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The Horse the Wheel and Language
The tribes Europeans encountered in their colonial ventures in Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas were at first assumed to have existed for a long time. They often claimed antiquity for themselves. But many tribes are now believed to have been transient political communities of the historical moment. Like the Ojibwa, some might have crystallized only after contact with European agents who wanted to deal with bounded groups to facilitate the negotiation of territorial treaties. And the same critical attitude toward bounded tribal territories is applied to European history. Ancient European tribal identities -- Celt, Scythians, Cimbri, Teoton, and Pict -- are now frequently seen as convenient names for chamelon-like political alliances that had no true ethnic identity, or as brief ethnic phenomena that were unable to persist for any length of time, or even as entirely imaginary later inventions.
That is from David W. Anthony's The Horse The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppe Shaped the Modern World. In particular this book focuses on the origin of the Indo-European language group and the relationship between archeology and linguistics. He is also skeptical of Jared Diamond's well-known thesis that early Europe had much diffusion of innovation in the East-West direction. Recommended.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 18, 2008 at 11:14 AM in Books, History | Permalink
Comments
Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities has the theme that one important force in creating or congealing political identities/imagined traditions were the administrative needs from the interface between indigenous people and another polity.
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Apr 18, 2008 11:34:06 AM
The Palestinian sense of national identity also became more crystallized after the birth of Israel.
Posted by: Chairman Mao at Apr 18, 2008 3:38:35 PM
If you've found that book interesting, you may like Empires of the Word: http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0066210860
Which is one of the best books on the subject. This book has one of the best most methodical approaches to historical linguistics I've seen, without sacrificing the quality of prose and interesting narrative. One of its great merits is that it is much more about description rather than putting forth new propositions. I find it is a problem when books (such as Jared Diamond's work) intertwine presentation of "facts" with the analysis of them. It is especially harmful to people who are not experts. I will claim some mild authority to determine this as a current linguistics student.
This book covers the history of the world with language change as the window.
I very very highly recommend it.
Posted by: Mike K at Apr 18, 2008 3:39:11 PM
This book has received some good reviews, but based on what is put here, I am not
sure what is new. Look, most of these "tribal" names were not and are not tribal.
They are the names of groups of people who speak, or spoke, an identical or similar
language, e.g. Celt, Teuton, Pict, and so on. These were never unified entities at
all, and these names themselves mostly came from outsiders. So, "Celt" was applied
by the Greeks, "Keltoi," to the Celts they encountered around Belgrade. The actual
Celts referred to themselves by actual tribal names, some of which did indicate
political entities, at least at times, e.g. the Belgae. The Germans were always
identified by their tribal identities among themselves, Sachsen, Swabische, and so
forth. "Pict" was assigned by the Romans to a bunch of tribes who had their own
names, one of them being Cruithni. So what?
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Apr 18, 2008 5:18:24 PM
"Cruithni" was, I understand, a Q-Celtic (e.g. Irish) name for the P- Celtic-speaking Britons. Replace the "C/Q" sound by a "P/B" sound and you hear the meaning pretty clearly.
Posted by: dearieme at Apr 18, 2008 7:09:53 PM
My understanding of the current Indo-European scholarship is that the whole "horsemen of the steppes" or "Bronze Age riders" scenario is a myth. They were farmers whose culture diffused across Europe; admittedly they were likely more powerful than the aboriginals, but the idea that they swooped in off the plains is mistaken.
Posted by: Dennis Mangan at Apr 18, 2008 7:24:38 PM
dearieme,
There is no question that "Cruithni" is a word referring to at least some of the Picts, probably
those of the lowlands of Scotland. The real question is whether or not the Picts spoke a non-Indo-
European language or some variation of Celtic, probably p-Celtic or Brythonic related to Welsh or not.
Many claim that "Cruithni" is an Old Irish word, that is q-Celtic, just to confuse things further, although
it may well have been yet another name given by outsiders. Most of the apparent words in their language
that appear to be Celtic appear to be p-Celtic, but there are odd elements that appear to be non-Indo-European,
including the matrilinearity of their society.
Dennis Morgan,
You are out of date. This is the theory of Colin Renfrew, but few buy it now. The Aryans-Indo-Europeans swept
out of Ukraine or thereabouts on their chariots, bearing partiarchial gods and wheels and horses, and eventually
iron as well. There is probably a link here with the discussion above. If Renfrew is right, then the Picts
probably spoke some sort of Celtic, the Aryan languages having gradually diffused much earlier, with this stuff
described in this new book, which agrees with the older, traditional stories, simply telling about an invasion
into central and western Europe by a particular group of Indo-Europeans who conquered other Indo-Europeans who
were already there, having diffused there much earlier with the spread of the neolithic revolution. Personally,
I tend to agree with this new/old view that these later invaders were Indo-European conquerors of older, non-
Indo-European groups, such as the Picts who lost their language and got absorbed into the modern Scots, with
only the Basques holding out and preserving their pre-Indo-European language (which is true in any case, whichever
of these theories is true).
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Apr 19, 2008 2:15:28 AM
Not to trod on the toes of all you experts, but one of Diamond's "facts" was that European diseases killed off 95% of Native Americans, many before Europeans even showed up in the neighborhood. Doesn't that imply that many of the tribes that occupied specific pieces of land had gone extinct by the time of actual colonization? And given the nature of tribal relations, that many of the survivors had been (brutally) conquered and absorbed by nearby tribes as a result? Would such survivors feel differently about being "colonized" by other Native Americans with whom they shared no language or other culture than about being colonized by Europeans?
Posted by: Larry at Apr 19, 2008 9:10:28 AM
David Anthony's book blends mind-numbing detail of archaeological evidence with wild evidence-free speculation about language. I find his arguments utterly unconvincing. At best, he provides a bit of information about strands of cultural continuity in the areas he is interested in, but is very obvious biases make the book nearly useless as a tool for learning anything.
This is in dramatic contrast to Nick Ostler's book (Empire of the Word). Nick presents what evidence there is and explains where there is reasonable doubt and then finally ends up with interesting conclusions.
Posted by: Ted Dunning at Apr 19, 2008 1:09:25 PM
Barkley, Renfrew's thesis is actually newer than most of the ideas of the Indo-European charioteers riding off the Eurasian plains to conquer the surrounding areas. Renfrew's approach actually holds up quite well according to the changes one might anticipate in Indo-European languages proper, with the oldest Indo-European languages actually coming out of Anatolia. The ideas of Indo-Europeans starting in the Eurasian plains just doesn't make any sense, because to prosper there initially they would have needed to have had horses domesticated already. The one truly new idea affecting all of the theories about the Indo-European diaspora involve the discovery that the Black Sea might have been a fresh water lake flooded by the rising Mediterranean due to the end of the last glacial period. The seafloor area around the Bosporus supports such an idea and the unique qualities of the Black Sea with its large quantities of non-decomposed organic matter at the bottom of the sea would suggest a large and rapid die off as well. A flooding of the Black Sea basin would have prompted the dispersal of a number of inter-related language groups from around the freshwater lake littoral, all in the range of 9000-7000 BCE. These ideas actually reinforce Renfrew's hypothesis rather than weaken it.
Posted by: PrahaPartizan at Apr 22, 2008 11:04:28 PM
1. Quote: " [Renfrew's] theory [of an Anatolian homeland for Proto-Indo-European]....is beset with a whole host of problems, not least...is that it requires a fantastically early date for the breakup of PIE -- a full three millennia before the earliest known wheeled vehicles. This date can only be maintained by wilfully ignoring the comparative linguistic evidence....", Benjamin W Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and Culture (Blackwell 2004) p. 42.
2. David Anthony at least takes the linguistic evidence _seriously_. He makes a _serious_ attempt to reconcile both the archaeology and the historical linguistics. The discussions above ignore, eg, (a) Tocharian (b) the Indo-Iranian language groups.
Posted by: Sudha Shenoy at Apr 23, 2008 1:53:57 AM
PrahaP.,
Sudha's point basically demolishes the Renfrew argument. I would note that I referred to the
invasion from Central Eurasia view as older than the Renfew argument. It is newer, but has not
been able to hold up very well for a lot of reasons.
Regarding who came out of Anatolia, well, the iron-bearing Hittites were Indo-Europeans, but
they were much later than the neolithics. Most recent evidence suggests that the initial
domestication of wheat was in what is now southeastern Turkey, but that was 10,000 years ago.
Hittites were a good 7,500 years later or so.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Apr 23, 2008 4:40:03 PM
Correction: more like 6500 years later.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Apr 23, 2008 6:13:22 PM
There is no real evidence for PIE speakers having a word for "wheel." They likely had a word for rotate, but that is not quite equivalent is it? Anthony and others have overstated their case on this single word. I'm afraid that Sudha and many others on the net have been misled into thinking that Renfrew's hypothesis is no longer viable. Any honest linguist will tell you that it is almost impossible to accurately determine what was spoken 6,000 years ago and by whom.
Posted by: Johnserrat at Jun 28, 2008 11:20:24 AM
