FJORDMAN ESSAY: Everything you wanted to know about the spread of the Indo-European language but were afraid to ask

Atlas indulges in art, music and affairs of the heart and soul rather frequently (it's why we fight eh?) so I thought my readers would enjoy this history lesson.

And now for something different, a Fjordman lesson in language. OT but wildly interesting.

Fjordman essay November 11, 08

Whenever I get tired of Islam, which happens increasingly often, I read about some other topic which I find fascinating. Lately, I've concentrated on the history of the Indo-European language family and why it spread in the first place. I will tell some of the tale here, with emphasis on Persian, Sanskrit and especially Greek. Here is what Nicholas Ostler  says in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, page 239:

"The Greek language was spread from its historic home, the southern Balkan peninsula and Aegean islands, through two processes, one piecemeal, long lasting and diffuse in its direction, the other organised, sudden and breathtakingly coherent. One is usually known as the Greek colonisation movement; the other is Alexander's conquest of the Persian empire. The first process, the colonisation of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts by Greek cities, lasted from the middle of the eighth to the early fifth century BC. The question why, of all the inhabitants of these shores, only the Greeks and the Phoenicians set up independent centres in this way has never been answered. The foundations clearly served a variety of purposes, as political safety valves, as trading posts for raw materials, and as opportunities to apply Greek agriculture to more abundant and less heavily populated soil, but it is noteworthy that they are exclusively coastal, never moving inland except on the island of Sicily. The Greek expansion came after the period of Phoenician settlements (eleventh to eighth centuries), so it may be that the most important factor was who had effective control of the sea."

The Greeks in the second millennium BC used a system of writing called Linear B, but this was a cumbersome script with a limited number of users and the knowledge of its use was lost after 1200 BC. This "Dark Age" was a troubled period in the entire Eastern Mediterranean region. Exactly when writing returned to the Greek world is a matter of some controversy. Early graffiti on pottery has been found which is believed to date to around 800 or maybe the mid-eighth century BC, but earlier is conceivable. Despite a claim that it was borrowed from a Canaanite alphabet ca. 1150, it is generally agreed that the origin of the Greek alphabet is to be found in the Phoenician alphabet in the early first millennium BC. Here is Jonathan M. Hall in A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, page 57:

"[M]ost scholars are agreed that it is an adaptation of the later Phoenician, or Northwest Semitic, script. Greek scripts display notable local characteristics – principally with regard to the shape of letters but also in the matter of the phonetic values attributed to signs such as san, sigma, khi, and psi. All local Greek scripts, however, share important divergences from the Phoenician prototype, notably in the reutilization of certain Semitic consonantal symbols to represent vowels and perhaps – though the evidence for the Southern Aegean scripts is ambiguous – in the creation of three new symbols to represent aspirated plosives (phi, khi, and psi). These shared divergences would suggest that the Greek alphabet was born in one place only, in a single moment and perhaps as a result of the initiative of a single creator. Local differences would have arisen only subsequently. What is less clear is where such a transmission took place and whether our earliest extant graffiti are really the first examples of writing or whether writing was actually practised earlier but on more perishable items such as skins or wood that have not survived in the archaeological record."

The place of transmission of the alphabet is currently not known but is usually assumed to have been somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean where Greeks and Phoenicians came into regular contact with one another, for instance Cyprus or Crete. The most complete poetic works from the Greek archaic period are the Iliad and the Odyssey, traditionally ascribed to Homer, and the Theogony and Work and Days, assigned to Hesiod. There is still debate regarding these works, but the internal literary unity of these four poems points to a single author for each of them. Ancient authors provided varying estimates for when Homer and Hesiod lived. Herodotus dates them to the late ninth century BC and Strabo to the mid-seventh. The ancients assumed that Homer was an historical person, whereas modern scholars are more skeptical of this view. The Homeric epics purport to portray the distant world of a Heroic Age. Earlier assumptions that this world matched the Mycenaean palatial civilization of the sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BC were dispelled after the decipherment of the Linear B tablets, which revealed a society that was structured very differently from that depicted by Homer. Jonathan M. Hall again, page 25:

"For some, Odysseus' wanderings reflect the great age of colonization in the last third of the eighth century, but others regard them as more indicative of a 'protocolonial' phase dating to the late ninth century. Hesiod's reference (Th. 490-500) to the sanctuary at Delphi could belong to any time after ca. 800 – the date from which cultic activity is first attested at the shrine. Descriptions in the Homeric epics of weaponry and battle tactics seem to presuppose the advent of hoplite warfare, which is normally dated to the first half of the seventh century. Finally, it has been suggested that the Homeric description of Achilles' shield (Il. 18.468-608) parallels early seventh-century Cypro-Phoenician metal vessels and that the premonition of the sack of Troy in the Iliad (12.17-32) consciously echoes accounts of the sack of Babylon at the hands of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689. For these reasons, there is a growing view among scholars that the Homeric and Hesiod poems date to the first half of the seventh century but no universal agreement has been reached and detailed chronological arguments based exclusively on the supposed dates of the poems are untenable."

Greek, the Indo-European language of the palace-centered Bronze Age warrior kings who ruled at Mycenae and other strongholds, is definitely attested in the mid-second millennium BC. The breakthrough in the decipherment of the Linear B tablets was made by the Englishmen Michael Ventris (1922–1956) and John Chadwick (1920–1998) in the early 1950s. Ventris was himself surprised to discover that the language was an early form of Greek. Here is David W. Anthony  in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, page 48-49:

"The Mycenaean civilization appeared rather suddenly with the construction of the spectacular royal Shaft Graves at Mycenae, dated about 1650 BCE, about the same time as the rise of the Hittite empire in Anatolia. The Shaft Graves, with their golden death masks, swords, spears, and images of men in chariots, signified the elevation of a new Greek-speaking dynasty of unprecedented wealth whose economic power depended on long-distance sea trade. The Mycenaean kingdoms were destroyed during the same period of unrest and pillage that brought down the Hittite Empire about 1150 BCE. Mycenaean Greek, the language of palace administration as recorded in the Linear B tablets, was clearly Greek, not Proto-Greek, by 1450 BCE, the date of the oldest preserved inscriptions. The people who spoke it were the models for Nestor and Agamemnon, whose deeds, dimly remembered and elevated to epic, were celebrated centuries later by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. We do not know when Greek speakers appeared in Greece, but it happened no later than 1650 BCE. As with Anatolian, there are numerous indications that Mycenaean Greek was an intrusive language in a land where non-Greek languages had been spoken before the Mycenaean age."

David W. Anthony believes that the "Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is today southern Ukraine and Russia," which is the most commonly cited alternative (and the one that I happen to favor, too), but by no means the only one. The homeland, or Urheimat, from which Proto-Indo-European (PIE) originally existed and spread has been sought for more than 200 years. It is in fact easier to establish when PIE was spoken than where, although there is dissent also here.

The Proto-Indo-European language is not historically recorded, which obviously makes our task much harder, but we can use its daughter languages and through comparative linguistics reconstruct with some degree of accuracy much of the vocabulary which existed in the mother language before it separated into different branches. We know that the people who spoke PIE were familiar with wheeled vehicles. The earliest archaeological evidence we currently have for wheeled vehicles anywhere on Earth dates from about 3500 BC and is found in Eastern and Central Europe. PIE contains words for silver, which was not known much before 4000 BC. Wool, the product of selectively bred sheep, also appears largely to be a development of the fourth millennium BC, although the dating here is less precise than with wheels.

All things considered, the Proto-Indo-European language which has been reconstructed by leading linguists over the past two centuries contains words for a technological package which probably did not exist before 4000 BC, possible not even before 3500 BC. PIE must thus have been a living language during the fourth millennium BC. It is likely that a very early form of PIE existed before 4000 BC and a very late form slightly after 3000 BC. Before and around 3000 BC Proto-Indo-European was rapidly expanding geographically and gradually breaking apart into what would later emerge as different Indo-European branches. Scholars J. P. Mallory  and D. Q. Adams tell the tale in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, page 103:

"[I]ndividual Indo-European groups are attested by c. 2000 BC. One might then place a notional date of c. 4500-2500 BC on Proto-Indo-European. The linguist will note that the presumed dates for the existence of Proto-Indo-European arrived at by this method are congruent with those established by linguists' 'informed estimation'. The two dating techniques, linguistic and archaeological, are at least independent and congruent with one another. If one reviews discussions of the dates by which the various Indo-European groups first emerged, we find an interesting and somewhat disturbing phenomenon. By c. 2000 BC we have traces of Anatolian, and hence linguists are willing to place the emergence of Proto-Anatolian to c. 2500 BC or considerably earlier. We have already differentiated Indo-Aryan in the Mitanni treaty by c. 1500 BC so undifferentiated Proto-Indo-Iranian must be earlier, and dates on the order of 2500-2000 BC are often suggested. Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Linear B tablets, is known by c. 1300 BC if not somewhat earlier and is different enough from its Bronze Age contemporaries (Indo-Iranian or Anatolian) and from reconstructed PIE to predispose a linguist to place a date of c. 2000 BC or earlier for Proto-Greek itself."

How was the Indo-European language family discovered? Similarities between European languages had been known for a long time, but a systematic study of them appeared gradually in early modern Europe. For instance, scholar Joseph Scaliger constructed language groups based on their word for "god," i.e. the Deus group (from Latin deus, with variations in the Romance languages), the Gott group (from Germanic god or Gott) and the Bog group (from Slavic bog). Suggestions of similarities between Indian and European languages began to be made by European visitors to India in the sixteenth century. Mallory and Adams, page 4:

"Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), French (later Dutch) Renaissance scholar and one of the founders of literary historical criticism, who incidentally also gave astronomers their Julian Day Count, could employ the way the various languages of Europe expressed the concept of 'god' to divide them into separate groups; in these we can see the seeds of the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic language groups. The problem was explaining the relationship between these different but transparently similar groups. The initial catalyst for this came at the end of the sixteenth century and not from a European language. By the late sixteenth century Jesuit missionaries had begun working in India – St Francis Xavier (1506-52) is credited with supplying Europe with its first example of Sanskrit, the classical language of ancient India, in a letter written in 1544 (he cited the invocation Om Srii naraina nama). Classically trained, the Jesuits wrote home that there was an uncanny resemblance between Sanskrit and the classical languages of Europe. By 1768 Gaston Cœurdoux (1691-1777) was presenting evidence to the French Academy that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were extraordinarily similar to one another and probably shared a common origin."

The correspondences between the language of ancient India and those of ancient Greece and Rome were too close to be dismissed as chance. The date which is usually seen as the birth of Indo-European studies is 1786 when the Englishman Sir William Jones (1746-94) gave a speech to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, India. Jones was a gifted classical scholar and is said to have known thirteen languages well, and twenty-eight fairly well, at the time of his death, among them Arabic and Persian. In 1783 Jones was knighted and appointed to the judgeship at the high court at Calcutta. He arrived in India in 1783 and was to stay there until his death in 1794.  He was to transform the intellectual and cultural life of India when he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the associated journal, Asiatick Researches, dedicated to the scientific study of the languages, literature, science, history, and philosophy of India. In 1786, Jones elaborated a theory of the common origins of most European languages and those of much of India, an intuition that marks the beginning of comparative-historical linguistics:

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, 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 Gothic [Germanic] and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; 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."

He was deeply interested in the cultures of the Middle East, India and Asia. As Ibn Warraq says in his book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, page 190-191:

"Jones was forever emphasizing the similarities between India and Greece, or pointing out Europe's debt to Indian philosophy, or hinting at a common source for the two great civilizations, writing, for instance, in the third anniversary discourse that it was impossible 'to read the Vedanta, or the many fine compositions in illustration of it, without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India.'…With his work on Indian chronology, and having created a solid framework for the understanding of India's past, Jones, in effect, can be considered the father of Indian history. Jones's translation of Sacontala (Shakuntala) had an enormous influence in Europe, inspiring Schiller, Novalis, Schlegel, and Goethe, who used its introductory scene as a model for the 'Vorspiel auf dem Theater' of Faust (1797). But even more remarkably, the collection, printing, and translations of Sanskrit texts by Jones and other Orientalists made available for the first time to Indians themselves aspects of their own civilization, changing forever their own self-image. Until now, these texts had only been accessible to a narrow coterie of Brahmins."

By 1800 a preliminary model for this language family had been constructed. The English polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829) first used the term Indo-European in 1813. Young is remembered for, among other things, his studies of the properties of light and contributions to the development of Egyptology. The French philologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) is correctly credited with having deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs from the trilingual Rosetta Stone in 1822, but contributions had been made by Young and others such as the Swedish orientalist Johan David Åkerblad (1763–1819). In the late nineteenth century, Indo-European studies had made enough progress for the German linguist August Schleicher (1821-1868) to publish in 1868 the first artificial text composed in the reconstructed language Proto-Indo-European (PIE). In the early century, progress was made by the German linguist Franz Bopp and philologist Rasmus Rask from Denmark. Mallory and Adams, page 6:

"The language family came to be known as Indo-Germanic (so named by Conrad Malte-Brun in 1810 as it extended from India in the east to Europe whose westernmost language, Icelandic, belonged to the Germanic group of languages) or Indo-European (Thomas Young in 1813). Where the relationship among language groups were relatively transparent, progress was rapid in the expansion of the numbers of languages assigned to the Indo-European family. Between the dates of the two early great comparative linguists, Rasmus Rask (1787-1832) and Franz Bopp (1791-1867), comparative grammars appeared that solidified the positions of Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, and Celtic within the Indo-European family. Some entered easily while others initially proved more difficult. The Iranian languages, for example, were added when comparison between Iran's ancient liturgical texts, the Avesta, was made with those in Sanskrit. The similarities between the two languages were so great that some thought that the Avestan language was merely a dialect of Sanskrit, but by 1826 Rask demonstrated conclusively that Avestan was co-ordinate with Sanskrit and not derived from it. He also showed that it was an earlier relative of the modern Persian language."

The closest relative of English is Frisian, with Dutch next in line among the Germanic languages. The Old Persian language was spoken in the sixth and fifth centuries BC by those who founded the Achaemenid Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great and Darius I the Great. The history of Sanskrit is equally fascinating. J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, page 32-33:

"The ancient Indo-European language of India is variously termed Indic, Sanskrit, or Indo-Aryan. While the first name is geographically transparent (the people of the Indus river region), Sanskrit refers to the artificial codification of the Indic language about 400 BC, i.e. the language was literally 'put together' or 'perfected', samskrta, a term contrasting with the popular or natural language of the people, Prakrit. Indo-Aryan acknowledges that the Indo-Europeans of India designated themselves as Aryans; as the Iranians also termed themselves Aryans, the distinction here is then one of Indo-Aryans in contrast to Iranians (whose name already incorporates the word for 'Aryan'). The earliest certainly dated evidence for Indo-Aryan does not derive from India but rather north Syria where a list of Indo-Aryan deities is appended to a treaty between the Mitanni and the Hittites. This treaty dates to c. 1400-1330 BC and there is also other evidence of Indo-Aryan loanwords in Hittite documents. These remains are meagre compared with the vast religious and originally oral traditions of the Indo-Aryans. The oldest such texts are the Vedas (Skt. veda 'knowledge'), the sacred writings of the Hindu religion. The Rgveda alone is about the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined."

Dating for the Rgveda or Rig Veda is usually estimated at around 1200 BC, give or take a couple of centuries. Great attention was given to the spoken word in traditional Indian culture; therefore these important texts probably haven't changed much during the centuries. A distinction must be made between Vedic Sanskrit and the later Classical Sanskrit from the first millennium BC onwards. The literary output in Sanskrit was enormous and included not only religious texts but also drama and scientific works.

In the late second and first millennium BC the distribution of Iranian languages was far greater than it is today, from Central Asia to China and the Black Sea. There are two groups, Eastern and Western Iranian. The Eastern branch is earliest attested in the form of Avestan, the liturgical language of the religion founded by Zarathustra, or Zoroaster as he was known to the Greeks. The religion of Zoroastrianism achieved prominence in Achaemenid Persian Empire. Pockets of followers of Zoroastrianism exist in India and Iran to this day, but in greatly diminished numbers due to later Islamic persecution. Mallory and Adams, page 33-34:

"The Avesta is a series of hymns and related material that was recited orally and not written down prior to the fourth century AD. Unlike the Rgveda, the integrity of its oral transmission was not nearly so secure and there are many difficulties in interpreting the earlier passages of the document. These belong to the Gathas, the hymns reputedly composed by Zarathustra himself; there is also much later material in the Avesta. The dates of its earliest elements are hotly disputed but generally fall c. 1000 BC and are presumed to be roughly contemporary with the Rgveda. Eastern Iranian offers many other more recently attested languages that belong to the Middle Iranian period….The European steppelands were occupied by the nomadic Scythians in the west and the Saka in the east, and what little evidence survives indicates that these all spoke an East Iranian language as well. The Saka penetrated what is now western China and settled along the southern route of the Silk Road in the oasis town of Khotan….The most important modern East Iranian language is Pashto, the state language of modern Afghanistan. The West Iranian languages were carried into north-west Iran by the Persians and Medes."

As mentioned before, we can see from the reconstructed PIE lexicon that the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European were familiar with wheeled vehicles and had terminology for wheels, axles, shafts and yokes, but there are indications that these words and objects were recent adoptions at the time. The earliest attested wheels are solid, tripartite disc wheels. The invention of the spoke, which made wheels much lighter and transportation therefore swifter, happened later, with spoked wheels appearing around 2500-2000 BC. The speakers of PIE had some knowledge of water transport, but the terminology relating to boats suggests little more than canoes or similar small craft suitable for crossing rivers or lakes.

InThe Making of Bronze Age Eurasia, Philip L. Kohl writes about early clay models of disk wheels and remains of wooden wheels and wagons with solid wooden wheels. Page 85:

"Such vehicles are among the earliest known examples of wheeled transport found on the Eurasian steppes. They may be roughly contemporaneous with or perhaps a few hundred years later than the now earliest well-documented carts from moors in northwestern Germany and Denmark (Hayden 1989; 1991: ptc. 7; and Häusler 1981; 1994). On current evidence, the diffusion of the technology of wheeled transport may have just as plausibly spread north to south from northwestern Europe with its forests of useable hard woods to the more open steppes to the southeast and then farther south into Mesopotamia as the reverse (cf. Bakker et al. 1999). The important point is not where this revolutionary technology first originated but rather how quickly it diffused across western Asia, Eurasia, and Europe during the Early Bronze period, underscoring the interconnections among disparate cultures throughout this vast area."

It is true that the technology spread quickly, but the earliest evidence of wheels we have today is found in Europe. It is thus possible that wheeled vehicles were invented by prehistoric Europeans and aided the first waves of the Indo-European expansion. The PIE word for "wheel" relates to words for "to turn, spin" while the word for wheel in Sumerian appears to be a loanword from Indo-European. It is not uncommon to borrow words for borrowed technology. The fact that wheels have a "native" terminology in Proto-Indo-European but a borrowed one in Sumerian strengthens the argument that the knowledge of wheels was spread in Eurasia by speakers of Indo-European languages. Kohl again, page 110-111:

"[I]t is roughly around the middle of the fourth millennium BC that wheeled transport fist appears, stretching across a vast interconnected region from northern Europe to southern Mesopotamia (Bakker et al. 1999). The precise determination of which area or which archaeological culture first developed wheeled vehicles may prove impossible to document archaeologically simply because the technology diffused as rapidly as it did across this vast contiguous area. The question of origins, however, is much less significant than this phenomenon of convergence, this almost simultaneous evidence for the early use of wheeled vehicles stretching from northern Germany and southern Poland south across Anatolia to southern Mesopotamia, beginning ca. 3500 BC or immediately after the collapse of the gigantic Tripol'ye settlements….It is shortly after the introduction of wheeled transport that evidence for its massive utilization on the western Eurasian steppes is documented in the excavation of scores of kurgans containing wheeled carts with tripartite wooden wheels. These were not the chariots of a military aristocracy but the heavy, ponderous carts and wagons of cowboys who were developing a form of mobile Bronze Age pastoral economy that fundamentally differed from the classic Eurasian nomadism that is later attested historically and ethnographically."

The images on the "Royal Standard of Ur" shows that the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia were familiar with wheeled vehicles before 2500 BC, but still in the form of slow-moving carts pulled by oxen or tamed asses. This was contemporary with the Old Kingdom period when the Egyptians built their most famous pyramids, yet we have no indications that they used wheels at this time. They did know wheels during the New Kingdom period (1570–1070 BC), when horse-drawn chariots were displayed in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (r. 1333 BC – 1323 BC). The Battle of Kadesh (1274 BC?) between the forces of the influential Pharaoh Ramesses II and the Indo-European speaking Hittites is often cited as the largest chariot battle ever fought, involving several thousand chariots.

It is likely that peoples of the Eurasian steppes were the first to tame the horse, maybe as a meat animal before they figured out they could ride them or use them for warfare. The faster horse-drawn chariot was developed before 2000 BC in the western steppes and contributed to another phase of the Indo-European expansion. The first practical spoked wheel horse-drawn chariots are attested in the burials of the so-called Andronovo culture in modern Russia, which practiced sophisticated bronze metallurgy and spread eastwards across the steppes. It is often assumed that they spoke an Indo-Iranian language. The first Chinese words for horses and chariots (and a few other terms) were Indo-European loanwords. Pottery of Andronovo-type has been found in Xinjiang in far western China. The first known chariot burial site in Shang Dynasty China dates to about 1200 BC, although it is possible that there were earlier ones. At the other end of Eurasia, a stone at Bredarör in southern Sweden dated to about 1300 BC is carved with an image of a chariot with four-spoke wheels drawn by two horses.

Diffusion eastwards in Eurasia of metallurgy and metal weapons and tools during the second millennium BC is certain and acknowledged by Chinese specialists. This external stimulus to the emerging Chinese civilization spread via the western Xinjiang region, which physically belongs to the steppes, to the Yellow River valley. Philip L. Kohl, page 240:

"[T]he diffusion west to east of metallurgy and horse rearing in no way constitutes a tale of civilization itself spreading from west to east, enlightening ultimately the indigenous inhabitants of China. Technologies and influences always spread in both directions, and there are many other tales to be told, including, probably, an early diffusion of sericulture and silks east to west. The early Chinese State may have received its metal technology, wheeled vehicles, and horses from the west, but they quickly adapted and improved on them for their own culturally defined purposes. The intricate, elaborately cast and figured bronze vessels for which the Shang Dynasty is so justly renowned have no direct parallels either in the way they were made or the uses to which they were put in western Asia. The 'world' of West Asia was not united with the 'world' of East Asia in a single interconnected 'world system' during the Bronze Age (contra Frank 1993), despite the undeniable fact that both areas were in indirect contact with one another and that both borrowed and benefited from such contact."

Silk fabric was developed very early in China, probably in prehistoric times. There is a claim that traces of Chinese silk have been found on an Egyptian mummy from the end of the New Kingdom period, ca.1070 BC. There were thus contacts across Asia more than a thousand years before what is usually seen as the beginning of the Silk Road, albeit sporadic ones.

The details of which culture spread where and exactly what language they spoke are still disputed by scholars, but the effects are clear: Between 1600-1200 BC you could find horse-drawn chariots in use throughout the entire landmass of Eurasia, from the border regions of Shang Dynasty China via Egypt and Anatolia to Northern Europe. This corresponds to the period of the ancient Vedas and the emergence of Vedic Sanskrit in India. Peoples speaking Indo-European languages played a vital role in the diffusion of wheeled vehicles.

As we have seen above, Greek shares a common history with Persian and Sanskrit, but there are other connections as well. The fact that the Greeks got the alphabet from the Phoenicians and medical knowledge from the Egyptians is well-known. They also learnt Babylonian mathematical astronomy and may have been influenced by other ideas from Mesopotamia. According to scholar Walter Burkert, affinities and similarities between oriental epic such as the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia and Homeric poetry can no longer be ignored in interpreting Homer. Ibn Warraq writes in Defending the West, page 71:

"It should come as no surprise if we detect a possible influence of Mesopotamian literature on Homer, particularly of the epic Gilgamesh. Burkert summarizes the similarities, which were also noted by Sir Maurice Bowra in his Heroic Poetry, between the two, 'In both cases, in Greek as in Akkadian, 'epic' means narrative poetry which employs a long verse repeated indefinitely, without strophic division; the tale is about gods, sons of gods, and great men from the past, all of whom may interact with each other. Main characteristics of style are the standard epithets, the formulaic verses, the repetition of verses, and typical scenes such as the 'assembly of the gods.' Many are also struck by the similarity between the openings of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey – we are told of a hero who wandered wide and saw many things – while his name is intentionally withheld. Since the publication in 1969 of the Akkadian epic Athrahasis, scholars have also remarked on correspondences between it and the Iliad."

Burkert is careful to point out that philosophy, in the modern sense, was nonetheless a Greek invention, as much as deductive proof in mathematics. As Ibn Warraq puts it, "what emerges is something entirely distinctive: what we call Greek civilization. The very strength of this civilization lay in its ability to learn from and improve upon the ideas, art, and literature of the Near East, Persia, India, and Egypt."

The Eastern Mediterranean was a culturally mixed zone in late second and early first millennium. The influence of Near Eastern culture on archaic Greece may have been underrated previously, but it is possible to go too far in the other direction as well. People sought goods in distant places, with the Phoenicians playing a primary role in travel and commercial activity. It is no surprise that the cultural contact between the Near East and the emerging Greek world was extensive. Many works of art, especially metalwork and ivories, entered Greece from the Near East and influenced Greek art. Scholar Marc Van De Mieroop explains in A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 - 323 BC, second edition, page 227:

"Other, less tangible, influences on Greek culture are clear, yet it is often difficult to demonstrate that they were directly borrowed, and, if so, when. Greek material may also have contained survivals from the second millennium, when the Aegean was clearly integrated in the regional system of the Near East. The elements where Near Eastern influence on Greek culture has been suggested include loan words, literary motifs, ideals of kingship, diplomacy, astronomy, divination, cultic procedures, mathematics, measures and weights, economic practices such as interest, and so on. The enthusiasm of scholars for finding connections depends largely on whether they see Greece as the beginning of western civilization or as located in a cultural evolution that dates much further back in time. It is usually difficult, it not impossible, to prove that Greeks were aware of a particular Near Eastern practice and consciously copied it. For example, Hesiod's Theogony, written around the year 700, has close parallels with second-millennium Hittite mythology. Did he personally know those texts, which would then have been preserved in Anatolia into the first millennium, or was he influenced by traditions that at some distant moment in time had inspired Hittite tradition as well?"

Two new branches were added to the Indo-European linguistic tree in the early twentieth century. The first one was Tocharian, announced by the German scholars Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling to be an Indo-European language in 1908. It was once spoken in Central Asia and the western border regions of China. The other was Anatolian, a branch which includes Hittite and Luvian. The Hittites created a state in central Anatolia (present-day Turkey) in the second millennium BC. The Hittite language occupies a special place in Indo-European studies because of what is perceived to be the extremely archaic features of its grammar. Hittite is extensively documented through tablets from the mid-second millennium and was first suggested to be an Indo-European language by the Norwegian linguist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon (1854-1917). The Czech linguist Bedřich Hrozný (1879-1952) deciphered the Hittite language some years later.

Finally, there are those who argue that through comparative studies, you can find traces of a Proto-Indo-European mythological universe distributed throughout the area of early Indo-European speech. This is obviously overlaid with many later changes as well as influences from earlier cultures, but can perhaps still be deducted through careful studies. Although the various Indo-European groups have different creation myths, there could be elements of a PIE creation myth preserved in the traditions of the Celts, Germans, Slavs, Iranians, and Indo-Aryans. These traditions all indicate a proto-myth whereby the universe is created from a primeval giant – either a cow such as the Norse Ymir or a "man" such as the Vedic Purusa – who is sacrificed and dismembered. The various parts of his anatomy serve to provide a different element of nature; his flesh becomes the earth, his hair grass, his bone yields stone, his blood water, his eyes the sun, his mind the moon, his brain the clouds, his breath the wind, and his head becomes the heavens, etc. Here is The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, page 435:

"As to the identity of the sacrificer we have hints in a related sacrifice that serves as the foundation myth for the Indo-Iranians, Germans, and Romans (with a possible resonance in Celtic). Here we find two beings, twins, one known as 'Man' (with a lexical cognate between Germanic Mannus and Skt Manu) and his 'Twin' (Germanic Twisto, Skt Yama with a possible Latin cognate if Remus, the brother of Romulus, is derived from *Yemonos 'twin'). In this myth 'Man', the ancestor of humankind, sacrifices his 'Twin'. The two myths, creation and foundation of a people, find a lexical overlap in the Norse myth where the giant Ymir is cognate with Skt. Yama and also means 'Twin'. The dismemberment of the primeval giant of the creation myth can be reversed to explain the origins of humans and we find various traditions that derive the various aspects of the human anatomy from the results of the original dismemberment, e.g. grass becomes hair, wind becomes breath. The creation myth is then essentially a sacrifice that brought about the different elements of the world. Conversely, as Bruce Lincoln has suggested, the act of sacrifice itself is a re-enactment of the original creation."

Mallory and Adams again, page 440:

"Current trends in Indo-European comparative mythology are taking several directions. The evidence for trifunctional (or quadri-functional) patterns is continually being augmented by further examples both from well-researched sources, e.g. Indic, Roman, Norse, and from other traditions such as Greek and Armenian that have seen far less attention. Moreover, an increasing number of scholars have been examining the narrative structure of the earliest literary traditions of the various Indo-European groups to reveal striking parallels between different traditions. For example, N. B. Allen has shown how much of the career of the Greek Odysseus is paralleled by distinct incidents in the lives of Arjuna in the Mahabharata, the Buddha in the earliest Buddhist texts, and CúChulainn in early Irish heroic literature. Other scholars such as Claude Sterckx, Stepan Ahyan, and Armen Petrosyan have uncovered detailed correspondences in other early Indo-European traditions. According to Allen, the close coincidences go beyond both the type of random generic parallels that one might expect between different literary traditions and beyond what we might ascribe to some form of distant diffusion. He argues that such comparisons provide us with at least some of the detritus of the Proto-Indo-European narrative tradition."

Comments

[kobi]

thanks for a well researched essay.
some comments:

from the jewish point of view, the Creator created and continually sustains the universe with the hebrew letters. they are known as the building blocks of creation. the zohar says the 'ohr haganuz' the hidden light which was the first 'light' created ("let there be light") is housed in the vessels of these letters.
rabbi matityahu glazerson's book "from hinduism back to judaism" shows the relationship between sanskrit and hebrew both linguistically and conceptually. unfortunatlely, most linguistic scholars are unaware of the hebraic origins of language and may point to sanskrit as the earliest language.
however, interestingly, rabbi lazer brody has shown parallels with cherokee and hebrew. recently i learned that one large group of american indians in the southwest usa, the tohono o'odham, also have these. their word for 'human being' is "o'odham"; when pronounced sounds clearly like "adam", the hebrew word for human being. 'adam' is related to 'adamah' earth. also, their word for Creator is "i'toy" which is very similar to one of the hebrew words for Gd.
native american languages are very old, so these parallels are notable.
as we know from the torah, originally all humans spoke the same language; however, from the tower of babel' incident, people were scattered into 70 language groups...of the 70 primary nations of the world.
the prophets of israel describe a time when once again Gd will bring people to a 'pure language', which is a return to the original language of the soul, of the torah.
now, you may notice that deeply rooted antisemitism can appear as dismissal of these ideas. no surprise there! but to give an example of what makes the depth and profundity of hebrew so different,let's take a brief look at the sacred science of gematria.
gematria is the science of the numerical value of each hebrew letter. there are different types of gematria and all of great sages of israel knew it well. what is amazing is that certain words have the same gematria, numeric value,indicating a higher/deeper relationship.
the first word in the torah, "bereshis" is translated as 'in the beginning'. there is a book, the 'tikkunei zohar' which discusses 70 meanings for this one word. the mispar katan, one aspect of gematria measures this word as the value of 13. what else is 13? the word for 'love', 'ahavah'. what do we learn from this? the zohar states that Gd created the world out of love.
finally, also the word 'ehad', 'one' is the value of 13. so we see the underlying concept of unity/oneness and love which is the basis for Creation.
the holy science of gematria is so vast, so deep. r' glazerson's books go into it at length.
i don't know of any other language that makes these connections.
additional note: the parallel with 'human being' adam/o'odham in hebrew and a southwest native american language can be also noted here:

there is a discussion in the talmud as to what is the most important statement in the torah? rabbi akiva says 'love thy neighbor as thyself' (vayikra/leviticus 19:18). this is often accepted as true,as well it should be. however, rabbi ben-azzai counters saying that one's neighbor is still a 'neighbor' or 'fellow' therefore "these are the generations of adam' (bereshis/genesis 5:1) is the most important statement because it shows that all humanity are 'bnei adam' children of adam and therefore all related. in israel, in hebrew, humanity is referred to as 'bnei adam' children of adam. (which in the first creation statement of the torah refers to both man and woman).

the torah is often referred to as a 'tree of life' similar to the tree described in gan eden, the garden of eden.

[kobi]

additionally, re wind and grass. the hebrew word 'ruach' can be understood as wind,breath or spirit. it is the second level of the soul connecting the nefesh/the physical to neshamah/the spiritual.

the word for soul, neshamah, has as its root the word 'to breathe'. therefore Gd 'blew' into the first human 'nishmat chayiim' the breath of life, the soul of life.

the word for grass in hebrew 'sadeh' has different levels of meaning also. jacob/yaakov's brother esav's name comes from that. he was unable to extricate himself from the physical world. in isaiah there is a sentence (around ch.40) "all flesh is grass". there are other insights to this word and i apologize that i don't know them offhand.