The early ethnic history of the peoples of Europe is one of the issues that causes lively debate. The question of what the population of Europe was like in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages is related to the problem of the formation of the Indo-European linguistic community and its localization.
In the Indo-European languages that spread throughout Europe, elements of clearly non-Indo-European origin are found. This is the so-called substrate vocabulary - relics of extinct languages, supplanted by Indo-European languages. The substrate leaves traces, sometimes very noticeable, not only in the vocabulary, but also in the grammatical structure of the dialects of the tribes that moved to new places of residence. In recent decades, the research of L. A. Gindin has established the presence of several substrate layers in the south of the Balkan Peninsula and the islands of the Aegean Sea. Among them, the Aegean substrate stands out - a conglomerate of heterogeneous and multi-temporal toponymic and onomastic formations. Much more homogeneous, according to researchers, is Minoan - the language of Linear A, which existed on Crete already in the 3rd millennium. A certain structural similarity of Minoan with the languages of the North-West Caucasus circle has been noted, the oldest representative of which - Chattic - is chronologically comparable to Minoan.
Several chronologically different substrate layers can be traced in the Apennines. The most ancient layer is probably of Iberian-Caucasian origin (traces of it are found in the west of the peninsula and especially on the island of Sardinia). To a later time, M. Pallottino attributes the “Aegean-Asian” substrate, which is also found throughout the Aegean.
In the Western Mediterranean, an autochthonous substrate was identified, to which Iberian probably belonged; Caucasian parallels are also allowed for it. According to archaeological reconstructions and some (so far isolated) linguistic facts, it can be assumed that there are analogies defined as Proto-North Caucasian in a number of Late Peolithic cultures of the Carpatho-Danube region.
The extreme west of Europe, before the appearance of the Indo-Europeans there (the arrival of the Celts in Ireland dates back to the second quarter of the 1st millennium BC), was inhabited by peoples whose anthropological type was close to the Mediterranean; the population of the northern regions of Ireland is believed to be of the Eskimoid type. The substratum vocabulary of this area has not yet been studied.
In northeastern Europe, an analysis of ancient hydronymy indicates the presence in these areas of a population belonging to the Finno-Ugric family. The western border of this range in the 4th millennium passed in Finland between the Torne and Kemi rivers and along the Aland Islands. As for Central Europe - the area of distribution of the so-called ancient European hydronymy - the ethnolinguistic characteristics of this area are difficult.
Subsequently, speakers of Indo-European dialects superimposed on the ancient local cultures of Europe, gradually assimilating them, but islands of these ancient cultures remained throughout the Early Bronze Age. Their material traces, preserved to this day in Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, include, in particular, special megalithic structures - dolmens, cromlechs, menhirs, which supposedly had a cult purpose.
In historical times, Indo-European peoples and languages gradually spread over a vast territory from the extreme west of Europe to Hindustan; It is obvious that as we move deeper into history we will come to the period of their existence in some territorially more limited area, which is conventionally defined as the Indo-European ancestral home. Since the emergence of Indo-European studies in the first half of the 19th century. the question of the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans has repeatedly been the focus of attention of researchers who, in addition to linguistic material, used data from those related sciences that in the corresponding period reached the required level of development, in particular archeology and anthropology.
A turning point in the approach to Indo-European problems emerged in the late 50s - early 60s, when an extensive study of both the archeology of Central and Eastern Europe and adjacent areas, as well as the relationships between the Indo-European language family and other families and numerous related studies led to the development of new methodological foundations for solving the problem of localizing the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans. In turn, the comparative historical study of Indo-European vocabulary and ancient written sources, dating back more than a century and a half, made it possible to identify the most ancient layers of the vocabulary fund that characterize the social level of the Indo-Europeans, their economy, geographical environment, everyday realities, culture, and religion. As the analysis procedure improves, the degree of reliability of the reconstructions increases. This should also be facilitated by closer contacts of Indo-European studies with related disciplines - archaeology, paleogeography, paleozoology, etc. To illustrate the need for such cooperation, we will give one well-known example. For Vedic asi-, Avest. ahhu- "(iron) sword" is reconstructed from the original form *nsis with the same meaning. However, archaeological data indicate that this restored form is neither pan-Indo-European, nor even Indo-Iranian, since the spread of iron as a material for weapons dates back no earlier than the 9th-8th centuries, when not only Indo-European, but also Indo-Iranian unity had long been didn't exist. Therefore, the semantic reconstruction of this stem as “a weapon (sword?) made of copper/bronze” is more likely.
In recent decades, it has been possible to achieve a relative unity of views on the chronological boundaries of the common Indo-European period, which dates back to the 5th-4th millennium. The 4th millennium (or, as some believe, the turn of the 4th and 3rd millennia) was probably the time when individual Indo-European dialect groups began to diverge. Of fundamental importance in solving these problems were the facts obtained through the analysis of linguistic data, on certain aspects of which it is advisable to dwell in more detail.
For common Indo-European, a fairly ramified terminology is being restored, associated with cattle breeding and including designations for the main domestic animals, often differentiated by sex and age: *houi- “sheep, ram” (the presence of common words with the meaning “wool” *hul-n-, “to comb wool " - *kes-/*pek- suggests that we are talking about a domestic sheep), *qog- “goat”, *guou- “bull, cow”, *uit-l-/s- “calf”, *ekuo- “horse”, *su- “pig”, *porko- “pig”. In Indo-European languages, the verb *pah- “to guard (livestock), herd” is widespread. Food products associated with raising livestock include *mems-o- “meat”, *kreu- “raw meat”; the name “milk” is limited to certain areas (its absence in some ancient Indo-European dialects is explained by researchers as the taboo of the designation “milk”, which in the ideas of the ancient Indo-Europeans was associated with the magical sphere), on the other hand, it is interesting to note some general designations for milk processing products, for example: *sur-,*s.ro- “curdled milk; cheese.”
General agricultural terms include designations of actions and tools for cultivating land and agricultural products: *har- “cultivate the land, plow”, *seH(i)- “sow”, *mel- “grind”, *serp- “sickle”, * meN- “ripen, harvest”, *pe(i)s- “pound, grind (grain)”. Among the common names of cultivated plants, *ieuo- “barley”, *Had- “grain”, *pur- “wheat”, *lino- “flax”, *uo/eino- “grapes, wine”, *(s) should be mentioned amlu- “apple”, etc.
Common Indo-European designations for environmental conditions and representatives of the plant world: *kel- “hill, hill”, *hap- “river, stream”, *tek- “to flow, run”, *seu-/*su- “rain”, *(s )neigh- “snow”, *gheim- “winter”, *tep- “heat, warmth”; Along with the general name “tree” *de/oru-, the following species are distinguished: *bhergh- “birch”, *bhaHgo- “beech”, *perk-u- “oak”, *e/oi- “yew”, *( s)grobho- “hornbeam”, etc.
The Indo-European fauna is represented by the following common names: *hrtko- “bear”, *ulko-/*lp- “wolf”, *1eu- “lion”, *ulopek- “fox, jackal”, *el(e)n-/* elk- "deer; elk", *leuk- "lynx", *eghi-(*oghi-, *anghi-) "snake",; *mus- “mouse”, *he/or- “eagle”, *ger- “crane”, *ghans- “water bird, goose, swan”, *dhghu- “fish”, *karkar- “crab”, etc. .
One of the most significant aspects of the Indo-European problem is the question of the absolute chronology of the processes that took place in the preliterate era. Discrepancies in determining the chronological boundaries of Indo-European unity, as well as the period of division of the Indo-European community and the identification of individual dialect groups, sometimes reach one or two millennia in different constructions. That is why the method of dating linguistic events (moments of the collapse of proto-linguistic communities), developed in comparative historical linguistics, is especially important, the so-called “glottochronology method, based on the fact of the presence of basic vocabulary in languages (including such universal human concepts as numerals, parts of the body, the most common phenomena environment, universal human states or actions), which, usually not borrowed from one language to another, is nevertheless subject to changes due to intralingual reasons. It has been established that over 10 thousand years, about 15% of the original vocabulary is replaced by a new one; as it deepens reconstruction, the percentage ratio shifts slightly: for example, over 2 thousand years, about 28% of the words of the main fund change, over 4 thousand - about 48%, etc. Despite the real difficulties facing glottochronology (for example, it does not take into account the possibility of sharp changes in the vocabulary of the language; moreover, one must constantly keep in mind that it will give an “underestimated” chronology as the reconstruction deepens), it can be used in calculations, partly comparable to radiocarbon dating in archaeology. Prerequisites are created for correlating the reconstructed data with archaeological complexes specific in place and time.
The role of vocabulary in the study of the preliterate history of peoples is not limited to the above. Along with the study of the main vocabulary fund, no less importance belongs to the analysis of cultural vocabulary - the designation of objects and concepts that are borrowed during various types of language contacts. Knowledge of the patterns of phonetic development of languages in contact makes it possible to determine the relative chronology of these contacts and thus narrow the probable boundaries of their localization.
Thus, a number of cultural terms are known that are common to Indo-European (or some part of its dialects), on the one hand, and Semitic or Kartvelian, on the other. At the end of the last century, separate Indo-European-Semitic convergences such as Indo-European *tauro- "(wild) bull ~ Semitic. *tawr- "bull" were noted; at the same time, the idea was expressed about the possible contiguity of the Indo-European and Semitic ancestral home. It should be noted a number of lexical borrowings into Indo-European languages from the ancient languages of Western Asia - Sumerian, Hutt, for example, Indo-European *r(e)ud(h) - “ore, copper; red" ~ Sumerian urud, Indo-European *pars-/*part- "leopard, leopard" ~ Hatt. ha-pras- "leopard", etc. Regardless of the direction of these borrowings, the very fact of the presence of linguistic (and therefore ethnic) borrowings is important. contacts, preventing the identification of most regions of Central and Western Europe with the Indo-European ancestral home.
About the preliterate period of Indo-European history, indirect evidence is preserved at other linguistic levels. Knowledge of phonetic patterns and the establishment of grammatical isoglosses make it possible to trace the sequential separation of dialect groups from a certain community: parallel language development observed in a group of separated dialects indicates their entry into a relatively closed zone and stay in it for a certain time. Taking into account phonetic changes is fundamentally important both when analyzing borrowings (this is the only way to determine the nature of the latter - pan-Indo-European, or Indo-Iranian, or East Iranian, etc.), and for identifying linguistic unions.
Currently, many points of view on Indo-European issues are grouped around several main hypotheses that localize the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, respectively, in the Balkan-Carpathian region, in the Eurasian steppes, in the territory of Western Asia, in the so-called circumpontic zone.
Since ancient times, the cultures of the Balkan-Carpathian region have been distinguished by their brightness and originality. This region, together with Asia Minor, formed one geographical zone in which the “Neolithic revolution” took place in the 7th-6th millennia: for the first time on the European continent, the population here moved from appropriating forms of economy to producing ones. The next stage of historical development was the discovery of the properties of copper; the level of metallurgical production in the 5th-4th millennium was very high in this area and, perhaps, had no equal at that time either in Anatolia, or in Iran, or in Mesopotamia. The Balkan-Carpathian cultures of this period, according to supporters of the hypothesis of the Balkan ancestral home (V. Georgiev, I.M. Dyakonov, etc.), are genetically related to the early agricultural cultures of the Neolithic. It was in this region, according to this hypothesis, that the ancient Indo-Europeans should have lived. Acceptance of this hypothesis seems to remove some historical, chronological and linguistic problems.
However, much more serious difficulties arise. First of all, it is necessary to take into account the archaeologically revealed orientation of the movement of the ancient Balkan cultures, which went in a southern direction. The continuation of the ancient Balkan cultures of the 4th millennium is found in the south of the Balkans and in the Aegean, Crete and the Cyclades, but not in the eastern direction, where, according to this hypothesis, individual groups of Indo-Europeans should have moved. There is no evidence of the movement of these cultures to the west of the European continent, which begins to “Indo-Europeanize” no earlier than the 2nd millennium BC. e. Therefore, within the framework of the Balkan hypothesis, it remains unclear where the speakers of Indo-European dialects were located after significant ethnocultural shifts in Central and Eastern Europe in the 4th-3rd millennium BC.
The chronological and cultural-historical difficulties associated with the acceptance of the Balkan hypothesis are aggravated by linguistic problems. Information about natural conditions, elements of the social system, economic structure, and worldview systems, which are restored for the ancient Indo-European period, do not fit into the set of characteristics characterizing Central European agricultural cultures. It is also significant that the hypothesis of the Balkan-Carpathian ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans is not able to explain where and when their long-term contacts with other language families (Kartvelian, North Caucasian, Semitic, etc.) could have occurred, accompanied by the borrowing of cultural vocabulary, the formation of language unions, etc. d. Finally, the localization of the Indo-European ancestral home in the Balkans would raise additional difficulties in front of the theory of Nostratic kinship, according to which a number of linguistic families of the Old World - Indo-European, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Uralic, Altai, Afrasian - go back to one macrofamily. According to historical and linguistic considerations, the time of the collapse of the Nostratic linguistic community, localized in northeast Africa and Western Asia, dates back to the 12th - 11th millennia. Despite the hypothetical nature of many particular issues of the Nostratic theory, it cannot be ignored in reconstructions of chronologically later periods of the corresponding linguistic families.
According to another hypothesis (T.V. Gamkrelidze, Vyach. Vs. Ivanov, etc.), the area of the initial settlement of the Indo-Europeans was the area within Eastern Anatolia, the South Caucasus and Northern Mesopotamia of the V-IV millennium. To prove this hypothesis, arguments from paleogeography and archeology are used (continuity of development of local Anatolian cultures throughout the 3rd millennium), data from paleozoology, paleobotany, linguistics (sequence of division of the Indo-European dialect community, borrowings from individual Indo-European languages or their groups into non-Indo-European languages and vice versa, etc.).
The linguistic argumentation of this hypothesis is based on the strict use of the comparative historical method and the basic principles of the theory of linguistic borrowing, although it raises objections from opponents on some particular issues. It is very important to emphasize that Indo-European migrations are considered according to this concept not as a total ethnic “expansion”, but as a movement primarily of the Indo-European dialects themselves, together with a certain part of the population, layering on various ethnic groups and transmitting their language to them. The last point is methodologically very important, since it shows the inconsistency of hypotheses based primarily on anthropological criteria in the ethnolinguistic attribution of archaeological cultures. In general, despite the fact that the hypothesis under consideration requires clarification on a number of archaeological, cultural-historical and linguistic issues, it can be stated that the identification of the area from the Balkans to Iran and further east as a territory in a certain part of which the Indo-European ancestral homeland can be localized has not yet been met fundamental refutations.
The problem of the disintegration of pan-Indo-European unity and the divergence of Indo-European dialects has received the most thorough development (despite the debatability of a number of points) within the framework of this concept, so they deserve special attention. According to this hypothesis, the beginning of the migrations of Indo-European tribes dates back to the period no later than the 4th millennium. The first linguistic community to emerge from the Indo-European is considered to be Anatolian. The original, more eastern and northeastern location of speakers of Anatolian languages in relation to their historical habitats is evidenced by bilateral borrowings found in Anatolian and Caucasian languages. The separation of the Greco-Armenian-Aryan unity follows the separation of the Anatolians, and the Aryan dialect area is presumably separated within the general Indo-European one. Subsequently, Greek (via Asia Minor) reaches the islands of the Aegean Sea and mainland Greece, layering on a non-Indo-European “Aegean” substrate, including various autochthonous languages; Indo-Aryans, part of the Iranians and Tocharians move at different times in a (north-) eastern direction (for Indo-Aryans the possibility of moving to the Northern Black Sea region through the Caucasus is allowed), while speakers of “ancient European” dialects move west through Central Asia and the Volga region to historical Europe. Thus, the existence of intermediate territories is allowed, where newly arriving population groups settled, joining local populations in repeated waves, and later populated the more western regions of Europe. For the “ancient European” languages, the region of the Northern Black Sea region and the Volga steppes are considered to be the common source (albeit secondary) area. This explains the Indo-European nature of the hydronymy of the Northern Black Sea region, comparable to Western European (the absence of more eastern traces of Indo-Europeans may be caused by insufficient knowledge of the ancient hydronymy of the Volga region and Central Asia), and the presence of a large layer of contact vocabulary in the Finno-Ugric, Yenisei and other languages.
The territory where the localization of a secondary linguistic community of originally related Indo-European dialects is supposed to occupy a central place in the third hypothesis of the Indo-European ancestral home, shared by many researchers, like. archaeologists and linguists.
The Volga region is one of those well studied archaeologically and described in a number of authoritative studies (K. F. Smirnov, E. E. Kuzmina, N. Ya. Merpert). It has been established that at the turn of the 4th - 3rd millennium, the Yamnaya cultural community spread in the Volga region. It included mobile pastoral tribes that explored the steppes and had widespread contact with foreign cultural territories. These contacts were expressed in exchanges, invasions of neighboring territories, and the settlement of some of the ancient Yamnaya tribes on the borderlands of the territories of early agricultural centers. Archaeologically, very early connections of the steppe tribes with the South and Southeast are noted; the possibility of movements of significant groups of the population to the steppe from the Caucasus and Caspian regions is not denied.
The western direction of the expansion of the Yamnaya cultures is postulated in a number of works exploring the transformation of Central European cultures from the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium and the reasons that caused it (M. Gimbutas, E.N. Chernykh). The changes taking place in the area of ancient European agricultural cultures, according to a number of researchers, affected the economic structure (a sharp increase in the share of livestock farming compared to agriculture), the type of housing and settlement, elements of worship, the physical type of the population, and there is a decrease in ethnocultural changes as the population progresses. to northwest Europe.
The main objections to this hypothesis stem from the fact that from the very beginning it was developed as a purely archaeological concept. The movements of the Indo-Europeans, according to some such constructions, look like migrations of entire cultures; To justify such migrations, many arguments of both economic and ethnocultural nature are given. At the same time, the extremely important fact remains aside that in the problem of localizing the ancient settlement area of the Indo-Europeans, the primary role belongs to linguistic and comparative historical and philological data, and only linguistic methods can reliably establish the ethnolinguistic affiliation of the population of a certain archaeological culture. For example, linguistic evidence does not allow us to identify the ancient population of the steppe zone of Central Asia, in particular the carriers of the Andronovo culture, with the Indo-Iranians - although such a point of view exists, it leaves unexplained the presence of Indo-Aryan elements in the Black Sea region and Western Asia. Chronological data (III millennium), as well as external contacts of Indo-European languages with other language families, make it possible to correlate the area of the ancient Yamnaya cultural community with the “secondary” area of settlement of the Indo-Europeans. It is these territories, and not the more southeastern or western ones, that, according to experts, are the place of isolation of the Indo-Iranian dialect community (the “ancestral homeland” of the Indo-Iranians). It is significant that the picture of the economy and life of the Indo-Iranians in their ancestral homeland among the archaeological cultures of the Old World, reconstructed according to linguistic data, correlates only with materials from the steppe cultures of Eurasia (E. E. Kuzmina, K. F. Smirnov, G. M. Bongard-Levin, E, A . Grantovsky).
A fundamentally different approach to defining the Indo-European ancestral home is represented by the concept of the so-called circumpontic zone, which has been actively developed in the last decade. According to the idea put forward, deep ethnocultural shifts in the development of the Balkan-Danube region in the second half of the 4th millennium went in parallel with the emergence of a new system of cultures, minimally connected with the previous ones. Complex historical and, in some cases, genetic connections of this system with such cultural communities as the Corded Ware cultures, spherical amphorae, and pastoral cultures of the Caspian-Black Sea steppes are noted (N. Ya. Merpert). It is assumed that there is a certain contact continuity and cultural integration not only in the area of distribution of the ancient Yamnaya cultures, but also south of the Black Sea, where elements of the new cultural system can be traced all the way to the Caucasus. In this vast territory, according to a number of researchers, the process of formation of specific groups of Indo-Europeans could have taken place. This process was quite complex; it included both the separation of initially unified groups and the convergence of unrelated groups drawn into the contact zone. The spread of similar elements within the zone could be due (along with the initial general impulse), in addition to contact continuity and close communication, also by the existence of a kind of “transfer sphere” - mobile pastoral groups. At the same time, this area was in contact with the ancient cultural centers of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, which would well explain the borrowing of cultural vocabulary along with the corresponding realities, techniques, etc.
It is interesting to note that this approach to determining the Indo-European ancestral home finds some analogues in the direction called “linguistic geography” (V. Pisani, A. Bartholdi, etc.). Indo-European linguistic unity is defined as a zone of transitional phenomena - isoglosses, genetic kinship gives priority to secondary “affinity” (affinite secondaire) - phenomena caused by parallel development in contacting dialects. The Indo-Europeans, as Pisani believes, for example, “are a collection of tribes who spoke dialects that were part of a single system of isoglosses, which we call Indo-European.” It is obvious that supporters of this trend make a certain (albeit negative) contribution to the solution of the Indo-European problem, simply removing it - after all, if, as they believe, there was no more or less compact Indo-European community, then the question of the Indo-European ancestral homeland becomes meaningless. As for the hypothesis of the “circumpontic” zone, its authors still make a reservation that this can be a solution to the Indo-European problem only in a certain chronological context.
To summarize the above, it should be noted that at the present stage of research, the most promising solution to the Indo-European problem seems to be the following. Some regions of Central Europe, starting from the Bronze Age, constituted the area of settlement of “ancient European” peoples; The Balkan-Carpathian region in this case becomes the “ancestral home” for some speakers of Indo-European dialects. This should have been preceded by a period of their stay in the more eastern territory, including the steppes of the Volga region and the Northern Black Sea region, as part of the Indo-European dialect community, which at that time still included Indo-Iranian (or part of it), Tocharian and other groups (cf. the idea of "circumpontic" zone). The “steppe” ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans will thus be correlated with the area common to most of the Indo-European dialects, from which the movement to the Central European regions took place. The question of whether this area was the primary ancestral home of all Indo-Europeans, or (as, for example, the authors of the West Asian hypothesis show on vast material) an intermediate area of settlement (“secondary ancestral home”) for the majority of Indo-European dialect groups, must be resolved in close connection with the question of the most ancient stages of the formation and development of a number of ethno-linguistic communities, revealing contact and genetic proximity to the Indo-European.
At the origins of the comparative historical study of Indo-European mythology and religion are A. Meillet and J. Vandries. Meillet was the first to express the idea of parallelism between the terms denoting deity among the Indo-European peoples. He showed that ancient Indian devah, Lithuania devas, Old Prussian deiws "god", Latin. divus "divine" may be associated with the Indo-European root "di-e/ow- "day, light". Meillet did not find common Indo-European terms for cult, priests, sacrifice; he noted that in the Indo-European world there were no gods as such, instead "natural and social forces" acted. The problem was further developed by Vandries, who explored such aspects as the range of terms associated with the concept of faith (Latin credo, Old Irish cretim, Old Indian crad, etc.), sacred administrative functions (for example, the designation of a priest: Latin flamen, ancient Indian brahman), specific sacred actions and objects (sacred fire, appeal to a deity, etc.) Analyzing the relevant terms, Vandries came to the conclusion about the existence of religious traditions common to Indo-Iranian , Latin and Celtic ethnolinguistic groups.He pointed out the main reason why, as he believed, languages so widely separated from each other held these traditions: only in India and Iran, in Rome and the Celts (but nowhere else in the Indo-European world ) their carriers have been preserved - colleges of priests. Despite the limited methodological basis of the noted studies, which were based primarily on data from etymological analysis, they undoubtedly opened up new perspectives for historical mythology.
The next stage, associated with the general progress of the development of philological sciences, was the transition from the study of specific mythological units to the study of Indo-European mythology as a system that has a certain structure, the individual elements of which are in relations of opposition, distribution, etc. In the works of J. Dumezil, in which largely determined the historical and mythological research of recent decades, the idea of a three-part structure of Indo-European ideology, correlated with the ideas of Indo-Europeans about man, nature, and the Cosmos, was consistently pursued.
Among the central Indo-European mythological motifs is the motif of the unity of heaven and earth as the progenitors of all things; in many Indo-European traditions there is a connection between the name of a person and the designation of the earth (Lithuanian zmones “people”, zeme “earth”, Latin homo “man”, humus “soil”), which finds a typological correspondence in the motif of the origin of man from clay, widespread in mythologies of the Middle East.
An important place in the Indo-European system of ideas is occupied by the idea of twinning, reflected in the motif of the original inseparable earth and sky. In all Indo-European traditions, there is a connection between the divine twins and the cult of the horse (Dioscuri, Ashvins, etc.). Associated with the idea of twinning is the motif of twin incest, which is present in the most ancient Indo-European mythologies (Hittite, ancient Indian, Baltic, etc.) and has certain typological parallels (albeit socially conditioned) in the upper strata of some ancient Eastern societies.
The central image of Indo-European mythology is the thunderer (ancient Indian Parjanya-, Hittite Pirua-, Slavic Perunъ, Lithuanian Perkunas, etc.), located “above” (hence the connection of his name with the name of a rock, mountain) and entering into single combat with the enemy , representing the “bottom” - it is usually located under a tree, mountain, etc. Most often, the opponent of the Thunderer appears in the form of a snake-like creature, correlated with the lower world, chaotic and hostile to man. At the same time, it is important to note that the creatures of the lower world also symbolize fertility, wealth, and vitality. A number of Indo-European mythological motifs (the creation of the universe from chaos, myths associated with the first cultural hero, the distinction between the languages of gods and people, a certain sequence in the succession of generations of gods, etc.) find parallels in ancient Eastern mythologies, which can be explained by the ancient contacts of Indo-Europeans with the peoples of the Middle East .
The dual social organization of ancient Indo-European society had a direct impact on the formation of the structure of spiritual concepts and the mythological picture of the world. It has been established that the main Indo-European mythological motifs (old and new gods, twin cult, incest, etc.) and ritually significant oppositions (top-bottom, right-left, sunset-sunrise, etc.), based on the principle of binary, are universal in nature and are found in various unrelated traditions associated with a certain stage of social development, undoubtedly earlier than that reflected in the reconstructions of Dumezil and his school. The absence of classical Indo-European ternary distributions in the Anatolian area, which in general was strongly influenced by ancient Eastern cultures (cf. also partly Greek), makes it possible to correlate two different systems of ideas with chronologically different periods of the existence of the Indo-European dialect community.
We have already noted that the main material for studying the ancient history of peoples, in particular the Slavic ones, including, naturally, the Russian people, is language data. Written sources testifying to the ancient Slavs appeared relatively late and date back to the beginning of the new era, with the exception of a few fragmentary and unclear passages from the works of authors who lived before the new era. The Eastern Slavs are mentioned in sources only in the 5th century.
The earliest works containing information about the Russians (Rus, Rosy) date back no earlier than the beginning of the 9th century, although some researchers talk about the appearance of this name in sources of an earlier time. Thus, if we take into account only written sources, then the most ancient periods will simply be inaccessible to us. If we are guided by monuments of material culture, material monuments, then, turning to those that were discovered on the territory of the settlement of the Slavs in historical times and go back to early historical eras, we will encounter such a mass of cultures, sometimes completely different from each other and mutually incompatible connected, that determining which one should be considered Slavic will be extremely difficult, sometimes simply impossible.
However, it would be wrong to refuse to read the first pages of the history of the Slavs on the basis of the lack of written sources and the extreme difficulty of ethnically defining monuments of material culture. We have language data at our disposal.
Slavic languages currently represented by Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian and Lusatian (Sorbian) languages, which are part of the family of Indo-European languages. These include: Germanic (German, English, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, etc.) > Romance (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), Indian (Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Bengali, Sinhala, etc. .), Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Tajik, Ossetian, etc.)” Greek, Armenian, Albanian languages. In addition, there were now extinct Indo-European languages: Latin, which laid the foundation for the Romance languages common in the territory of the former Roman Empire, Hittite in Asia Minor, Tocharian in Western China and other so-called “dead languages”.
In our time, peoples speaking Indo-European languages constitute the largest group4. Indo-European speech is now heard in Europe and Asia, Africa and Australia, North and South America.
In the distant past, people who spoke Indo-European, related languages, and perhaps some very ancient Indo-European language, divided into dialects, lived in a relatively limited territory, from where they settled for hundreds and thousands of years until they populated the entire planet. Among them were the distant ancestors of the Slavs, who had not yet separated from the mass of other tribes with an Indo-European language. These were not yet Slavs, but only their distant physical and linguistic ancestors, the pro-State Slavs.
Our task, first of all, is to try to answer the questions of what the people who spoke the languages of the Indo-European language family did, what their social system was, the system of kinship ties, customs, etc., i.e., everything that characterizes them : where they lived, in what direction and where they settled, when the ancestors of the Slavs emerged from their midst (as they are called, “Proto-Slavs” and “Proto-Slavs”), how the ancient Slavic language began to take shape, where is the region that is often called the “ancestral home of the Slavs” ", from where they came out and settled over vast areas from the Elbe to the Oka and Volga, from Lakes Ladoga and Onega to the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas.
Indo-European languages. Indo-European linguistic community
A few comments about the most ancient period in the history of the Indo-European peoples, of which the Slavs belong. Recently, the idea has been expressed that the “formation” of the Indo-European linguistic community dates back to the era of the separation from the mass of primitive agricultural tribes, pastoral tribes, to the time of the transition from the maternal to the paternal clan. According to the archaeological classification, this period refers to the end of the Chalcolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age, i.e., to a time distant from us by 5-6 thousand years. This kind of statement needs very serious corrections.
Firstly, there is no reason to believe that the Indo-European linguistic community emerged only during the period of the separation of patrilineal pastoralists. The fathers, grandfathers, and ancestors of pastoralists who were engaged in primitive agriculture undoubtedly spoke languages or even a proto-language with some kind of tribal dialects, very close to the speech of their closest descendants who switched to pastoral cattle breeding. And it can hardly be denied that the tribes themselves, engaged in primitive hoe farming, descended from the ancestral clan groups of hunters and fishermen of the Neolithic and even the Middle Stone Age, Mesolithic, in turn preserved some remnants of the speech of the latter.
Thus, some elements of Indo-European tribal languages existed long before the transition to pastoral cattle breeding, the transition to which can only be considered as a factor that contributed to the settlement of Indo-European tribes, their rapid spread in all three parts of the Old World.
An analysis of the oldest core vocabulary of the Indo-European languages suggests that they existed long before metal and pastoralism. This is evidenced by such terms as, for example, the German hammer - hammer, associated with the Russian stone and Lithuanian akmio, the Slavic flint, reflected in the German skrama - ax, the Slavic knife, associated with the Old Prussian nagis - flint, etc.5
The given examples indicate that Indo-European languages (or Indo-European proto-language) already existed in those times when tools were still made from stone, i.e. during the Neolithic. There are no reliable common Indo-European names for metals. There are common names for metals only in certain groups of Indo-European languages, which indicates their relatively late appearance. At the same time, the meaning of the terms. denoting metals and ores, extremely diverse. For example, ore is blood and ore is what metal is smelted from. The same term exists to designate both copper and iron (Sanskrit ayah, Latin aes, Gothic aiz - copper, at the same time aisen - iron)6. Consequently, the Indo-European community did not go beyond the Neolithic before its collapse and its entire history dates back to the Stone Age7.
Of course, when Indo-European linguistic community ceased to exist, and the Indo-European ethnic unity ceased to exist. The Indo-Europeans of that time (V-IV millennium BC) were a vast group of tribes that spoke close, related languages. The origins of this community go back to a very distant past. It can be assumed that some elements of Indo-European languages existed back in the Mesolithic era (XIII-VII millennium BC)8. The extreme antiquity of Indo-European languages is also indicated by the terminology of kinship. This latter developed back in the period of the maternal clan, when kinship was counted along the maternal line, when the husband entered the wife’s clan, the property of the deceased was inherited by the wife’s clan, the children remained in the mother’s clan and all the mother’s sisters were their mothers, and all the father’s brothers were considered fathers etc. This kind of marriage relationship developed a very long time ago, during the heyday of the primitive communal system, at the stage of developed maternal gender, when the language reflected only the attitude towards the mother (for example, sate - son, literally birth, doija - infant, doika - nurse, etc.) e. It should be taken into account that the system of notations characteristic of the generic organization is different in different groups of Indo-European languages. This indicates that Indo-European linguistic unity goes back to a very ancient stage of development of tribal society, that is, not to the time of a highly developed tribal system with tribal languages, but to the era of an early tribal system with tribal languages.
If the flourishing of matriarchy among the Neolithic tribes of Europe dates back to no later than the 5th-4th millennium BC. e., then the early period of its development, which lasted a long time, dates back to the Mesolithic, when small clan groups of hunters and fishermen moved from the south to the north of Central and Eastern Europe following the retreating glacier. This dates back to a time separated from us by 12-10 thousand years11.
The oldest layers of the vocabulary of the Indo-European languages include the words meat, blood, bone, sinew, etc. This is evidence that meat food played a huge role in the life of the ancient Indo-Europeans, and not necessarily from the time of the emergence and spread of cattle breeding, but much earlier, during the reign of hunting. This is also evidenced by the wide distribution in Indo-European languages of the names of some wild animals and birds (wolf, beaver, otter, deer, duck, goose). A trace of the hunting image of the ancient Indo-Europeans is the Latin ada - skin, fur and at the same time adata - needle (for sewing fur). These are all hunters' terms. Later adit means to knit, adits means knitted. This term is characteristic of the language of pastoralists (wool, wave, d "o ~ livestock, knitting) 12. In all Indo-European languages, words associated with cattle breeding dating back to ancient times are very common (sheep, beef, wave - wool, bitch, gu - bull, yoke-yoke, etc.) Common to all Indo-European languages is the name for honey and drinks made from honey.
There are no ancient Indo-European names for fish and common Indo-European terms associated with agriculture 13. All this suggests that the Indo-European languages of the Neolithic were widespread among pastoralists and hunters who extracted honey from wild bees, who knew almost no fishing and, perhaps, were just beginning to master agriculture .
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. The group of 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 does the population of different European countries differ so much? 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 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 the 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 a pagan god Perun, and the Lithuanians had 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
The main distinguishing feature of the Indo-Europeans is their linguistic community. Despite some similarities, different peoples of Indo-European origin 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. The 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, combine their efforts 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?”
Doctor of History, Prof. L.L. Zaliznyak
Part 1. IN SEARCH OF THE HOMELAND
Preface
This work is an attempt at a popular presentation of complex problems of Indo-European studies to a wide range of educated readers. Since the early 90s of the last century, when the author of this work became interested in Indo-European studies, several of his articles have been published. Most of them are intended not for a narrow circle of professional Indo-Europeanists (linguists, archaeologists), but for a wide audience of readers interested in ancient history and, above all, students of historians and archaeologists from history departments of universities in Ukraine. Therefore, some of these texts exist in the form of separate chapters of textbooks for history faculties of Ukraine. One of the incentives for this work was the unprecedented explosion in the post-Soviet space of fantastic quasi-scientific “concepts” of countless myth-makers.
The fact that most modern researchers, to one degree or another, include the territory of Ukraine in the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, also played a role, and some even narrow the latter to the steppes between the Southern Carpathians and the Caucasus. Despite the fact that archaeological and anthropological materials obtained in Ukraine are actively interpreted in the West, Indo-European studies has not yet become a priority issue for Ukrainian paleoethnologists, archaeologists, and linguists.
My vision of the problem of the origin and early history of the Indo-Europeans was formed on the basis of the developments of many generations of Indo-Europeans from different countries. Without in any way claiming to be the author of most of the points raised in the work and having no illusions regarding the final solution to the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans or an exhaustive analysis of all the vast literature on Indo-European studies, the author tries to give a critical analysis of views on the origin of the Indo-Europeans from the standpoint of archeology and other sciences.
There is a huge literature in different languages of the world dedicated to the search for the country from where the ancestors of related Indo-European peoples 5-4 thousand years ago settled the space between the Atlantic in the west, India in the east, Scandinavia in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south. Considering the limited amount of work aimed at a wide audience, the bibliography of the article is narrowed to the most important works on the topic. The specific genre and limited volume of the work excludes the possibility of a full historiographical analysis of the problems raised in it, which would require a full-fledged monographic study.
The direct predecessors of this article were the author’s works published over the last quarter of a century (Zaliznyak, 1994, pp. 78-116; 1998, pp. 248-265; 2005, pp. 12-37; 1999; 200; 2012, pp. 209- 268; Zaliznyak, 1997, p.117-125). The work is actually an expanded and edited translation into Russian of one of the two chapters of a course of lectures for history faculties of Ukraine dedicated to Indo-European studies, published in 2012 ( Leonid Zaliznyak Ancient history of Ukraine. - K., 2012, 542 pp.). The full text of the book can be found on the Internet.
The term Ukraine is used not as the name of a state or ethnonym, but as a toponym denoting a region or territory.
I would like to sincerely thank Lev Samoilovich Klein, a classic of modern archeology and ancient history that I deeply respected from my student days, for the kind offer and the opportunity to place this far from perfect text on this site.
Discovery of the Indo-Europeans
The high level of human development at the beginning of the third millennium was largely predetermined by the cultural achievements of European civilization, the founders and creators of which were, first of all, the peoples of the Indo-European language family - the Indo-Europeans (hereinafter referred to as I-e). In addition, the settlement of other peoples largely predetermined the modern ethnopolitical map of Europe and Western Asia. This explains the extreme scientific significance of the problem of the origin of the Indo-European family of peoples for the history of mankind in general and for the primitive history of Ukraine in particular.
The mystery of the origin of i-e has been worrying scientists in many countries for more than two centuries. The main difficulty in solving it lies, first of all, in the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the problem. That is, to solve it it is necessary to involve data and methods from various scientific disciplines: linguistics, archeology, primitive history, anthropology, written sources, ethnography, mythology, paleogeography, botany, zoology, and even genetics and molecular biology. None of them separately, including the latest sensational constructions of geneticists, are able to solve the problem on their own.
The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 coincided with the 200th anniversary of the great discovery of Indian Supreme Court Justice Sir William Jones, which Hegel compared to the discovery of the New World by Columbus. Reading the book of religious hymns of the Aryan conquerors of India, the Rig Veda, W. Jones came to the conclusion about the relatedness of the genetic predecessors of other languages - Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Germanic, Slavic. The work of the English lawyer was continued by German linguists of the 19th century, who developed the principles of comparative analysis of languages and finally proved the origin of i-e from one common ancestor. Since then, both modern and dead languages have been thoroughly studied. The latter are known from the sacred texts of the Rig Veda of the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, later written down in Sanskrit, the hymns of the Avesta at the turn of the 2nd-1st millennium BC, the proto-Greek language of ancient Mycenae of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writings Hittites of Anatolia of the 2nd millennium BC, Tocharian sacred texts of Xinjiang of Western China.
Classification of Indo-European languages and peoples
In the middle of the nineteenth century. German linguist A. Schleicher proposed the principle of reconstructing Proto-Indo-European vocabulary using the method of comparative linguistic paleontology. The use of comparative linguistics made it possible to develop a diagram of the genetic tree of languages. The consequence of centuries of efforts by linguists was the classification of languages, which basically took shape by the end of the 19th century. However, to this day there is no consensus among experts about the number of not only languages, but also linguistic groups and peoples. Among the most recognized is the classification scheme, which covers 13 ethno-linguistic 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 the Brahmanas, Upanishads, sutras, as well as the epic poems Mahabharata and Ramayana are written in classical Sanskrit. In parallel with literary Sanskrit, living Prakrit languages functioned in early medieval India. From them come the modern languages of India: Hindi, Urdu, Bykhali, Bengali, etc. Texts in Hindi have been known since the 13th century.
Kafir, or Nuristani, languages are common in Nuristan, a mountainous region of Afghanistan. In the mountains of Northern Afghanistan and the adjacent mountainous regions of Pakistan and India, the Dardic languages, which are close to Kafir, are widespread.
Iranian(Irano-Aryan) group of languages: Avestan, Old Persian, Median, Sogdian, Khorezmian, Bactrian, Parthian, Pahlavi, Saka, Massagetian, Scythian, Sarmatian, Alanian, Ossetian, Yaghnobi, Afghani, Mujan, Pamir, New Per, Tajik, Talysh, Kurdish, Baluchi, Tat, etc. The Iranian-Aryan group is related to the Indo-Aryan group and comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. settled Iran or Airiyan, which means “country of the Aryans”. Later, their hymns were recorded in the Avestan language in the sacred book of the followers of Zarathustra, the Avesta. The ancient Persian language is represented by cuneiform writings of the Achaemenid period (VI–IV centuries BC), including historical texts of Darius the Great and his successors. Median is the language of the tribes that inhabited Northern Iran in the VIII–VI centuries. BC. before the emergence of the Persian Achaemenid kingdom. The Parthians lived in Central Asia in the 3rd century. BC e. – III Art. AD, until their kingdom was conquered in 224 by the Sassanids. Pahlavi is the literary language of Persia during the Sasanian era (III–VII centuries AD). At the beginning of our era, Sogdian, Khorezmian and Bactrian languages of the Iranian group also functioned in Central Asia.
Among the North Iranian languages of the Eurasian steppe, the dead languages of the nomadic Sakas, Massagetae, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans and direct descendants of the last Ossetians of the North Caucasus are known. The Yaghnobi language of Central Asia is a direct continuation of the Sogdian language. Many modern Iranian languages are descended from Farsi, the language of early Middle Ages Persia. These include Novopersky with literary monuments from the 9th century. AD, close to it Tajik, Afghan (Pashto), Kurdish, Talysh and Tat of Azerbaijan, Baluchi, etc.
In history Greek There are three main eras of the language: Ancient Greek (XV century BC – IV century AD), Byzantine (IV–XV centuries AD) and Modern Greek (from the XV century). The ancient Greek era is divided into four periods: archaic (Mycenaean or Achaean), which dates back to the 15th–7th centuries. BC, classical (VIIII–IV centuries BC), Hellenistic (IV–I centuries BC), late Greek (I–IV centuries AD). During the Classical and Hellenistic periods, the following dialects were common in the Eastern Mediterranean: Ionian-Attic, Achaean, Aeolian and Dorian. The Greek colonies of the Northern Black Sea region (Thira, Olbia, Panticapaeum, Tanais, Phanagoria, etc.) used the Ionian dialect, since they were founded by immigrants from the capital of Ionia, Miletus in Asia Minor
The most ancient monuments of the Greek language were written in the Cretan-Mycenaean linear letter “B” in the 15th–12th centuries. BC. Homer's poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", describing the events of the Trojan War in the 12th century. BC. were first recorded in the 8th–6th centuries. BC. the ancient Greek alphabet, which laid the foundation for the classical Greek language. The classical period is characterized by the spread of the Attic dialect throughout the Greek world. It was on it that during the Hellenistic period the pan-Greek Koine was formed, which, during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, where it dominated in Roman and Byzantine times. The literary language of Byzantium strictly corresponded to the norms of the classical Attic dialect of the V–IV centuries. BC. It was used by the court of the Byzantine emperor until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The modern modern Greek language was finally formed only in the 18th–19th centuries.
Italian(Romance) group of languages includes Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin and the Romance languages derived from the latter: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Sardinian, Romansh, Provençal, French, Romanian, etc. Inscriptions related to Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin, appeared in Central Italy in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. During the process of Romanization of the provinces in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. Latin dialects spread throughout the Roman Empire. In the early Middle Ages, this “kitchen Latin” became the basis for the formation of the Romance group of languages.
Celtic The group of languages consists of Gaulish, Irish, Breton, Equine, Welsh, Gaelic (Scottish), and the O.Men dialect. Ancient sources first mention the Celts in the 5th century. BC. in the territories between the Carpathians in the east and the Atlantic coast in the west. In IV–III centuries. BC. There was a powerful Celtic expansion to the British Isles, to the territory of France, the Iberian, Apennine, and Balkan peninsulas, to Asia Minor, in the central regions of which they settled under the name of the Galatians. The La Tène archaeological culture of the 5th–1st centuries is associated with the Celts. BC, and the area of their formation is considered to be the northwestern foothills of the Alps. Due to the expansion first of the Roman Empire, and later of the Germanic tribes (primarily the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), the Celts were forced out to the extreme north-west of Europe.
The language of the Gauls assimilated by the Romans from the territory of France at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. known very little from a few inclusions in Latin texts. The Breton, Cornish, and Welsh languages of the Breton peninsulas in France, Cornwall and Wales in Great Britain descended from the language of the Britons, who dispersed under the onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th–7th centuries. The Scottish and Manx languages are close to Irish, which is recorded in written sources of the IV, VII, XI centuries.
Illyrian the group of languages covers the Balkan-Illyrian, Mesapian, Albanian languages. The Illyrians are a group of Indo-European tribes, which, judging by ancient sources, at least from the 7th century. BC. lived in the Carpathian Basin, on the Middle Danube, in the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula (Fig. 2). Its archaeological correspondence is the so-called eastern Hallstatt VIII–V centuries. BC. The Illyrian tribes were assimilated by the Romans and later by the South Slavs. The Albanian language is an Illyrian relic that has been significantly influenced by Latin, Greek, Slavic and Thracian dialects. Albanian texts have been known since the 15th century. Mesapian is a branch of the Illyrian language massif of the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula, which is preserved in the form of grave and household inscriptions of the 5th–1st centuries. BC. in the east of the Apennine Peninsula in Calabria.
In Phrygian The group includes the Thracian dialects of the Dacians, Getae, Mesians, Odrysians, and Tribalians, who in ancient times lived in Transylvania, the Lower Danube and the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula. They were assimilated by the Romans in the 2nd–4th centuries. and the Slavs in the early Middle Ages. Their Romanized descendants were the medieval Volochs - the direct ancestors of modern Romanians, whose language, however, belongs to the Romance group. The Phrygians are a people whose ancestors (flies) in the 12th century. BC. came from the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula to Asia Minor. I.M. Dyakonov believed that they took part in the destruction of Troy and the Hittite kingdom (History of the Ancient East, 1988, vol. 2, p. 194). Later, the state of Phrygia with its capital Gordion arose in northern Anatolia, which was destroyed by the Cimmerians around 675 BC. Phrygian inscriptions date back to the 7th–3rd centuries. BC.
Armenian a language related to Phrygian, and through it connected with the Thracian dialects of the Balkans. According to ancient sources, the Armenians came to Transcaucasia from Phrygia, and the Phrygians came to Asia Minor from Thrace, which is confirmed by archaeological materials. I.M. Dyakonov considered the Armenians to be the descendants of the Phrygians, some of whom, after the fall of Phrygia, moved east to Transcaucasia to the lands of the Huritto-Urartians. The Proto-Armenian language was partially transformed under the influence of the aboriginal language.
The oldest Armenian texts date back to the 5th century, when the Armenian alphabet was created by Bishop Mesrop Mashtots. The language of that time (grabar) functioned until the 19th century. In the XII–XVI centuries. Two dialects of modern Armenian began to form: Eastern Ararat and Western Constantinople.
Tocharian language is the conventional name for dialects, which in the 6th–7th centuries. AD functioned in Chinese Turkestan (Uighuria). Known from religious texts of Xinjiang. V.N. Danilenko (1974, p. 234) considered the ancestors of the Tocharians to be the population of the Yamnaya culture, which in the 3rd millennium BC. reached Central Asia, where it was transformed into the Afanasyev culture. In the sands of Western China, mummies of light-pigmented northern Caucasians of the 1st millennium BC were found, the genome of which shows similarities with the genome of the Celts and Germans of northwestern Europe. Some researchers associate these finds with the Tocharians, who were finally assimilated in the 10th century. Uyghur Turks.
Germanic languages are divided into three groups: northern (Scandinavian), eastern (Gothic) and western. The oldest Germanic texts are represented by archaic runic inscriptions of Scandinavia, which date back to the 3rd–8th centuries. AD and bear the features of the common Germanic language before its dismemberment. Numerous Old Icelandic texts from the 13th century. preserved rich Scandinavian poetry (Elder Edda) and prose (sagas) of the 10th-12th centuries. From about the fifteenth century. The collapse of the Old Icelandic, or Old Norse, language began into the West Scandinavian (Norwegian, Icelandic) and East Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish) branches.
The East Germanic group, in addition to Gothic, known from the translation of the Bible by Bishop Ulfila, included the now dead languages of the Vandals and Burgundians.
The West Germanic languages include Old English (Anglo-Saxon texts of the 7th century), Old Frisian, Old Low German (Saxon texts of the 9th century), and Old High German. The most ancient monuments of West Germanic languages are the Anglo-Saxon epic of the 8th century. “Beowulf”, known from manuscripts of the 10th century, the High German “Song of the Nibelungs” of the 8th century, the Saxon epic of the 9th century. "Heliad".
Among the modern Germanic languages is English, which in the 11th–13th centuries. was significantly influenced by French, Flemish is a descendant of Old Frisian, Dutch is a branch of Old Low German. Modern German consists of two dialects - in the past separate languages (Low German and High German). Among the Germanic languages and dialects of our time, mention should be made of Yiddish, Boer, Faroese, and Swiss.
Baltic The languages are divided into Western Baltic languages - dead Prussian (disappeared in the 18th century) and Yatvingian, which was widespread in the Middle Ages in the territory of North-Eastern Poland and Western Belarus, and Eastern Baltic languages. The latter include Lithuanian, Latvian, Latgalian, as well as common until the 17th century. on the Baltic coast of Lithuania and Latvia the Curonian. Among the dead are the Selonian and Golyad languages of the Moscow region, and the Baltic language of the Upper Dnieper region. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Baltic languages were widespread from the Lower Vistula in the west to the Upper Volga and Oka in the east, from the Baltic in the north to Pripyat, Desna and Seim in the south. The Baltic languages have preserved the ancient Indo-European linguistic system more fully than others.
Slavic languages are divided into Western, Eastern and Southern. East Slavic – Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian. West Slavic are divided into three subgroups: Lechitic (Polish, Kashubian, Polabian), Czech-Slovak and Serbologian. The Kashubian language, related to Polabian, was widespread in Polish Pomerania to the west of the Lower Vistula. Lusatian is the language of the Lusatian Serbs of the upper reaches of the Spree in Germany. South Slavic languages - Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian. Slavic languages are close to each other, since they come from one Old Slavic language, which collapsed relatively recently in the 5th–7th centuries. Presumably, the speakers of Old Slavic before its collapse were the Antes and Sklavins of the territory of Ukraine, whose archaeological counterparts were the population of the Prague-Korchak and Penkovka cultures.
Most modern Indo-Europeanists, recognizing the existence of the 13 mentioned groups of Indo-European languages, abandoned the simplified scheme of the ethnogenesis of Indo-European peoples according to the principle of the genetic tree, proposed back in the 19th century. Obviously, the process of glottogenesis and ethnogenesis occurred not only through the transformation or division of the mother language into daughter languages, but, perhaps to a greater extent, in the process of interaction of languages with each other, including with non-Indo-European ones.
Scientists explain the high degree of relatedness of Indo-European languages by their origin from a common genetic ancestor - the Proto-Indo-European language. This means that more than 5 thousand years ago, in some limited region of Eurasia, there lived a people from whose language all Indo-European languages originate. Science was faced with the task of searching for the homeland of the Indo-European peoples and identifying the routes of their settlement. By Indo-European ancestral home, linguists mean the region occupied by the speakers of the ancestral language before its collapse in the 4th millennium BC.
History of the search for the Indo-European ancestral home
The search for this ancestral home has a two-hundred-year dramatic history, which has been repeatedly analyzed by various researchers (Safronov 1989). Immediately after the discovery of William Jones, the ancestral home was proclaimed India, and the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda was considered almost the ancestor of all languages, which supposedly retained all the features of the Indo-European proto-language. It was believed that due to the favorable climate of India, population explosions occurred, and the surplus population settled west into Europe and Western Asia.
However, it soon became clear that the languages of the Iranian Avesta are not much younger than the Sanskrit Rigveda. That is, the common ancestor of all i-e peoples could live in Iran or somewhere on Middle East, where great archaeological discoveries were made at this time.
In 30-50 years. XIX century Indo-Europeans were derived from Central Asia, which was then considered the “forge of nations.” This version was fueled by historical data on migration waves that periodically arrived from Central Asia to Europe over the past two thousand years. This refers to the arrival in Europe of the Sarmatians, Turkic and Mongolian tribes of the Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Torks, Cumans, Mongols, Kalmyks, etc. Moreover, at this time, European interest in Central Asia grew, since its colonization by Russians began from the north and the British from the south.
However, the rapid development of linguistic paleontology in the middle of the 19th century. showed the discrepancy between Asia and the natural and climatic realities of its ancestral home. The common I-e language reconstructed by linguists indicated that the ancestral home was located in a region with a temperate climate and its corresponding flora (birch, aspen, pine, beech, etc.) and fauna (grouse, beaver, bear, etc.). In addition, it turned out that most I-e languages were localized not in Asia, but in Europe. The vast majority of ancient Indo-European hydronyms are concentrated between the Rhine and the Dnieper.
From the second half of the 19th century. many researchers transfer their ancestral home to Europe. The explosion of German patriotism in the second half of the 19th century, caused by the unification of Germany by O. Bismarck, could not but influence the fate of Indo-European studies. After all, most of the specialists of that time were ethnic Germans. Thus, the growth of German patriotism was stimulated by the popularity of the concept of the origin of i-e from German territory.
Referring to the temperate climate of the ancestral home established by linguists, they begin to localize it precisely in Germany. An additional argument was the Northern European appearance of the ancient Indo-Europeans. Blonde hair and blue eyes are a sign of aristocracy both among the Aryans of the Rigveda and the ancient Greeks, judging by their mythology. In addition, German archaeologists came to the conclusion about the continuous ethnocultural development on the territory of Germany from the archaeological culture of linear-band ceramics of the 6th millennium BC. to modern Germans.
The founder of this concept is considered to be L. Geiger, who in 1871, relying on the argument of beech, birch, oak, ash eel and three seasons in the reconstructed language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as well as on the evidence of Tacitus about the autochthony of the Germans east of the Rhine, proposed Germany as possible ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans (Geiger, 1871).
A significant contribution to the development of the Central European hypothesis of the origin of i-e was made by the famous German philologist Hermann Hirt. He came to the conclusion that German is a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European. The languages of other peoples allegedly arose in the process of mixing the language of the Indo-Germans who arrived from the north of Central Europe with the languages of the aborigines (Hirt 1892).
The ideas of L. Geiger and G. Hirt were significantly developed by Gustav Kosinna. A philologist by training, G. Kossinna analyzed enormous archaeological material and in 1926 published the book “The Origin and Distribution of the Germans in Prehistoric and Early Historical Times” (Kossinna 1926), which the Nazis used as a scientific justification for their aggression to the east. G. Kosinna traces the archaeological materials of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages “14 colonial campaigns of megalithic Indo-Europeans to the 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 to be 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 home.
At the same time, the location of the ancestral home on Armenian Highlands and the attempt to argue for the settlement of Europe by Indo-Europeans bypassing the Caspian Sea from the east does not stand up to criticism. Plants (aspen, hornbeam, yew, heather) and animals (beaver, lynx, black grouse, elk, crab) that are typical for their homeland are not typical for Transcaucasia. Corresponding hydronymy is also very scarce here. The journey around the Caspian Sea through Central Asia, the Lower Volga region and the steppes of Ukraine to the west is also not confirmed by archaeological material.
Colin Renfrew (1987) places his homeland within the fertility crescent - in the south Anatolia. This assumption is fundamental to his concept because it is based on the obvious fact of the migration of early farmers of the Middle East west to Europe and east to Asia. The researcher started from the Nostratic concept of V. Illich-Svitych (1964, 1971), according to which the linguistic kinship with the peoples of the Afroasiatic, Ellamo-Dravidian, Ural and Sino-Caucasian families is explained by their common ancestral home in the Middle East. Pointing out that the speakers of the mentioned languages are also genetically related, K. Renfrew claims 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-Europeans doubt that there were Indo-Europeans among the migrants from the Middle East.
Balkan the concept of the origin of i-e is associated with the discovery in the first half of the twentieth century. Balkan-Danube Neolithic proto-civilization of the 7th-5th millennium BC. It was from here that, according to archaeological data, the Neolithization of Europe took place. This gave grounds to B. Gornung (1956) and V. Georgiev (1966) to suggest that Proto-Indo-Europeans formed on the Lower Danube as a result of mixing of local Mesolithic hunters with Neolithic migrants from the Balkans. The weak point of the concept is the extreme poverty of the Mesolithic Lower Danube. I. Dyakonov also considered the Balkans to be his ancestral home (1982).
The ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans according to paleolinguistics
The realities of the ancestral home must correspond to the natural landscape, socio-economic and cultural-historical characteristics reconstructed using linguistic analysis of the most ancient common elements of the basic vocabulary of different languages.
The 19th century was an era of bold reconstructions of the society, economy, culture, spiritual world, and natural environment of the early Indo-Europeans with the help of so-called linguistic paleontology. The successful works of A. Kuhn (Kuhn, 1845) and J. Grimm (Grimm, 1848) provoked numerous paleolinguistic studies, the authors of which did not always adhere to strict rules for the comparative analysis of languages. Criticism of attempts to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European realities using linguistic analysis made it possible for A. Schleicher (1863) to introduce such reconstructions within the framework of strict rules. However, the real discovery of the world of Proto-Indo-Europeans belongs to O. Schrader (1886), who summarized the results of the reconstructions of his predecessors, clarifying and checking them using materials from the Bronze Age, which at that time became available to researchers.
Using the method of linguistic paleontology, scientists were able to reconstruct the stages of the formation of the proto-language. Based on the developments of F. Saussure and A. Meillet, M.D. Andreev (1986) suggested the existence of three stages of its formation: boreal, early and late Indo-European.
The proto-language reconstructed on the basis of the general i-e vocabulary at the stage preceding its collapse in the 4th millennium BC. T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov (1984) analyzed them into separate language groups. The Proto-Indo-European dictionary indicates that its speakers lived in a temperate zone, albeit with a sharply continental climate, with cold winters and warm summers. They lived in both mountainous and flat areas, among rivers, swamps, coniferous and deciduous forests. They were well acquainted with the natural and climatic specifics of the steppes.
The economy of the Proto-Indo-Europeans at the time of the collapse was of a pastoral and agricultural nature. However, the significant development of cattle-breeding terminology indicates the dominance of this particular industry in the economy. Domestic animals include a horse, a bull, a cow, a sheep, a goat, a pig, and a dog. Transhumance cattle breeding for meat and dairy production dominated. Proto-Indo-Europeans possessed advanced methods of processing livestock products: hides, wool, milk. The cult of the horse and the bull occupied an important place in ideology.
Agriculture has reached a fairly high level. There was a transition from hoeing to the early form of arable farming, using a rawl and a plow pulled by a pair of oxen. They grew barley, wheat, and flax. The harvest was harvested with sickles and threshed, the grain was ground with grain grinders and millstones. They baked bread. They knew gardening (apples, cherries, grapes) and beekeeping. They made a variety of pottery. They were familiar with the metallurgy of copper, bronze, silver, and gold. Wheeled transport played a special role: bulls and horses were harnessed to carts. They knew how to ride a horse.
The significant role of cattle breeding in the economy determined the specifics of the social system. It was characterized by patriarchy, male dominance in the family and clan, and belligerence. Society was divided into three strata: priests, military aristocracy and simple community members (shepherds, farmers, warriors). The warlike spirit of the era was reflected in the construction of the first fortified settlements - fortresses. The uniqueness of the spiritual world consisted in the sacralization of war, the supreme warrior god. They worshiped weapons, horses, war chariots (Fig. 5), fire, and the sun-wheel, the symbol of which was the swastika.
An important element of mythology is the world tree. By the way, this indicates that the ancestral home was a fairly forested region. Plants and animals whose names are present in the Late European language recreated by linguists help to localize it more precisely.
Plants: oak, birch, beech, hornbeam, ash, aspen, willow, yew, pine, walnut, heather, rose, moss. Animals: wolf, bear, lynx, fox, jackal, wild boar, deer, elk, wild bull, hare, snake, mouse, louse fish, bird, eagle, crane, crow, black grouse, goose, swan, leopard, lion , monkey, elephant.
The last four animals are atypical for the European fauna, although lions and leopards lived in the Balkans for another 2 thousand years. back. It has been established that the words denoting leopard, lion, monkey and elephant came into the I-e proto-language from the Middle East, most likely from the Afrasians of the Levant (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 506, 510).
Thus, the flora and fauna of their ancestral home correspond to the temperate zone of Europe. This gave the basis for most modern researchers to place it between the Rhine in the west, the Lower Volga in the east, the Baltic in the north and the Danube in the south (Bosh-Gimpera, 1961; Devoto, 1962; Grossland, 1967; Gimbutas, 1970; 1985; Häusler, 1985; Gornung, 1964; Georgiev, 1966; Mallory, 1989; Childe, 1926; Sulimirski, 1968, Zaliznyak, 1994, 1999, 2012, Pavlenko, 1994, Koncha, 2004). L.S. Klein places the ancestral home within the same limits in his fundamental monograph of 2007.
The reconstruction of the unified vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-Europeans gave grounds to assert that before their collapse they already knew agriculture, cattle breeding, ceramic dishes, copper and gold metallurgy, the wheel, that is, they were at the Eneolithic stage. In other words, the collapse occurred no later than the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 667-738, 868-870). The same is evidenced by the discovery of Hittite, Palai, Luwian and 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 undivided 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-Ugric peoples, 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 the 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 nature 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).
Near East it also could not have been its ancestral home, because here was the homeland of non-Indo-European ethnic groups: the Hattic, Khuritian, Elamite, Afroasiatic linguistic communities. Mapping of the I-e languages shows that this region was the southern periphery of their ecumene. The Hittites, Luwians, Palayans, Phrygians, and Armenians appeared here quite late - in the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, that is, after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European language in the 4th millennium BC. Unlike Europe, there is almost no hydronymy here.
The cold continental climate of the ancestral home with frosty snowy winters does not correspond to the realities of the Middle East. Almost half of the plants and animals that appear in the language are missing here (aspen, hornbeam, linden, heather, beaver, black grouse, lynx, etc.). On the other hand, the I-E dictionary does not contain the names of typical representatives of the Middle Eastern fauna and flora (cypress, cedar, etc.). As for the lion, leopard, monkey and elephant, their names turned out to be borrowed from Proto-Semitic. If these animals were typical of their ancestral home, then why was it necessary to borrow them from their southern neighbors? Proto-Indo-Europeans could not live in the Middle East because the strong influence of their language can be traced to the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland is located too far north of the Middle East, which excludes the possibility of contacts with them.
Assuming that both happen to Balkan, we will ignore their linguistic connections not only with the Finno-Ugric peoples, but also with the Kartvelians of the Caucasus. It is impossible to remove their eastern branch, the Indo-Iranians, from the Balkans. This is contradicted by data from both archeology and linguistics. Both hydronyms are known only in the north of the Balkans. Most of them are distributed to the north, between the Rhine and the Dnieper. The hypothesis about the origin of the i-e from the Balkan Neolithic farmers is also contradicted by the fact that the appearance of the first i-e on the historical arena in the 4th–3rd millennium BC. e. coincided with the aridization of the climate, the separation of cattle breeding into a separate industry and its spread across the vast expanses of Eurasia, and, finally, with the collapse of the agricultural Neolithic itself in the Balkans and Danube region. What gives grounds for some researchers to consider the Balkan Peninsula as their ancestral home?
The famous researcher Colin Renfrew rightly believes that the grandiose linguistic phenomenon of the spread of languages must be met by an equally large-scale socio-economic process. According to the scientist, such a global phenomenon in primitive history was the neolithization of Europe. This refers to the settlement of ancient farmers and livestock breeders from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe.
A reasoned criticism of K. Renfrew's attempts to derive i-e from the Middle East from the standpoint of new genetic research was given by R. Solaris (1998, p. 128, 129). Biomolecular analysis of paleoanthropological and paleozoological remains demonstrates the correspondence of genome changes between Europeans and domesticated animals of Near Eastern origin. This strongly suggests that Europe was colonized by Neolithic populations from the Middle East. However, substrate phenomena in Greek and other i-e languages indicate that i-e came to the Balkans after they were explored by Neolithic colonists from Anatolia. The genetic kinship of the peoples of the Nostratic family of languages of Eurasia is explained, according to R. Sollaris (1988, p. 132), by the existence of common ancestors of the population of Eurasia, who settled from the Western Mediterranean to the west and east at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic 40 thousand years ago.
The fact that the “surplus” of the early agricultural population flowed from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe is beyond doubt. However, was it Indo-European? After all, archeology shows that from the first centers of the productive economy in the south of Anatolia, in Syria, Palestine, in the Zagrosu Mountains, it was not the Elamite, the Hattian, the Huritian, the Sumerian and the Afrasian communities that grew up. It is in the latter that the material and spiritual culture and economy of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans have direct parallels. Their anthropological type is close to the type of Neolithic inhabitants of the Middle East and differs significantly from the anthropology of the first reliable Indo-Europeans who lived in the 4th millennium BC. e. in Central Europe (Corded Ware culture) and in the forest-steppes between the Dnieper and Volga (Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures). If the Neolithic population of the Balkans and the Middle East was a bearer of the southern European or Mediterranean anthropological type (gracile, short Caucasians), then the mentioned Indo-Europeans were massive, tall northern Caucasians (Potekhina 1992) (Fig. 6). Clay figurines from the Balkans depict people with large noses of a specific shape (Zaliznyak, 1994, p. 85), which are an important defining feature of the Eastern Mediterranean anthropological type, according to V.P. Alekseev (1974, pp. 224, 225).
The direct descendant of the Neolithic proto-civilization of the Balkans was the Minoan civilization, which formed on the island of Crete around 2000 BC. According to M. Gimbutas, the Minoan linear letter “A” comes from the sign system of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans of the 4th millennium BC. e. Attempts to decipher the texts of the Minoans showed that their language belongs to the Semitic group (Gimbutas 1985; Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 912, 968; Renfrew 1987, p.50). Since the Minoans were descendants of the Balkan Neolithic, the latter could not possibly be Indo-European. Both archaeologists and linguists came to the conclusion that before the appearance of the first i-e in Greece in the 2nd millennium BC. e. non-Indo-European tribes lived here.
Thus, culturally, linguistically, anthropologically and genetically, the Balkan Neolithic was closely related to the non-Indo-European Neolithic proto-civilization of the Middle East. It seems that the mentioned significant number of agricultural terms of Middle Eastern origin in the I-e languages is explained by the intense cultural influence of Balkan farmers, genetically related to the Middle East, on the ancestors of the I-e - the aborigines of Central and southern Eastern Europe.
Steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans
The most well-reasoned and popular in our time versions of the location of the ancestral homeland of the I-e peoples include the steppe version, according to which the I-e originated in the steppes between the Dniester, the Lower Volga and the Caucasus. Its founders were the aforementioned O. Schrader (1886) and G. Child (1926, 1950), who at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. expressed the idea that the first impetus for the Indo-Europeanization of Eurasia came from the ancient pastoralists of the Northern Black Sea steppes and forest-steppes. Later, this hypothesis was fundamentally substantiated and developed by T. Sulimirsky (1968), V. Danilenko (1969; 1974), M. Gimbutas (1970; 1985), D. Mallory (1989), D. Anthony (1991). Its supporter was Yu. Pavlenko (1994).
According to this version, the oldest i-e were formed in the south of Ukraine as a result of complex historical processes that led to the separation of cattle breeding into a separate branch of the primitive economy. Due to the long-term agrarian colonization of the Balkans and Danube region by Middle Eastern hoe farmers, the reserves of hoe farming in Central Europe were exhausted. Further expansion of the reproducing economy in the steppe and forest zones required an increase in the role of cattle breeding. This was facilitated by the progressive aridization of the climate, which led to a crisis in the agricultural economy of the Balkans and Danube region, while at the same time creating favorable conditions for the spread of various forms of livestock farming. This was also facilitated by the clearing of deciduous forests of Central Europe and Right Bank Ukraine by Neolithic farmers in the 4th-5th millennium BC. e., since wastelands on the site of former fields became potential pastures.
Neolithic hoe farmers grazed their few animals near villages. When the harvest ripened, they were driven away from the crops. Thus, the oldest transhumance form of cattle breeding arose. It is common for her to graze animals in the summer on pastures remote from permanent settlements. It was this ancient type of cattle breeding that made it possible for societies with a reproducing economy to colonize not only the Eurasian steppes, but also to move into the forests of central Europe.
The separation of cattle breeding from the ancient mixed agricultural and livestock economy of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic into a separate industry began in the south of Ukraine, on the border of the fertile black soils of the Right Bank of the Dnieper occupied by hoe farmers and the Eurasian steppes, which from that time became the home of mobile and warlike pastoral peoples. Thus, in the 4th millennium BC. e. the territory of Ukraine became the border between the sedentary, peace-loving farmers of the Danube region and the mobile, warlike pastoralists of the Eurasian steppes.
It was in the south of Ukraine that the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and Danube region, through its northeastern outpost - the Trypillian culture - directly influenced the ancestors of the most ancient pastoralists - Mesolithic and Neolithic hunters and fishermen of the forest-steppes of the Dnieper and Seversky Donets basins. The latter received from the Balkan-Danube descendants of the ancient farmers and pastoralists of the Middle East not only the skills of reproducing farming, but also Middle Eastern agricultural terminology, traced by linguists in other languages (Illich-Svitych 1964; 1971; Starostin, 1988). The localization of the first shepherds-pastoralists in the steppes and forest-steppes between the Dniester, Lower Don and Kuban is in good agreement with the three main directions of Proto-Indo-European linguistic contacts. In the west they directly bordered with the speakers of agricultural vocabulary of Middle Eastern origin (Trypillians), in the northeast - Finno-Ugric, and in the southeast - Kartvelian vocabulary of the Caucasus (Fig. 2).
M. Gimbutas placed the birthplace of cattle breeding and its first carriers in the Middle Volga region, which is difficult to agree with. After all, cattle breeding was born from complex hoe farming in the process of separation into an independent branch of the economy. That is, this could only happen 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 a tribal patriarch with the corresponding attributes of a warrior leader and a shepherd (Fig. 8). An important feature of the first and southern Ukraine is the domestication of the horse, traces of which can be traced in the forest-steppe Dnieper region from the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. (Telegin 1973).
The unprecedented scale of settlement of the ancient I-e from the south of Ukraine to the endless steppe expanses to the Middle Danube in the west and to Altai in the east is explained by the pastoral economy, the spread of wheeled transport - carts and war chariots (Fig. 9), draft animals (bull, horse) , and later horsemanship, which determined the mobile way of life, militancy and the grandiose scale of expansion of the early I-e (Fig. 2).
From Rhine to Donets
However, limiting the I-e ancestral home to only the steppes and forest-steppes of Ukraine does not explain why the main body of the most ancient I-e hydronymics lies in Central Europe between the Rhine and the Dnieper. Such natural realities as mountains, swamps, the spread of aspen, beech, yew, heather, beavers, black grouse, etc. also do not fit with the south of Ukraine. These elements of the natural environment are more typical for the temperate and cool climate of Central Europe than for the sultry steppes of the Black Sea region. And the northern European appearance of the first i-e, as evidenced by the most ancient written sources, does not fit with the Black Sea region.
These contradictions are resolved if we assume the existence of a single ethnocultural substrate between the Lower Rhine and the Donets, on which in the 5th-4th millennium BC. The ancient Indo-Europeans of the Black Sea region and Central Europe began to form. Such a substrate began to emerge in the last third of the 20th century. during studies of Mesolithic monuments in the North German, Polish, Polesie lowlands, in the Neman and Donets basins.
The Central European lowlands, which stretch from the Thames basin through northern Germany, Poland, Polesie to the Middle Dnieper, from the final Paleolithic until the Middle Ages, were a kind of corridor through which migration waves rolled from west to east. The reindeer hunters of the Lingby culture were the first to travel this route from Jutland to the Dnieper 12 thousand years ago (Fig. 10). They settled the Central European lowlands that had just been liberated from the glacier, giving rise to related cultures of reindeer hunters of the last millennium of the Ice Age: Arensburg of Northern Germany, Svider and Krasnoselye of the Vistula, Neman, Pripyat, Upper Dnieper basins.
Rice. 10. Map of the distribution of monuments of the Bromme-Lingby type, about 11 thousand years ago. back. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p.45) Conventional signs: 1- sites of the Lingbi culture, 2- locations of the Lingbi tips, 3- directions of migration of the population of the Lingbi culture, 4- southern and eastern border of the outwash lowlands.
The Mesolithic of the Central European Lowlands began with a new wave of settlers to the east, which led to the formation of the Duvensi cultural region. It includes the related Early Mesolithic cultures of Star Car of England, Duvensey of Germany, Klosterlund of Denmark, Komornitsa of Poland, Kudlaevka of Polesie and the Neman basin (Fig. 11, 12).
The migration of bearers 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 into 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 the Maglemose cultural traditions from Polesie to the south was probably stimulated by the movement in a southerly direction along the river valleys of broad-leaved forests in connection with the general warming and humidification of the climate at the end of the Mesolithic. As a result of the spread of forest and forest-steppe biotopes with the corresponding fauna along river valleys up to the Black and Azov Seas, conditions were created for the advance of forest hunters of the Yanislavitsa culture to the south and southeast of Ukraine.
So, in the VI-V millennium BC. The Late Mesolithic post-Maglemosis cultural community 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 region, a special role was played by the cultures of linear-band ceramics and Cucuteni-Trypillia.
The existence of a cultural and genetic community on the plains from the Lower Rhine to the Seversky Donets is confirmed not only by archeology. The above-mentioned autochthonous hunting communities of the Central European lowlands and the Dnieper region were connected not only by a single type of forest hunting and fishing economy and material culture, but also by an anthropological type of population. Anthropologists have long written about the penetration of northern Caucasoids from the Western Baltic to the Middle Dnieper and South-East Ukraine in the Mesolithic and Neolithic (Gokhman 1966, Konduktorova 1973). Comparison of materials from Mesolithic and Neolithic burial grounds of the Dnieper region of the 6th-4th millennium BC. with the synchronous burials of Jutland indicates both a certain cultural and genetic relatedness of the population that left them. Not only the funeral rites were similar, but also the anthropological type of those buried (Fig. 4). These were tall, very massive, broad-faced northern Caucasians, buried in an extended position on their backs (Telegin 1991, Potekhina 1999). In the 5th millennium BC. this population advanced through the forest-steppe strip to the Left Bank Ukraine and to the east of the Middle Volga region (Syezzhee burial ground), forming the Mariupol cultural community, represented by numerous Mariupol-type burial grounds with numerous osteological remains of massive northern Europeans (Telegin, 1991). The population of early Indo-European communities of the 4th millennium BC comes 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 gracilization of the skeleton, which indicates their formation on the basis of local northern Caucasians under the conditions of a certain influx of a more graceful non-Indo-European population from the Danube region colonized by farmers. Massive northern Caucasians, according to E.E. Kuzmina (1994, pp. 244-247), were also carriers of the Andronovo culture of Central Asia (Fig. 9).
The Northern European appearance of the early I-e is confirmed by written sources and mythology, which indicate the light pigmentation of the Indo-Europeans of the 2nd millennium BC. Thus, in the Rig Veda, the Aryans are characterized by the epithet “Svitnya”, which means “light, fair-skinned”. The hero of the famous Aryan epic "Mahabharata" often has eyes the color of "blue lotus". According to Vedic tradition, a real Brahman should have brown hair and gray eyes. In the Iliad, the Achaeans have golden blonde hair (Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus), the Achaean women and even the goddess Hera have blonde hair. The god Apollo was also depicted as golden-haired. On Egyptian reliefs from the time of Thutmose IV (1420-1411 BC), the Hittite charioteers (Mariana) have a Nordic appearance, in contrast to their Armenoid squires. In the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Blonde-haired descendants of the Aryans allegedly came to the king of Persia from India (Lelekov, 1982, p. 33). According to the testimony of ancient authors, the Celts of Central and Western Europe were tall blonds. The legendary Tocharians of Xinjiang in Western China, not surprisingly, belonged to the same Northern European type. This is evidenced by their mummified bodies, which date back to approximately 1200 BC. and Tocharian wall paintings of the VII-VI centuries. AD Ancient Chinese chronicles also testify to blue-eyed blonds who in ancient times lived in the deserts of Central Asia.
The fact that the oldest Indo-Europeans belonged to the Northern Caucasians is consistent with the localization of their ancestral home between the Rhine and the Seversky Donets, where by the 6th-5th millennium BC. According to modern archeology, an ethnocultural community was formed (Fig. 16), on the basis of which the most ancient cultures arose (Mariupol, Sredny Stog, Yamnaya, funnel-shaped beakers, spherical amphorae).
To sum up, we can assume that the ancestral home of 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 that was defining for the early I-E (mobile pastoral cattle breeding, burial mound rites, 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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The Indo-European language family is the most widespread in the world. Its languages are spoken by more than 2.5 billion people. It includes modern Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Albanian language groups.
Many ancient Indo-Europeans (Indo-Iranians, for example) were nomads and could graze their herds over vast areas, passing on their language to local tribes. After all, it is known that the language of nomads often becomes a kind of Koine in the places of their nomads.
Slavic peoples
The largest ethnolinguistic community of Indo-European origin in Europe is the Slavs. Archaeological evidence indicates the formation of the early Slavs in the area between the Upper Dniester and the basin of the left tributaries of the Middle Dnieper. The earliest monuments (III–IV centuries) recognized as authentically Slavic were found in this region. The first mentions of the Slavs are found in Byzantine sources of the 6th century. Retrospectively, these sources mention the Slavs in the 4th century. It is not known for certain when the Proto-Slavic people separated from the pan-Indo-European (or intermediate Balto-Slavic) people. According to various sources, this could have happened in a very wide time range - from the 2nd millennium BC. until the first centuries AD As a result of migrations, wars and other types of interactions with neighboring peoples and tribes, the Slavic linguistic community split into eastern, western and southern. In Russia, predominantly Eastern Slavs are represented: Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Rusyns. Russians make up the absolute majority of the population of the Russian Federation, Ukrainians are the third largest people in the country.
The Eastern Slavs were the main population of medieval Kievan Rus and Ladoga-Novgorod land. Based on the East Slavic (Old Russian) nationality by the 17th century. Russian and Ukrainian peoples were formed. The formation of the Belarusian people was completed by the beginning of the 20th century. The question of the status of the Rusyns as a separate people is still controversial to this day. Some researchers (especially in Ukraine) consider Rusyns to be an ethnic group of Ukrainians, and the word “Rusyns” itself is an outdated name for Ukrainians, used in Austria-Hungary.
The economic basis on which the East Slavic peoples were historically formed and developed over the centuries was agricultural production and trade. In the pre-industrial period, these peoples developed an economic and cultural type in which arable farming with the cultivation of cereals (rye, barley, oats, wheat) predominated. Other economic activities (livestock raising, beekeeping, gardening, gardening, hunting, fishing, collecting wild plants) were important, but not of primary importance in ensuring life. Until the 20th century Almost everything necessary in the peasant economy of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians was produced independently - from houses to clothing and kitchen utensils. Commodity orientation in the agricultural sector accumulated gradually, and primarily at the expense of landowners' farms. Crafts existed both in the form of auxiliary household crafts and in the form of specialized industries (iron-making, blacksmithing, pottery, salt-making, cooperage, charcoal-burning, spinning, weaving, lace-making, etc.).
A very important element of the economic culture of the East Slavic peoples has traditionally been otkhodnichestvo - the earnings of peasants in a foreign land, far from their native village: this could be work in large landowner farms, in artels of artisans, in mines, in logging, work as itinerant stove makers, tinkers, tailors and etc. It was from the otkhodniks that the human resources of urban industrial production were gradually formed. With the development of capitalism at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. and further, in the process of Soviet industrialization, the outflow of people from the countryside to the city increased, the role of industrial production, non-production areas of activity, and the national intelligentsia grew.
The predominant type of traditional dwelling among the Eastern Slavs varied depending on the area. For Russian, Belarusian, and Northern Ukrainian dwellings, the main material was wood (logs), and the type of structure was a log-frame above-ground five-walled hut. In the north of Russia, log houses were often found: courtyards in which different residential and outbuildings were combined under one roof. Southern Russian and Ukrainian rural housing is characterized by a combination of wood and clay. A common type of structure was the hut: a mud hut - made of wattle, coated with clay and whitewashed.
Family life of the East Slavic peoples before the beginning of the 20th century. was characterized by the spread of two types of families - large and small, with a partial predominance of one or the other in different areas in different historical eras. Since the 1930s There is an almost universal disintegration of the extended family.
An important element of the social structure of the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples during their stay in the Russian Empire was the class division. Estates differed in specializations, privileges, responsibilities, and property status.
And although in some periods there was a certain inter-class mobility, in general, stay in a class was hereditary and lifelong. Some classes (for example, the Cossacks) became the basis for the emergence of ethnic groups, among which only the memory of the class affiliation of their ancestors is now preserved.
The spiritual life of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Rusyns is rich and varied. Orthodoxy with elements of folk rituals plays a special role. Catholicism (mainly of the Greek rite - among Ukrainians and Ruthenians), Protestantism, etc. are also widespread.
The South Slavs were formed mainly on the Balkan Peninsula, closely interacting with the Byzantines-Romans, then with the Turks. Today's Bulgarians are the result of a mixture of Slavic and Turkic tribes. Modern South Slavs also include Macedonians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Bosnians, Slovenes, and Gorani.
The religion of the majority of South Slavs is Orthodoxy. Croats are predominantly Catholic. Most of the Bosnians (Muslims, Bosniaks), Gorani, as well as Pomaks (ethnic group) and Torbeshi Allegory of Rus' (ethnic group) are Muslims.
The area of modern residence of the Southern Slavs is separated from the main Slavic area by non-Slavic Hungary, Romania and Moldova. Currently (according to the 2002 census), the southern Slavs living in Russia are Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, and Montenegrins.
The Western Slavs are the Kashubians, Lusatian Sorbs, Poles, Slovaks and Czechs. Their homeland is in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and certain regions of Germany. Some linguists also classify the dialect of the Pannonian Rusyns living in the Serbian region of Vojvodina as West Slavic.
The majority of Western Slav believers are Catholics. There are also Orthodox and Protestants.
Among the Western Slavs living in Russia are Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. There are quite large Polish communities in the Kaliningrad region, St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Komi Republic, and the Krasnodar Territory.
Armenians and Hemshils
The Armenian language stands apart in the Indo-European family of languages: the Armenian language group includes only it and several of its dialects. The formation of the Armenian language and, accordingly, the Armenian people took place in the 9th–6th centuries. BC. within the state of Urartu.
The Armenian language is spoken in Russia by two peoples: the Armenians and the related Khemshils (Hamshens). The latter come from the Armenian city of Hamshen (Hemshin) in the Pontic Mountains.
The Hemshils are often called Muslim Armenians, but the northern Hamshenians, who moved to the territory of the present-day Krasnodar Territory and Adygea even before the Islamization of their fellow tribesmen, belong, like the majority of Armenians, to the Christian (pre-Chalcedonian) Armenian Apostolic Church. The remaining Khemshils are Sunni Muslims. There are Catholics among the Armenians.
Germanic peoples
The peoples of the Germanic linguistic group in Russia include the Germans, Jews (conditionally) and the British. Within the West Germanic area in the 1st century. AD Three groups of tribal dialects were distinguished: Ingveonian, Istveonian and Erminonian. Relocation in the 5th–6th centuries. Part of the Ingveonian tribes to the British Isles predetermined the further development of the English language.
German dialects continued to form on the continent. The formation of literary languages was completed in England in the 16th–17th centuries, in Germany in the 18th century. The emergence of the American version of English is associated with the colonization of North America. Yiddish emerged as the language of Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in the 10th–14th centuries. based on Central German dialects with extensive borrowings from Hebrew, Aramaic, as well as from Romance and Slavic languages.
Religiously, Protestants and Catholics predominate among Russian Germans. The majority of Jews are Judaizers.
Iranian peoples
The Iranian group includes at least thirty languages spoken by dozens of peoples. At least eleven Iranian peoples are represented in Russia. All languages of the Iranian group in one way or another go back to the ancient Iranian language or a group of dialects spoken by the Proto-Iranian tribes. About 3–2.5 thousand years BC. dialects of the Iranian branch began to separate from the common Indo-Iranian root. During the era of pan-Iranian unity, the Proto-Iranians lived in the space from modern Iran to, probably, the south and southeast of the present European part of Russia. Thus, the Iranian languages of the Scythian-Sarmatian group were spoken by the Scythians, Sarmatians and Alans. Today the only living language of the Scythian subgroup is spoken by Ossetians. This language has retained certain features of ancient Iranian dialects. The languages of the Persians and Tajiks belong to the Persian-Tajik subgroup proper. Kurdish language and Kurmanji (Yazidi language) - to the Kurdish subgroup. Pashto, the language of the Afghan Pashtuns, is closer to Indian languages. The Tat language and the Dzhugurdi language (the dialect of Mountain Jews) are very similar to each other. In the process of formation, they were significantly influenced by the Kumyk and Azerbaijani languages. The Talysh language was also influenced by Azerbaijani. The Talysh language itself goes back to Azeri, the Iranian language spoken in Azerbaijan before its capture by the Seljuk Turks, after which most of the Azerbaijanis switched to the Turkic language, which is now called Azerbaijani.
There is almost no need to talk about common features in the traditional economic complex, customs and spiritual life of different Iranian peoples: they have lived far from each other for too long, they have experienced too many very different influences.
Romance peoples
Romance languages are so called because they go back to Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Of the Romance languages in Russia, the most widespread is Romanian, or rather its Moldavian dialect, which is considered an independent language. Romanian is the language of the inhabitants of ancient Dacia, on whose lands modern Romania and Moldova are located. Before the Romanization of Dacia, tribes of Getae, Dacians, and Illyrians lived there. The area was then under Roman rule for 175 years and underwent intensive colonization. The Romans went there from all over the empire: some dreamed of retiring and occupying free lands, others were sent to Dacia as an exile - away from Rome. Soon almost all of Dacia spoke a local version of folk Latin. But from the 7th century. Most of the Balkan Peninsula is occupied by the Slavs, and for the Vlachs, the ancestors of the Romanians and Moldovans, the period of Slavic-Roman bilingualism begins. Under the influence of the Bulgarian kingdom, the Vlachs adopted Old Church Slavonic as the main written language and used it until the 16th century, when Romanian writing itself finally appeared based on the Cyrillic alphabet. The Romanian alphabet, based on the Latin alphabet, was introduced only in 1860.
Residents of Bessarabia, which was part of the Russian Empire, continued to write in Cyrillic. Until the end of the 20th century. the Moldovan language was strongly influenced by Russian.
The main traditional occupations of Moldovans and Romanians - until the 19th century. cattle breeding, then arable farming (corn, wheat, barley), viticulture and winemaking. Believing Moldovans and Romanians are mostly Orthodox. There are Catholics and Protestants.
The homeland of other Romance-speaking peoples, whose representatives are found in Russia, is far abroad. Spanish (also called Castilian) is spoken by Spaniards and Cubans, French by the French, and Italian by Italians. Spanish, French and Italian were formed on the basis of folk Latin in Western Europe. In Cuba (as in other Latin American countries), the Spanish language took hold during the process of Spanish colonization. Most of the believers among representatives of these nations are Catholics.
Indo-Aryan peoples
Indo-Aryan are languages that go back to ancient Indian. Most of these are the languages of the peoples of Hindustan. Also included in this group of languages is the so-called Romani Chib - the language of Western gypsies. Gypsies (Roma) come from India, but their language developed in isolation from the main Indo-Aryan area and today differs significantly from the Hindustan languages proper. In terms of their way of life, the Gypsies are closer not to their linguistically related Indians, but rather to the Central Asian Gypsies. The latter include the ethnic groups Lyuli (Dzhugi, Mugat), Sogutarosh, Parya, Chistoni and Kavol. They speak dialects of Tajik mixed with “Lavzi Mugat” (a special argot based on Arabic and Uzbek languages interspersed with Indo-Aryan vocabulary). The Parya group, in addition, retains its own Indo-Aryan language for internal communication, which differs significantly from both the Hindustan languages and the Gypsy. Historical data suggests that the Lyuli probably came to Central Asia and Persia from India during the time of Tamerlane or earlier. Some Lyuli moved directly to Russia in the 1990s. Western gypsies from India came to Egypt, then for a long time they were subjects of Byzantium and lived in the Balkans, and came to Russian territory in the 16th century. through Moldova, Romania, Germany and Poland. Roma, Lyuli, Sogutarosh, Parya, Chistoni and Kavol do not consider each other related peoples.
Greeks
A separate group within the Indo-European family is the Greek language, it is spoken by the Greeks, but conventionally the Greek group also includes the Pontic Greeks, many of whom are Russian-speaking, and the Azov and Tsalka Urum Greeks, who speak languages of the Turkic group. Heirs of the great ancient civilization and the Byzantine Empire, the Greeks came to the Russian Empire in different ways. Some of them are descendants of Byzantine colonists, others emigrated to Russia from the Ottoman Empire (this emigration was almost continuous from the 17th to the 19th centuries), others became Russian subjects when some lands that previously belonged to Turkey were transferred to Russia.
Baltic peoples
The Baltic (Letto-Lithuanian) group of Indo-European languages is related to the Slavic and once probably formed a Baltic-Slavic unity with it. There are two living Baltic languages: Latvian (with the Latgalian dialect) and Lithuanian. The differentiation between the Lithuanian and Latvian languages began in the 9th century, however, they remained dialects of the same language for a long time. Transitional dialects existed at least until the 14th–15th centuries. Latvians migrated to Russian lands for a long time, escaping from German feudal lords. Since 1722, Latvia was part of the Russian Empire. From 1722 to 1915, Lithuania was also part of Russia. From 1940 to 1991, both of these territories were part of the USSR.