Hint-Avrupalıların İzinde: Dil, Arkeoloji ve Mit

by J.P. Mallory, Müfit Günay (Translator)

Hint-Avrupalıların kökenleri üzerine şimdiye dek yapılmış araştırmalardan farklı olarak, bu kültüre dair arkeolojik bulguların mitik bir yaşam alanı ve dilbilimsel etkileşimler ağında yeniden çözümlendiği en bütünlüklü yapıtlardan biri. Bugün içinde yaşadığımız dilsel evrenin tüm öncülerini asıl kaynağına dek izleyen Mallory, sadece bir kültür evreninin etimolojik soyağacını çıkarmakla kalmıyor, tüm koşut etkilerin orta yerinde 'kültürlerarasılık' ve 'kültürel/dilsel aktarım' gibi kavramsal yoğunlukta tartışmalara yeni bir ufuk da açıyor. Avrupa ve Asya'da yaşayan Hint-Avrupalı halkların bir taraftan dilbilimsel veriler öte yandan arkeolojik bulgular ve karşılaştırmalı mitoloji yöntemiyle çözümlendiği yapıt, 'anayurt' ve 'tarihsel miras' gibi temel çıkış noktalarını tüm olasılıklar ışığında yeniden gözden geçiriyor. Yeryüzünün şaşırtıcı derecede büyük bir kısmını baştan sona kat eden bir dil değişkesinin çokkatmanlı ve çokyönlü öyküsü.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Anthropology, Archaeology, Ancient History

362 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

James Patrick Mallory is an Irish-American archaeologist and Indo-Europeanist. Mallory is a professor at the Queen's University, Belfast.

Born in 1945, Mallory received his A.B. in History from Occidental College in California in 1967, then served three years in the US Army as a military police sergeant. He received his Ph.D. in Indo-European studies from UCLA in 1975. He has held several posts at Queen's beginning in 1977, becoming Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology in 1998.

Professor Mallory's research has focused on Early Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, the problem of the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and the archaeology of early Ireland. He favors an integrative approach to these issues, comparing literary, linguistic and archaeological evidence to solve historical puzzles.

One consequence of this preference for an integrated approach is that Professor Mallory has been strongly critical of the widely publicised theory of Indo-European origins held by Colin Renfrew which locates the urheimat or homeland of this language family in early Neolithic Anatolia and associates its spread with the spread of agriculture. A key element of his criticism has been a vigorous defence of lingustic palaeontology as a valid tool for solving the Indo-European homeland problem, arguing that Renfrew is sceptical about it precisely because it offers some of the strongest evidence against the latter's own model. Professor Mallory recently published a new book with D.Q. Adams, entitled The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World and published by Oxford University Press, where doubtless the debate with Renfrew will resume in earnest.

He is the editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, published by the Institute for the Study of Man of which Roger Pearson is the founding editor.

Reviews

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third time that I read this book since I bought it last year. Every time I read it I discover something new. Its an amazing book for anyone interested in the Indo-Europeans.

The book is written from the point of view of an archeologist who has knowledge of historical linguistic methods. For dating the author uses dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. He tells the story of how the Indo-Europeans where discovered, and then takes you on a journey to find out who are they in Asia, and who are they in Europe. The book also discusses an overview of Proto-Indo-European culture and an overview of Indo-European religion. Then the author gives you the theories of the Indo-European homeland and the problems associated with each theory and gives HIS most like homeland based on his thoughts and discussions.

What makes this book different is that it is easy to read and the author assumes that you know nothing about the subject and explains things very well. He doesn't only depend on the linguistics but also on the archeology and what is known of the history of Proto-Indo-European culture.

Another book that must be read to know about the Indo-Europeans!

[Individualfrog · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally speaking, I don't read toward any purpose, I read just to read. But now and again I read to learn something. When I do, though, I very rarely read a book cover-to-cover, but rather flip around gathering bits like an unsystematic magpie. I have books I've owned for decades, on topics I'm fascinated by, which I've probably not read the majority of, and certainly have never read in sequence, or even thought about doing so. But for whatever reason, I did read this book front to back. I tried not to skim, though I did allow myself to just keep going even when I couldn't keep straight in my mind the Andronovo, Afanasievo, Bug-Dniester, Dnieper-Donets, Tazabagyab, TRB, Swiderian-Kunda, and Novodanilovka cultures, among many other archeological cultures (and "horizons" in the lovely term of art) which are discussed. Although this book is written as an introduction, if not exactly for general readers than at least for newer students, the enormous complexity of the topic makes it impossible to avoid some dense and confusing passages.

Talking about certain modern readers of Gibbon on this site once, I mentioned that many autodidacts, amateurs, and dilettantes (a group which I am a proud member of) seek, when they read, a Single Source by which they can Get It and move on to the next thing, and resist the literally ceaseless churning of thesis and rebuttal, theory and counter-theory, discovery of new evidence and reexamination of old evidence, which characterizes actual scholarship. This book is a great example of the latter (and, I think, one can detect some frustration with that in a few of the reviews here.) Nothing is presented as "fact" but just something which linguists or archeologists "broadly agree" on, and a truly dizzying array of hypotheses, and arguments against them, are presented with evenhanded fairness. The sum impression of the book is that (in the 80s when the book was written, anyway, but it seemed like this will always be true) the linguistic and archeological evidence for the Proto-Indo-European people and their homeland cannot really be reconciled and synthesized into a plausible complete theory about them. You might want to connect culture X with protolanguage Y, but you can never really do it, so they must remain separate, even though culture X had to speak something, and protolanguage Y had to be spoken by somebody. The lack of consensus is emphasized by the fact that several of the theories are credited to specific, named scholars, not even schools or camps. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone has an opinion on everyone else's opinion.

Which is fine with me. I'm not a scholar, and my own opinion will never matter to anyone, so I enjoy feeling free to pick and choose my favorites out of this enormous grab bag (and I don't even need to worry about whatever academia politics go along with them!) I think the thing that kept me reading this book straight through is that I am fascinated by both sides of the story. Historical linguistics is pure enchanting magic to me. The fact that we can, simply by examining the languages of the present, which are, of course, things with no physical existence, deduce from them some bits and pieces of the languages of the past, just as we can dig pottery out of the ground, is simply awe-inspiring. We can even find, simply by looking at words and names (especially of rivers and other physical features of the land) evidence of extinct or long-since-assimilated peoples and their extinct languages, which have left some tell-tale signs, deep, deep in the dark chthonic depths of living languages. We can find layers of language revealing movements of people, relationships and cultures and lives of people gone for thousands of years, people who lived in the Neolithic age. We know they raised cattle, we know they lived near water, we know what trees were there. We know something of their family relationships and gods. Two different terms for farting have somehow survived down the millenia to be reconstructable today. It's fascinating.

The archeological part is also fascinating, in a different way. For one thing, in this book archeology seems full of interestingly abstract models of networks and spheres of contact etc that feel a bit more like reading about computer systems than anything else. Furthermore, perhaps because Mallory is an archeologist and more au courant with its controversies, this is where the theory-countertheory stuff really gets wild and wooly, with 1,000 different working hypotheses for everything. (It's interesting, as a bit of history, to learn that in the 80s at least the latest fashion in archeology was to deny much or any human migration and to insist instead on internal change to explain the emergence of new technologies and styles of artifacts. I wonder if that's still the case?) But really also I just get a super boyish thrill from Mallory's line drawings of unearthed burials--bones, pottery, stone knives and arrowheads, all those honest, delightful artifacts which I like looking at in museums. The intangible artifacts of historical linguistics are perhaps more amazing, but these emphatically physical ones are thrilling in a different, less intellectual way.

I'm sure there are more up-to-date books on this topic, but this one I found used for a couple dollars and I am happy with it. It's never going to be a pleasure on a purely reading level, but I would prefer this to a more snappy popular science kind of book which blithely declares "the facts" in that overconfident popular science way. It's a window onto the complex, always raging, never settled debate that is scholarship, and onto the still-mysterious people whose language still lives deep inside the one I am writing this review in.

[Darcey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first full book I have ever read on the Proto-Indo-Europeans. I picked it up because I wanted to learn more about what life was like the PIE world, particularly their religion and culture. However, this book was not really about that; it was mainly about the PIE homeland problem (that is, determining where the PIEs originated, and hopefully matching them up with an archeologically attested culture if possible). So this isn't quite what I was looking for, but it was interesting nonetheless.

The entire book is basically one big argument in favor of Mallory's preferred solution to the homeland problem, which places the PIEs in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during the Eneolithic period. In order to argue for this, Mallory summarizes all the evidence that was available at the time (the book was written in 1989), and explains how it supports his hypothesis; he also summarizes other people's arguments claiming that this evidence supports a different homeland, and then argues against them. So the book isn't just a neutral survey of the field; it places itself firmly on one side of the debate. But I do think Mallory gives a fair hearing to the other perspectives; I feel like, after reading this book, I have something of a sense for what the theories are, and why different people believe different ones.

One thing I really liked about Mallory is that he is very meticulous about epistemology. He talked a lot about the sorts of evidence that are available, and whether that evidence is trustworthy. For instance, he talked about different models of linguistic change, and how that impacts our understanding of the PIE language; he also talked about what sort of evidence we need to trace a word all the way back to PIE. In the chapter on religion, he talked about the comparative mythologists, who have tried to apply something like the comparative method in linguistics to the myths of different IE peoples, in order to determine what PIE religion and mythology was like, and he explained why this method is somewhat suspect. And in the chapters on archaeology, he talked about some of the debates within archaeology about whether or not you can infer invasions from certain types of evidence.

If you read this book, beware that it is very dry. Mallory writes in a dense, methodical, factual style that considers all the evidence for a particular thing, writes maybe a paragraph of summary, and then moves onto the next section looking at all the evidence for the next thing. If you find these facts inherently interesting, then great. But if you're not sure whether you care about the PIEs, then this book probably won't get you interested. Mallory does not seem to care about appealing to a popular audience. (However, he does seem to have a very dry wit, which occasionally shows itself in between the dense factual descriptions. Also, he really does not the ideas of this other guy named Colin Renfrew.)

My main complaint about this book is that it references a lot of geographic locations without giving adequate maps for me to know where they are. If you're familiar with the geography of Europe, then this might not be such a problem for you. But I wasn't familiar with most of the geographical descriptions he gave (which were both in terms of modern-day countries, like Romania and Poland, and in terms of geographical features, like the Balkans or the Urals or a whoooole lot of river names). He did give some maps, and these helped a little, but they were not always labelled with the locations I was confused about, and also the maps changed rotation from page to page, which made it really hard to keep up with what was going on. I looked up some of the place names on Wikipedia as I read, but I wasn't willing to do that for every single thing. And so now, after finishing the book, I have a vague sense for where e.g. the Balkans are, but I wouldn't be able to circle them on a map.

Towards the beginning of the book, I felt unconvinced that any of Mallory's conclusions were true. The whole field seemed to be based on so many assumptions: assumptions about how language change worked, assumptions about how population movement worked and how that might appear in the archaeological and historical records, and so on and so forth. And so many conclusions seemed to be built on previous conclusions, like, "if we assume that this group migrated from this area, then that fits with some other things we decided earlier, so I guess it all works out". In the first few chapters, I had an intense urge to plug all of the facts into some sort of constraint satisfaction system. The evidence presented seemed to be *one* solution to the system of constraints provided, but were there other plausible solutions? Could it be that we've been barking up the wrong tree for the entire time?

It just seemed like Mallory was taking ambiguous evidence from all sorts of fields. And each piece of evidence, on its own, could give rise to a bunch of different conclusions. And Mallory happened to pick the conclusion for each piece of evidence that accorded with the other conclusions and supported his overall hypothesis, but other scholars had picked other conclusions.

Towards the end of the book, though, I started to be convinced of the Kurgan hypothesis. There was just so much evidence to account for, and the Kurgan hypothesis accounted for almost all of it. To return to the constraint satisfaction analogy, it seemed like there were enough constraints that the likelihood of finding several good solutions was low.

(I also want to give Mallory credit for inspiring me to think critically about all of this. It was his epistemological rigor that caused me to wonder about all this, and if he had written in a less cautious way, I probably would have just gone along with whatever he said.)

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

While superseded to some degree by David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel and Language, J.P. Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans is fine reading for those interested in the people who spoke the ancestor of most tongues of Europe and western Asia. While scholars have carefully reconstructed a proto-language, the identity of its speakers and their geographical origin remain a mystery, and J.P. Mallory shows what is currently thought in the field.

Mallory begins by tracing the historical development of European comparative linguistics, and then examines the various branches of the Indo-European language family first in Asia, then in Europe. However, the most useful portion of the book begins when Mallory attempts to reconstruct as well as one can the actual cultural and social traits of the Indo-Europeans based on the proto-language they spoke. He shows how horses must have been very important within such a culture, asserts that the people must have lived within certain geographical boundaries based on their common vocabulary, and even postulates Proto-Indo-European religious rituals. Unlike Watkins’s How to Kill a Dragon or M.L. West’s Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Mallory does not give much space to concepts of comparative Indo-European poetics.

The last third of Mallory's work is concerned with the Indo-European homeland problem, the eternal conundrum for those who would apply comparative linguistics to actual archaeology. Mallory favours the Russian steppes or Ukraine, as do most scholars, and argues quite well against the usual alternative theory of an Anatolian origin. I felt, however, that his placement of the Indo-Europeans could have been more substantial than it was if he had worked in more evidence of contact with speakers of the Uralic languages.

A downside of the book is that, while Mallory's entire topic is based on linguistic reconstruction, there is no passion for linguistics in this book. I was unhappy to see, for example, that while Mallory is well aware of laryngeal discoveries, he has chosen to give the older reconstructions of PIE roots in the interest of pronouncability. I don't think the benefits outweight the appearance of datedness and quaintness.

While introductions to comparative Indo-European linguistics abound, there are few volumes like In Search of the Indo-Europeans which apply reconstruction to substantial archeological exploration. Mallory's work should certainly be read by anyone interested in larger applications of Indo-European philology. I should note that this book should not be approached by the layman unfamiliar with comparative linguistics, and that a work like Lehmann’s Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics is a necessary prequisite.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comparison with its spiritual successor, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, which I read last year, is inevitable, so let's dispense with it: In Search of the Indo-Europeans covers pretty much the same ground in pretty much the same way (starting with a brief introduction to the language, and then combining that with a survey of archaeological evidence to go over a bunch of hypothetical locations for the PIE homeland before eventually settling on the Pontic-Caspian steppe) and is more engaging but also considerably sloppier (both to some extent consequences of its much shorter length), and while 1989 isn't a million years ago, parts of it are—inevitably—kind of dated.
Those include relatively trivial things, like calling Dutch a Low Germanic language (actually, that was already wrong in 1989), as well as more important ones, like the Samara culture, which was a relatively new discovery when the book was written but has seen more work since, and, obviously, the greater availability of Soviet research to western academics. One specific thing to mention is the difficulty that exists in distinguishing the remains of domesticated horses from those of wild ones, or those of draft horses from riding horses, in the absence of additional artefacts, which, of course, forms the focus of research by Dorcas Brown and David Anthony that is addressed at length in the latter's book.
Which is to say that if you're only ever going to read one book on the subject of Proto-Indo-European or the PIE homeland, it should probably be The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. But really, you should read both. They're both very good.

[Skallagrimsen]

Maybe this a forlorn hope, and maybe I'm rash for admitting it, but I'd like to see a rehabilitation of the term "Aryan." It has no intrinsic connection to fascism or any doctrine of racial supremacy. Like the ancient eastern symbol of the swastika, "Aryan" was appropriated and perverted by the Nazis. It originally referred to a vast Eurasian language family, most of whose speakers are not and have never been blonde, blue eyed Germanic peoples. "Indo-European" is such a clunky substitute. "Aryan," is concise and euphonious. It seems wrong to let the Nazis have it.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like a college textbook than general overview. Solid work, but it's 30 years old. I suggest The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World as a more recent review of the evidence, even though it has a specific theory to support.

[Book Nerd]

This book was really interesting but it was a bit much for a layman like me. Honestly I was kind of skimming when he was talking about all the theories for an indo-european homeland and all the problems with all of them.
Should definitely be read with maps at hand and the internet to look up terms.
But I do recommend it if you're interested in reading about the obscure and little understood parts of history.

[Lee Drake · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't the greatest book in the world. Mallory basically argues through holes in Indo-European theories. While it ties together archaeological and linguistic evidence, it is ultimately unsatisfying and doesn't really take a strong stance on when, where, and how all these languages spread.

[Beansism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and unbiased introduction to the topic. Exactly what I was looking for.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to Wikipedia there are 445 living languages that share a common Indo-European ancestry, and over 40% of humanity speaks one of them as their mother tongue. For centuries people have noticed similarities in words widely separated by time and space, leading to an assumption that they must have derived from a single source in the distant past. For example, the English word “mother” is reflected in Latin “māter”, Ancient Greek “mḗtēr,” Sanskrit “mā́tṛ,” Celtic “māthir,” Tocharian (an extinct language all the way over in western China) “mācar,” and many more. Their ultimate source is found in the reconstructed language of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken sometime between 4000 and 2500 B.C. Writing had not been invented yet, so what we can infer about their speakers comes from linguistic and archaeological clues.

Once the idea took hold that an ancestral home of most Western languages existed, there was a scramble for the honor of being that homeland, and claims were made for Indo-European's origins in Western Europe, Russia, the Balkans, Anatolia, Iran, and India. Although there is still scholarly debate on this topic, most experts now believe it was located on the steppes north of the Black Sea, oceans of grassland that stretched for three thousand miles from Hungary to China, which would have provided a natural highway for horse mounted warriors and settlers.

Keeping in mind that everything we know about PIE is speculative, it is nonetheless brilliant speculation, with scholars patiently scrutinizing word lists from languages living and dead to look for cognates. It is like reconstructing a multi-dimensional puzzle with most of the pieces missing. So, for instance, there are clues to the location of their homeland by the trees that they had words for, such as oak, elm, maple, and willow. We know from their horse-related words that they had domesticated horses and used wagons, although the lack of common words for chariot indicates those were invented elsewhere. They raised pigs and sheep, hunted the fierce Aurochs, a type of wild cattle, and grew wheat and rye.

Similarly, there are a number of words for family relationships, of which mother is one, and from the words for their gods that they probably worshiped a sun god and had a patriarchal social structure. They also seem to have had a tripartite social division, of warriors, priests, and herders/farmers. It is amazing how much can be deduced from these kinds of word clues.

The other source of information is from archaeology. For much of the 20th century political tensions with the Soviet Union closed off the most promising PIE digsites, and Soviet archaeologists had no access to Western research findings. The opening up of those areas for exploration, combined with the new technologies of radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology has vastly expanded our knowledge of PIE cultures. The burial goods show the domestic items they prized and the weapons they used. Analyses could be made of the metals they had, to show where the ores originated, and thus to find out which items they produced locally and which came from trade or plunder.

Although the author is clear about his opinions regarding PIE language and culture, he is scrupulously fair in showing competing claims, allowing the non-specialist reader to get a good feel for the breadth of scholarly opinion. It is an amazing story. His book was published in 1989, so there has been additional research since then, and David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, published in 2007, provides additional information, while demonstrating additional evidence supporting the steppes as the Indo-European homeland

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I flipped through this book about 20 years ago, but read it cover to cover for the first time this week. There is something I find enchanting about the Indo-Europeans. They are a kind of ghost-people, neither fictional nor historical. We know them only through the traces they left behind not in the world, but on the ideas that we call language. Yet those traces are indisputable and broadly established.
The Indo-Europeans are the people, whoever they were, whose language would eventually evolve into the major European and Indian language families. They lived from around 4500 - 2000 BC, probably somewhere near the Ukraine, though it is still heavily disputed. From the words that are the same among languages descended from their language, we know what their world was like-- they rode horses, and kept sheep, cattle, hounds, pigs, geese and ducks; were plagued by bears, wolves and mice; fished for salmon; plowed fields to grow wheat, rye, and flax; collected honey and made mead; had a special word for daughter-in-law, but called nephews and grandsons the same thing; counted into the hundreds; had doors, homes, wheels, and looms; and had names for all the trees of the deciduous forest-- alder, ash, apple, elm, hazel, linden, maple, oak, willow, and yew. From the names of gods and priests we know that they worshiped a sky father, and were patriarchal. They were well acquainted with war and weapons. All of this is possible to reconstruct from the shared vocabulary of a language that can only be inferred.
The book discusses the surrounding cultures that are either candidates for, descendents of, neighbors to, enemies of, or displaced by the Indo-Europeans. A particularly interesting one to me was the Tocharians, a culture in China with green eyes, red hair, and an appearance (to the Han Chinese) like hairy monkeys. They spoke a language that was in many ways eerily similar to Irish.
I was a little surprised to find that the picture of the world the author presented supported the theory of Marija Gimbutas that matriarchal, goddess worshipping cultures in Europe were displaced by a particularly patriarchal one as the Indo-Europeans came to dominate. The more recent (but less expert) material I've been reading treats this as merely an unsubstantiated myth. I'll have to look into it more.
A lot of the discussion, especially of the other cultures, was too technical for my level of expertise and I was left with a dizzying impression of hundreds of peoples, each as idiosyncratic and fascinating as say, the Romany or the Ainu, most of which were completely lost to us. But somehow this one group of forest-loving horsemen managed to spread their culture through most of the world-- only the Middle and Far East today don't speak an Indo-European language as an official national language.

[Volsung]

This book (an essential resource in the field) excels for its breadth of coverage, and its scholarly caution: the major theories are given attention, and even where the author favors one solution as more likely than another, adequate space is always given to counter-arguments which have been proposed for a given issue.(Were the Indo-Europeans ultimately, via the migrating Indo-Aryans, ultimately responsible for the introduction of the horse-drawn chariot to the Near East; how does Dumezil's theory of "tripartite" Proto-Indo-European myth and society hold up to archaeological finds; to what extent was the PIE language group in contact with other the Finno-Ugric and Semitic language families; etc. etc.) A criticism made by another reviewer, to the effect that the book presents every side to every argument while never reaching a conclusion, is a fair and appropriate observation; however, as a /complaint/ against the work, it is not entirely justified, as it does not take into account the nature of this book -- it is meant to be an introduction to problems and topics, and at this it succeeds admirably. It is a clear-minded and considered overview, a highly readable and informative work.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes interesting treatment of the people whose language is now spoken in all its derivatives by some two billion people, from India and Iran to the Americas. Horsemen, herders, pastoral nomads, poets, the Indo-Europeans came out of the mists of history and named the world.

[Richard Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very useful book, excellent for those with a particular interest in the topic and more than a little expertise.

It's a little less useful for people like me--a history enthusiast without specialized knowledge. That's why it took me many years to finish. I read about a third of it probably 20 years ago, then read the rest in bits over the last several months.

It's actually great, though--definitely a 5-star book for information. I expect it's assigned for use in college history or linguistics classes, or it should be, because it's dense with facts, theories, discussions of competing models and the like. The author has a perspective, and occasionally has sharp criticism for poorly supported theories, but I feel like he does a good job weighing and analyzing the ideas of other researchers, giving them their due even when not fully convinced.

The fact that Indo-Europeans, as they spread into settled agricultural areas, came in like an ox-drawn wagon in a china shop, was kind of a surprise to me. I always assumed many of those areas were sparsely settled at that distant time, though I guess I hadn't considered it too deeply. Finding out that these folks were so disruptive to regions that were more advanced in many ways, taking a lot of material culture backwards, is pretty disappointing. What civilizations might have sprouted if they had been left alone? What languages would be spoken? What literature might they have produced?

The final chapter tries to describe how the spreading Indo-Europeans might have pushed their language into so many parts of Europe and Asia without necessarily displacing the natives, maybe without even outnumbering them. (Kind of like the way Norman French was imposed on England, despite the native English speakers greatly outnumbering the invaders.) It's interesting that there are a couple vectors for that, including the idea that, in good years, herders can produce a great deal of wealth quickly. That made them rich neighbors on the one hand, giving them power in that area, and also made their lifestyle, being conducive to upward mobility, enticing to local agriculturalists, encouraging them to join up. Both of these things bolstered the intrusive Indo-European language at the expense of the more numerous native people and their original language.

Anyway, those are just a small part of the topics I found interesting here.

Most of the text is at a pretty high level, though, and seems to presuppose a pretty decent grounding in the basics of the subject. Or, if the author isn't presupposing that, he does a poor job of reaching the average reader. (Me. I'm the average reader.) In parts, I mean, not everywhere. There are some parts of chapters that are very clear, informative, and full of exciting information, and I enjoyed those a lot. The tougher parts took more time but still had nuggets worth digging out. What I wouldn't say, though, is that this book is a decent example of popularizing specialized information. It isn't really. (Experts who ARE good at that, IMO, are John McWhorter and Steven Pinker in linguistics, Richard Dawkins and Sean Carrol in genetics, and Reza Aslan in religious history. They make the content very accessible for a broad audience.) It takes a lot of energy to get through this, and I wish more of it had been organized for readers like me.

Still, there's a lot to like, even for readers without expertise, because I learned a whole bunch, and for better-informed readers there's even more to like. And if you want to read parts and skim others, you might like it even better than I did. But it's not really a book for the casual reader.

[Chitram Banerjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers the story of emergence and evolution of the alleged proto indo european (PIE) language and culture. The author, in his time (and even now) was ( and still is somewhat) current in the archaeological and philological domains of research.

The book is written as a progressive unfolding of various clues and possible deductions, just as a detective novel does. But to contrast, here is no final solution. The author often bends upon some solutions than the others, which he himself states in the introduction and many times in the contents. For example, in related cases, he favours the Asia-minor theory and advocates the eastward migration as the major hypothesis even when they give rise to certain fallacies (which he is clear to mention).

Overall, the book is a nice and informative bit of read for someone like me, who is an intruder into this arena.

[Chris Godwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this work by J.P. Mallory which is an important read for those who are looking to know more about the cultures of their ancestors. Mallory initially enumerates the various IE cultures starting from Asia and ending with the Celts.

I really enjoyed his understanding of the PIE religion relating to the horse and cattle raiding. I found the parts about the stone axes and PIE burials very fascinating. When Mallory tested the Georges Dumezil’s Tripartite theory I began to see the various daughter cultures of the PIE folks in a new light and structure.

One excellent thing Mallory does is iterate through all the PIE homeland theories and the evidence that upholds them before telling you how those theories are not likely and saving the most likely theory for last. He pretty much does this for any hypothesis, linguistic or archaeological, throughout the entire book.

I pretty much droned out reading the section about the archeology of the Proto-Indo-Europeans but I did take away from it that the Corded ware people became a substrate for the development of the indo-europeans in northern europe.

I share Mallory’s assumption that the pontic-caspian steppe is the proper homeland for the PIE folk and I’d go a step further and say they were the Yamanya and Sredny Stog Cultures. I also would exclude the pastoral cultures south of the urals, because though they use Tumulus, the burials do not share the traits of the PIE Kurgan burials.

I found it interesting that there were gender based orientations in these burials though persons of both sexes were buried facing south. I wonder the significance of the orientation and the direction.

I think it says a lot about the tenacity of people of this early neolithic age culture and their wartime innovations when you look at the map of the world with 75% of the world predominantly speaks or holds and Indo-European Language as its official tongue.

I read through the migrations section quickly as Mallory laid the groundwork for these invasions in the earlier parts of this book. Overall, I have a new understanding of Language, and how it plays a major role in cultural expansions of intrusive invaders.

[Grace]

To be honest, I didn't actually read this book all the way through--I kinda skimmed it and studied the charts and photos. Fascinating stuff, though, and I may read it more completely at a later date. It seems a rather scholarly work, a little dry perhaps, unless you're really into archeology and historical linguistics.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Search of the Indo-Europeans—J.P. Mallory
American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots—Calvert Watkins

Both of these books offer a fascinating glimpse onto the dawning of civilized humankind, when skills of agronomy, animal husbandry, wheel technology, inter-community trade, and equine mastery all combined to poise humankind for literacy and the building in brick and stone our first ancient city-states circa 3000BC.

Half the world speaks a language that is descended from a single pre-historic language. Both Watkins and Mallory describe how in the late 18th century linguists observed that Sanskrit, ancient Greek, and Latin all appeared to have been descended from a common language. Linguists then determined which living and ancient languages were related by comparison of fundamental vocabularies (comprising the most basic nouns and verbs), then demonstrated how each language showed a systematic transformation in pronunciation/spelling. This historical linguistic/phonetic analysis gave linguists means to reverse-engineer an ur- or proto-language that was the mother of all the Indo-European languages. Further linguistic archeology led to establishing for the Proto Indo-Europeans a general geographic homeland, a culture, an ethos, a religion/mythology, and some general historic migratory patterns. Both authors present a sweeping picture of how linguistic archeology establishes a framework upon which traditional material archeology has been able to produce evidence of pre-historic communities whose physical remains corroborate and amplify who the Indo-Europeans must have been and where they might have hailed from.

While both authors assume that we readers know that writing itself only began in the late 3rd millennium BC, it’s important to bear in mind that pre-history is really synonymous with pre-literacy. I wish that—in the larger presentation of Mallory’s very good survey of all the theories and contributions to the hunt for an Indo-European people/homeland—more would have been made of this point, ie, that one can only know that a language existed by its being literally “spelled out” and that transformations in the daily use of the language are thereafter reflected in the written language. With that premise—that language is always changing in whatever community it is practiced—a reader can see how astounding it is that linguists have been able to look at all the ancient texts and made such a comprehensive analysis of how all these languages underwent historic and pre-historic/pre-literate changes.

While Watkins is content in the wide-ranging introduction to the Dictionary of Indo-European Roots to offer a summary picture of what is known of the Indo-Europeans, Mallory is more concerned with providing a more nuanced, ie, muddled, picture of what the evidence indicates. Archeologists have unearthed a number of different peoples inhabiting the regions around the Caspian and Black Seas, where they believe the Proto Indo-Europeans hailed (based on vocabularies that established flora/fauna, climate, and terrain concordances), and the muddle is furthered when it is obvious that different peoples shared the same sites at different times. Mallory does an excellent, technical description of the current different migratory theories, demonstrating to what extent they can align chronologically in order to explain eastern migrations into the mid-East and India, as well as western migrations that moved the Indo-European languages into southern and northern Europe. Because no single pre-historic people conclusively conforms to all the evidence, there is speculation about an extensive, overlapping population that was interwoven via trade and the leadership afforded by a more dominant, mobile, horse-using people.

Mallory also addresses in a final chapter the sordid racism of the “Aryan myth” which was inaugurated in the late 19th century and reached its apogee with Hitler. As with Watkins’ preface to the dictionary, Mallory downplays the idea of blonde-haired warriors descending on dark native peoples in Asia and Europe. “Conquest” was more subtle and usually was a usurpation/interpolation at the highest levels of a native population, which did little to affect the day-to-day lives of a native population. The resulting social organization conformed to Greek, Indian, and Norse patriarchial religious pantheons which defined a ruling warrior culture/class and a priest/Brahmin class, both of which overtopped a peasant/farmer class (which population was assumed to be the mass of the native population).

The dictionary entries of Indo-European roots following Watkins’ historical survey demonstrate etymologically the extent to which English has its roots in Proto Indo-European. Each of the 600 or so (I’m guessing) entries reveals how our language still shows signs of its origins nearly 5000 years ago, when humankind was stumbling its way towards civilization.

[WilleZurMacht · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first work I read on Indo-Europeans. The memorable portions for this reader were the excellent chronological overview of the attested Indo-European languages and their historical contexts, and the section on Indo-European culture. The tone is scholarly and considered, but not dry; although the author is cautious in speculation, neither does he abstain from it, and often grounds several differing theories in the available evidence without choosing between them.
Some of the more parenthetical inclusions and small details are highly interesting (ideas about the relation between the words for 'comb' and 'sheep' and 'wealth', ideas about what the linguistic evidence shows about the relationship between religious movements in what is now southern Iran and northern Pakistan, come to mind as examples).
It contains a rather extensive refutation of Renfrew's Anatolian origin hypothesis, and a heavily detailed section on approaches to locating the Indo-European homeland. Mallory was a student of Gimbutas and her influence is felt in this section. There are many useful maps, tables, and pictures throughout the text.
Being new to this field of study, I cannot comment on updates to the available evidence since its publishing date, nor its place in the literature overall. The edition is printed on high quality and rigid paper, about the nicest type of paperback one can find. Strong recommend.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I probably should have read this before David W. Anthony's "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language," but the time spent marinating in Anthony's jargon did help prepare me for Mallory's. Both books favor the "kurgan hypothesis" and Proto-Indo-European origins in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, in any case. Mallory's early chapters on the original homelands of the European branches of the Indo-Europeans are complex but fascinating; later chapters on reconstructing PIE material culture and setting from language, and looking at common mythological names/themes, are even better.

I'm probably doing this backwards, as some of the questions about whose folk migrations led where, and whose legacy was merely cultural, have probably been settled since Anthony and Mallortly wrote. It might be time for Johannes Krause's "A Short History of Humanity" or something similar involving semi-impenetrable explanations of clades and haplotypes.

Random memorable item, from pages 260-260: When two languages meet, the question of which will dominate isn't as simple as which side is richer or better armed, Mallory says, using the example of Baluchis and Pathans on the Afghaniatan-Pakistan border. It's all in the way the opposing societies are organized.

[Curt Hopkins Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never been so glad to finish a book. Not because it was bad -- far from it -- but because it was so dense. The archaeological sections were especially rough because, unlike the linguistic terms, I'd never heard of the cultures the author explored. If you're interested in where the languages spoken by half the world's population come from, and what the cultural elements are that define that original culture (horses, tripartition, etc.) this is a great introduction. He always uses the epilogue to address the bullshit use by dummo 19th century pseudo-scientists and outright racists of the term "Aryan" and how real science can serve as a stop on that. Although these days, the notion that people use pseudo-science out of ignorance is quaint.

[Роман Вашурин · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, in-depth introduction to the subject.

Some established interest in the topic is probably required to not fall asleep reading through detailed discussions of contemporary (with the book publication) theories and intricacies of inter-cultural relations.

The only statements I was able to identify as out of date were ascribing earliest horse riding to Crimea (cheekpieces found there were later re-dated to 1st millenium BC and labeled invasive) and mentioning discontinuities in eneolithic archaeology of Greece, which is now considered continuous, as far as I know.

[Leon O'Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a little dated now, for example he makes a number of references to Soviet scholars- long gone. The key point of the book for me was thinking about origins and how the various groups of people around the world connect, and how that movement was made. Not a easy read or something you want to start when sleepy!!!

[Amith]

I couldn't finish this book. I felt the writing to be too dense for a layperson. It felt as if the book mandates at least a fundamental knowledge of the field before picking it up. A lot of ancient places/cultures which I have no knowledge of popped in and out of discussion at such a pace that it tired me out. Gotta start with something simpler, hence leaving it unrated.

[Fernando Alonso Lakkis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arsenal de disciplinas, increíblemente desplegado, que da por tierra con la hipótesis de Renfrew. Incluso tiempo antes de la confirmación que nos llega por los estudios genéticos de este siglo. Mantiene un sano límite en la especulación teórica y evita ir hasta los supuestos que criticaron y reprobaron de Gimbutas cuando esta habló de las dos Europas.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I'd read this one earlier. Mallory does a fantastic job of elucidating the linguistics and I feel like I have a much better grasp of all it as a result. The archaeology gets a little dry, but it's still a great book if you're a PIE nerd like me.

[Franz · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I skimmed chapters 7 and 8, I found this book to be incredibly informative and much more accessible than Anthony’s “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language”.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting. I read history, but I hadn't come across this field of research before. Obviously, some of the technical terms were dizzying.

[wayne mcauliffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a bad read have to do it again sometime