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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