survives today. Thus, the Indo-European steamroller was not a single wave, but a long chain of events that has taken 5,000 years to unfold.
As an analogy, consider how Indo-European languages came to dominate North and South America today. We have abundant written records to prove that they stem from invasions of Indo-European speakers from Europe. Those European immigrants did not overrun the Americas in one step, and archaeologists do not find remains of unmodified European culture throughout the sixteenth-century New World. That culture was useless on the US frontier. Instead, the colonists' culture was a highly modified or hybrid one that combined Indo-European languages and much of European technology (such as guns and iron) with American Indian crops and (especially in Central and South America) Indian genes. Some areas of the New World have taken many centuries for Indo- European language and economy to master. The takeover did not reach the Arctic until this century. It is reaching much of the Amazon only now, and the Andes of Peru and Bolivia promise to remain Indian for a long time yet.
Suppose that some future archaeologist should dig in Brazil, after written records have been destroyed and Indo-European languages have disappeared from Europe. The archaeologist will find European artifacts suddenly appearing on the coast of Brazil around 1530, but penetrating the Amazon only very slowly thereafter. The people whom the archaeologist finds living in the Brazilian Amazon will be a genetic mishmash of American Indians, blacks, Europeans, and Japanese, speaking Portuguese. The archaeologist will be unlikely to realize that Portuguese was an intrusive language, contributed by invaders, to a hybrid local society. Even after the PIE expansion of the fourth millenium BC, new interactions of horses, steppe peoples, and Indo-European languages continued to shape Eurasian history. PIE horse technology was primitive and probably involved little more than a rope-bit and bareback rider. For thousands of years thereafter, the military value of horses continued to improve with inventions ranging from metal bits and horse-drawn battle chariots around 2000 BC to the horseshoes, stirrups, and saddle of later cavalry. While most of these advances did not originate in the steppes, steppe peoples were still the ones who profited the most, because they always had more pasture and therefore more horses.
As horse technology evolved, Europe was invaded by many more steppe peoples, among whom the Huns, Turks, and Mongols are best known. These peoples carved out a succession of huge, short-lived empires, stretching from the steppes to Eastern Europe. But never again were steppe peoples able to impose their language on Western Europe.
They enjoyed their biggest advantage at the outset, when PIE bareback riders invaded a Europe entirely without domestic horses.
There was another difference between these later recorded invasions and the earlier unrecorded PIE invasion. The later invaders were no longer Indo-European speakers from the western steppes, but speakers of Turkic and Mongol languages from the eastern steppes. Ironically, horses were what enabled Turkish tribes from central Asia in the Eleventh Century AD to invade the land of the first written Indo-European language, Hittite. The most important innovation of the first Indo-Europeans was thus turned against their descendants. Turks are largely European in their genes, but non-Indo-European (Turkish) in their language. Similarly, an invasion from the east in 896 AD left modern Hungary largely European in its genes but Finno-Ugric in its language. By illustrating how a small invading force of steppe horsemen could impose their language on a European society, Turkey and Hungary provide models of how the rest of Europe came to speak Indo-European.
Eventually, steppe peoples in general, regardless of their language, ceased to win in the face of Western Europe's advancing technology. When the end came, it was swift. In 1241 AD the Mongols achieved the largest steppe empire that ever existed, stretching from Hungary to China. But after about 1500 AD the Indo-European- speaking Russians began to encroach on the steppes from the west. It took only a few more centuries of tsarist imperialism to conquer the steppe horsemen who had terrorized Europe and China for over 5,000 years. Today the steppes are divided between Russia and China, and only Mongolia remains as a vestige of steppe independence.
Much racist nonsense has been written about the supposed superiority of Indo-European peoples themselves. Nazi propaganda invoked a pure Aryan race. In fact, Indo-Europeans have never been unified since the PIE expansion of 5,000 years ago, and even PIE speakers themselves may have been divided among related cultures. Some of the most bitter fighting and vilest deeds of recorded history pitted one Indo-European group against another. The Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs whom the Nazis sought to exterminate conversed in languages as Indo-European as that of their persecutors. Speakers of proto-Indo-European merely happened to be in the right place at the right time to put together a useful package of technology. Through that stroke of luck, theirs was the mother tongue whose daughter languages came to be spoken by half the world today.
[The] Sheep and [the] Horses
On [a] hill, [a] sheep that had no wool saw horses, one [of them] pulling [a] heavy wagon, one carrying [a] big load, and one carrying [a] man quickly.
[The] sheep said to [the] horses: 'My heart pains me, seeing [a] man driving horses.
[The] horses said: 'Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see [this]: [a] man, the master, makes
[the] wool of [the] sheep into [a] warm garment for himself. And [the] sheep has no wool.
Having heard this, [the] sheep fled into [the] plain.
In order to provide some sense of how proto-Indo-European (PIE) might have sounded, I have included the fable above, in reconstructed PIE, together with an English translation. The fable was invented over a century ago by the linguist August Schleicher. The revised version given here is based on one published by W.P. Lehmann and L. Zgusta in 1979, which takes account of the deeper understanding of PIE gained since Schleicher's time. This version has been slightly altered from that of Lehmann and Zgusta to make it more 'user-friendly' for non-linguists, with the advice of Jaan Puhvel.
While PIE initially looks strange, many words will prove familiar on scrutiny because of similar English or Latin roots derived from PIE. For instance,
While this sample text will show what some linguists think PIE was like, it cannot be taken as an exact sample. Remember: PIE was never written; scholars differ on details of how to reconstruct PIE; and the fable itself is imaginary. 249-
SIXTEEN
IN BLACK AND WHITE
