The stories of all peoples go back to ancient times. People often traveled long distances in search of suitable conditions for their homes. You can learn more about who the Indo-Europeans are and how they are related to the Slavs from this article.
Who is this?
Speakers of an Indo-European language are called Indo-Europeans. Currently this ethnic group includes:
- Slavs
- Germans.
- Armenians
- Hindus.
- Celts.
- Grekov.
Why are these peoples called Indo-European? Almost two centuries ago, great similarities were discovered between European languages and Sanskrit, the dialect spoken by Indians. To the group Indo-European languages includes almost all European languages. The exceptions are Finnish, Turkic and Basque.
The original habitat of the Indo-Europeans was Europe, but due to the nomadic lifestyle of most peoples, it spread far beyond the original territory. Now representatives of the Indo-European group can be found on all continents of the world. The historical roots of the Indo-Europeans go far into the past.
Homeland and ancestors
You may ask, how is it that Sanskrit and European languages have similar sounds? There are many theories about who the Indo-Europeans were. Some scientists suggest that the ancestor of all peoples with similar languages were the Aryans, who, as a result of migrations, formed different peoples with different dialects, which remained similar in the main. Opinions also differ about the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans. According to the Kurgan theory, widespread in Europe, the territories of the Northern Black Sea region, as well as the lands between the Volga and Dnieper, can be considered the homeland of this group of peoples. Why then is the population so different? different countries Europe? Everything is determined by differences in climatic conditions. After mastering the technologies of domesticating horses and making bronze, the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans began to actively migrate in different directions. The difference in territories explains the differences in Europeans, which took many years to form.
Historical roots
- The first option is Western Asia or Western Azerbaijan.
- The second option, which we have already described above, is certain lands of Ukraine and Russia, on which the so-called Kurgan culture was located.
- And the last option is eastern or central Europe, or more precisely the Danube Valley, the Balkans or the Alps.
Each of these theories has its opponents and supporters. But this question has still not been resolved by scientists, although research has been ongoing for more than 200 years. And since the homeland of the Indo-Europeans is not known, it is also not possible to determine the territory of the origin of the Slavic culture. After all, this will require accurate data about the ancestral homeland of the main ethnic group. The tangled tangle of history, which contains more mysteries than answers, is beyond the power of modern humanity to unravel. And the time of the birth of the Indo-European language is also shrouded in darkness: some call the date at 8 centuries BC, others - 4.5 centuries. BC
Traces of a former community
Despite the isolation of peoples, traces of commonality can be easily traced among the various descendants of the Indo-Europeans. What traces of the former community of Indo-Europeans can be cited as evidence?
- Firstly, this is the language. He is the thread that still connects people on different parts of the planet. For example, Slavic people have such general concepts as “god”, “hut”, “axe”, “dog” and many others.
- The commonality can also be seen in applied arts. The embroidery patterns of many European nations are strikingly similar to each other.
- The common homeland of the Indo-European peoples can also be traced by “animal” traces. Many of them still have a cult of the deer, and some countries hold annual holidays in honor of the awakening of the bear in the spring. As you know, these animals are found only in Europe, and not in India or Iran.
- In religion one can also find confirmation of the theory of community. The Slavs had pagan god Perun, and the Lithuanians have Perkunas. In India, the Thunderer was called Parjanye, the Celts called him Perkunia. And the image of the ancient god is very similar to the main deity of Ancient Greece - Zeus.
Genetic markers of Indo-Europeans
Home distinctive feature Indo-Europeans is only a linguistic community. Despite some similarities, different peoples Indo-European origins are very different from each other. But there is other evidence of their commonality. Although genetic markers do not 100% prove the common origin of these peoples, they still add more common characteristics.
The most common haplogroup among Indo-Europeans is R1. It can be found among the peoples who inhabited the territories of Central and Western Asia, India and Eastern Europe. But this gene was not found in some Indo-Europeans. Scientists believe that the language and culture of the Proto-Indo-Europeans were transmitted to these people not through marriage, but through trade and socio-cultural communications.
Who applies
Many modern peoples are descendants of Indo-Europeans. These include the Indo-Iranian peoples, Slavs, Balts, Romanesque peoples, Celts, Armenians, Greeks and Germanic peoples. Each group, in turn, is divided into other, smaller groups. Slavic branch is divided into several branches:
- South;
- Eastern;
- Western.
The South, in turn, is divided into such famous peoples as Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Slovenes. Among the Indo-Europeans there are also completely extinct groups: the Tocharians and Anatolian peoples. The Hittites and Luwians are considered to have appeared in the Middle East two thousand years BC. Among the Indo-European group there is also one people who do not speak the Indo-European language: the Basque language is considered isolated and it has not yet been precisely established where it originates.
Problems
The term "Indo-European problem" appeared in the 19th century. It is connected with the still unclear early ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. What was the population of Europe like during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages? Scientists have not yet come to a consensus. The fact is that in the Indo-European languages that can be found on the territory of Europe, sometimes elements of non-Indo-European origin are found. Scientists, studying the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, join forces and use all possible methods: archaeological, linguistic and anthropological. After all, in each of them lies a possible clue to the origin of the Indo-Europeans. But so far these attempts have led nowhere. More or less studied areas are the territories of the Middle East, Africa and Western Europe. The remaining parts remain a huge blank spot on the archaeological map of the world.
Studying the language of Proto-Indo-Europeans also cannot provide scientists with much information. Yes, it is possible to trace the substrate in it - the “traces” of languages supplanted by Indo-European ones. But it is so weak and chaotic that scientists have never come to a consensus about who the Indo-Europeans are.
Settlement
The Indo-Europeans were originally sedentary peoples, and their main occupation was arable farming. But with climate change and the coming cold, they had to begin to develop neighboring lands, which were more favorable for life. From the beginning of the third millennium BC it became the norm for the Indo-Europeans. During the resettlement, they often entered into military conflicts with the tribes living on the lands. Numerous skirmishes are reflected in the legends and myths of many European peoples: Iranians, Greeks, Indians. After the peoples inhabiting Europe were able to domesticate horses and make bronze items, the resettlement gained even greater momentum.
How are Indo-Europeans and Slavs related? You can understand this if you follow their spread. Their spread began from the southeast of Eurasia, which then moved to the southwest. As a result, the Indo-Europeans settled all of Europe as far as the Atlantic. Some of the settlements were located on the territory of the Finno-Ugric peoples, but they did not go further than them. The Ural Mountains, which were a serious obstacle, stopped Indo-European settlement. In the south they advanced much further and settled in Iran, Iraq, India and the Caucasus. After the Indo-Europeans settled across Eurasia and began to lead again, their community began to disintegrate. Under the influence of climatic conditions, peoples became more and more different from each other. Now we can see how strongly anthropology was influenced by the living conditions of the Indo-Europeans.
Results
Modern descendants of Indo-Europeans inhabit many countries of the world. They speak different languages, eat different foods, but still share common distant ancestors. Scientists still have many questions about the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans and their settlement. We can only hope that, over time, comprehensive answers will be received. As well as the main question: “Who are the Indo-Europeans?”
INDO-EUROPEANS, Indo-Europeans, units. Indo-European, Indo-European, husband. Nationalities, nations speaking Indo-European languages. Ushakov's explanatory dictionary. D.N. Ushakov. 1935 1940 … Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary
INDO-EUROPEANS, ev, units. eets, eitsa, husband. The general name of the tribes of the ancestors of modern peoples speaking languages of the Indo-European family. | adj. Indo-European, oh, oh. Ozhegov's explanatory dictionary. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949 1992 … Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary
Indo-Europeans- INDO-EUROPEANS, ev, pl (ed Indo-European, eytsa, m). The general name of the tribes of the ancestors of peoples speaking languages of the Indo-European family of languages; people belonging to this group of tribes. The Indo-Europeans spoke the ancient languages of Asia and Europe, to which... Explanatory dictionary of Russian nouns
Mn. The peoples of Europe, Western Asia, and Hindustan, speaking related languages. Ephraim's explanatory dictionary. T. F. Efremova. 2000... Modern explanatory dictionary of the Russian language by Efremova
Indo-Europeans- Indo-Europeans, ev, units. h. eets, eitsa, creation. p. eyets... Russian spelling dictionary
Indo-Europeans- (English: Indo Europeans), a language family whose origins appear to be related to the steppes. Indo-European languages spread widely during the migration of peoples of the 2nd millennium BC. in Europe, as well as in Iran, India, temporarily also... Archaeological Dictionary
Indo-Europeans Indo-European languages Anatolian · Albanian Armenian · Baltic · Venetian Germanic · Illyrian Aryan: Nuristanian, Iranian, Indo-Aryan... Wikipedia
Indo-Europeans Indo-European languages Albanian · Armenian Baltic · Celtic Germanic · Greek Indo-Iranian · Romance Italic · Slavic Dead: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkan ... Wikipedia
Indo-Europeans Indo-European languages Anatolian · Albanian Armenian · Baltic · Venetian Germanic · Illyrian Aryan: Nuristanian, Iranian, Indo-Aryan... Wikipedia
Books
- Indo-Europeans, O. Schrader. We present to the attention of readers a book by the famous German linguist and historian Otto Schrader, the purpose of which the author saw was to bring together all the scientific information in the field...
- Indo-Europeans, Schrader O.. Readers are invited to a book by the famous German linguist and historian Otto Schrader (1855-1919), the purpose of which the author saw was to bring together all the scientific information in the field...
Doctor of History, Prof. L.L. Zaliznyak
Part 1. IN SEARCH OF THE ANIMAL HOMELAND
Preface
This work is an attempt at a popular presentation of the 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 mid-2nd millennium BC, later written down in Sanskrit, the hymns of the Avesta at the turn of the 2nd-1st millennium BC, proto Greek language ancient Mycenae of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writings of the Hittites of Anatolia 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 are no specialists consensus about the number of not only languages, but also language groups and e 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, Dardic languages 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. Greek colonies 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. Classical period characterized by the spread of the Attic dialect in 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. Due to the expansion of first the Roman Empire, and later the Germanic tribes (primarily the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), the Celts were driven 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. Albanian- an Illyrian relic that was 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, 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 - conventional name i-e dialects, which in the VI–VII 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.
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 India's favorable climate was responsible for population explosions and surplus i-e 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 related genetically, 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 society, economy, culture, spiritual world, the 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.
Important element i-e 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 a 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 home 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).
Middle 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 origin 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 both languages is explained by the intense cultural influence of Balkan farmers, genetically related to the Middle East, on ancestors– 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 due to complex historical processes, which 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. This one oldest species pastoralism made it possible for societies with regenerative economies to colonize not only the Eurasian steppes, but also to move into the forests middle zone 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 if the first pastoralists had direct and close contacts 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 last millennium ice age: Arensburg of Northern Germany, Swider 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 South 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 Maglemose cultural traditions from Polesie to the south was probably stimulated by movement in a southerly direction along river valleys deciduous forests due to 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 forest hunters of the Yanislavitsa culture to move to the south and south-east 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 Baltic states, Janislavitsa of the Vistula, Neman, and Pripyat basins, as well as the Donetsk culture of the Seversky Donets basin. The flint inventory of these cultures convincingly testifies to 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 special role played by the Linear Band Ware and Cucuteni-Trypillia cultures.
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. In 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. The blond 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 indicate blue-eyed blondes 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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Traditionally ancient history begin to study with the civilizations of Ancient Egypt, Sumerians, Babylon. There is no doubt that these civilizations have made a significant contribution to the development of humanity. But in parallel with the emergence and development of these civilizations in the north, on the territory of modern Russia, events took place that were no less, and probably even more important for world history. These events were connected with the ancient Indo-Europeans, which we will talk about in this post.
Why Indo-Europeans? Back in the 18th century, Europeans who visited India noticed a clear similarity between Sanskrit and European languages. Sanskrit was an ancient language whose position in India resembled that of Latin in Europe, some texts in Sanskrit are more than 3 thousand years old. Similarities were found not only in language, but also in traditions and beliefs, so it became clear that the ancient Indians and ancient Europeans had common ancestors.
More than a hundred years of disputes and searches followed, spent reliably establishing where the ancient Indo-Europeans lived and where their ancestral home was. There has been a lot of speculation on this topic. The German Nazis, for example, at one time announced that the ancient Indo-Europeans, or ancient Aryans, lived on the territory of modern Germany and represented a special superior race. However, research has shown a completely different picture.
In ancient times, the Indo-Europeans truly represented one people. They lived relatively compactly in the Don and Volga basin, on the territory of modern Russia. The most ancient archaeological culture for which its Indo-European origin has been proven is Samara. It dates back to the 5th millennium BC. e., and its distribution area covers the territory of modern Samara, Saratov and Orenburg regions. In the next millennium, Indo-European cultures expanded their range, capturing the Urals and Kazakh steppes in the east, and reaching the Dnieper in the west. Up to 3-4 millennium BC. e. The Indo-Europeans were a single community.
Who were the ancient Indo-Europeans? They were a warlike people, but they also had a developed mythology and valued knowledge. According to the ideas of modern scientists, the society of the ancient Indo-Europeans was divided into three main groups - priests, warriors and those who were engaged in agriculture and cattle breeding. They worshiped different gods, the main one of which was the god of thunder and lightning (the same one who Ancient Rus' was known as Perun, and in Ancient Greece as Zeus). The ancient Indo-Europeans believed in an afterlife and the existence of hell and heaven. They also had a cult of heroes, about whose exploits legends were written.
About 5-6 thousand years ago, the Indo-Europeans made one of the most important discoveries in human history - they invented the wheel and learned to harness horses to carts. This event turned the history of Eurasia upside down. Soon the warlike Indo-Europeans, who by that time already knew how to smelt copper and bronze, moved in all directions from their ancestral home.
Settlement of the Indo-Europeans (red shows the distribution to the middle of the 3rd millennium BC and orange - to the 1st millennium BC)
The Indo-Europeans were divided. Some of the Indo-Europeans moved to Europe, the entire local population living there was conquered and assimilated (it is believed that the only fragment of pre-Indo-European culture is the small Basque people in Spain). Indo-European peoples in Europe created outstanding ancient civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome, while the “barbarians” who lived to the north - Slavic, Germanic and Celtic tribes were also Indo-Europeans. Some came to Asia Minor (the territory of modern Turkey). The Indo-European people of the Hittites created a powerful kingdom and were the first in history to master iron smelting. Part of the Indo-European tribes, staying for some time Southern Urals, moved south, coming first to Central Asia, and then to India and Iran. It was these peoples who called themselves Aryans and were the very first to write down their myths in Sanskrit. The most ancient Vedas are believed to have been written down in the 16th century. BC e. Finally, part of the Indo-European tribes moved east, reaching the Yenisei and settling in northwestern China. In a relatively short period of time, the Indo-Europeans occupied most of Eurasia.
Origin of the Indo-Europeans
Lysenko Nikolay
Indo-Europeans, as a socio-cultural community, have been of genuine interest for decades. But many unresolved problems remain, giving rise to heated debates. There are discussions about their origin and settlement routes. There is not even a generally accepted definition of the term "Indo-Europeans".
Summarizing the accumulated knowledge, we can only postulate that the definition of Indo-Europeans includes a large group of people speaking closely related languages (possibly having the same origin), belonging to the European or Caucasian race. This community is characterized by haplogroups R1a and R1b, its representatives use certain strategies for survival and life management, and their religious views have a common past and similar evolution. Only by the combination of all these characteristics can the Indo-Europeans be distinguished into a separate community. We must not forget that their ethnogenesis has been going on for thousands of years and continues to this day. Mass migrations, cultural exchanges, conquests would seem to forever erase the contours of the original core that gave birth to this ethnic group. But no. Without the use of this concept, the development of social, historical and other sciences is impossible.
Indo-Europeans began to be perceived as a single whole in the 19th century, when it became clear that the languages of many peoples scattered around the world had similar grammar, phonetics, etc. They began to look for the linguistic ancestral home of this community. The structure and structure of languages, patterns of their development and interaction with other ethnic groups were analyzed in detail. Archaeological, climatic and genetic data were involved. Literary sources were studied and oral creativity. Even mathematical programs were used to describe the spread of viruses. It turned out that pathogenic organisms and languages spread in the same way. Currently, most scientists agree that the Indo-European proto-language was formed in Western Asia at the end of the last glaciation. It was here that a significant part of the population, displaced by the glacier from Europe, was supposed to concentrate. Shepherd tribes from the south, including from the Sahara, also arrived here. Gradual warming changed air flows, drying out northern Africa and then the Middle East. All this drove animals and people north, along the Mediterranean coast. This was also facilitated by the rise in sea level. In particular, the lands that became the bottom of the Persian Gulf were covered with water. Thus, a large number of pastoral and hunting tribes have accumulated on the territory of modern Turkey. Europe was then unsuitable for life, and the oases in Mesopotamia and neighboring regions were firmly occupied by settled peoples. Only the lush pastures and forests of Anatolia could provide shelter for herds of cattle and large wild animals. Here a “melting pot” was formed where the Indo-European languages arose. Secondary centers of linguistic ethnogenesis have also been found: the Balkans, the Sredne Stog culture.
During this period, the anthropogenic type of people characteristic of Indo-Europeans also took shape. The most ancient layers of mythology of many Indo-European peoples testify to the struggle and subsequent unification of two powerful ethnic groups. Most often these are the godlike Aesir and Vanir. The Ases were warriors and hunters, the Vans were grain growers, livestock breeders and fishermen. The first worshiped the sun, the second - water. These characters are present in Germanic sagas, Indo-Iranian Vedas, in the self-names of many peoples and place names. One of the many examples is the name of Lake Van, the shores of which are considered the homeland in the legends of many peoples. Vishaps - stone fish or dragons - are often found here. These ritual objects represented fertility. And all Indo-European symbolism is based on the eternal confrontation between the solar deity in the form of a spiral or swastika and the ruler of the underwater world.
Who were these legendary ancestors? Here we can only build hypotheses based on numerous facts obtained by science in recent years. It is known about the Indo-Europeans that they developed cattle breeding in ancient times. Moreover, both archeology and mythology indicate that they preferred cattle. They also developed a mutation that allows them to consume milk as adults. They also had farming skills. Consequently, the ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans must include a group of people who participated in the Neolithic revolution. It is known that the domestication of animals and the development of crop production skills occurred simultaneously in different places. It has been established that one of the places where cattle was domesticated was the Sahara during its drying out period. Both people and animals flocked to increasingly rare bodies of water, thirst brought them closer together. Later, pastoral tribes inevitably had to migrate either towards the equator or in a northern direction. Groups of shepherds reached Asia Minor and settled here. You can trace a chain of cultures genetically related to each other: Tassil-Ajer; Göbekli Tepe; Çatalhöyük - from the Sahara to the outskirts of the modern Turkish city of Konya. The similarities are manifested in religion, art, and the organization of everyday life. Even fairy tales have similar plots. A hero kissing a princess sitting high in a mansion appears in both ancient Egyptian and modern European epics. It is these cultural communities that most researchers correlate with the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans. The only problem is that their representatives for the most part belonged to the Mediterranean type of people. At the same time, the ancestors of the Hurrians and Hattians formed in the same territories. In passing, it should be noted that shepherds with herds of cattle from the Sahara also moved south. Among the nomadic livestock breeders of Central Africa, a tradition has been preserved of creating hecatombs - slaughtering and burying livestock with a deceased owner. We find the same custom among the ancient Greeks, Scythians and other Indo-European peoples. Playing with a bull is popular among the Ethiopian Hamer tribe. Here we find direct analogies with Mediterranean cultures.
What ethnic group should be considered the second “ancestor” of the Indo-Europeans? From whom most of them have light eyes and skin, tall stature and much more. Cro-Magnons are best suited for this role. But we should not think that these ancient big game hunters lived exclusively in Europe. Following herds of animals, they moved across the steppes of Eurasia. And during certain periods of the Great Glaciation they were completely forced out into a narrow strip around the Mediterranean Sea. These people settled not only in the European, but in the Asian and African parts of this reservoir, which by this time was thoroughly shallow. The white population of the Libyan Desert is mentioned in ancient Egyptian chronicles, Europeans encountered them in the Canary Islands, and even today many groups of Berbers bear the features of Cro-Magnons. Recently found in southern Egypt near the village of Kurta rock paintings Stone Age works are strikingly reminiscent of similar works from Spanish and French caves. No wonder they were called the African Altamira. Similar drawings were found in the north of Libya, in Sicily.
Thus, upon completion ice age hunters of the Cro-Magnon type had long-term contacts with primitive farmers and pastoralists, close in origin to the Proto-Hurrians and Proto-Hattians. Moreover, interaction between them took place in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor and Europe. This is how the Indo-European community was formed.
This conclusion is confirmed by genetic research. Among Indo-Europeans, subclades of haplogroups R1a and R1b are common. It should be emphasized that the connection between languages and genetic data can only be found in huge amounts of information collected according to certain rules. Particular examples may contradict the general mainstream. Thus, among the Karachais, Ossetians - Digorians and individual communities of the Circassians, the “Hattian” haplogroup G1 predominates, but they speak languages from completely different language groups. But in general, the connection between these indicators has been mathematically proven. R1b was the first to appear about 16 thousand years ago in Asia Minor or the Middle East. It is impossible to establish more precisely, since genetic information in human communities does not always spread radially. Currently, this haplogroup is most often found around the Mediterranean Sea. Its spread deep into Asia, Africa and Europe, to other continents is secondary. In general, this agrees well with the previously proposed ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. Haplogroup R1a arose from R1 somewhat later in the Northern Black Sea region. Gradually its carriers settled in Europe, reaching China, India, Iran, and Egypt. Which of the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans originally carried R1. It is impossible to establish this yet. But we know that the Cro-Magnon population of Eurasia and Africa did not simply follow herds of animals. It created grandiose cultural communities and was distinguished by its belligerence. Confronted with the peaceful farmers and pastoralists of the Neolithic, these people inevitably dominated the resulting syncretic societies. Their men passed on their genetic information more women. Therefore, haplogroup R1 can most likely be associated with the descendants of Cro-Magnons. Less common among Indo-Europeans, I and J may have been introduced by the sedentary population of Western Asia. At the same time, the core of the Indo-European languages most likely formed precisely among the Asia Minor tribes experiencing the Neolithic revolution. Their thinking and speech, enriched by an increasingly complex social structure, undoubtedly had a significant influence on the life of hunters. This is confirmed by examples from other eras. For example, the Bulgarian Turks gradually forgot their language after conquering the Slavs. indo-european race community evolution
Each ethnic group chooses its own strategy for survival and life management. Millennia pass, forms of social organization and methods of production change, but the same Ugrofins at their core remain forest dwellers. The Turkic peoples, having formed in the steppe zone, even living in megacities, are largely nomads in their worldview. The inhabitants of the desert and tundra are even more unique. Since ancient times, Indo-Europeans have specialized in large animals. At first they hunted them, later they tamed them. Of course, sheep, goats, pigs, poultry, and so on were also used along the way. It’s just that this ethnic group has always chosen ecological niches where cattle and horses were freely bred. Bulls and cows are deified in all Indo-European cultures. In archaic Greece, Hera, the wife of Zeus, had the appearance of a “burenka”. Cows acquired sacred status in India with the arrival of the Aryans. Climatic changes and demographic processes often forced the Indo-Europeans to move with their herds over vast distances. They have always been great travelers. And this, in turn, stimulated the exchange of goods and contributed to the evolution of equipment and technology. But their agriculture sometimes faded away. This is unthinkable for the sedentary cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus, the Mekong, the Nile, and the Yellow River.
These trends were most clearly demonstrated in the example of mastering the horse. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Indo-Europeans were the first to do this. Perhaps these were carriers of the Sredne Stog culture. There could have been other centers of domestication. There was an opinion that the horse was tamed in Mesopotamia or in the Zagros mountains. But the authors of such theories should ask the question whether these animals existed there. Donkeys lived there, which were adopted by early civilizations. But tarpans were found in the Great Steppe from Central Europe to Mongolia. Since ancient times, the Cro-Magnon population of these areas hunted horses, some groups even specialized in them. Naturally, they were repeatedly tamed by people, but the need for their domestication did not arise until the arrival of settled livestock breeders and farmers from the south. It was economic expediency and the need to move over vast distances that contributed to the domestication of the horse. The unification of life paradigms of various ethnic groups created a completely new socio-cultural reality. The inhabitants of the steppes shared their ability to survive in open spaces, hunting and military traditions. They were donors of a special anthropogenic type - tall and strong people, optimally adapted to existence in the forest-steppe. Southerners brought skills of settled life, agriculture, crafts, and a more advanced language.
Religious ideas are among the most stable categories of human existence. Their foundations have been preserved for thousands of years. And it is very difficult to identify those layers of beliefs that are objectively associated with the Indo-European community. Many authors consider the gods to be Indo-European only on the basis that their names have common roots in Greek, Russian, Sanskrit, etc. But we must also take into account the fact that the religious tradition to which this or that deity belongs may be very ancient . She is able to join the spiritual life of the most various peoples, undergoing only purely external changes. It is necessary to highlight the transcendental tradition, which is uniquely connected with Indo-European ethnic groups. Initially, one should discard magic, animism, animalism, and the deification of the forces of nature. These views arose in the Middle Paleolithic, and are found in one form or another in all cultures. This should be a religion that best suits the way of life and intellectual quests of the Indo-Europeans during a long period of their ethnogenesis.
Since ancient times, Indo-Europeans occupied the open spaces of Eurasia from forest zones to semi-deserts. These territories are subject to constant climatic changes; processes in human formations are actively occurring here. This way of life implies constant movement, and, consequently, a firm connection to spatial and temporal coordinates. The forest hunter follows the game, the farmer carries out work as certain phases occur in the plants. And only a migrating shepherd needs to have a “calendar” and a “compass” every day. Moreover, he must be able to foresee the future. Otherwise, his herds will simply die from drought or cold. The best reference point is the Earth's revolution around the Sun. The luminary, depending on the time of year, always rises and sets at certain points on the earth’s surface. Probably, Paleolithic hunters in Europe were able to determine the time of the summer and winter solstices. After all, they depended on large wild animals, which went north in the spring and returned back in winter. Ancient paintings are found only in those caves that are illuminated during the solstice period. Later, this effect was used in the construction of tunnel tombs and sun temples. The altar there was illuminated only at certain times of the year.
All cultures, from ancient times to the Middle Ages, reliably associated with the Indo-Europeans, are usually accompanied by cromlechs a certain type. These are stones or logs installed in a circle. They were oriented according to solar periods and served as both an observatory and a temple. There are grandiose buildings, like the famous Stonehenge. And there were also temporary structures. Only one thing is constant - Indo-European communities could not exist without them. Their entire religious life was strictly tied to the calendar. We find images of calendars on vessels, headdresses and stone slabs. The year began with the summer or winter solstice, the autumn and spring equinoxes were marked, and holidays in the remaining months were correlated with them. Even Christianity and Islam absorbed traces of these pagan celebrations. The whole world was drawn into an eternal cycle (the wheel of Samsara). Every morning the solar deity began its journey across the sky, bestowing order and blessings on people, and at night it went under the ocean, where it fought with a water monster. There were also annual cycles, which were more pronounced in temperate latitudes. In difficult periods, people helped God in his struggle (hence the stormy winter festivals of all Indo-European peoples). The rest of the time they themselves turned to a higher being for help. But the most important thing is that the priests entered into co-creation with God and seemed to control time. After all, the herder in the steppe himself decided where and when to go. Communicating directly with the deity, perhaps for the first time he realized himself as the master of his destiny. It is clear that not only Indo-Europeans worshiped the solar deity. But it was they who understood divine providence as an eternal cycle of struggle between light and dark principles, as a source of order that formalizes all human life. It is clear that due to various social processes, these views have repeatedly become the property of other ethnic groups. But it was among the Indo-Europeans that they existed for millennia and became the basis of their worldview. Christianity has existed in Rus' for more than 1000 years, but Kupala, a sunny holiday with roots in the Paleolithic, still excites the minds of people. It is preceded by mermaid week. And the water maidens were originally dragons.
If you trace the distribution of cromlechs around the world, the most ancient of them are located in North Africa (Nabta Playa 15 thousand years ago). After 5 thousand years they appeared in the Middle East - Gobekli Tepe. This culture is genetically related to Çatalhöyük, which researchers attribute to Proto-Indo-European. The "Göbeklin" steles often depicted eagles tormenting people on high towers. This plot is typical for Indo-Europeans and even entered the religious practices of the Iranian Aryans in the form of Zoroastrianism. The further spread of cromlechs across Europe and Asia is associated with the migrations of Indo-European tribes: Karahunj (Armenia); Goseck Circle (Germany); Arkaim (Russia); Stonehenge (UK). It turns out that the core of the religious views of the Indo-Europeans was formed long before the separation of their language. And this probably happened in northern Africa during the end of the last ice age. Migrating north, the bearers of this paradigm took part in the formation of the Indo-European community. All this is consistent with the previously cited data from genetics, archeology, anthropology, and mythology.
List of used literature
- 1. Lysenko N.F. Development of agriculture and processing industry of Kuban. - Krasnodar: Kubankino, 2006. C 54 - 156.
- 2. Lysenko N.F. Religions of the North-West Caucasus. Study guide. - Maykop: Polygraph Adygea, 2007. pp. 12 -96.
- 3. Lysenko N.F. Ancient Christianity of the Western Caucasus (collection of articles) "Questions of the history of Pourupya". Issue 1.