.), and to identify linguistic unions.
These are the main features of linguistic material as a source for the reconstruction of history and methods of its processing.
Currently, many points of view on Indo-European issues are grouped around several main hypotheses that localize the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, respectively, in the Balkan-Carpathian region, in the Eurasian steppes, in the territory of Western Asia, in the so-called circumpontic zone.
Since ancient times, the cultures of the Balkan-Carpathian region have been distinguished by their brightness and originality. This region, together with Asia Minor, formed one geographical zone in which the “Neolithic Revolution” took place in the 7th-6th millennia: for the first time on the European continent, the population here moved from appropriating forms of economy to producing ones. The next stage of historical development was the discovery of the properties of copper; the level of metallurgical production in the 5th-4th millennium was very high in this area and, perhaps, had no equal at that time either in Anatolia, or in Iran, or in Mesopotamia. The Balkan-Carpathian cultures of this period, according to supporters of the hypothesis of the Balkan ancestral home (V. Georgiev, I.M. Dyakonov, etc.), are genetically related to the early agricultural cultures of the Neolithic. It was in this region, according to this hypothesis, that the ancient Indo-Europeans should have lived. Acceptance of this hypothesis seems to remove some historical, chronological and linguistic problems. For example, for most Indo-European dialects, the distance that their speakers had to travel to historical habitats is significantly reduced; a slightly different picture of the dialect division of Indo-European unity is proposed, which is in line with classical ideas.
However, much more serious difficulties arise. First of all, it is necessary to take into account the archaeologically revealed orientation of the movement of the ancient Balkan cultures, which went in a southern direction. The continuation of the ancient Balkan cultures of the 4th millennium is found in the south of the Balkans and in the Aegean, Crete and the Cyclades, but not in the eastern direction, where, according to this hypothesis, individual groups of Indo-Europeans should have moved. There is no evidence of the movement of these cultures to the west of the European continent, which begins to “Indo-Europeanize” no earlier than the 2nd millennium BC. e. Therefore, within the framework of the Balkan hypothesis, it remains unclear where the speakers of Indo-European dialects were located after significant ethnocultural shifts in Central and Eastern Europe in the 4th-3rd millennium BC.
The chronological and cultural-historical difficulties associated with the acceptance of the Balkan hypothesis are aggravated by linguistic problems. Information about natural conditions, elements of the social system, economic structure, and worldview systems, which are restored for the ancient Indo-European period, do not fit into the set of characteristics characterizing Central European agricultural cultures. It is also significant that the hypothesis of the Balkan-Carpathian ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans is not able to explain where and when long-term contacts with other language families (Kartvelian, North Caucasian, Semitic, etc.) could have occurred, accompanied by the borrowing of cultural vocabulary, the formation of language unions, etc. Finally, the localization of the Indo-European ancestral home in the Balkans would raise additional difficulties for the theory of Nostratic kinship, according to which a number of linguistic families of the Old World - Indo-European, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Uralic, Altaic, Afrasian - go back to one macrofamily. According to historical and linguistic
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According to images, the time of the collapse of the Nostratic linguistic community, localized in northeast Africa and Western Asia, dates back to the 12th-11th millennia. Despite the hypothetical nature of many particular issues of the Nostratic theory, it cannot be ignored in reconstructions of chronologically later periods of the corresponding language families.
According to another hypothesis (T.V. Gamkrelidze, Vyach. Vs. Ivanov, etc.), the area of the initial settlement of the Indo-Europeans was the area within Eastern Anatolia, the South Caucasus and Northern Mesopotamia of the V-IV millennium. To prove this hypothesis, arguments from paleogeography and archeology are used (continuity of development of local Anatolian cultures throughout the 3rd millennium), data from paleozoology, paleobotany, linguistics (sequence of division of the Indo-European dialect community, borrowings from individual Indo-European languages or their groups into non-Indo-European languages and vice versa, etc.).
The linguistic argumentation of this hypothesis is based on the strict use of the comparative historical method and the basic provisions of the theory of linguistic borrowings, although it raises objections from opponents on some particular issues. It is very important to emphasize that Indo-European migrations are considered according to this concept not as a total ethnic “expansion”, but as a movement, first of all, of the Indo-European dialects themselves, together with a certain part of the population, layering on various ethnic groups and transmitting their language to them. The last point is methodologically very important, since it shows the inconsistency of hypotheses based primarily on anthropological criteria in the ethnolinguistic attribution of archaeological cultures. In general, despite the fact that the hypothesis under consideration requires clarification on a number of archaeological, cultural-historical and linguistic issues, it can be stated that the identification of the area from the Balkans to Iran and further east as a territory in a certain part of which the Indo-European ancestral homeland can be localized has not yet been met fundamental refutations.
The problem of the collapse of pan-Indo-European unity and the divergence of Indo-European dialects has received the most thorough development (despite the debatability of a number of points) within the framework of this concept, so they should be given special attention. According to this hypothesis, the beginning of migrations of Indo-European tribes dates back to the period no later than
IV thousand. The first linguistic community to emerge from the Indo-European is considered to be Anatolian. The original, more eastern and northeastern location of speakers of Anatolian languages in relation to their historical habitats is evidenced by bilateral borrowings found in Anatolian and Caucasian languages. The separation of the Greco-Armenian-Aryan unity follows the separation of the Anatolians, and the Aryan dialect area is presumably separated within the general Indo-European one. Subsequently, Greek (via Asia Minor) reaches the islands of the Aegean Sea and mainland Greece, layering on a non-Indo-European “Aegean” substrate, including various autochthonous languages; Indo-Aryans, part of the Iranians and Tocharians move at different times in a (north-) eastern direction (for Indo-Aryans the possibility of moving to the Northern Black Sea region through the Caucasus is allowed), while speakers of “ancient European” dialects move west through Central Asia and the Volga region to historical Europe. Thus, the existence of intermediate territories is allowed, where newly arriving population groups settled, joining local populations in repeated waves, and later populated the more western regions of Europe. For “ancient European” languages, the region of the Northern Black Sea region and the Volga steppes are considered to be the common source (albeit secondary) area. This explains the Indo-European
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The Chinese character of the hydronymy of the Northern Black Sea region, comparable to Western European (the absence of more eastern traces of Indo-Europeans may be caused by insufficient knowledge of the ancient hydronymy of the Volga region and Central Asia), and the presence of a large layer of contact vocabulary in the Finno-Ugric, Yenisei and other languages.
The territory where the localization of the secondary linguistic community of originally related Indo-European dialects is assumed to occupy a central place in the third hypothesis of the Indo-European ancestral home, shared by many researchers, both archaeologists and linguists.
The Volga region is one of those well studied archaeologically and described in a number of authoritative studies (K. F. Smirnov, E. E. Kuzmina, N. Ya. Merpert). It has been established that at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennium the Yamnaya cultural community spread in the Volga region. It included mobile pastoral tribes that explored the steppes and had widespread contact with foreign cultural territories. These contacts were expressed in exchanges, invasions of neighboring territories, and the settlement of some of the ancient Yamnaya tribes on the borderlands of the territories of early agricultural centers. Archaeologically, very early connections of the steppe tribes with the South and Southeast are noted; the possibility of movements of significant groups of the population to the steppe from the Caucasus and Caspian regions is not denied.
The western direction of expansion of the Yamnaya cultures is postulated in a number of works exploring the transformation of Central European cultures from the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium and the reasons that caused it (M. Gimbutas, E. N. Chernykh). The changes taking place in the area of ancient European agricultural cultures, according to a number of researchers, affected the economic structure (a sharp increase in the share of livestock farming compared to agriculture), the type of housing and settlement, elements of worship, the physical type of the population, and there is a decrease in ethnocultural changes as the population progresses. to northwest Europe.
The main objections to this hypothesis stem from the fact that from the very beginning it was developed as a purely archaeological concept. The movements of the Indo-Europeans, according to some such constructions, look like migrations of entire cultures; To justify such migrations, many arguments of both economic and ethnocultural nature are given. At the same time, the extremely important fact remains aside that in the problem of localizing the ancient settlement area of the Indo-Europeans, the primary role belongs to linguistic and comparative historical and philological data, and only linguistic methods can reliably establish the ethnolinguistic affiliation of the population of a certain archaeological culture. For example, linguistic evidence does not allow us to identify the ancient population of the steppe zone of Central Asia, in particular the carriers of the Andronovo culture, with the Indo-Iranians - although such a point of view exists, it leaves unexplained the presence of Indo-Aryan elements in the Black Sea region and Western Asia. Chronological data (III millennium), as well as external contacts of Indo-European languages with other language families, make it possible to correlate the area of the ancient Yamnaya cultural community with the “secondary” area of settlement of the Indo-Europeans. It is these territories, and not the more southeastern or western ones, that, according to experts, are the place of isolation of the Indo-Iranian dialect community (the “ancestral homeland” of the Indo-Iranians). It is significant that the picture of the economy and life of the Indo-Iranians in their ancestral homeland among the archaeological cultures of the Old World, reconstructed according to linguistic data, correlates only with materials from the steppe cultures of Eurasia (E. E. Kuzmina, K. F. Smirnov, T. M. Bongard-Levin, E. A . Grantovsky).
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A fundamentally different approach to defining the Indo-European ancestral home is represented by the concept of the so-called circumpontic zone, which has been actively developed in the last decade. According to the idea put forward, deep ethnocultural shifts in the development of the Balkan-Danube region in the second half of the 4th millennium went in parallel with the emergence of a new system of cultures, minimally connected with the previous ones. Complex historical and, in some cases, genetic connections of this system with such cultural communities as the Corded Ware cultures, spherical amphorae, and pastoral cultures of the Caspian-Black Sea steppes are noted (N. Ya. Merpert). It is assumed that there is a certain contact continuity and cultural integration not only in the area of distribution of the ancient Yamnaya cultures, but also south of the Black Sea, where elements of the new cultural system can be traced all the way to the Caucasus. In this vast territory, according to a number of researchers, the process of formation of specific groups of Indo-Europeans could have taken place. This process was quite complex; it included both the separation of initially unified groups and the convergence of unrelated groups drawn into the contact zone. The spread of close elements within the zone could be due (along with the initial general impulse), in addition to contact continuity and close communication, also by the existence of a kind of “transfer sphere” - mobile pastoral groups. At the same time, this area was in contact with the ancient cultural centers of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, which would well explain the borrowing of cultural vocabulary along with the corresponding realities, techniques, etc.
It is interesting to note that this approach to determining the Indo-European ancestral home finds some analogues in the direction called “linguistic geography” (V. Pisani, A. Bartholdi, etc.). Indo-European linguistic unity is defined as a zone of transitional phenomena - isogloss, genetic kinship gives priority to secondary “affinity” (affinité secondaire) - phenomena caused by parallel development in contacting dialects. The Indo-Europeans, as Pisani believes, for example, “are a collection of tribes who spoke dialects that were part of a single system of isoglosses, which we call Indo-European.” It is obvious that supporters of this trend make a certain (albeit negative) contribution to the solution of the Indo-European problem, simply removing it - after all, if, as they believe, there was no more or less compact Indo-European community, then the question of the Indo-European ancestral homeland becomes meaningless. As for the hypothesis of the “circumpontic” zone, its authors still make a reservation that this can be a solution to the Indo-European problem only at a certain chronological point.
To summarize the above, it should be noted that at the present stage of research, the most promising solution to the Indo-European problem seems to be the following. Some regions of Central Europe, since the Bronze Age, constituted the area of settlement of “ancient Europeans;” peoples; The Balkan-Carpathian region in this case becomes the “ancestral home” for some speakers of Indo-European dialects. This should have been preceded by a period of their stay in the more eastern territory, including the steppes of the Volga region and the Northern Black Sea region, as part of the Indo-European dialect community, which at that time still included Indo-Iranian (or part of it), Tocharian and other groups (cf. the idea of “circumpontic” zone). The “steppe” ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans will thus be correlated with the area common to most of the Indo-European dialects, from which the movement to the Central European regions took place. The question of whether this area was the primary homeland of all Indo-Europeans, or (as, for example, show
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The authors of the Near East hypothesis draw on a huge amount of material) as an intermediate area of settlement (“secondary ancestral home”) for most Indo-European dialect groups, it is necessary to solve in close connection with the question of the most ancient stages of formation and development of a number of ethno-linguistic communities that reveal contact and genetic similarities to Indo-European.
At the origins of the comparative historical study of Indo-European mythology and religion are A. Meilleux and J. Vandries. Meillet was the first to express the idea of parallelism between the terms denoting deity among the Indo-European peoples. He showed that ancient Indian devah, Lithuania dëvas, Old Prussian. deiws "god", Latin, divus "divine" may be related to the Indo-European root *di-e/ow - "day, light". Meillet did not find any common Indo-European terms for cult, priests, or sacrifice; he noted that in the Indo-European world there were no gods as such; instead, “natural and social forces” acted. The problem was further developed by Vandries, who explored such aspects as the range of terms associated with the concept of faith (Latin credo, Old Irish cretim, Old Indian çrad, etc.), sacred administrative functions (for example, the designation of a priest: Latin. flamen, ancient Indian brahman), specific sacred actions and objects (sacred fire, appeal to a deity, etc.). Analyzing the relevant terms, Vandries came to the conclusion that there were religious traditions common to the Indo-Iranian, Latin and Celtic ethno-linguistic groups. He pointed out the main reason why, as he believed, languages so widely separated from each other maintained these traditions: only in India and Iran, in Rome and among the Celts (but nowhere else in the Indo-European world) their carriers - colleges of priests - were preserved . Despite the limited methodological basis of the noted studies, which were based primarily on data from etymological analysis, they undoubtedly opened up new perspectives for historical mythology.
The next stage, associated with the general progress of the development of philological sciences, was the transition from the study of specific mythological units to the study of Indo-European mythology as a system that has a certain structure, the individual elements of which are in relations of opposition, distribution, etc. In the works of J. Dumézil, in which largely determined the historical and mythological research of recent decades, the idea of a three-part structure of Indo-European ideology, correlated with the ideas of Indo-Europeans about man, nature, and the Cosmos, was consistently pursued.
To ensure the existence and prosperity of archaic groups, it was necessary to perform three main functions, comparable to three social groups, which can be conventionally designated as “kings”/“priests” (the personification of power), “warriors” (the personification of strength), “communists” (providing fertility). This is accordingly ancient Indian. brahman/raja, ksatriya and vaiçya (the fourth ancient Indian class - çudra - originally included an autochthonous non-Indo-European population, which, according to the Rigveda, performed subordinate functions relative to the first three classes), similarly - Avest. aftarvan/aftravan “priests”, raftaes-tar “warriors-chariots”, vastryo-fsuyant “farmers-cattle breeders”; among the Celts, judging by Caesar’s Notes on the Gallic War and some Irish texts of the Christian period, druida “priests”, fir flatha “military aristocracy owning land”, boaîri “free community members owning cattle”; in Rome - the triad Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus (cf. related Italian tradition: Umbrian Juu-, Mart-, Vofion (o)-). The three-member structure of the ancient Indian is similar to it. pantheon: Mithra - Varuna (priestly-sacral function), Indra (military function), Nasatya - Ashwins
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(economic functions). Even among those Indo-European peoples where the ternary distribution of functions is not clearly expressed, it, according to Dumezil and his followers, can, as a rule, be restored. Thus, Greek authors (Strabo, Plato, Plutarch) emphasize the functional nature of the Ionian tribes, which, according to tradition, are associated with the initial period of the existence of Athens: priests (or religious rulers), warriors (guardians), plowmen/artisans. These different types of life activities (ways of life, βίοι) are reflected in the three classes of Plato's ideal republic.
Despite some artificiality and rigid boundaries of a number of Dumezil's constructions, they marked a turn to the study of Indo-European mythology and rituals as sign systems - an approach whose promise has become especially obvious in recent decades. Numerous works by Western and Soviet researchers devoted to the analysis of Indo-European cult systems and ritual and mythological motifs have made it possible to identify the most archaic layers of ideas characterizing the worldview of the ancient Indo-Europeans.
Among the central Indo-European mythological motifs is the motif of the unity of heaven and earth as the progenitors of all things; in many Indo-European traditions there is a connection between the name of a person and the designation of land (Lithuanian zmonés “people”< zémè «земля», латинск. homo «человек», humus «почва»), которая находит типологическое соответствие в мотиве происхождения человека из глины, распространенном в мифологиях Ближнего Востока.
An important place in the Indo-European system of ideas is occupied by the idea of twinning, reflected in the motif of the original undividedness of earth and sky. In all Indo-European traditions, there is a connection between the divine twins and the cult of the horse (Dioscuri, Ashvins, etc.). Associated with the idea of twinning is the motif of twin incest, which is present in the most ancient Indo-European mythologies (Hittite, ancient Indian, Baltic, etc.) and has certain typological parallels (albeit socially conditioned) in the upper strata of some ancient Eastern societies.
The central image of Indo-European mythology is the thunderer (ancient Indian Parjany a-, Hittite Pirua-, Slavic Perunъ, Lithuanian Perkünas, etc.), located “above” (hence the connection of his name with the name of a rock, mountain) and entering into single combat with the enemy representing the “bottom” - he is usually located under a tree, mountain, etc. Most often, the enemy of the Thunderer appears in the form of a snake-like creature, correlated. with the lower world, chaotic and hostile to man. At the same time, it is important to note that the creatures of the lower world also symbolize fertility, wealth, and vitality. A number of Indo-European mythological motifs (the creation of the universe from chaos, myths associated with the first cultural hero, the distinction between the languages of gods and people, a certain sequence in the succession of generations of gods, etc.) find parallels in ancient Eastern mythologies, which can be explained by the ancient contacts of Indo-Europeans with the peoples of the Middle East .
The dual social organization of ancient Indo-European society had a direct impact on the formation of the structure of spiritual concepts and the mythological picture of the world. It has been established that the main Indo-European mythological motifs (old and new gods, twin cult, incest, etc.) and ritually significant oppositions (top - bottom, right - left, sunset - sunrise, etc.), based on the principle of binary, are universal in nature and are found in various unrelated traditions associated with a certain stage of social development, undoubtedly earlier than the one
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paradise is reflected in the reconstructions of Dumezil and his school. The absence of classical Indo-European ternary distributions in the Anatolian area, which in general was strongly influenced by ancient Eastern cultures (cf. also partly Greek), makes it possible to correlate two different systems of ideas with chronologically different periods of the existence of the Indo-European dialect community.
Doctor of History, Prof. L.L. Zaliznyak
Part 1. IN SEARCH OF THE HOMELAND
Preface
This work is an attempt at a popular presentation of complex problems of Indo-European studies to a wide range of educated readers. Since the early 90s of the last century, when the author of this work became interested in Indo-European studies, several of his articles have been published. Most of them are intended not for a narrow circle of professional Indo-Europeanists (linguists, archaeologists), but for a wide audience of readers interested in ancient history and, above all, students of historians and archaeologists from history departments of universities in Ukraine. Therefore, some of these texts exist in the form of separate chapters of textbooks for history faculties of Ukraine. One of the incentives for this work was the unprecedented explosion in the post-Soviet space of fantastic quasi-scientific “concepts” of countless myth-makers.
The fact that most modern researchers, to one degree or another, include the territory of Ukraine in the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, also played a role, and some even narrow the latter to the steppes between the Southern Carpathians and the Caucasus. Despite the fact that archaeological and anthropological materials obtained in Ukraine are actively interpreted in the West, Indo-European studies has not yet become a priority issue for Ukrainian paleoethnologists, archaeologists, and linguists.
My vision of the problem of the origin and early history of the Indo-Europeans was formed on the basis of the developments of many generations of Indo-Europeans from different countries. Without in any way claiming to be the author of most of the provisions raised in the work and having no illusions regarding the final solution to the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans or an exhaustive analysis of all the vast literature on Indo-European studies, the author tries to give a critical analysis of views on the origin of the Indo-Europeans from the standpoint of archeology and other sciences.
There is a huge literature in different languages of the world dedicated to the search for the country from where the ancestors of related Indo-European peoples 5-4 thousand years ago settled the space between the Atlantic in the west, India in the east, Scandinavia in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south. Considering the limited amount of work aimed at a wide audience, the bibliography of the article is narrowed to the most important works on the topic. The specific genre and limited volume of the work excludes the possibility of a full historiographical analysis of the problems raised in it, which would require a full-fledged monographic study.
The direct predecessors of this article were the author’s works published over the last quarter of a century (Zaliznyak, 1994, pp. 78-116; 1998, pp. 248-265; 2005, pp. 12-37; 1999; 200; 2012, pp. 209- 268; Zaliznyak, 1997, p.117-125). The work is actually an expanded and edited translation into Russian of one of the two chapters of a course of lectures for history faculties of Ukraine dedicated to Indo-European studies, published in 2012 ( Leonid Zaliznyak Ancient history of Ukraine. - K., 2012, 542 pp.). The full text of the book can be found on the Internet.
The term Ukraine is used not as the name of a state or ethnonym, but as a toponym denoting a region or territory.
I would like to sincerely thank Lev Samoilovich Klein, a classic of modern archeology and ancient history that I deeply respected from my student days, for the kind offer and the opportunity to place this far from perfect text on this site.
Discovery of the Indo-Europeans
The high level of human development at the beginning of the third millennium was largely predetermined by the cultural achievements of European civilization, the founders and creators of which were, first of all, the peoples of the Indo-European language family - the Indo-Europeans (hereinafter referred to as I-e). In addition, the settlement of other peoples largely predetermined the modern ethnopolitical map of Europe and Western Asia. This explains the extreme scientific significance of the problem of the origin of the Indo-European family of peoples for the history of mankind in general and for the primitive history of Ukraine in particular.
The mystery of the origin of i-e has been worrying scientists in many countries for more than two centuries. The main difficulty in solving it lies, first of all, in the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the problem. That is, to solve it it is necessary to involve data and methods from various scientific disciplines: linguistics, archeology, primitive history, anthropology, written sources, ethnography, mythology, paleogeography, botany, zoology, and even genetics and molecular biology. None of them separately, including the latest sensational constructions of geneticists, are able to solve the problem on their own.
The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 coincided with the 200th anniversary of the great discovery of Indian Supreme Court Justice Sir William Jones, which Hegel compared to the discovery of the New World by Columbus. Reading the book of religious hymns of the Aryan conquerors of India, the Rig Veda, W. Jones came to the conclusion about the relatedness of the genetic predecessors of other languages - Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Germanic, Slavic. The work of the English lawyer was continued by German linguists of the 19th century, who developed the principles of comparative analysis of languages and finally proved the origin of i-e from one common ancestor. Since then, both modern and dead languages have been thoroughly studied. The latter are known from the sacred texts of the Rig Veda of the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, later written down in Sanskrit, the hymns of the Avesta at the turn of the 2nd-1st millennium BC, the proto-Greek language of ancient Mycenae of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writings Hittites of Anatolia of the 2nd millennium BC, Tocharian sacred texts of Xinjiang of Western China.
Classification of Indo-European languages and peoples
In the middle of the nineteenth century. German linguist A. Schleicher proposed the principle of reconstructing Proto-Indo-European vocabulary using the method of comparative linguistic paleontology. The use of comparative linguistics made it possible to develop a diagram of the genetic tree of languages. The consequence of centuries of efforts by linguists was the classification of languages, which basically took shape by the end of the 19th century. However, to this day there is no consensus among experts about the number of not only languages, but also linguistic groups and peoples. Among the most recognized is the classification scheme, which covers 13 ethnolinguistic groups of peoples: Anatolian, Indian, Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Illyrian, Phrygian, Armenian, Tocharian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic (Fig. 1). Each of these groups consists of many closely related living and dead languages.
Anatolian(Hittite-Luwian) group includes Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, as well as the so-called “minor languages”: Pisidian, Cilician, Maeonian. They functioned in Asia Minor (Anatolia) during the 2nd millennium BC. The first three languages are known from the texts of 15,000 clay cuneiform tablets obtained by the German archaeologist Hugo Winkler in 1906. During the excavations of the capital of the Hittite kingdom, the city of Hattusa, east of Ankara. The texts were written in Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) cuneiform, but in an unknown language, which was deciphered in 1914 by the Czech B. Grozny and was called Hittite or Nesian. Among the mass of ritual and business texts in the Hittite language, a few records were found in the related Hittite languages Luwian and Palayan, as well as in the non-Indo-European Hattian. The autochthons of Asia Minor, the Hutts, were conquered at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. the Hittites, but influenced the language of the Indo-European conquerors.
The early Anatolian Hittite, Luwian, and Palalayan languages functioned in Asia Minor until the 8th century. BC. and in ancient times gave rise to the Late Anatolian Lydian, Carian, Cilician and other languages, the speakers of which were assimilated by the Greeks in Hellenistic times around the 3rd century. BC.
Indian(Indo-Aryan) group: Mithani, Vedic, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Urdu, Hindi, Bikhali, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Sindhi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Bhili, Khandeshi, Pahari, Kafir or Nuristani, Dardic languages, Gypsy dialects .
The Mittani language was spoken by the ruling elite of the Mittani state, which in the 15th–13th centuries. BC. existed in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. The Indian group of languages comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. advanced from the north into the Indus Valley. The oldest part of their hymns was recorded in the 1st millennium BC. Vedic language, and in the III century. BC. – IV Art. AD - literary language Sanskrit. The sacred Vedic books of Brahmanas, Upanishads, sutras, as well as the epic poems Mahabharata and Ramayana are written in classical Sanskrit. In parallel with literary Sanskrit, living Prakrit languages functioned in early medieval India. From them come the modern languages of India: Hindi, Urdu, Bykhali, Bengali, etc. Texts in Hindi have been known since the 13th century.
Kafir, or Nuristani, languages are common in Nuristan, a mountainous region of Afghanistan. In the mountains of Northern Afghanistan and the adjacent mountainous regions of Pakistan and India, the Dardic languages, which are close to Kafir, are widespread.
Iranian(Irano-Aryan) group of languages: Avestan, Old Persian, Median, Sogdian, Khorezmian, Bactrian, Parthian, Pahlavi, Saka, Massagetian, Scythian, Sarmatian, Alanian, Ossetian, Yaghnobi, Afghan, Mujan, Pamir, Novoper, Tajik, Talysh, Kurdish, Baluchi, Tat, etc. The Iranian-Aryan group is related to the Indo-Aryan group and comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. settled Iran or Airiyan, which means “country of the Aryans”. Later, their hymns were recorded in the Avestan language in the sacred book of the followers of Zarathustra, the Avesta. The ancient Persian language is represented by cuneiform writings of the Achaemenid period (VI–IV centuries BC), including historical texts of Darius the Great and his successors. Median is the language of the tribes that inhabited Northern Iran in the VIII–VI centuries. BC. before the emergence of the Persian Achaemenid kingdom. The Parthians lived in Central Asia in the 3rd century. BC e. – III Art. AD, until their kingdom was conquered in 224 by the Sassanids. Pahlavi is the literary language of Persia during the Sasanian era (III–VII centuries AD). At the beginning of our era, Sogdian, Khorezmian and Bactrian languages of the Iranian group also functioned in Central Asia.
Among the North Iranian languages of the Eurasian steppe, the dead languages of the nomadic Sakas, Massagetae, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans and direct descendants of the last Ossetians of the North Caucasus are known. The Yaghnobi language of Central Asia is a direct continuation of the Sogdian language. Many modern Iranian languages are descended from Farsi, the language of early Middle Ages Persia. These include Novopersky with literary monuments from the 9th century. AD, close to it Tajik, Afghan (Pashto), Kurdish, Talysh and Tat of Azerbaijan, Baluchi, etc.
In history Greek There are three main eras of the language: Ancient Greek (XV century BC – IV century AD), Byzantine (IV–XV centuries AD) and Modern Greek (from the XV century). The ancient Greek era is divided into four periods: archaic (Mycenaean or Achaean), which dates back to the 15th–7th centuries. BC, classical (VIIII–IV centuries BC), Hellenistic (IV–I centuries BC), late Greek (I–IV centuries AD). During the Classical and Hellenistic periods, the following dialects were common in the Eastern Mediterranean: Ionian-Attic, Achaean, Aeolian and Dorian. The Greek colonies of the Northern Black Sea region (Thira, Olbia, Panticapaeum, Tanais, Phanagoria, etc.) used the Ionian dialect, since they were founded by immigrants from the capital of Ionia, Miletus in Asia Minor
The most ancient monuments of the Greek language were written in the Cretan-Mycenaean linear letter “B” in the 15th–12th centuries. BC. Homer's poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", describing the events of the Trojan War in the 12th century. BC. were first recorded in the 8th–6th centuries. BC. the ancient Greek alphabet, which laid the foundation for the classical Greek language. The classical period is characterized by the spread of the Attic dialect throughout the Greek world. It was on it that during the Hellenistic period the pan-Greek Koine was formed, which, during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, where it dominated in Roman and Byzantine times. The literary language of Byzantium strictly corresponded to the norms of the classical Attic dialect of the V–IV centuries. BC. It was used by the court of the Byzantine emperor until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The modern modern Greek language was finally formed only in the 18th–19th centuries.
Italian(Romance) group of languages includes Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin and the Romance languages derived from the latter: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Sardinian, Romansh, Provençal, French, Romanian, etc. Inscriptions related to Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin, appeared in Central Italy in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. During the process of Romanization of the provinces in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. Latin dialects spread throughout the Roman Empire. In the early Middle Ages, this “kitchen Latin” became the basis for the formation of the Romance group of languages.
Celtic The group of languages consists of Gaulish, Irish, Breton, Equine, Welsh, Gaelic (Scottish), and the O.Men dialect. Ancient sources first mention the Celts in the 5th century. BC. in the territories between the Carpathians in the east and the Atlantic coast in the west. In IV–III centuries. BC. There was a powerful Celtic expansion to the British Isles, to the territory of France, the Iberian, Apennine, and Balkan peninsulas, to Asia Minor, in the central regions of which they settled under the name of the Galatians. The La Tène archaeological culture of the 5th–1st centuries is associated with the Celts. BC, and the area of their formation is considered to be the northwestern foothills of the Alps. As a result of the expansion of first the Roman Empire, and later the Germanic tribes (primarily the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), the Celts were forced out to the extreme north-west of Europe.
The language of the Gauls assimilated by the Romans from the territory of France at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. known very little from a few inclusions in Latin texts. The Breton, Cornish, and Welsh languages of the Breton peninsulas in France, Cornwall and Wales in Great Britain descended from the language of the Britons, who dispersed under the onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th–7th centuries. The Scottish and Manx languages are close to Irish, which is recorded in written sources of the IV, VII, XI centuries.
Illyrian the group of languages covers the Balkan-Illyrian, Mesapian, Albanian languages. The Illyrians are a group of Indo-European tribes, which, judging by ancient sources, at least from the 7th century. BC. lived in the Carpathian Basin, on the Middle Danube, in the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula (Fig. 2). Its archaeological correspondence is the so-called eastern Hallstatt of the 8th–5th centuries. BC. The Illyrian tribes were assimilated by the Romans and later by the South Slavs. The Albanian language is an Illyrian relic that has been significantly influenced by Latin, Greek, Slavic and Thracian dialects. Albanian texts have been known since the 15th century. Mesapian is a branch of the Illyrian language massif of the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula, which is preserved in the form of grave and household inscriptions of the 5th–1st centuries. BC. in the east of the Apennine Peninsula in Calabria.
In Phrygian The group includes the Thracian dialects of the Dacians, Getae, Mesians, Odrysians, and Tribalians, who in ancient times lived in Transylvania, the Lower Danube and the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula. They were assimilated by the Romans in the 2nd–4th centuries. and the Slavs in the early Middle Ages. Their Romanized descendants were the medieval Volochs - the direct ancestors of modern Romanians, whose language, however, belongs to the Romance group. The Phrygians are a people whose ancestors (flies) in the 12th century. BC. came from the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula to Asia Minor. I.M. Dyakonov believed that they took part in the destruction of Troy and the Hittite kingdom (History of the Ancient East, 1988, vol. 2, p. 194). Later, the state of Phrygia with its capital Gordion arose in northern Anatolia, which was destroyed by the Cimmerians around 675 BC. Phrygian inscriptions date back to the 7th–3rd centuries. BC.
Armenian a language related to Phrygian, and through it connected with the Thracian dialects of the Balkans. According to ancient sources, the Armenians came to Transcaucasia from Phrygia, and the Phrygians came to Asia Minor from Thrace, which is confirmed by archaeological materials. I.M. Dyakonov considered the Armenians to be the descendants of the Phrygians, some of whom, after the fall of Phrygia, moved east to Transcaucasia to the lands of the Huritto-Urartians. The Proto-Armenian language was partially transformed under the influence of the aboriginal language.
The oldest Armenian texts date back to the 5th century, when the Armenian alphabet was created by Bishop Mesrop Mashtots. The language of that time (grabar) functioned until the 19th century. In the XII–XVI centuries. Two dialects of modern Armenian began to form: Eastern Ararat and Western Constantinople.
Tocharian language is the conventional name for dialects, which in the 6th–7th centuries. AD functioned in Chinese Turkestan (Uighuria). Known from religious texts of Xinjiang. V.N. Danilenko (1974, p. 234) considered the ancestors of the Tocharians to be the population of the Yamnaya culture, which in the 3rd millennium BC. reached Central Asia, where it was transformed into the Afanasyev culture. In the sands of Western China, mummies of light-pigmented northern Caucasians of the 1st millennium BC were found, the genome of which shows similarities with the genome of the Celts and Germans of northwestern Europe. Some researchers associate these finds with the Tocharians, who were finally assimilated in the 10th century. Uyghur Turks.
Germanic languages are divided into three groups: northern (Scandinavian), eastern (Gothic) and western. The oldest Germanic texts are represented by archaic runic inscriptions of Scandinavia, which date back to the 3rd–8th centuries. AD and bear the features of the common Germanic language before its dismemberment. Numerous Old Icelandic texts from the 13th century. preserved rich Scandinavian poetry (Elder Edda) and prose (sagas) of the 10th-12th centuries. From about the fifteenth century. The collapse of the Old Icelandic, or Old Norse, language began into the West Scandinavian (Norwegian, Icelandic) and East Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish) branches.
The East Germanic group, in addition to Gothic, known from the translation of the Bible by Bishop Ulfila, included the now dead languages of the Vandals and Burgundians.
The West Germanic languages include Old English (Anglo-Saxon texts of the 7th century), Old Frisian, Old Low German (Saxon texts of the 9th century), and Old High German. The most ancient monuments of West Germanic languages are the Anglo-Saxon epic of the 8th century. “Beowulf”, known from manuscripts of the 10th century, the High German “Song of the Nibelungs” of the 8th century, the Saxon epic of the 9th century. "Heliad".
Among the modern Germanic languages is English, which in the 11th–13th centuries. was significantly influenced by French, Flemish is a descendant of Old Frisian, Dutch is a branch of Old Low German. Modern German consists of two dialects - in the past separate languages (Low German and High German). Among the Germanic languages and dialects of our time, mention should be made of Yiddish, Boer, Faroese, and Swiss.
Baltic The languages are divided into Western Baltic languages - dead Prussian (disappeared in the 18th century) and Yatvingian, which was widespread in the Middle Ages in the territory of North-Eastern Poland and Western Belarus, and Eastern Baltic languages. The latter include Lithuanian, Latvian, Latgalian, as well as common until the 17th century. on the Baltic coast of Lithuania and Latvia the Curonian. Among the dead are the Selonian and Golyad languages of the Moscow region, and the Baltic language of the Upper Dnieper region. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Baltic languages were widespread from the Lower Vistula in the west to the Upper Volga and Oka in the east, from the Baltic in the north to Pripyat, Desna and Seim in the south. The Baltic languages have preserved the ancient Indo-European linguistic system more fully than others.
Slavic languages are divided into Western, Eastern and Southern. East Slavic – Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian. West Slavic are divided into three subgroups: Lechitic (Polish, Kashubian, Polabian), Czech-Slovak and Serbologian. The Kashubian language, related to Polabian, was widespread in Polish Pomerania to the west of the Lower Vistula. Lusatian is the language of the Lusatian Serbs of the upper reaches of the Spree in Germany. South Slavic languages - Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian. Slavic languages are close to each other, since they come from one Old Slavic language, which collapsed relatively recently in the 5th–7th centuries. Presumably, the speakers of Old Slavic before its collapse were the Antes and Sklavins of the territory of Ukraine, whose archaeological counterparts were the population of the Prague-Korchak and Penkovka cultures.
Most modern Indo-Europeanists, recognizing the existence of the 13 mentioned groups of Indo-European languages, abandoned the simplified scheme of the ethnogenesis of Indo-European peoples according to the principle of the genetic tree, proposed back in the 19th century. Obviously, the process of glottogenesis and ethnogenesis occurred not only through the transformation or division of the mother language into daughter languages, but, perhaps to a greater extent, in the process of interaction of languages with each other, including with non-Indo-European ones.
Scientists explain the high degree of relatedness of Indo-European languages by their origin from a common genetic ancestor - the Proto-Indo-European language. This means that more than 5 thousand years ago, in some limited region of Eurasia, there lived a people from whose language all Indo-European languages originate. Science was faced with the task of searching for the homeland of the Indo-European peoples and identifying the routes of their settlement. By Indo-European ancestral home, linguists mean the region occupied by the speakers of the ancestral language before its collapse in the 4th millennium BC.
History of the search for the Indo-European ancestral home
The search for this ancestral home has a two-hundred-year dramatic history, which has been repeatedly analyzed by various researchers (Safronov 1989). Immediately after the discovery of William Jones, the ancestral home was proclaimed India, and the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda was considered almost the ancestor of all languages, which supposedly retained all the features of the Indo-European proto-language. It was believed that due to the favorable climate of India, population explosions occurred, and the surplus population settled west into Europe and Western Asia.
However, it soon became clear that the languages of the Iranian Avesta are not much younger than the Sanskrit Rigveda. That is, the common ancestor of all i-e peoples could live in Iran or somewhere on Middle East, where great archaeological discoveries were made at this time.
In 30-50 years. XIX century Indo-Europeans were derived from Central Asia, which was then considered the “forge of nations.” This version was fueled by historical data on migration waves that periodically arrived from Central Asia to Europe over the past two thousand years. This refers to the arrival in Europe of the Sarmatians, Turkic and Mongolian tribes of the Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Torks, Cumans, Mongols, Kalmyks, etc. Moreover, at this time, European interest in Central Asia grew, since its colonization by Russians began from the north and the British from the south.
However, the rapid development of linguistic paleontology in the middle of the 19th century. showed the discrepancy between Asia and the natural and climatic realities of its ancestral home. The common I-e language reconstructed by linguists indicated that the ancestral home was located in a region with a temperate climate and its corresponding flora (birch, aspen, pine, beech, etc.) and fauna (grouse, beaver, bear, etc.). In addition, it turned out that most I-e languages were localized not in Asia, but in Europe. The vast majority of ancient Indo-European hydronyms are concentrated between the Rhine and the Dnieper.
From the second half of the 19th century. many researchers transfer their ancestral home to Europe. The explosion of German patriotism in the second half of the 19th century, caused by the unification of Germany by O. Bismarck, could not but influence the fate of Indo-European studies. After all, most of the specialists of that time were ethnic Germans. Thus, the growth of German patriotism was stimulated by the popularity of the concept of the origin of i-e from German territory.
Referring to the temperate climate of the ancestral home established by linguists, they begin to localize it precisely in Germany. An additional argument was the Northern European appearance of the ancient Indo-Europeans. Blonde hair and blue eyes are a sign of aristocracy both among the Aryans of the Rigveda and the ancient Greeks, judging by their mythology. In addition, German archaeologists came to the conclusion about the continuous ethnocultural development on the territory of Germany from the archaeological culture of linear-band ceramics of the 6th millennium BC. to modern Germans.
The founder of this concept is considered to be L. Geiger, who in 1871, relying on the argument of beech, birch, oak, ash eel and three seasons in the reconstructed language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as well as on the evidence of Tacitus about the autochthony of the Germans east of the Rhine, proposed Germany as possible ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans (Geiger, 1871).
A significant contribution to the development of the Central European hypothesis of the origin of i-e was made by the famous German philologist Hermann Hirt. He came to the conclusion that German is a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European. The languages of other peoples allegedly arose in the process of mixing the language of the Indo-Germans who arrived from the north of Central Europe with the languages of the aborigines (Hirt 1892).
The ideas of L. Geiger and G. Hirt were significantly developed by Gustav Kosinna. A philologist by training, G. Kossinna analyzed enormous archaeological material and in 1926 published the book “The Origin and Distribution of the Germans in Prehistoric and Early Historical Times” (Kossinna 1926), which the Nazis used as a scientific justification for their aggression to the east. G. Kosinna traces the archaeological materials of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages “14 colonial campaigns of megalithic Indo-Europeans east through Central Europe to the Black Sea.” It is clear that this politicized pseudoscientific version of resettlement failed along with the Third Reich.
In the 70s of the twentieth century. P. Bosch-Gimpera (1961) and G. Devoto (1962) derived it from the culture of linear band ceramics. They made an attempt to trace the phases of development of i-e from the Danube Neolithic of the 5th millennium BC. to the Bronze Age and even to the historical peoples of the Early Iron Age. P. Bosch-Zhimpera considered the culture of Tripoli to be Indo-European, since, in his opinion, it was formed on the basis of the culture of linear band ceramics.
Fig.3. Steppe mound
Almost together with Central European concept of origin and-e was born and steppe. Its supporters consider it the ancestral home of the steppe from the Lower Danube to the Volga. The founder of this concept is rightfully considered the outstanding German scientist, encyclopedist of Indo-European studies Oswald Schrader. In his numerous works, which were published between 1880 and 1920, he not only summarized all the achievements of linguists, but also analyzed and significantly developed them using archaeological materials, including from the Black Sea steppes. The linguistic reconstruction of the pastoral society of the ancient Indo-Europeans has been brilliantly confirmed by archaeology. O. Schrader considered the pastoralists of the Eastern European steppe of the 3rd–2nd millennium BC to be Proto-Indo-Europeans, who left thousands of mounds in the south of Eastern Europe (Fig. 3). Since both languages are widespread in Europe and Western Asia, then, according to O. Schrader, their ancestral home should be located somewhere in the middle - in the steppes of Eastern Europe.
Gordon Childe, in his 1926 book “The Aryans,” significantly developed the ideas of O. Schrader, narrowing the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans to the steppes of Ukraine. Based on new archaeological materials, he showed that burials under burial mounds with ocher in the south of Ukraine (Fig. 4) were left by the most ancient Indo-European pastoralists, who began to settle throughout Eurasia from here.
As a follower of G. Child, T. Sulimirsky (1933; 1968) expressed the idea that the Corded Ware cultures of Central Europe were formed as a result of the migration of the Yamniki from the Black Sea steppes to the west.
In his 1950 book, G. Child supported T. Sulimirsky and concluded that the Yamniki from the south of Ukraine through the Danube migrated to Central Europe, where they laid the foundation for Corded Ware cultures, from which most researchers derive the Celts, Germans, Balts, and Slavs. The researcher considered the Yamnaya culture of the south of Eastern Europe to be undivided i-e, which advanced not only to the Upper Danube, but also to the north of the Balkans, where they founded the Baden culture, as well as to Greece and Anatolia, where they laid the foundation for the Greek and Anatolian branches of the i-e.
A radical follower of Gordon Childe was Maria Gimbutas (1970, p.483; 1985), who considered the Yamniki to be Proto-Indo-Europeans, “who moved west and south in the 5th-4th millennium BC. from the lower Don and Lower Volga." By the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, the researcher understood the settlement of militant carriers of the Kurgan culture of the steppes of Eastern Europe to the Balkans and Western Europe, inhabited at that time by non-Indo-European groups of the Balkan-Danubian Neolithic and the Funnel Beaker culture.
Due to schematism, ignorance of linguistic data and some radicalism, the works of M. Gimbutas were criticized, but her contribution to the development of the ideas of O. Schrader and G. Child is unconditional, and the steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans remains quite convincing. Among her followers we should remember V. Danilenko (1974), D. Mallory (1989), D. Anthony (1986; 1991), Yu. Pavlenko (1994), etc.
Middle Eastern version of the origin of i-e was born at the dawn of Indo-European studies. In 1822 G. Link and F. Miller placed their homeland in Transcaucasia. Under the influence of Pan-Babylonism, T. Momsen believed that they originated from Mesopotamia. However, the most detailed argument about the origin of i-e from the Middle East, more precisely from the Armenian Highlands, was presented in their two-volume encyclopedic work of 1984 by G.T. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov. Based on an in-depth analysis of a huge array of linguistic material and a generalization of the developments of predecessors, the researchers gave a broad picture of the economy, life, material culture, beliefs of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the natural landscape characteristics of their ancestral homeland.
At the same time, the location of the ancestral home on Armenian Highlands and the attempt to argue for the settlement of Europe by Indo-Europeans bypassing the Caspian Sea from the east does not stand up to criticism. Plants (aspen, hornbeam, yew, heather) and animals (beaver, lynx, black grouse, elk, crab) that are typical for their homeland are not typical for Transcaucasia. Corresponding hydronymy is also very scarce here. The journey around the Caspian Sea through Central Asia, the Lower Volga region and the steppes of Ukraine to the west is also not confirmed by archaeological material.
Colin Renfrew (1987) places his homeland within the fertility crescent - in the south Anatolia. This assumption is fundamental to his concept because it is based on the obvious fact of the migration of early farmers of the Middle East west to Europe and east to Asia. The researcher started from the Nostratic concept of V. Illich-Svitych (1964, 1971), according to which the linguistic kinship with the peoples of the Afroasiatic, Ellamo-Dravidian, Ural and Sino-Caucasian families is explained by their common ancestral home in the Middle East. Pointing out that the speakers of the mentioned languages are also genetically related, K. Renfrew argues that their resettlement from a common ancestral home took place in the 8th-5th millennium BC. in the process of spreading the reproducing economy (Renfrew, 1987). Without refuting the very fact of the mentioned migrations, most Indo-Europeanists doubt that there were Indo-Europeans among the migrants from the Middle East.
Balkan the concept of the origin of i-e is associated with the discovery in the first half of the twentieth century. Balkan-Danube Neolithic proto-civilization of the 7th-5th millennium BC. It was from here that, according to archaeological data, the Neolithization of Europe took place. This gave grounds to B. Gornung (1956) and V. Georgiev (1966) to suggest that Proto-Indo-Europeans formed on the Lower Danube as a result of mixing of local Mesolithic hunters with Neolithic migrants from the Balkans. The weak point of the concept is the extreme poverty of the Mesolithic Lower Danube. I. Dyakonov also considered the Balkans to be his ancestral home (1982).
The ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans according to paleolinguistics
The realities of the ancestral home must correspond to the natural landscape, socio-economic and cultural-historical characteristics reconstructed using linguistic analysis of the most ancient common elements of the basic vocabulary of different languages.
The 19th century was an era of bold reconstructions of the society, economy, culture, spiritual world, and natural environment of the early Indo-Europeans with the help of so-called linguistic paleontology. The successful works of A. Kuhn (Kuhn, 1845) and J. Grimm (Grimm, 1848) provoked numerous paleolinguistic studies, the authors of which did not always adhere to strict rules for the comparative analysis of languages. Criticism of attempts to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European realities using linguistic analysis made it possible for A. Schleicher (1863) to introduce such reconstructions within the framework of strict rules. However, the real discovery of the world of Proto-Indo-Europeans belongs to O. Schrader (1886), who summarized the results of the reconstructions of his predecessors, clarifying and checking them using materials from the Bronze Age, which at that time became available to researchers.
Using the method of linguistic paleontology, scientists were able to reconstruct the stages of the formation of the proto-language. Based on the developments of F. Saussure and A. Meillet, M.D. Andreev (1986) suggested the existence of three stages of its formation: boreal, early and late Indo-European.
The proto-language reconstructed on the basis of the general i-e vocabulary at the stage preceding its collapse in the 4th millennium BC. T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov (1984) analyzed them into separate language groups. The Proto-Indo-European dictionary indicates that its speakers lived in a temperate zone, albeit with a sharply continental climate, with cold winters and warm summers. They lived in both mountainous and flat areas, among rivers, swamps, coniferous and deciduous forests. They were well acquainted with the natural and climatic specifics of the steppes.
The economy of the Proto-Indo-Europeans at the time of the collapse was of a pastoral and agricultural nature. However, the significant development of cattle-breeding terminology indicates the dominance of this particular industry in the economy. Domestic animals include a horse, a bull, a cow, a sheep, a goat, a pig, and a dog. Transhumance cattle breeding for meat and dairy production dominated. Proto-Indo-Europeans possessed advanced methods of processing livestock products: hides, wool, milk. The cult of the horse and the bull occupied an important place in ideology.
Agriculture has reached a fairly high level. There was a transition from hoeing to the early form of arable farming, using a rawl and a plow pulled by a pair of oxen. They grew barley, wheat, and flax. The harvest was harvested with sickles and threshed, the grain was ground with grain grinders and millstones. They baked bread. They knew gardening (apples, cherries, grapes) and beekeeping. They made a variety of pottery. They were familiar with the metallurgy of copper, bronze, silver, and gold. Wheeled transport played a special role: bulls and horses were harnessed to carts. They knew how to ride a horse.
The significant role of cattle breeding in the economy determined the specifics of the social system. It was characterized by patriarchy, male dominance in the family and clan, and belligerence. Society was divided into three strata: priests, military aristocracy and simple community members (shepherds, farmers, warriors). The warlike spirit of the era was reflected in the construction of the first fortified settlements - fortresses. The uniqueness of the spiritual world consisted in the sacralization of war, the supreme warrior god. They worshiped weapons, horses, war chariots (Fig. 5), fire, and the sun-wheel, the symbol of which was the swastika.
An important element of mythology is the world tree. By the way, this indicates that the ancestral home was a fairly forested region. Plants and animals whose names are present in the Late European language recreated by linguists help to localize it more precisely.
Plants: oak, birch, beech, hornbeam, ash, aspen, willow, yew, pine, walnut, heather, rose, moss. Animals: wolf, bear, lynx, fox, jackal, wild boar, deer, elk, wild bull, hare, snake, mouse, louse fish, bird, eagle, crane, crow, black grouse, goose, swan, leopard, lion , monkey, elephant.
The last four animals are atypical for the European fauna, although lions and leopards lived in the Balkans for another 2 thousand years. back. It has been established that the words denoting leopard, lion, monkey and elephant came into the I-e proto-language from the Middle East, most likely from the Afrasians of the Levant (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 506, 510).
Thus, the flora and fauna of their ancestral home correspond to the temperate zone of Europe. This gave the basis for most modern researchers to place it between the Rhine in the west, the Lower Volga in the east, the Baltic in the north and the Danube in the south (Bosh-Gimpera, 1961; Devoto, 1962; Grossland, 1967; Gimbutas, 1970; 1985; Häusler, 1985; Gornung, 1964; Georgiev, 1966; Childe, 1926; Sulimirski, 1968, Zaliznyak, 1994, 1999, 2012, Pavlenko, 1994, Koncha, 2004). L.S. Klein places the ancestral home within the same limits in his fundamental monograph of 2007.
The reconstruction of the unified vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-Europeans gave grounds to assert that before their collapse they already knew agriculture, cattle breeding, ceramic dishes, copper and gold metallurgy, the wheel, that is, they were at the Eneolithic stage. In other words, the collapse occurred no later than the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 667-738, 868-870). The same is evidenced by the discovery of Hittite, Palai, and Luwian individual languages due to the decipherment of texts from the library of the capital of the Hittite kingdom, Hatusa, 2nd millennium BC. Since there is convincing archaeological evidence that the Hittites came to Anatolia at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, the collapse of the Proto-Indo-Europeans into separate branches began no later than the 4th millennium BC.
G. Kühn believed that Proto-Indo-European unity existed in the Upper Paleolithic, and associated it with the Magdalenian culture of France (Kühn, 1932). S.V. Koncha sees undifferentiated Indo-Europeans in the early Mesolithic lowlands between the Lower Rhine in the west and the Middle Dnieper in the east (Koncha, 2004).
Linguistic contacts of Proto-Indo-Europeans
Archaic i-e hydronymy is concentrated in Central Europe between the Rhine in the west, the Middle Dnieper in the east, the Baltic in the north and the Danube in the south (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, p. 945).
Traces of contacts with the Finno-Ugrians, Kartvelians and the peoples of the Middle East (Prahattas, Prahurites, Afrasians, Sumerians, Elamites) make it possible to more accurately localize the ancestral homeland. Linguistic analysis indicates that the Proto-Finno-Ugrians, before their collapse in the 3rd millennium BC. borrowed from them a significant amount of agricultural terminology (pig, piglet, goat, grain, hay, hammer ax, etc.). A variety of i-e vocabulary is present in the Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan) (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, p. 877). Particularly important for the localization of their ancestral home is the presence in their languages of parallels with the languages of the peoples of the Middle East.
The famous linguist V. Illich-Svitych (1964) noted that a certain part of the agricultural and livestock vocabulary was borrowed from the proto-Semites and Sumerians. As an example of Proto-Semitic borrowings, the researcher named the words: tauro - bull, gait - goat, agno - lamb, bar - grain, cereal, dehno - bread, grain, kern - millstone, medu - honey, sweet, sekur - axe, nahu - vessel , ship, haster - star, septm - seven, klau - key, etc. According to V. Illich-Svitych, the following words were borrowed from the Sumerian language: kou - cow, reud - ore, auesk - gold, akro - cornfield, duer – doors, hkor – mountains, etc. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 272–276).
However, especially a lot of agricultural and livestock terminology, names of food products, and household items were borrowed from the Prakhatti and Prahurites, whose ancestral homeland is located in Anatolia and in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. S. A. Starostin (1988, pp. 112–163) believes that the roots of klau, medu, akgo, bar and some others given by V. Illich-Svitych are not at all Proto-Semitic or Sumerian, but Hatto-Huritic. In addition, he provides numerous examples of Hatto-Huritic vocabulary in both languages. Here are just a few of them: ekuo - horse, kago - goat, porko - pig, hvelena - wave, ouig - oats, hag - berry, rughio - rye, lino - flion, kulo - stake, list, gueran - millstone, sel - village, dholo - valley, arho - open space, area, tuer - cottage cheese, sur - cheese, bhar - barley, penkue - five and many others. Analysis of these linguistic borrowings indicates that they occurred in the process of direct contacts of Proto-Indo-Europeans with the more developed Prahatto-Hurites no later than the 5th millennium BC. (Starostin, 1988, pp. 112–113, 152–154).
The nature of all these expressive linguistic parallels between the Proto-Indo-European, on the one hand, and the Proto-Ugro-Finnish, Proto-Kartvelian, languages of the mentioned peoples of the Middle East, on the other, indicates that they are a consequence of close contacts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with these peoples. That is, the sought-after ancestral homeland had to be located somewhere between the homelands of these ethnic groups, which makes it possible to more accurately localize it. It is known that the ancestral home of the Finno-Ugric peoples is the forest-steppe between the Don and the Urals, and the Kartvelians are the Central Caucasus. Regarding the mentioned Middle Eastern borrowings in other languages, their source, in our opinion, could be the Balkan-Danube Neolithic, including the bearers of the Trypillian culture of Right Bank Ukraine. After all, the Neolithic colonization of the Balkans and Danube region took place in the 7th - 6th millennium BC. from Asia Minor, the homeland of the Hatto-Hurites.
Analysis of modern versions of the ancestral home
In our time, five regions claim the honorable right to be called their ancestral home: Central Europe between the Rhine and the Vistula (I. Geiger, G. Hirt, G. Kosinna, P. Bosch-Zimpera, G. Devoto), the Middle East (T. Gamkrelidze, V. Ivanov, K. Renfrew), the Balkans (B. Gornung, V. Georgiev, I. Dyakonov) and the forest-steppe and steppe zones between the Dniester and Volga (O. Schrader, G. Child, T. Sulimirsky, V. Danilenko , M. Gimbutas, D. Mallory, D. Anthony, Y. Pavlenko). Some researchers combine Central Europe with the Eastern European steppes up to the Volga into their ancestral home (A. Heusler, L. Zaliznyak, S. Koncha). Which of these versions is more plausible?
Origin concept Central Europe(lands between the Rhine, Vistula and Upper Danube) was especially popular at the end of the 19th - in the first half of the 20th century. As noted, its founders were L. Geiger, G. Hirt, G. Kosinna.
The constructions of the mentioned German researchers are based on the coincidence of the natural and climatic realities of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with the nature and temperate climate of Central Europe, as well as the Northern European appearance of the early I-e (Fig. 6). Also important is the fact that the main area of hydronymy coincides with the territories of several archaeological cultures. This refers to the cultures of linear-band ceramics, funnel-shaped beakers, spherical amphorae, and corded ceramics, which from the 6th to 2nd millennium BC. successively replaced each other in the indicated territories of Central Europe.
No one now doubts the Indo-European nature of the Corded Ware cultures. Their genetic predecessors were the Funnel Beaker and Globular Amphorae cultures. However, there is no reason to call the culture of linear-band ceramics Indo-European, since it lacks the defining features reconstructed by linguists: the pastoral direction of the economy, the dominance of men in society, the warlike nature of the latter - the presence of a military elite, fortresses, the cult of war, weapons, war chariots, horse, sun, fire, etc. The bearers of the traditions of the linear-band ceramics culture, in our opinion, belonged to the Neolithic circle of the Balkans, the non-Indo-European character of which is recognized by most researchers.
The location of the ancestral homeland in Central Europe is hampered by the presence in the I-e languages of traces of close linguistic contacts with the proto-Kartvelians of the Caucasus and the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland was the forest-steppe between the Don and the Southern Urals. If the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in Central Europe, then how could they have contacted the inhabitants of the Caucasus and Transdon?
Most modern scientists consider Central Europe to be the birthplace of the Corded Cultures of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, whose bearers were the ancestors of the northern branches of the Ie: Celts, Germans, Balts, Slavs. However, Central Europe could not be the homeland of all I-e peoples because the southern I-e (Illyrians, Phrygians, Greeks, Hittites, Italics, Armenians), as well as the eastern (Indo-Iranians) cannot be derived from the Corded People either linguistically or archaeologically . In addition, in the forest-steppes and steppes of Ukraine, the i-e appeared earlier than the most ancient corded people - no later than the end of the 5th millennium BC. (Sredny Stog residents).
Near East it also could not have been its ancestral home, because here was the homeland of non-Indo-European ethnic groups: the Hattic, Khuritian, Elamite, Afroasiatic linguistic communities. Mapping of the I-e languages shows that this region was the southern periphery of their ecumene. The Hittites, Luwians, Palayans, Phrygians, and Armenians appeared here quite late - in the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, that is, after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European language in the 4th millennium BC. Unlike Europe, there is almost no hydronymy here.
The cold continental climate of the ancestral home with frosty snowy winters does not correspond to the realities of the Middle East. Almost half of the plants and animals that appear in the language are missing here (aspen, hornbeam, linden, heather, beaver, black grouse, lynx, etc.). On the other hand, the I-E dictionary does not contain the names of typical representatives of the Middle Eastern fauna and flora (cypress, cedar, etc.). As for the lion, leopard, monkey and elephant, their names turned out to be borrowed from the Proto-Semitic. If these animals were typical of their ancestral home, then why was it necessary to borrow them from their southern neighbors? Proto-Indo-Europeans could not live in the Middle East because the strong influence of their language can be traced to the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland is located too far north of the Middle East, which excludes the possibility of contacts with them.
Assuming that both happen to Balkan, we will ignore their linguistic connections not only with the Finno-Ugric peoples, but also with the Kartvelians of the Caucasus. It is impossible to remove their eastern branch, the Indo-Iranians, from the Balkans. This is contradicted by data from both archeology and linguistics. Both hydronyms are known only in the north of the Balkans. Most of them are distributed to the north, between the Rhine and the Dnieper. The hypothesis about the origin of the i-e from the Balkan Neolithic farmers is also contradicted by the fact that the appearance of the first i-e on the historical arena in the 4th–3rd millennium BC. e. coincided with the aridization of the climate, the separation of cattle breeding into a separate industry and its spread across the vast expanses of Eurasia, and, finally, with the collapse of the agricultural Neolithic itself in the Balkans and Danube region. What gives grounds for some researchers to consider the Balkan Peninsula as their ancestral home?
The famous researcher Colin Renfrew rightly believes that the grandiose linguistic phenomenon of the spread of languages must be met by an equally large-scale socio-economic process. According to the scientist, such a global phenomenon in primitive history was the neolithization of Europe. This refers to the settlement of ancient farmers and livestock breeders from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe.
A reasoned criticism of K. Renfrew's attempts to derive i-e from the Middle East from the standpoint of new genetic research was given by R. Solaris (1998, p. 128, 129). Biomolecular analysis of paleoanthropological and paleozoological remains demonstrates the correspondence of genome changes between Europeans and domesticated animals of Near Eastern origin. This strongly suggests that Europe was colonized by Neolithic populations from the Middle East. However, substrate phenomena in Greek and other i-e languages indicate that i-e came to the Balkans after they were explored by Neolithic colonists from Anatolia. The genetic kinship of the peoples of the Nostratic family of languages of Eurasia is explained, according to R. Sollaris (1988, p. 132), by the existence of common ancestors of the population of Eurasia, who settled from the Western Mediterranean to the west and east at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic 40 thousand years ago.
The fact that the “surplus” of the early agricultural population flowed from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe is beyond doubt. However, was it Indo-European? After all, archeology testifies that from the first centers of the productive economy in the south of Anatolia, in Syria, Palestine, in the Zagrosu Mountains, it is not e-e, but Elamite, Hattian, Huritian, Sumerian and Afrasian communities that grow. It is in the latter that the material and spiritual culture and economy of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans have direct parallels. Their anthropological type is close to the type of Neolithic inhabitants of the Middle East and differs significantly from the anthropology of the first reliable Indo-Europeans who lived in the 4th millennium BC. e. in Central Europe (Corded Ware culture) and in the forest-steppes between the Dnieper and Volga (Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures). If the Neolithic population of the Balkans and the Middle East was a bearer of the southern European or Mediterranean anthropological type (gracile, short Caucasians), then the mentioned Indo-Europeans were massive, tall northern Caucasians (Potekhina 1992) (Fig. 6). Clay figurines from the Balkans depict people with large noses of a specific shape (Zaliznyak, 1994, p. 85), which are an important defining feature of the Eastern Mediterranean anthropological type, according to V.P. Alekseev (1974, pp. 224, 225).
The direct descendant of the Neolithic proto-civilization of the Balkans was the Minoan civilization, which formed on the island of Crete around 2000 BC. According to M. Gimbutas, the Minoan linear letter “A” comes from the sign system of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans of the 4th millennium BC. e. Attempts to decipher the texts of the Minoans showed that their language belongs to the Semitic group (Gimbutas 1985; Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 912, 968; Renfrew 1987, p.50). Since the Minoans were descendants of the Balkan Neolithic, the latter could not possibly be Indo-European. Both archaeologists and linguists came to the conclusion that before the appearance of the first i-e in Greece in the 2nd millennium BC. e. non-Indo-European tribes lived here.
Thus, culturally, linguistically, anthropologically and genetically, the Balkan Neolithic was closely related to the non-Indo-European Neolithic proto-civilization of the Middle East. It seems that the mentioned significant number of agricultural terms of Middle Eastern origin in the I-e languages is explained by the intense cultural influence of Balkan farmers, genetically related to the Middle East, on the ancestors of the I-e - the aborigines of Central and southern Eastern Europe.
Steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans
The most well-reasoned and popular in our time versions of the location of the ancestral homeland of the i-e peoples include the steppe, according to which the i-e arose in the steppes between the Dniester, the Lower Volga and the Caucasus. Its founders were the aforementioned O. Schrader (1886) and G. Child (1926, 1950), who at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. expressed the idea that the first impetus for the Indo-Europeanization of Eurasia came from the ancient pastoralists of the Northern Black Sea steppes and forest-steppes. Later, this hypothesis was fundamentally substantiated and developed by T. Sulimirsky (1968), V. Danilenko (1969; 1974), M. Gimbutas (1970; 1985), D. Mallory (1989), D. Anthony (1991). Its supporter was Yu. Pavlenko (1994).
According to this version, the oldest i-e were formed in the south of Ukraine as a result of complex historical processes that led to the separation of cattle breeding into a separate branch of the primitive economy. Due to the long-term agrarian colonization of the Balkans and Danube by Middle Eastern hoe farmers, the reserves of hoe farming in Central Europe were exhausted. Further expansion of the reproducing economy in the steppe and forest zones required an increase in the role of cattle breeding. This was facilitated by the progressive aridization of the climate, which led to a crisis in the agricultural economy of the Balkans and Danube region, while at the same time creating favorable conditions for the spread of various forms of livestock farming. This was also facilitated by the clearing of deciduous forests of Central Europe and Right Bank Ukraine by Neolithic farmers in the 4th-5th millennium BC. e., since wastelands on the site of former fields became potential pastures.
Neolithic hoe farmers grazed their few animals near villages. When the harvest ripened, they were driven away from the crops. Thus, the oldest transhumance form of cattle breeding arose. It is common for her to graze animals in the summer on pastures remote from permanent settlements. It was this ancient type of cattle breeding that made it possible for societies with a reproducing economy to colonize not only the Eurasian steppes, but also to move into the forests of central Europe.
The separation of cattle breeding from the ancient mixed agricultural and livestock economy of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic into a separate industry began in the south of Ukraine, on the border of the fertile black soils of the Right Bank of the Dnieper occupied by hoe farmers and the Eurasian steppes, which from that time became the home of mobile and warlike pastoral peoples. Thus, in the 4th millennium BC. e. the territory of Ukraine became the border between the sedentary, peace-loving farmers of the Danube region and the mobile, warlike pastoralists of the Eurasian steppes.
It was in the south of Ukraine that the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and Danube region, through its northeastern outpost - the Trypillian culture - directly influenced the ancestors of the most ancient pastoralists - Mesolithic and Neolithic hunters and fishermen of the forest-steppes of the Dnieper and Seversky Donets basins. The latter received from the Balkan-Danube descendants of the ancient farmers and pastoralists of the Middle East not only the skills of reproducing farming, but also Middle Eastern agricultural terminology, traced by linguists in other languages (Illich-Svitych 1964; 1971; Starostin, 1988). The localization of the first shepherds-pastoralists in the steppes and forest-steppes between the Dniester, Lower Don and Kuban is in good agreement with the three main directions of Proto-Indo-European linguistic contacts. In the west they directly bordered with the speakers of agricultural vocabulary of Middle Eastern origin (Trypillians), in the northeast - Finno-Ugric, and in the southeast - Kartvelian vocabulary of the Caucasus (Fig. 2).
M. Gimbutas placed the birthplace of cattle breeding and its first carriers in the Middle Volga region, which is difficult to agree with. After all, cattle breeding was born from complex hoe farming in the process of separation into an independent branch of the economy. That is, this could only happen under the condition of direct and close contacts of the first pastoralists with large agrarian communities, such as the early agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and Danube region.
There was nothing like this in the Volga region. The nearest center of agriculture lay 800 km south of the Middle Volga region behind the Great Caucasus Range in the basins of the Kura and Araks rivers. If the first pastoralists had borrowed the productive economy along with agricultural terminology from there, then the latter would have been mainly Kartvelian. However, a significant number of common Indo-European pastoral and agricultural terms are not of Caucasian, but of Anatolian origin. Thus, they were directly borrowed by the Proto-Indo-Europeans from the Neolithic population of the Balkans and Danube region - the direct descendants of the Neolithic colonists from Anatolia, most likely the Proto-Hurites.
The cattle-breeding skills acquired from the Trypillians took root and quickly developed into a separate industry in the favorable conditions of the steppes and forest-steppes of Left Bank Ukraine. Herds of cows and flocks of sheep moved intensively in search of pastures, which required pastoralists to live an active lifestyle. This stimulated the rapid spread of wheeled transport, domestication in the 4th millennium BC. e. horses, which, together with bulls, were used as draft animals. The constant search for pastures led to military clashes with neighbors, which militarized society. Pastoral farming turned out to be very productive. One shepherd was tending a flock that could feed many people. In conditions of constant conflicts over pastures and cows, the surplus of male labor was transformed into professional warriors.
Among pastoralists, unlike farmers, it was not a woman, but a man who became the main figure in the family and community, since all life support lay with the shepherds and warriors. The possibility of accumulating livestock in one hand created the conditions for property differentiation of society. A military elite appears. The militarization of society determined the construction of ancient fortresses, the spread of the cults of the supreme god of the warrior and shepherd, the war chariot, weapons, horses, the sun-wheel (swastika), and fire.
Rice. 7. Yamnaya pottery (1-4), as well as dishes and war hammers (vajras) of the Catacomb cultures of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC. South of Ukraine. Catacomb vessels and axes - Ingul culture
These ancient pastoralists of the south of Eastern Europe of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. were not yet real nomads who spent their entire lives on horseback or on a cart in constant migrations for herds and herds of animals. Nomadism, as a way of nomadic life and a developed form of pastoral economy, was finally formed in the steppes only at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. The basis of the economy of the steppes of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. there was less mobile transhumance. It provided for more or less settled living of women and children in permanent settlements in river valleys, where they grew barley, wheat, raised pigs, goats, and fished. The male population spent more and more time with herds of cows, sheep and horses on the summer steppe pastures. In the spring, the animals, accompanied by shepherds and armed guards, were driven far into the steppe and only returned home for the winter in the fall. This semi-sedentary way of life quickly acquired more and more mobile forms due to the increasing role of cattle breeding.
These early semi-nomadic pastoralists left few settlements, but a large number of burial mounds. Especially many of them were poured by the pitmen (hundreds of thousands) in the 3rd millennium BC. e. Archaeologists recognize them by the so-called steppe burial complex. Its most important elements are the burial mound, placing the deceased in a burial pit in a crouched position, and filling the buried person with red ocher powder. Rough clay pots, often decorated with cord marks and impalations, and weapons (stone war hammers and maces) were placed in the grave (Fig. 7). Wheels were placed in the corners of the pit, symbolizing the funeral cart, and often its parts (Fig. 4). Stone anthropomorphic steles are found in the mounds, which depict the tribal patriarch with the corresponding attributes of a warrior leader and a shepherd (Fig. 8). An important feature of the first and southern Ukraine is the domestication of the horse, traces of which can be traced in the forest-steppe Dnieper region from the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. (Telegin 1973).
The unprecedented scale of settlement of the ancient I-e from the south of Ukraine to the endless steppe expanses to the Middle Danube in the west and to Altai in the east is explained by the pastoral economy, the spread of wheeled transport - carts and war chariots (Fig. 9), draft animals (bull, horse) , and later horsemanship, which determined the mobile way of life, militancy and the grandiose scale of expansion of the early I-e (Fig. 2).
From Rhine to Donets
However, limiting the I-e ancestral home to only the steppes and forest-steppes of Ukraine does not explain why the main body of the most ancient I-e hydronymics lies in Central Europe between the Rhine and the Dnieper. Such natural realities as mountains, swamps, the spread of aspen, beech, yew, heather, beavers, black grouse, etc. also do not fit with the south of Ukraine. These elements of the natural environment are more typical for the temperate and cool climate of Central Europe than for the sultry steppes of the Black Sea region. And the northern European appearance of the first i-e, as evidenced by the most ancient written sources, does not fit with the Black Sea region.
These contradictions are resolved if we assume the existence of a single ethnocultural substrate between the Lower Rhine and the Donets, on which in the 5th-4th millennium BC. The ancient Indo-Europeans of the Black Sea region and Central Europe began to form. Such a substrate began to emerge in the last third of the 20th century. during studies of Mesolithic monuments in the North German, Polish, Polesie lowlands, in the Neman and Donets basins.
The Central European lowlands, which stretch from the Thames basin through northern Germany, Poland, Polesie to the Middle Dnieper, from the final Paleolithic until the Middle Ages, were a kind of corridor through which migration waves rolled from west to east. The reindeer hunters of the Lingby culture were the first to travel this route from Jutland to the Dnieper 12 thousand years ago (Fig. 10). They settled the Central European lowlands that had just been liberated from the glacier, giving rise to related cultures of reindeer hunters of the last millennium of the Ice Age: Arensburg of Northern Germany, Svider and Krasnoselye of the Vistula, Neman, Pripyat, Upper Dnieper basins.
Rice. 10. Map of the distribution of monuments of the Bromme-Lingby type, about 11 thousand years ago. back. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p.45) Conventional signs: 1- sites of the Lingbi culture, 2- locations of the Lingbi tips, 3- directions of migration of the population of the Lingbi culture, 4- southern and eastern border of the outwash lowlands.
The Mesolithic of the Central European Lowlands began with a new wave of settlers to the east, which led to the formation of the Duvensi cultural region. It includes the related Early Mesolithic cultures of Star Car of England, Duvensey of Germany, Klosterlund of Denmark, Komornitsa of Poland, Kudlaevka of Polesie and the Neman basin (Fig. 11, 12).
The migration of the carriers of the Maglemose culture traditions of the South-Western Baltic was especially powerful in the Atlantic period of the Holocene. In the boreal in the 7th millennium BC. Maglemose was transformed into the Svadborg culture of Jutland, whose population was due to the Baltic transgression around 6000 BC. migrated to the east, where it took part in the formation of the Janisławice culture of the Vistula, Neman and Pripyat basins (Fig. 13) (Kozlowsky 1978, p. 67, 68; Zaliznyak 1978, 1984, 1991, pp. 38-41, 2009, p. 206 -210). At the end of the 6th millennium BC. bearers of the Yanislavitsky traditions advanced through the Dnieper valley to Nadporozhye and further east to the Seversky Donets basin (Fig. 15). This is evidenced by the map of the distribution of characteristic Janisławice points (Fig. 14).
Rice. 13. Map of the distribution of monuments of the Janislavice culture of the 6th-5th millennium BC. Neman basin (Zaliznyak, 1991, p. 29)
Rice. 14. Map of the distribution of points with microincisal chips on plates on the territory of Ukraine. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p. 109) Conventional signs: 1-sites with a series of points, 2-points with 1-3 points, 3-direction of migration from the Southern Baltic in the 7th-5th millennium BC, 4-border Polesie, the 5th southern border of forests in the Atlanticum.
Rice. 15. Points on plates with microincisal chips from Ukrainian sites. Janislavitz type and the like. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p. 110)
The process of penetration of forest hunters of the Maglemose cultural traditions from Polesie to the south was probably stimulated by the movement in a southerly direction along the river valleys of broad-leaved forests in connection with the general warming and humidification of the climate at the end of the Mesolithic. As a result of the spread of forest and forest-steppe biotopes with the corresponding fauna along river valleys up to the Black and Azov Seas, conditions were created for the advance of forest hunters of the Yanislavitsa culture to the south and southeast of Ukraine.
So, in the VI-V millennium BC. The Late Mesolithic cultural community of post-maglemosis was formed, which covered the low-lying areas from Jutland to the Seversky Donets (Fig. 16). It included the Mesolithic post-Maglemosis cultures of the Western and Southern Baltics, Janislavitsa of the Vistula, Neman, Pripyat basins, as well as the Donetsk culture of the Seversky Donets basin. The flint inventory of these cultures convincingly indicates their relationship and genesis on the basis of the Baltic Mesolithic. Numerous finds of microliths characteristic of the Mesolithic Baltic and Polesie in Nadporozhye and even on the Seversky Donets indicate that migrants from the Baltic reached the Donets (Zaliznyak, 1991, pp. 40, 41; 2005, pp. 109–111).
In the 5th millennium BC. on the basis of post-maglemosis, but under the southern influence of cultural communities of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic, a group of forest Neolithic cultures was formed: Ertebølle of the South-Western and Tsedmar of the Southern Baltic, Dubichay of the Neman basin, Volyn of the Pripyat and Neman basin, Dnieper-Donetsk of the Middle Dnieper and Donetsk of the Seversky Donets (Fig. . 16). Among the Neolithic donors of the mentioned forest Neolithic cultures of the German, Polish, Poloska lowlands and the Middle Dnieper region, a special role was played by the cultures of linear-band ceramics and Cucuteni-Trypillia.
The existence of a cultural and genetic community on the plains from the Lower Rhine to the Seversky Donets is confirmed not only by archeology. The above-mentioned autochthonous hunting communities of the Central European lowlands and the Dnieper region were connected not only by a single type of forest hunting and fishing economy and material culture, but also by an anthropological type of population. Anthropologists have long written about the penetration of northern Caucasoids from the Western Baltic to the Middle Dnieper and South-East Ukraine in the Mesolithic and Neolithic (Gokhman 1966, Konduktorova 1973). Comparison of materials from Mesolithic and Neolithic burial grounds of the Dnieper region of the 6th-4th millennium BC. with the synchronous burials of Jutland indicates both a certain cultural and genetic relatedness of the population that left them. Not only the funeral rites were similar, but also the anthropological type of those buried (Fig. 4). These were tall, very massive, broad-faced northern Caucasians, buried in an extended position on their backs (Telegin 1991, Potekhina 1999). In the 5th millennium BC. this population advanced through the forest-steppe strip to the Left Bank Ukraine and to the east of the Middle Volga region (Syezzhee burial ground), forming the Mariupol cultural community, represented by numerous Mariupol-type burial grounds with numerous osteological remains of massive northern Europeans (Telegin, 1991). The population of early Indo-European communities of the 4th millennium BC originates from this anthropological massif. – Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures of forest-steppe Ukraine.
Thus, in the VI-V millennium BC. The northern European hunting population, which since the end of the Ice Age lived in the lowland forest expanses of the Southern Baltic and Polesie, moved along the Left Bank of the Dnieper to the Seversky Donets basin. A huge ethnocultural community was formed, which stretched from Jutland to the Donets for two thousand km and consisted of related cultures of hunters and fishermen. Under the influence of the agricultural cultures of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic from the south, the post-Maglemesian Mesolithic community moved to the Neolithic stage of development. Due to the spread of steppes due to climate aridization, these aboriginal societies of northern Europeans began to switch to cattle breeding and transformed into the most ancient cultures of the 4th millennium BC. (Srednostogovskaya on the Left Bank of the Dnieper and funnel-shaped cups in Central Europe).
Thus, the ancient Indo-Europeans of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. The carriers of the Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures (arose on the basis of the Dnieper-Donets and Mariupol cultures) in the east and the funnel-shaped beaker and spherical amphorae cultures (descendants of the Ertebelle culture) in the west belonged to the North European anthropological type. At the same time, the bearers of these early Indo-European cultures exhibit some gracefulness of the skeleton, which indicates their formation on the basis of local northern Caucasians under the conditions of a certain influx of a more graceful non-Indo-European population from the Danube region colonized by farmers. Massive northern Caucasians, according to E.E. Kuzmina (1994, pp. 244-247), were also carriers of the Andronovo culture of Central Asia (Fig. 9).
The Northern European appearance of the early I-e is confirmed by written sources and mythology, which indicate the light pigmentation of the Indo-Europeans of the 2nd millennium BC. Thus, in the Rig Veda, the Aryans are characterized by the epithet “Svitnya”, which means “light, fair-skinned”. The hero of the famous Aryan epic "Mahabharata" often has eyes the color of "blue lotus". According to Vedic tradition, a real Brahman should have brown hair and gray eyes. In the Iliad, the Achaeans have golden blonde hair (Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus), the Achaean women and even the goddess Hera have blonde hair. The god Apollo was also depicted as golden-haired. On Egyptian reliefs from the time of Thutmose IV (1420-1411 BC), the Hittite charioteers (Mariana) have a Nordic appearance, in contrast to their Armenoid squires. In the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Blonde-haired descendants of the Aryans allegedly came to the king of Persia from India (Lelekov, 1982, p. 33). According to the testimony of ancient authors, the Celts of Central and Western Europe were tall blonds. The legendary Tocharians of Xinjiang in Western China, not surprisingly, belonged to the same Northern European type. This is evidenced by their mummified bodies, which date back to approximately 1200 BC. and Tocharian wall paintings of the VII-VI centuries. AD Ancient Chinese chronicles also testify to blue-eyed blonds who in ancient times lived in the deserts of Central Asia.
The fact that the oldest Indo-Europeans belonged to the Northern Caucasians is consistent with the localization of their ancestral home between the Rhine and the Seversky Donets, where by the 6th-5th millennium BC. According to modern archeology, an ethnocultural community was formed (Fig. 16), on the basis of which the most ancient cultures arose (Mariupol, Sredny Stog, Yamnaya, funnel-shaped beakers, spherical amphorae).
To summarize, we can assume that the ancestral homeland of the I-e was probably the German, Polish, Dnieper lowlands and the Donets basin. At the end of the Mesolithic in the 6th–5th millennium BC. these territories were inhabited by massive northern Caucasians from the Baltic states. In the 5th millennium BC. on their genetic basis, a group of related Neolithic cultures is formed, which developed under the progressive influence of the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans. As a result of contacts with the latter, in conditions of climate aridization and expansion of the steppes, the transformation of the autochthons of Proto-Indo-Europeans into the actual Indo-European early pastoral mobile society took place (Zaliznyak 1994, pp. 96-99; 1998, pp. 216-218, 240-247; Zaliznyak, 1997, p .117-125; 2005). An archaeological marker of this process is the beginning of formation in the Azov and Black Sea steppes at the end of the 5th–4th millennium BC. pastoral burial mound burial rite (mound, burials with skeletons crouched and painted with ocher, anthropomorphic steles with images of weapons and shepherd attributes, traces of the cult of the horse, bull, wheeled vehicles, weapons, etc.).
If the author of these lines considers the post-Maglemez ethnocultural community he identified to be the 6th–5th millennium BC. (Fig. 16) by Proto-Indo-Europeans, the substrate on which the Indo-Europeans themselves were formed, then another Ukrainian researcher S.V. Koncha considers the carriers of post-maglemosis as already established Indo-Europeans before their collapse into separate ethno-linguistic branches. According to S.V. Koncha, “there are strong reasons to date the Indo-European community to the early Mesolithic (VIII-VII millennium BC), and associate the beginning of its collapse with the resettlement of the Yanislavitsky population to the east, in Polesie, and further, to the Donets basin in the 6th–5th millennium BC.” The researcher believes that the cultural complex defining the early I-E (mobile pastoral cattle breeding, burial mound ritual, cults of the horse, bull, sun-wheel, weapon, patriarch shepherd-warrior, etc.) was acquired by the I-E later, already after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European community in the 4th–3rd millennium BC. (Concha, 2004, pp.191-203).
One way or another, in the lowlands from the Lower Rhine in the west to the Middle Dnieper and Seversky Donets in the east, a cultural and historical community can be traced archaeologically, which began to form with the end of the Ice Age and which may have been the ethnocultural basis of the Indo-European group of peoples.
The problem of the Indo-European homeland is far from its final solution. The considerations expressed above will undoubtedly be adjusted and clarified as new facts become available and the latest scientific methods are applied to solving the problems of Indo-European studies.
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