The European view of the Indo-European
Homeland
(Pragyata , December 2018)
The present publication is
an English translation of Alain de Benoist’s book The Indo-Europeans. In
Search of the Homeland, brought out by Arktos, London 2016. It has to be
understood from the outset that the French original’s second and last edition
dates from 1997, and no attempt has been made to provide an update. The most
recent Indo-Europeanist trend discussed here is the briefly popular Anatolian
Homeland Theory by Colin Renfrew, thoroughly refuted here and by now also gone
out of fashion among professionals.
Out of India
Even more conspicuous by
its absence is the Out-of-India theory (OIT). At this point I declare my
interest: the 2001 issue of de Benoist’s yearbook Nouvelle Ecole carried
an article by myself presenting the Out-of-India Theory (OIT), a complete first
for its readership. It was at once gainsaid (some would say “refuted”) in
articles by leading Indo-Europeanist Jean Haudry and also by editor de Benoist
himself. Of course I don’t mind the expression of rival opinions, not even when
they articulate the readership’s own sensibilities. But at least it is
undeniable that since then, he knows about the OIT. Therefore adepts of the
OIT, or more generally of any responsible search for the Homeland, may object
with indignation that the OIT is passed over in silence in this book.
This criticism is
misplaced, for there is a perfectly honourable explanation: this book dates
back to 1997, when India as Homeland candidate did not figure in de Benoist’s horizon.
If criticism is persisted in, it should be directed at the publisher, who chose
to republish a book from a past stage of an ongoing debate without providing an
update.
There is only passing
mention of the (not yet thus called) OIT in its earlier European version, ca.
1800. It has only been called OIT since 1996, and many watchers of the Homeland
debate have only gradually learned about it. Even then, they have mostly
misunderstood it: while most Hindus reject a more westerly Homeland, it is not
true that they therefore subscribe to what Westerners would consider its
opposite scenario, viz. an emigration from India. Once you accept the
linguistic kinship of Europe and India, you have to assume either an immigration
into India or an emigration from India; but most Hindus have never fully
interiorized this kinship.
Thus, most Indian
archaeologists state authoritatively that the Harappan area shows no sign of an
invasion of immigration that could be identified as IE or “Aryan”; but this
doesn’t imply that they have explored or even just affirmed a reverse migration
from India. Their horizon usually stops at the Khyber Pass and they have no
notion of, nor interest in, what has happened in Central Asia and Europe. I
find this situation deplorable, but something similar exists on the Western
side, that stonewalls any Indian contribution to the debate.
The New Right
Alain de Benoist can rightfully
be called the mastermind of the New Right, or in the French original, the Nouvelle
Droite. This is a European continental phenomenon, to be distinguished from
the Anglo-Saxon Thatcher-Reaganite New Right. The latter was anti-socialist,
pro-capitalist, sceptical about communal identity issues, and in the US mostly
Christian. The Nouvelle Droite, by contrast, is decidedly against
Christianity (one of its icons is the late Lithuanian Indo-Europeanist Marija
Gimbutas, much discussed here, who was cremated with Pagan rites), pro social
security, against the ongoing post-socialist precarization, against the pursuit
of “ever more” brought on by Capitalism (as contrasting with the “nothing in
excess” of the Greek philosophers), against unlimited growth, against
one-dimensional economic man with his “rugged individualism”.
What makes it “rightist”
is its favouring of ethnic and communitarian identities against homogenizing
globalism, and its scepticism of the Social Justice Warrior’s ideal of
equality, favouring “differentialism” instead. What makes it “new” is that, as
against the old monarchists and followers of a leader/dictator, it has nothing
against democracy, often even favouring forms of direct democracy; and against
the old nationalisms with their cramped emphasis on homogeneity, it favours European
unity (official motto: “unity in diversity”) in a federal or confederal form,
with ample space for regional identities.
A part of the Nouvelle
Droite’s construction of the European identity is not to identify Europe
with Christianity, as conservative Christians (and many non-Christian
non-Europeans) do, but to bring in the somewhat older Indo-European (IE) identity.
The Christian argument is that tribal Europe only became a self-conscious unit
by acquiring a common Christian identity: the first time “Europe” (from
Phoenician Ereb, “evening, west”, used by the Greeks for the lands west
of the Aegean Sea, roughly greater Greece minus Ionia) got used in its present
meaning, was in the reporting about the Frankish Christian victory against the
Moorish invaders in the battle of Poitiers/Tours in 731. But the New-Rightists
look deeper, at the IE cultures of most of Europe before Christianization was
imposed.
This is a bit strange,
because the oldest European language, Basque, is not part of the IE family; and
even Basque is an immigrant language, or at least from the absolute rim of
Europe, the Caucasus. This Northwest-Caucasian origin, dating back 8,000 years
or so, has been demonstrated by the late Georges Dumézil, who otherwise remains
a reference point for the Nouvelle Droite.
The Uralic languages
(Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Sami/Lapponic, and a dozen more languages in
Russia on both sides of the Ural mountains), similarly have immigrated, viz. from
Central Asia. They are not IE either, but the settlement of their part of
Europe happened in parallel with the great IE trek westwards. This reached the
Atlantic coasts of Portugal, Ireland and Iceland, but where exactly did it
start?
The Homeland
The currently prevalent
theory put this Homeland (or Urheimat) somewhere near the Volga river,
again on the eastern rim of Europe, in what the Russians call the Yamna
or Pit-grave culture, beyond 3,000 BCE. In the centuries after 3,000 BCE, this
Yamna population spectacularly broke through Central Europe, leaving a deep archaeological
and genetic footprint. Next it filled up or assimilated the remaining pockets
of Western Europe, with some non-IE or “Old European” languages holding out in
parts of Italy and Spain well into the Roman period, possibly in Scotland even
beyond.
As for the
Indo-Europeans, they too are immigrants. Either they came from India, as
Europeans thought ca. 1800 and many Indians think today: or, according to the
presently dominant position, they came from the rim of Europe, from Pontus, the
area north of the Caspian and Black Seas. That is the mainstream hypothesis,
but Alain de Benoist sets out to amend it slightly.
First he goes over the
entire history of this debate, starting with Willian Jones’s famous 1786 speech
before the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Or rather, starting earlier: though not
having similar dramatic consequences, the announcement of a kinship between the
Indian and European civilizations had already been made just years before the
announcement of a linguistic kinship between India and Europe, by Voltaire,
Immanuel Kant, Johann Herder and others. Insufficient attention is paid to the
little-known fact that in the first decades, the Out-of-India Theory was deemed
natural in Europe.
Next, de Benoist gives a
good factual overview of the march of IE linguistics, deemed to have started with
the first book on Sanskrit grammar by Franz Bopp in 1816. He introduces the
main episodes, such as the controversy since ca. 1870 between the Genealogical
Tree model and the Wave model, which pay too little c.q. too much attention to
the influence of neighbouring languages upon one other. This factual presentation
of the history of the Indo-Europeanist discipline is certainly the greatest merit
of the book for laymen.
Gradually, the linguistic
distance between Sanskrit and the reconstructed ancestral language (Proto-Indo-European,
PIE) was theorized to become bigger, and in proportion with this, the geographical
distance between India and the putative Homeland. In much of the 19th
century, Bactria remained a candidate, favoured e.g. by Friedrich Max Müller.
From the 1920s onwards, the needle pointed more and more stably to Southwestern
Russia. But before that, it had pointed to most regions west of India,
including the Balkans, the Baltics, Germany, Scandinavia, Belarus, and even
Atlantis. In the 1990s, Anatolia was also briefly in favour, but the consensus
among Western Indo-Europeanists reverted to the East-European steppe lands. To
explain the language family’s actual presence in India, the only explanation
was the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT). This is assumed here, though without any
ado because it is not deemed to be the object of controversy. The only
controversy is between different Homelands in Europe: East or Central.
The point of this book,
except for giving an overview of the Homeland debate’s different phases, is to reopen
the debate and relocate the Homeland more to the West, in Central Europe. This
way, the IE-speaking tribes no longer carry the “odium” of being immigrants,
interlopers into an earlier but long-disappeared Old-European culture. Instead,
they become the undisputed core of Europe, the real native Europeans. To anchor
the language family even deeper in Europe, the stage of Proto-Indo-European
unity is pushed back beyond the Neolithic to the end of the Ice Age in the
Mesolithic (more than 10,000 years ago, rather than the usually assumed 6,000),
all on the strength of already existing hypotheses by legitimate scholars. This
would satisfy the Nouvelle Droite’s identity project, viz. with IE as
the backbone of Europe.
In 1997, one could still,
narrowly, plead ignorance about the revived OIT. But to republish the book two
decades later as if nothing had happened in this eventful period is a bit
bizarre. It is but an extreme of an attitude common among Indo-Europeanists,
viz. to stonewall any arguments for the OIT and ignore it as not worth
mentioning.
Ötzi
The book’s frontpage
sports an imaginative action picture of Ötzi, the 5500-year-old “Iceman” found
in the melted ice of the Ötztal in South Tirol. He has become something of a
mascot of the Euro-Nationalists. Back then it was not known yet, but today we
know that he constitutes a formidable pointer to Indian origins.
Prof. Subhash Kak (“Was the Indian Sub-Continent the
Original Genetic Homeland of the Europeans?”, Swarajya, 16 Jan. 2016) reports:
“Researchers at the European Academy of Bolzano (EURAC) (…) picked on the
stomach bacterium ‘Helicobacter pylori’, which is found in all human
populations, with two major strains that are Asian and African. The modern
Europeans have ‘H. pylori’ that is a hybrid between Asian and African bacteria.
In research published in the 8 January, 2016 issue of the Science Magazine,
the EURAC authors announced that the Iceman’s stomach has ‘H. pylori’ that is
of Indian origin (but now extinct) and not related to the hybrid variety of the
modern European ‘admixture’. This means that Indians as migrants were present
in Europe in 3300 BC.”
For good measure, he extends this suspicion of an Indian origin
to another European icon: “The Gundestrup cauldron found in a peat bog in
Denmark and estimated to have been made about 2000 years ago has images of
Indian deities on it (including, most strikingly, that of a goddess worshiped
by two elephants, Gajalakshmi), and thus may have been done by craftsmen of
Indian origin, perhaps in Thrace. Trade between India and the West has been
traced back to the third millennium BC. Such continuing interaction must have
led to diffusion of art and culture.”
Euro-nationalists are,
even more than most academic Indo-Europeanists, blind to the input from India.
De Benoist has later informed himself a little about this Indian element, but
many of his followers still stonewall this information. And even he was
ignorant of it back in 1997, a moment in time perpetuated by the present book.
Read more!
