Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (12 page)

First of all, the Indo-European speakers spread, from somewhat further north,
¹¹
up to the Caucasus and Black Sea regions, which were already occupied by non-Indo-European-speaking peoples. Those who continued on, going much further than the others, are the ancestors of the Tokharians and Anatolians, who share the Group A features
¹²
and constitute the only known members from what may be called the first wave of emigrants out of Central Eurasia. They are attested in the eastern Tarim Basin and Anatolian Plateau regions at the very end of the third or beginning of the second millennium
BC
¹³
and in the nineteenth century
BC
, respectively. The Proto-Indo-Europeans are known to have had wagons, but the first wave seems to have left the proximal homeland either before the war chariot per se was developed, or before the Indo-Europeans had learned how to use chariots for war.
¹⁴

Although the Indo-Europeans settled in new lands, in some cases (such as Greece) evidently by conquest, they did not always dominate the local people in the beginning. Instead, they often served the local peoples as mercenary warriors, or came under their domination in general. In either case, the Indo-European migrants—who were mostly men—married local women and, by mixing with them, developed their distinctive creole dialect features. The most influential of the new dialects was Proto-Indo-Iranian, the speakers of which appear to have been influenced linguistically by a non-Indo-European people from whom the Indo-Iranians borrowed their distinctive religious beliefs and practices. The locus of this convergence is increasingly thought to have been the area of the advanced, non-Indo-European-speaking Bactria-Margiana Culture
¹⁵
centered in what is now northwestern Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan. The other Indo-Europeans developed different dialects and beliefs under the influence of other non-Indo-European languages and cultures.

After the Proto-Indo-Iranian dialect and culture had formed, the Greek, Italic, Germanic, and Armenian dialect speakers and some of the Indo-Iranians came under the influence of a non-Indo-European language with a significantly different phonological system,
¹⁶
which introduced the highly distinctive Group B features,
¹⁷
as well as the particular features that characterize Proto-Indic and distinguish it from Proto-Iranian.
¹⁸
When a long enough period had passed for the Group B linguistic features to have taken hold, the Indians and Iranians seem to have become enemies. The Indo-Europeans of Group B also either acquired the chariot or learned how to use their existing chariot-like vehicles for warfare, as did the Group A Hittites, whose home city, Kanesh, has the earliest archaeological (pictorial) evidence for a chariot-like vehicle in the ancient Near East. This weapon gave the Indo-European peoples a technological edge over their neighbors.
¹⁹

The Iranians subsequently defeated the Indians and chased them to the extremities of Central Eurasia.
²⁰
The second wave of migrations out of the steppe zone and its vicinity then began. It included the peoples who spoke the Group B dialects—Indic, Greek, Italic, Germanic, and Armenian. The Indo-Europeans of this group did have the war chariot, and when they moved into the areas of the peripheral civilizations in the mid-second millennium
BC
they had a revolutionary cultural and ethnolinguistic impact on them. They settled in their newly conquered lands and took local wives, whose non-Indo-European languages and cultures had an equally revolutionary impact on the Indo-Europeans, again producing new Indo-European creoles.
²¹
With the second wave, two more Indo-European peoples—the Old Indic speakers of Mitanni and the Mycenaean Greeks—enter actual recorded history. The second wave had a much greater impact on the Eurasian world than the first wave.

Old Indic and Mycenaean Greek are both first attested in their earliest locations—upper Mesopotamia and the Greek Aegean, respectively—in the middle of the second millennium
BC
, in similar historical circumstances. The Old Indic linguistic materials are distinctively Indic, not Indo-Iranian, while the Shaft Grave culture of Greece, which appears precisely at this time, has been identified with the appearance of the Mycenaean Greeks. The particular closeness of Greek and Indic in certain respects as compared to other Group B languages suggests they may have remained together as a subgroup until shortly before they settled in their respective destinations,
²²
but Group B had broken up by this date.

The second-wave period ended with Iranians dominating all of the Central Eurasian steppe zone and with Germanic peoples in temperate-zone Central Europe. Because the Germanic peoples largely retained the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, they effectively enlarged the Central Eurasian cultural area.
²³

Finally the third wave, or Group C, migrated. It consisted of the Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian,
²⁴
and Iranian peoples, who had remained in the area of the homeland in Central Eurasia proper outside the region inhabited by the Group B peoples. The Celtic, Albanian, Slavic, and Baltic peoples moved westward, northwestward, and northward away from the Iranians, who nevertheless continued to expand and to dominate them (most strongly the Celts and Slavs). At the same time, the Iranians apparently pursued the Indians across the Near East to the Levant (the lands of the eastern Mediterranean littoral), across Iran into India,
²⁵
and perhaps across Eastern Central Asia into China.

The traditional theory that Indo-European developed into its attested daughter languages over many millennia in the Proto-Indo-European homeland is essentially impossible typologically. It has recently been contested, and a more likely “big-bang” type of split proposed instead, such as the one historically attested later for the spread of Turkic and Mongolie
²⁶
The old theory is essentially disproved also by the fact that, if the Indo-European daughter languages had already been fully developed before the migrations, there would be evidence of early Greek, for example, in Iran, or Russia; evidence of Germanic in India or Italy; evidence of Tokharian in Greece or Iran, and so on. But there is no such evidence. Leaving aside much later, historically attested migrations, Anatolian is known only from Anatolia, Greek only from Greece, Tokharian only from East Turkistan, Germanic only from northwestern Europe, Armenian only from Armenia, and so on. The only possible exception is Old Indic, which is attested first in upper Mesopotamia and the Levant, and later in India. Although it is assumed that the Iranian expansion into Persia is responsible for splitting the Old Indic–speaking people into the two attested branches, even in this case there is no evidence for Indic ever having been spoken in Europe, say, or northern Eurasia. Proto-Indo-European was spoken in the Central Eurasian homeland, while the attested daughter languages were spoken in their attested homelands outside it, where they developed as creoles almost instantaneously after their introduction there. The scenario presented here thus accords with typology, the recorded history of language development and spread, and with the actual attested situation of the Indo-European daughter languages.

The Early Peoples of Kroraina

The earliest Indo-Europeans discovered so far are directly known only from archaeology and palaeoanthropology. Although there is no way to know what language—let alone which dialect—was spoken by the people whose remains have been excavated, they are marked by specific physical anthropological and cultural features, the lack of any other known long-distance migrants at that point in history, and the unusually clear continuity of their occupation down to historical times. The historical and linguistic evidence allows them to be identified as Proto-Tokharians.

Their mummified Caucasoid bodies, the earliest dated to around 2000
BC
, have been found in great numbers in the eastern Tarim Basin in the area of ancient Kroraina, near Lop Nor, which is just west of the ancient pre-Chinese cultural zone. The best-reported site so far is Qäwrigul
(qävrigul
‘grave valley’).

The people wore wool garments, both felted and woven, and were buried with baskets containing grains of wheat placed beside their heads, as well as branches of ephedra, the plant from which the intoxicating drink of the Vedas,
soma
(Iranian
haoma),
appears to have been made. The bodies typically have ochre applied to their faces. Remains of domestic cattle, sheep, goat, horse, and camel
²⁷
show that the animals were raised by the Krorainian people, who also hunted wild sheep, deer, and birds, and caught fish.
²⁸
This cultural assemblage is characteristic of the early Indo-Europeans.
²⁹

It has long been known that a language or dialect of Tokharian was spoken in the Kroraina area and neighboring regions in early Antiquity. It survived there long enough to leave loanwords in the third-century
AD
literary Prakrit documents from Kroraina, the region said by the Chinese to be the ancient home of the Yüeh-chih, who are in turn explicitly equated with Tokharians. The Tokharian language shares some features with Anatolian, the only other known Group A daughter language of Proto-Indo-European, and the earliest to be attested, in the nineteenth century
BC
. It is therefore possible to state fairly confidently that the early inhabitants of the Kroraina region—who are known to have been Yüeh-chih, which people are solidly identified both with the Tokharoi of Greek sources and with the peoples of Kucha and Turfan (Qocho), who spoke West and East Tokharian respectively—were Proto-Tokharian speakers.
³⁰

The Anatolians

The pre-Anatolian origins of the Indo-European speakers who became the Anatolians are much debated, due to the ambiguous archaeological evidence. Their earliest linguistic and historical attestations are as names mentioned in Assyrian mercantile texts from nineteenth-century
BC
Kanesh.
³¹
From them stem the earliest certainly known Indo-European nation, the Hittites, who around 1650
BC
³²
established a powerful state in the territory of the Hatti, the non-Indo-European people they supplanted and whose name they adopted.
³³
The extant Hittite language texts were mostly written in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries
BC
, but some are copies of originals as old as the seventeenth century
BC
.
³⁴

The history of the Hittite migration is unknown and must be inferred or reconstructed indirectly on the basis of suggestive details that are known. It is clear that the Hittites did not take power as an invading army—that is, by direct conquest from outside. They had lived in the area of Hatti long enough to be an established local people by the time of their conquest. It is unclear whether the Hittites had chariots when they first settled in Anatolia, but the fact that the earliest “Near Eastern” representations of what look like chariots are on seals from the Hittite home city of Kanesh
³⁵
suggests that they did have chariots. In any case, they certainly did have and use them in their later conquest of Hatti and establishment of their empire. On the basis of numerous similar cases from Antiquity up through the Middle Ages, as well as the First Story model, it is likely that Central Eurasian–type warrior-merchants from a group of Anatolians were hired by the Hatti Kingdom to fight against other groups of invading Indo-Europeans and thus became established in the kingdom.

In view of the first Hittite rulers’ cultural assimilation to the Hatti, they must have grown up learning Hatti customs and language. But as Indo-Europeans they belonged to a warrior-trader patriarchal culture and identified themselves primarily with their fathers’ people. They retained their own language and kept at least some of their own beliefs and customs as well. The Hittite king had an elite personal bodyguard, the
MEšEDI,
consisting of twelve warriors who accompanied and protected him at all times.
³⁶
Considering their small number and very high status (similar to that of the Old Indic–speaking
maryannu
in the neighboring Mitanni Kingdom), it is likely that they were in fact his comitatus.
³⁷
With the Hittites’ Indo-European hero-worshiping ethos, and sympathy for themselves as downtrodden people whose cattle and women had unrightfully been stolen by their alien rulers, it was only a matter of time before they realized that they were in the position of subjects under unjust alien rulers. When they had the knowledge and means to do so, they overthrew the Hatti rulers and set up their own leader as king. This they did with their first fully historical king, Hattusili I, who established the Hittite Kingdom around 1650
BC
with the great assistance of the most advanced weapon of the day, the war chariot,
³⁸
which was just then spreading across the Near East.
³⁹