The European view of the Indo-European Homeland

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 19^th 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.

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European unity

 

People sometimes ask me about my views on Europe and the EU. I don’t have any specific expertise in this field, e.g. I understand nothing of the ongoing discussion of the “Eurobonds”. But I know something of international relations, and understand that we cannot seriously go back to the confinement to small states which Europe was conceived to liberate us from.  I will briefly state where I stand.

Flemings of my generations were Europe-minded as a matter of course, and I still feel that way. One reason is that we don’t have a nation-state to exchange for a European identity. “Belgian” is only a passport identity, there is no such thing as a Belgian nation. Therefore, in supporting European integration, we are not losing or even compromising a nation-state; we never had one. When I hear the Dutch philosopher Thierry Baudet argue for Dutch sovereignty and against the projected European identity, I hear someone speak from a confident sense of nationality, which I realize we have never had.

Another reason is that the European level counts internationally. For us, being from a small country, Europe is the only way to feel big. Maybe the French don’t need Europe to take themselves seriously, or at least they still have the historical memory of greatness, so they know what it feels to be something else than European. But for us, being European is the highest concrete political identity we aspire to.

In today’s and tomorrow’s world, size matters. One day we may have global unity, but during my lifetime, it will be alright if we can already manage continental unity. When we have to deal with giants like India or China, we do have to speak from a sufficiently large platform rather than from a small Dutch or Portuguese or Latvian position.

So much for my general sympathies: I am all for European unity. My study of India’s struggle for its own unity and integrity confirms the importance of a sense of unity over and above the sense of local specificity.

As for the euro currency: I am all for a common currency, which is very practical for borderers (and in Belgium, you’re always near a border) and travellers. Moreover, for Flemish autonomy, it takes away one of the worst hurdles: a Belgian currency would always be used as a blackmail instrument against the plan to break up Belgium. It is always said that the Belgian level will erode between the Flemish and European levels, but we see no such thing happening. In the case of the currency, however, it does. That is one reason to oppose these left- and right-wing radicals who oppose the common currency. However, a common currency requires a common economic policy. That is why I support further political and economic unity.

The problem is the EU’s reach and structure, not the abstract geographical entity Europe (of which democratic Switzerland and Iceland and prosperous Norway are parts, even though they reject EU membership). It is obvious that the EU badly needs to be democratized. The EU has just condemned the Swiss referendum resulting in a majority for limiting immigration, as well as the Crimean referendum yielding an immense majority for accession to Russia. It ignored and overruled the 2005 French and Dutch referendum results rejecting the proposed EU Constitution, which was reintroduced as the Lisbon Treaty. It made the Irish vote again until their referendum yielded the “right” majority, thus making a mockery of people’s sovereignty. As for representative democracy, the European Parliament is not really representative and does not have the power to bring down the effective EU government, called the European Commission.

So, the EU institutions have to be restructured to create a democratic and transparent power hierarchy, and provision must be made for a binding referendum at citizen’s initiative. Many competences in the cultural and social fields should be de-europeanized and given back to the member states, the European level should simply not deal with them.

On the other hand, the EU should speak with one voice on the world stage. Foreign policy and defence competences should be delegated by the states upwards to the European level. A European army should be created, not because we are eager to make war on anyone, but to give credibility to the EU’s diplomacy.

The present situation is neither here nor there. It is very confused and has its priorities backwards. We need to have less EU involvement with quota for butter or so, and more with the serious business of international relations. So, there is a lot of work to do in order to make Europe a fatherland we can love. But this is no reason to back off from the original plan to unite the European countries. I am not a Eurosceptic.

Since Europe is not a very deep concern, I will appeal to a very light kind of authority here.  As Toto Cotugno, the 1990 Eurosong winner from Italy, sang: “Insieme: unite, unite, Europe!”

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The “Varna event” and the Indo-European homeland question

 

Harald Haarmann is one of the leading scholars of Indo-European (IE) and among other things a pioneer on the first identifiable linguistic developments on the Balkans. I have just read his book Indo-Europeanization -- Day One. Elite Recruitment and the Beginnings of Language Politics (Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2012) on the train ride to Antwerp from Münster, where I bought it at the German Orientalist Conference. It was a very pleasant read, also quite accessible for the educated layman, though pioneering at the very edge of Indo-European (IE) research. It proposes a concrete answer to the question how the Europeans ended up speaking a language originating in the east, at least as far east as eastern Ukraine, if not farther.

 

AIT

Haarmann’s Homeland theory follows the widespread assumption that the Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) can be identified with the semi-nomadic cattle-herders on the steppes of Eastern Europe. Their location, it is widely believed,  can be confirmed by the presence of a sizable vocabulary borrowed from IE in North-Caucasian and even more in Uralic, neighbouring the IE Homeland from the south c.q. the north. For the Iranian and Indian branches, this implies a migration from the steppe to their historical heartlands: Afghanistan and Northwestern India. In India, this is called the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT).

For Europe, this steppe homeland theory is tied in with an important archaeological finding. In the Pontic area, i.e. present-day eastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia, agriculture was introduced only ca. 5500, pastoralism at least a thousand years earlier (p.35). PIE shows older terms in its lexicon for herding than for agriculture. (The forthcoming IE conference in Leipzig, early December 2013, seeks precisely to verify and amplify the linguistic evidence for this thesis: do agricultural terms tend to be borrowed from substratal languages, in contrast with the pastoralist and wheeled-locomotion terminology which are thoroughly IE?)

Off-hand, he refutes the Anatolian homeland theory put forward by Colin Renfrew and the Diffusionists. Thus, the Hittites in Anatolia borrowed a lot of vocabulary (including, I may add, the name by which they are known) from the native Hatti, whose language also remained in use for sacred purposes, and this is a typical pattern of conquerors making themselves at home in a country deemed more civilized. I may confirm this objection, borrowing from the Greek Sankritist Nicholas Kazanas, with the observation that unlike the other branches of IE, the Anatolian language group lost practically all its IE-derived terms for family relations: symptomatic of a history of conquest where male invaders married native women who persisted in using their native kinship terminology.

 

 

OIT

That there could be a theory locating the homeland in India, seems unknown to Haarmann. As I could recently verify at IE conferences in Leiden (comparative IE linguistics) and Louvain-la-Neuve (comparative IE mythology), as well as at the IE sections of the Münster conference, quite a few scholars have not even heard of the challenge thrown by the Out-of-India Theory. Others have heard of it, have also vaguely heard of its association with Hindu nationalism, and don’t take it seriously. Thus, a leading French IE philologist who was given a prize at the Louvain-la-Neuve conference, said that he had read a review of Michel Danino’s book on Harappan civilization (The Lost River: On the Trail of the Saraswati, Penguin, Delhi 2010), countering the AIT, but that he wouldn’t waste his time on actually reading the book, as its main thesis was “obviously ridiculous”. This way, the arguments for the OIT remain, wilfully or involuntarily, perfectly unknown in professional circles.

This state of affairs would not be very surprising, given that the limelight for the OIT has been captured by Hindu noise-makers, whose arrogance rivals only with their ignorance. Their behavior caused scholars to deviate from the normal procedure of taking cognizance of any new theory and evaluate it seriously. (Well, “new”, let’s amend that to “renewed”, as the OIT was the very first homeland theory.) But it becomes surprising if you have entered this debate through the medium of Hindu literature and lists assuring us, fifteen years ago already, that “nobody believes in the AIT anymore”. It is this false confidence that caused the Hindu lobby to suffer an ignominious defeat in the California textbook affair (2005-2009). The said claim drew the attention of some academic India-watchers, no doubt partisan but at any rate more powerful than the Hindu outsiders knocking at the doors of multicultural policy-making. These scholars condescendingly overruled the Hindu demands for rewriting the history of Hinduism, including the replacement of the AIT by its opposite. Fact is that the AIT is alive and well, both in political circles (such as on  the Government of India website) and among academics.

 

The “Varna event”

The cattle-herders in South Russia and Ukraine had few conflicts with the hunter-gatherers to their north because their economies were complementary and they didn’t compete for resources. However, the “Varna event” marks a conflict with their western neighbours, known as the Old Europeans, or rather the resolution of a preceding conflict. Hundreds of graves near the town of Varna, Bulgaria, from ca. 4400 BCE, show a hitherto unknown stratification between the native masses and an intrusive elite. This is best exemplified by the presence of many golden grave-goods including a scepter. Apparently, the lowlier natives had come (or been forced) to accept the superimposition of an elite consisting of immigrants from the steppe. Yet, there are no signs of armed conflict: the immigrants from the east seem to have established themselves peacefully. It is from developments like this one that Aryan invasion theorists take heart to explain the peaceful demise of the Harappan cities and the lack of armed conflict of the supposed Aryan invaders with the natives.   

We do not pretend to be archaeologists, therefore we take the findings presented to us by the archaeologists at face value. So yes, the cattle-herding population established itself  in parts of Old Europe, forming a hierarchically structured symbiosis with the natives. This created the circumstances for language transmission: not so much a transmission imposed from above, but one wanted and organized from below within the power equation imposed from above. Ordinary people wanted to be on a par with the new, foreign-born elite, so they voluntarily adopted its language. This is indeed how we should explain the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: not the replacement of natives by invaders, but the adoption of the invader language by the natives. The large differences between the different IE language groups can then be understood as the effect of borrowing from the divergent languages of Old Europe, e.g. Greek has some 40% loans, often existing side by side with IE synonyms, but none of them the same as the loanwords in Germanic. So, the language situation prevailing throughout Europe (except for the Basque and the Uralic pockets) is nicely made sense of by the scenario outlined by Haarmann, with the Varna event as an early and spectacular illustration.

 

Objections

However, Haarmann’s basic data may lend themselves to other explanations than his own. First off, 4400 BCE is a bit early for the expansion and differentiation of PIE. At least, many scholars teach that some kind of unity of PIE must have existed until the invention of the wheel, not proven to be older than 3500 BCE. But this amounts to one archaeological finding against another, and we don’t want to prejudge the issue. The wheel may be older than the oldest findings of it. Maybe Haarmann ought to answer this objection first; here, he corroborates his estimate with the findings of lexicostatistics, admittedly an inexact science.

Secondly, while an intrusion and integration of a domineering community from the steppes may indeed be established, and while Haarmann’s thesis that hierarchization is   typical of pastoral rather than agricultural societies may be accepted, we don’t know what language these people used. Archaeological data don’t speak, so this IE component is a good guess at best. Haarmann bases his reconstruction of the history of both the IE and the Uralic family heavily on the book Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations, edited by Christian Carpelan et al. (Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, Helsinki 2001), which remains on very shaky ground throughout though it is very happy to give details on each language’s genesis and whereabouts. In my book Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan (Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 2007), I have jocularly said that it gives the exact birthplace and date of each of these two language families’ branches, so that a family astrologer may draw up their horoscopes to reveal not just their past but even their future. Anyone not so desperate to find the Homeland at last would be skeptical of their detailed reconstruction, deemed valid for an era about five thousand years before writing appeared in Eastern Europe. Historical linguistics is more powerful than certain Hindu noise-makers imagine, but not as accurate as its own aficionados assume.

Thirdly, while the steppe people intruded from the east into Old Europe, we don’t know from how far east they came. Haarmann, like Elena Kuzmina in The Origins of the Indo-Iranians (Brill, Leiden 2007), assumes a steppe homeland in working out the archaeology of that area, but fails to clear the deck, declare the homeland question open, and then prove the East-European Homeland from scratch. Of course he does, since all his predecessors and colleagues and textbooks say that the East-European homeland is an established fact. But to our knowledge, nothing stands in the way of a different scenario, viz. a linguistic assimilation with a population intruding all the way from India, in several stages of mixing and linguistic assimilation.

The latter unknown is now the missing link that scholars convinced of the OIT, or willing to consider the OIT as a possibility, ought to explore. Many Indian archaeologists have abandoned the AIT and turned against it because after 150 years of being the official and well-funded theory it has still not been corroborated by any archaeological proof. It is simply assumed and not questioned, see Haarmann for a very recent example. The Aryans entering India have not been traced. Prof. B.B. Lal, who once made his name by identifying the Painted Grey Ware with the Aryans fighting their way into India, has turned against the AIT later in life, arguing that it was only an assumption that the people concerned were Aryan invaders. We simply don’t know the linguistic situation. But then it falls upon these Indian (and a few Western) archaeologists to explain how the Indo-European languages reached Europe, and to identify Aryans on their way from India to Europe in the archaeological record. So far, the Indian archaeologists have been satisfied to refute the reigning AIT as explaining the Indian situation, but the state of affairs outside India has not been of any interest to them. Their horizon stops at the Khyber Pass.

 

 

Uralic

Haarmann is aware that hundreds of IE, mainly Iranian words have entered the lexicon of the Uralic languages. He acknowledges that the Uralic tribe names in Russia are Iranian (p.65). But then he makes an observation that, while uncontroversial, upsets the whole steppe homeland theory: “Lexical borrowing was unidirectional, from Indo-European to Uralic.” (p.84) This off-hand assertion summing up the professional communis opinio is actually strong proof against any East-European Homeland scenario.

As I too have asserted in my book Update on the Aryan Invasion Theory, it “was a one-way traffic” (Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 1999, p.135). At the time, I still didn’t realize the straightforward simplicity of the only conclusion allowed by this one-way borrowing. The point was made at greater length and more forcefully by Shrikant Talageri in his book The Rigveda, the Final Evidence (Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 2008), who devotes a chapter to it. He concludes that an AIT scenario would have shown up as a string of Uralic loans into Indo-Iranian. By contrast, the present scenario of a one-way imparting of loans from Indo-Iranian to Uralic is only compatible with a wayward and peripheral section of the Indo-Iranians settled in Uralic-speaking areas imparting their vocabulary, and perhaps also borrowing some words but not communicating them back to their linguistic heartland.

 

Egalitarianism

Haarmann is convinced that the agricultural Old European society of the town of Varna had been more egalitarian than the hierarchical class system imposed by the immigrating pastoralists. He sees an even more decidedly egalitarian society in a more developed urban society, viz. the Harappan civilization. On p.91-92, Haarmann quotes Charles Keith Maisels (Early Civilizations of the Old World, Routledge, London & New York, 1999, p.252-254): “The Indus civilization (…) is doubly remarkable: first, because it was the only complex society of either Antiquity or the modern world, that operated without social stratification and the state; and, second, in what must be a related phenomenon, because it was an agrarian society in which the villages were not oppressed by the towns (…) In sum, Indus Civilization is by far the most egalitarian of any of the pristine Old or New World civilizations, and that by a long way and by any measure.”

Precisely the same thing was said about Rg-Vedic society. Thus, the Marxist historian Shereen Ratnagar asserts: “if, as in the case of the early Vedic society, land was neither privately owned nor inherited by successive generations, then land rights would have been irrelevant to the formation of kin groups, and there would be nothing preventing younger generations from leaving the parental fold. In such societies the constituent patrilineages or tribal sections were not strongly corporate. So together with geographic expansion there would be social flexibility.” (“Agro-pastoralism and the migrations of the Indo-Iranians”, in Thapar, R., et al.: India. Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the Aryan, National Book Trust, Delhi 2006, p.157-192, spec. p.166) Nowadays it has become fashionable to moralize about the caste system, with evil Brahmins inventing caste and then imposing it on others; but hard-headed Marxists don’t fall for this conspiracy theory and see the need for socio-economic conditions to explain the reigning system of hierarchy or equality. In particular, it is pointless to lament the inequality of “feudal”, premodern societies, as the socio-economic conditions for equality didn’t prevail yet. Socialism or feminism simply couldn’t exist or emerge in a feudal society. However, the pastoral early-Vedic society did have the conditions for a far more equal relation between individuals. In the later Vedic period, the caste system emerged, first with mixing of castes (caste was passed on in the male line, but the father was free to marry a woman of another caste, see the Chandogya Upanishad or still the Buddha), then with endogamy.  

So, not everyone is convinced that pastoral societies such as the Rg-Vedic one were inegalitarian or even the source of inequality. But in the case of the Harappans, we have tangible evidence that convinces mainstream scholars of their egalitarianism. In Haarmann’s view, this ancient egalitarianism was not unique to the Harappans: “This concept of egalitarianism has parallels in Old European society (…) There is no evidence of a state organization or domination by a centralized political organization in the areas where Old European civilization flourished. The distribution of goods and resources was organized on the basis of interregional trade for mutual advantage. Additionally, Old European civilization exhibits social egalitarianism (i.e. gender imbalance)”. (p.92) The usual AIT reading of this proposition is indeed to draw a parallel between Harappan and Old European society: both were fairly egalitarian, and both were overpowered by immigrating Indo-Europeans and henceforth became hierarchical. The OIT pleads for a different reading of Indian history, but accepts the European part of Indo-European history.

 

Language transmission and transformation

There is no objection to Haarmann’s main thesis: that the immigrating pastoralists imposed inequality on the native Old Europeans and thus created the conditions for language transmission. The lower classes imitated the upper class, if only to give their children a better chance in life, and took to their Indo-European language. After a few generations, the native language was forgotten, though the resulting Indo-European mother tongue was influenced by the native substratum language, “producing various locally-specific cultural-linguistic blends of old and new constituents”. (p.119). Sometimes the substratal influence was from Uralic (e.g. the stress on the first syllable in Germanic, a typical feature of Uralic and not attested in the other IE branches), mostly from languages that have disappeared (such as the large Pelasgian or otherwise native substratum in the Greek vocabulary). Similar substratal effects are visible in material culture and in mythology.

Summing up, we find in this book an excellent and pioneering account of the Indo-Europeanization of Central and Western Europe. Over the eastern part of the IE speech area, by contrast, the discrepancy between the homeland theory assumed here and the actual data leaves a question mark. That the IE homeland was vaguely somewhere on the Volga, is assumed here, as by most scholars, but by no means proven.   

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