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Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West
JEAN- PAUL DEMOULE
Translated
by
RHODA CRONIN- ALLANIC
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Demoule, Jean-Paul, author. | Cronin-Allanic, Rhoda, translator. Title: Te Indo-Europeans : archaeology, language, race, and the search for the origins of the West / Jean-Paul Demoule ; [translated by] Rhoda Cronin-Allanic.
Other titles: Mais où sont passés les lndo-Européens? English Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2022054572 (print) | LCCN 2022054573 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197683286 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197506479 (hardback) | ISBN9780197506493 (epub) | ISBN 9780197506486
Subjects: LCSH: Indo-Europeans—Ethnic identity. | Indo-Europeans—Historiography. | Ethnology—Political aspects. | Civilization, Western. | Indo-European languages—History. | Archaeology and history.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054572
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054573
Paperback printed by Marquis Book Printing, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To the memory of Maurice Olender and of Phil Kohl
Epigraph
“Te reader might be led to believe that the discipline of linguistics is still in its infancy, and he is gripped by the same skepticism that Saint Augustin expressed, almost ffeen centuries ago, when he declared, in reference to similar works, that the explanation of words depends on one’s imagination, just like the interpretation of dreams”
Michel Bréal (1866)
“In truth, when we become aware of the extraordinary fruitfulness of the comparative approach in the area of Indo-European studies . . .; and when we recognize the elusive nature of the realities to which the substantives which qualify the adjective “Indo-European” refer, we tell ourselves that the researcher, when he attempts to explore the relationships between the human spirit and the cultures, fabricates myths himself. In this instance, Freud perhaps ofers us a foothold and the inestimable gif of lucidity: speaking of the theory of drives, a theory that he invented and that forms the basis of his scientifc work, he remarks on several occasions that it is “in a manner of speaking, our mythology”
Charles Malamoud (1991)
I OVERTURE
II FIRS T MOVEMENT (1814– 1903)
III S ECOND MOVEMENT
IV THIRD MOVEMENT (1945– THIRD MILLENNIUM)
18.
19.
V FIN ALE AND SECOND OVERTURE
1 Simplifed chronological table of the main archaeological cultures and civilizations in Eurasia (from
2 Dates of emergence of the major Indo-European languages
3
of the Indo-European languages
4 Te development of the Indo-European languages according to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1985)
5 A Map of some of the solutions of the Indo-European homeland problem proposed since 1960 461
6 Map of the main archaeological cultures defned in the 1930s 461 7 Te Indo-European migrations, afer Gustav Kossinna 462 8 Te early historical distribution of the main Indo-European–speaking peoples
Te neolithization of Europe
10 Te spread of Indo-European languages, afer Colin Renfrew 463 11 Te spread of Indo-European people, afer Marija Gimbutas’s theories
15 Map of the Chalcolithic cultures in the second millennium
16 Comparative trees of human genes and language families 467
17 Te Indian linguistic area, afer Colin Masica 468
18 Relationships between the Indo-European languages, afer Paul Heggarty 468
19 Relationships between the Indo-European languages, afer Alfred
Preface
Europe is haunted by a ghost: the ghost of the Indo-Europeans. Having departed from a specifc point in Eurasia several millennia ago, this conquering and enterprising people are thought to have gradually taken control of virtually all of Europe, as well as India, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and neighboring regions, imposing their order, language, and culture wherever they settled. Out of their language all known Indo-European languages would gradually emerge like the branches of a tree. Likewise, their original way of thinking would have structured the mythologies, epics, and institutions of the speakers of these languages before the Christianization of Europe partly, but only partly, wiped them out. Driven by the same spirit, these European peoples set out to conquer the rest of the planet some fve centuries ago, thereby spreading Indo-European languages and imposing their way of life and thinking throughout the world.
Today, as Europeans seek reasons to live together, beyond “free and fair” competition and opaque regulations, are they perhaps secretly reunited by a community spirit whose origins lie in the mists of time? And behind this “European miracle,” so ofen celebrated but already in decline, is there perhaps an “IndoEuropean miracle”? At the same time we are aware that, under the guise of the “Aryans,” these “Indo-Europeans” provided a pretext for the worst ideologies of the 20th century: But was this not simply an accidental subversion which has already been healed and which has no descendants today?
Trough the convergence of linguistics, history, archaeology, mythology, and biological anthropology, in recent years our knowledge of this subject has grown steadily. Prudently put to one side afer the Second World War, the IndoEuropean question became increasingly mediatized in the 1970s and even more so in the 1990s by the self-proclaimed “New Synthesis,” which gave us the single family tree of all the world’s languages and all the world’s genes. DNA analysis of paleogenetics, as well as developments in quantitative linguistics and its sophisticated mathematical models, added a touch of modernism and technology to this well-worn subject. At the same time, the number of archaeological excavations, especially those carried out ahead of major infrastructural developments, has continued to grow and to add to our understanding of ancient European societies. Indeed second- and third-hand publications on the Indo-European question abound as if the issue has already been resolved and all that is needed is to present the well-established results to the wider public.
It is therefore an opportune time to undertake a critical overview of this three hundred-year-old problem and retrace the systematic and dogged construction of an alternative origin myth to the Bible; in the latter instance, Europeans (Christians or of Christian tradition) were beholden, in a pathetic schizophrenia, to their worst enemies within and favorite scapegoats, the Jews. In the same way, Europeans invented a “continent” for themselves by arbitrarily excluding the easternmost part of Eurasia and even a so-called white or Caucasian “race,” which would prove just as difcult to delimit convincingly. Tis critical overview is necessarily accompanied by an assessment of the contribution of the various sciences involved in the debate today, including their methods and techniques, but also all of the questions that remain unresolved. Tis overview is also an intellectual history of the West and of the felds of knowledge that it has regarded as central for reconstructing, or imagining, its origins.
Te subject of this book was suggested to me many years ago by Maurice Olender, to whom I am indebted for his tenacity and patience (and also for rereading the original French text) and with whom I shared the same interests and the same questions regarding this issue. It was on the occasion of the “Dumézil” colloquium that he organized on February 7–8, 1981, at the Centre Tomas-More, in Arbresle near Lyon; it followed the publication of my frst article entitled “Les Indo-Européens ont-ils existé?” in L’Histoire in 1980. Since then, I have continued my inquiries, regularly publishing articles and presenting conferences papers while at the same time working on the current book.
Over the long term, this work has beneftted from discussions, some of which have been quite heated, with a number of colleagues including Gabriel Bergounioux, Patrice Brun, Serge Cleuziou, Anick Coudart, Michel Danino, Pierre Encrevé, Henri-Paul Francfort, Gérard Fussman, Marija Gimbutas, Blagoje Govedarica, Éric de Grolier, Augustin Holl, Jean-Marie Hombert, Ivan Ivanov, Jean-François Jarrige, Kristian Kristiansen, Bernard Laks, Sander van der Leeuw, Jan Lichardus, Marion Lichardus-Itten, János Makkay, Charles Malamoud, James Mallory, Laurence Manolakakis, Nikolaï Merpert, Marcel Otte, Colin Renfrew, Alain Schnapp, Natalya Shishlina, Bohumil Soudský, Dmitri Telegin, Henrieta Todorova, Gilles Touchais, Zoï Tsirtsoni, and Christophe Vielle.
I have also beneftted from briefer, occasional, but always fruitful exchanges on the same subject with, among others, Alexandra Yurevna Aikhenvald, Morten Allentof, David Anthony, Raimo Anttila, Esther Banfy, Louis-Jean Boë, Céline Bon, Catherine Breniquet, Joachim Burger, Georges Charachidzé, Gilles Col, Bernard Comrie, Eugen Comşa, Valentin Danilenko, Pierre Darlu, Fabrice Demeter, Alexandre Demoule, Jean Deshayes, Julien D’Huy, Ann Dodd-Opritesco, Paul Dolukhanov, Daniel Dubuisson, Georges Dumézil,
Manfred Eggert, François Émion, Alexandre François, Roslyn Frank, Romain Garnier, Eva-Maria Geigl, Russel D. Gray, Alain Guénoche, Jean Guilaine, Xavier Gutherz, Wolfgang Haak, Harald Hauptmann, Eric Hazan, Paul Heggarty, Javier de Hos, Volker Heyd, Guillaume Jacques, Guy Jucquois, Elke Kaiser, Alain Kihm, Philip Kohl, Guus Kroonen, Charles de Lamberterie, André Langaney, Jean Lassègue, Olivier Lemercier, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, Marsha Levine, Jean-François Lyotard, Vladimir Makarenkov, Angela Marcantonio, Arek Marcziniak, Emilia Masson, Laurent Métoz, Pierre Moret, Rafael Moreira, Ali Moussa, Salikoko Mufwene, Robert Nikolaï, Tomas Pellard, Asya Pereltsvaig, Daniel Petit, Georges-Jean Pinault, Kostantin Pozdniakov, Nicolas Ragonneau, Yuri Rassamakin, David Reich, Petre Roman, Merritt Ruhlen, Laurent Sagart, Jean-Michel Salanskis, Louis de Saussure, Win Scutt, Bernard Sergent, Patrick Seriot, Victor Shnirelman, Guy Stroumsa, Pierre-François Souyri, Mark Tomas, Marc Van der Linden, Bernard Victorri, Tandy Warnow, Nicolas Witkowski, and Marek Zvelebil.
It goes without saying that none of these researchers is responsible for the ideas presented in this work and, indeed, that a large number of them hold quite opposite views.
As a guide to the reader, at the end of this Preface I have provided a list of the twelve canonical theses of classic Indo-European theory, which can be usefully compared to the twelve alternative propositions that I present in this work.
Te transcription of words from other alphabets in the Latin alphabet is always problematic. I have attempted to use standard English transliterations (based on Czech in the case of Cyrillic) throughout, but it should be noted that the name of the same Slavic author, for example, might be spelled diferently depending on whether he published in English, French, or Cyrillic. Tere remains a degree of relative “fuzziness” in this regard. On occasion, I have simplifed or omitted a certain number of diacritical signs used in various languages: I apologize in advance to non-specialist readers. An asterisk (*) before a word indicates a reconstructed Indo-European root, which is not attested as such in real languages. In order to avoid breaking up the text, I have opted to present references and bibliographic justifcations as footnotes, which essentially provide only this type of information; readers may thus choose to ignore them as soon as they encounter them unless they wish to immediately pursue a given issue in more depth. Te bibliography on this subject is of course immense, and I have therefore decided to limit myself to those references that are most pertinent. A growing number of older publications are now available on the Internet; given the constant evolution of the situation I have not indicated them here. As regards citations from other languages, the translation of texts in foreign languages, unless indicated otherwise, are my own.
Te ofcial Indo-European hypothesis: Te twelve canonical theses
Tesis 1. Te Indo-European languages, spoken three thousand years ago in at least the major part of western Eurasia and today throughout much of the world, include twelve principal subfamilies (see Appendix 2) and have been organized by linguists into a single family tree springing from a reconstructed shared original language.
Tesis 2. Te kinship link between these languages was discovered by English scholar William Jones in 1786, was formalized by German scholar Franz Bopp in the early twentieth century, and has continued to be refned ever since.
Tesis 3. Te reconstruction of the original language (Ursprache in German) and of the family tree of Indo-European languages (Stammbaum) is based on two centuries of linguistic research and on the most up-to-date methods of quantitative linguistics.
Tesis 4. Tis shared original language was spoken by an original People (Urvolk in German).
Tesis 5. Tis original People lived in an original Homeland (Urheimat in German), namely a specifc and delimited region of Eurasia, localized thanks to linguistic paleontology and archaeology.
Tesis 6. Linguistic paleontology allows us to reconstruct the natural environment, economy, and culture of the original People using words that are common to all or a great majority of Indo-European languages.
Tesis 7. Te difusion of the Indo-European languages occurred through migrations and conquests from the original Homeland by peoples who can be traced in the archaeological record and who are the direct forebears of peoples described in Classical and Medieval texts (see Appendix 8).
Tesis 8. Biological anthropology, through the study of skeletons and through the analysis of bone chemistry and DNA, allows us to reconstruct the paths of these migrations.
Tesis 9. Comparisons between the diferent religions and mythologies of ancient Indo-European peoples allow us to reconstruct their original mythology, just as comparisons between various surviving texts allow us to reconstruct their institutions and even their poetry.
Tesis 10a. Te convergence of all of these scientifc disciplines allows us to localize the original People and their original Homeland in the steppes to the north of the Black Sea in the ffh millennium bce (see Appendix 11).
Tesis 10b. Te convergence of all of these scientifc disciplines allows us to localize the original People and their original Homeland in Anatolia (Turkey) in the seventh millennium bce.
Tesis 10c. Te convergence of all of these scientifc disciplines allows us to localize the original People and their original Homeland on the shores of the Baltic in the tenth millennium bce (see Appendix 7).
Tesis 10d. Te convergence of all of these scientifc disciplines allows us to localize the original People and their original Homeland in various other points of Eurasia (see Appendix 5).
Tesis 11. Te misuse of the Indo-European phenomenon by various nationalist ideologies, and particularly by national-socialism and contemporary extreme right groups (sometimes referred to as “New Right”), is nothing more than a marginal phenomenon that has nothing to do with scientifc research.
Tesis 12. Today, the question of the development and history of Indo-European languages, and of the peoples who spoke them, can essentially be considered as resolved.
I OVERTURE
From the Renaissance to the French Revolution
1
Te search for a long-anticipated discovery
Te history of Indo-European studies reads with all the straightforward clarity of a family saga, with its founding fathers, child prodigies, and even misguided sons. It also forms part of the catalogue of great scientifc sagas, on a par with the discovery of penicillin, gravity, and electricity. Of all the discoveries claimed by the social sciences, it is probably one of the few that the “hard” sciences (i.e., sciences concerned with physical matter and nature) are willing to acknowledge. Not only was the recognition of resemblances between the languages that we now term “Indo-European” an achievement in its own right, but the comparative grammar of these languages also became the foundation on which general linguistics was gradually constructed as a scholarly discipline over the course of the nineteenth century: indeed, it is the only social science to have developed, and successfully applied, widely recognized mathematical models, much to the envy and fascination of other social sciences. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, the German grammarian Schleicher made specifc reference to Darwin in the construction of his family tree of Indo-European languages. In parallel, biologists taking this biologically inspired tree at face value are today attempting to uncover traces of the Indo-European migrations hidden deep within the human genome.
Te Indo-European “Golden Legend”
Te saga had its pioneers, those who at the end of the eighteenth century had the intuitive genius to spot relationships between languages, initially by comparing Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Te best known of these pioneers was Sir William Jones who, in the nineteenth century, inspired three generations of mainly German linguists. Te frst generation was led by the German Franz Bopp (from 1816), and the Dane Rasmus Rask (from 1818),1 who defned the principles and tools of comparative grammar and who extended the corpus to include all Indo-European language families (Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Persian, Armenian, Albanian). Te second generation was that of August Schleicher, who was the frst to construct a family tree of these languages based on the natural sciences model (in 1861, only two years afer the publication of Darwin’s Origin
1 Bopp, 1816, 1833–1852; Rask, 1818 (written in 1814), 1932–1937.
of the Species); he was also the frst to write a short fable in the reconstructed “primordial language” (Ursprache).2 And fnally, the generation of Leipzig “Neo-Grammarians” who, deeming the methods of their predecessors insufciently rigorous, defned a corpus of phonetic laws capable of explaining both the evolution and reconstruction of languages, laws “that would not tolerate any exceptions.” Out of this century of German scholarship would emerge an etymological dictionary of Indo-European (initiated by Walde) and a comparative grammar of Indo-European languages (by Brugmann and Delbrück), two key tools that still remain indispensable to this day.
While the twentieth century saw linguistics emerge from the strict bounds of comparative grammar to become a general discipline, the three great principles of the previous century (i.e., the comparative method, the family treemodel, and the regularity of phonetic laws) would remain the cornerstones of Indo-European studies. Quite simply, the development of the structuralist method based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure provided researchers with new tools, particularly in the realm of phonology, the study of the speech sounds of languages. Te reconstruction of the “primordial language” progressed further and the discovery of previously unknown Indo-European languages, such as Tocharian in Chinese Turkestan (in the 1910s) and Hittite (in the 1920s), provided perfect confrmation of the method’s efcacy. Afer the Second World War, the study of Indo-European culture spread beyond Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris to become a global feld of research. Up until recently, the Die Sprache journal could list almost 2,000 published works on this subject per year.
From the 1930s onward, work on ancient texts by Emile Benveniste, in the area of institutions, and by Georges Dumézil, in the area of religion, have greatly added to our understanding of the functioning and mentality of the frst IndoEuropean societies, if not those of the “primordial” Indo-European people itself. Archaeologists meticulously combing the soils of Europe uncovered increasingly precise evidence for the great prehistoric migrations of Indo-European peoples and were able to retrace the phases and chronology of these movements. By the beginning of the twenty-frst century, 200 years afer its initial emergence, this feld of research was sufciently well-established that numerous books were published with the aim of disseminating its results to the wider public. Biologists, for their part, would also uncover confrmation of their own hypotheses. Te aberrant subversion of Indo-European studies in the name of the “Aryan race” by National Socialists, and by their spiritual heirs today, hardly needs mentioning: this misappropriation has unjustly prompted certain individuals of dubious intent to cast aspersions on the feld of study as a whole.
2 Schleicher, 1861, 1863a and 1863b, 1868.
Such is the Golden Legend, more detailed accounts of which can be readily found elsewhere.3
Uncertain inventors
Tere is an air of Archimedes’s bathtub and Newton’s apple about the IndoEuropean discovery in so far as a certain number of long-known resemblances suddenly gained new meaning, leading to a general reinterpretation and the creation of a new paradigm. However, there was no Newton or Archimedes of comparative grammar, although various nations haggled discretely over the privilege of claiming the frst discoverer as one of their own: such controversy more usually surrounds important technological inventions (e.g., the phonograph, airplane) than great scientifc discoveries.
In this, as in other domains, English-speaking hagiographers have long imposed one of their own, Sir William Jones, as the discoverer. Jones was a colonial administrator in India who was introduced to Sanskrit through managerial necessity: he was tasked with the translation of a corpus of legal documents written in the ancient language of the colony. Te announcement of the discovery can be dated precisely to February 2, 1786, when Jones gave a lecture in Kolkata on the occasion of the third anniversary of the founding of the Asiatic Society. On page 10 of his discourse he declares that
Te Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refned than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger afnity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very diferent idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.4
Tis passage is so ofen quoted that the rest of his discourse tends to be overlooked. In fact, nowhere else in the text does he deal with this linguistic
4 Jones, 1799; 1807a, pp. 34–35; regarding Jones, cf. also Cannon, 1987, Vielle, 1994.
kinship, and indeed philological reasoning is generally absent in his other works (he died in 1794). Te 1786 lecture was entitled “Te Hindus” and was presented as a very general exposé of all aspects of ancient Indian civilization—religion, philosophy, literature, architecture—areas in which Jones demonstrated similar zeal for comparative studies. He drew parallels between the Sphynx and the pyramids of Egypt and the colossal Buddhist statues of India. He compared the physical traits of modern Abyssinians with those of Bengali mountain populations which, together with references from Greek and Roman authors, led him to state that “all these indubitable facts may induce no ill-grounded opinion, that Ethiopia and Hindustàn were peopled or colonized by the same extraordinary race.” Hence his fnal conclusion that “the Hindus . . . had an immemorial afnity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians; the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans; the Scythians or Goths, and Celts; the Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians; whence, as no reason appears for believing that they were a colony from any one of those nations, or any of those nations from them, we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded from some central country, to investigate which will be the object of my future Discourses.”5
What general impression might the attentive reader get from Sir Jones’s text? Tat an enlightened amateur, like many afer him, was suddenly gripped by the scholarly excitement of jumbled comparison; that it was impossible for him to grasp the history of known human civilizations other than through the lens of an “Adamic” or “Babelian” model (he stated in 1792, the year of his death, that “the language of Noah is irredeemably lost”6); that as a colonial administrator for an empire on which the sun was destined never to set, he could only perceive the world in terms of universal colonization emanating from a central point. Sir Jones was indeed a precursor, but to an even greater extent than is usually realized: as soon as it appears, comparative grammar becomes inextricably associated with an “Adamic,” colonialist model which completely overwhelms it.
In the face of their counterparts in the English-speaking world, French inventors always seem to be unjustly condemned to languish in obscurity (Charles Cros preceded Edison, Clément Ader preceded the Wright Brothers). Similarly, Sir Jones was preceded by the unassuming Jesuit, Cœurdoux. In 1767, this missionary from Pondichéry presented the eminent Parisian Hellenist, Abbé Barthélémy, with a grammar and dictionary of Sanskrit along with an essay “Question posée à Monsieur l’Abbé Barthélémy et aux autres membres de l’Académie des belles lettres et inscriptions.” Te question mentioned in the title was “How is it that a large number of words in the Sanskritam language are also found in Latin and Greek, particularly in Latin?” Cœurdoux provided numerous
5 Jones, 1799, p. 34, 1807a, pp. 45–56; emphasis in original.
6 Jones, 1807b. See Vielle, 1994.
examples of shared vocabulary (words for “I” and “four”), morphology (augment of verbs, the dual, the privative “a”), and phonetics. He rejected the explanation of a possible infuence from the Greek kingdoms founded in Bactria in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests. Unfortunately, the Academy, already disinclined at this period to encourage innovation, refused to publish his paper although it was read in session. Anquetil-Duperron, the Iranologist who discovered and translated the sacred texts of the Avesta, was charged with providing a response. He disdainfully dismissed the discovery, frmly attributing the similarities between the languages to the legacy of Alexander the Great. It was, in efect, unthinkable that the history of the world be viewed in any way other than through the lens of Classical Antiquity. It would take until 1808 for the Academy, by then struck by remorse, to publish Cœurdoux’s paper following a dissertation by Anquetil-Duperron.7 However, it came far too late to allow the Jesuit priest to take his rightful place in history. Sir Jones’s paper had appeared twenty years earlier, and the German school of philology was already gathering momentum.
Te search for an anticipated discovery
Sir Jones had, however, a long line of predecessors. Since the Renaissance, numerous scholars had highlighted the close lexical and morphological resemblances between certain far-fung languages. As early as 1538, the Jesuit Tomas Stephens had compared the structure of Latin to that of Indian, while, shortly afer, the Florentine merchant Sassetti noted the resemblances between number names in Sanskrit and Italian. Similarities between Persian and German had been noted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Bonaventure Vulcanius, Juste Lipse, and Abraham van der Mijl. In 1686, the Swede Andreas Jäger forwarded the hypothesis of a kinship between the languages that would eventually be termed “Indo-European” by Sir Jones exactly 100 years later.8
Moreover, philological comparison had never been confned to the study of Indo-European languages. As early as the Middle Ages, Jewish scholars had already commented on the similarities between the Hebrew and Arabic lexica.9 Later, the Swedish ofcer Philipp Johann Tabbert von Strahlenberg, when captured by the Russians afer the Battle of Poltava in 1709, made the most of his subsequent forced sojourn in Siberia by writing a monograph (published in 1730) on the northern regions of the Russian Empire.10 He included a “tabula
9 Dotan, 1987; Van Bekkum, 1983; Valle Rodriguez, 1983.
10 Strahlenberg, 1730.
polyglotta,” a table juxtaposing the translation of a type list of ffy essential words (names of numbers, family relations, parts of the body, environment, etc.) in thirty-two diferent Northern Eurasian languages. Te table groups the languages, depending on their afnities, into fve or six classes including Finno-Ugric languages, Turkish languages, etc. Two and a half centuries later, “glottochronology” would still follow this same model.
Should we then, as we are prompted to do by ofcial history, consider all of these scattered intuitions simply as symptoms of three centuries of gestation, all leading up to Sir William Jones’s grand entry onto the scene? Are they, to quote the words of one language historian, manifestations of a “call of history”?11
A recurring discovery?
Let us take a leap forward in time. During the 1950s and ’60s, as we will see in Chapter 14, numerous excavations in the areas around the Black Sea revealed the remains of great civilizations dating to the end of the Neolithic (i.e., Chalcolithic); these civilizations invented, among other things, copper and gold metallurgy. During the fourth millennium bce, these civilizations appear to have collapsed in the face of an infux of nomadic pastoralists whose existence was also being revealed by new excavations and who, in the southern steppes of the Ukraine, domesticated horses and buried their high-ranking dead under earthen mounds known as kurgans. In 1963, these new archaeological discoveries led Lithuanian-American Marija Gimbutas to propose a general overview and to suggest that these nomadic pastoralists were the “proto-Indo-Europeans” that researchers had been seeking for the past 200 years: “Te existence of IndoEuropean homelands advocated by linguists for more than 100 years is no longer an abstraction; results achieved by archaeological research make it possible to visualize the homelands, at a certain time and place, as a historical reality.”12 Tis hypothesis—which at the time appeared to be revolutionary and which has since become predominant among archaeologists advocating the reality of an original homeland—is based on archaeological arguments, the validity of which we shall examine in more detail at a later stage.
However, thirty years earlier, well before the discovery of this rich archaeological evidence, the French linguist Emile Benveniste was already in a position to claim: “If one studies, in an unbiased fashion, the distribution of languages, terms and objects, the earliest migrations and conficts between peoples, the succession of religions, and the chronology of material cultures, one is inevitably
11 Droixhe, 1978.
12 Gimbutas, 1970, p. 155, 1973, 1977; see Chapter 14.
led to search, if not for the cradle, at least for the frst center of dispersion of the Indo-European peoples in southeastern Russia.”13 It is true that when he refers to the risks of a biased approach in his 1939 text, he is explicitly targeting the “Nordic” theory of Nazi archaeologists, a theory which, he states a little further on, “has recently found renewed favor in Germany, for obvious reasons.”
However, let us once more step back 235 years. In his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (written in 1705 and published in 1765), which is written in the form of a dialogue between himself (under the name Teophilus) and Locke (under the name Philalethes), the German philosopher Leibniz deals with the question of language. He states that most known languages have “common roots,” which supposes the existence of a “common origin for all nations” and, therefore, of a “primordial root language.” He even proposes a classifcation of the languages according to the resemblances between them: he illustrates his theory in the form of a family tree, an approach which was well ahead of its time. Describing the cousinly resemblances between Celtic, Greek, and Latin, he concludes that “we can surmise that they arise from the common origin of these people of Scythian descent who came from the Black Sea, crossed the Danube and Vistula, from whence some might have moved on to Greece while others would populate Germany and Gaul; this follows the hypothesis that Europeans came from Asia.”14
In these lines, which closely mirror those of Benveniste and Gimbutas, but which were written eighty years before Sir William Jones’s famous lecture, Leibniz does not claim to have made a new discovery. He is merely stating what he considers to be given facts, albeit it with some reservations: he warns against following the example of Flemish scholar Van Gorp, also known as “Goropius Becanus,” who in the mid-sixteenth century rose to fame for his fanciful etymologies.15 However, Leibniz adds that Van Gorp “was not far wrong when he claimed that the Germanic language, which he called Cimbrian, retained as many, if not more, traces of something primordial than even Hebrew.”
Tere is nothing more to add. At the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the greatest Western philosophers takes two facts for granted: all human languages derive from one primitive language, of which those who will later be known as “Indo-European” form a separate branch, and the original homeland of the speakers of this branch is situated on the shores of the Black Sea. Tree centuries later, have we really made much progress?
13 Benveniste, 1939, p. 16.
14 Leibniz, 1993 [1765], p. 228 (emphasis added); Olender, 2008, p. 2.
