Who are the Indo-Europeans? Historical roots, settlement. Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

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1 L. S. Klein Ancient migrations and the origin of Indo-European peoples St. Petersburg 2007

2 Contents Preface Introduction. Ethnogenesis and the family tree model: the problem of cooperation between archeology and linguistics. Chapter I. Iranians 1. Historical legend 2. Cattle breeders or farmers? 3. Bronze Age: Srubnaya and Andronovo cultures 4. BMAC 5. Archeology in identifying the Iranian ethnic group 6. Andronovo cultures Iranians or Indo-Iranians? 7. Problems and searches 8. Archaeological correspondence to the division of Iranian languages ​​9. Hypothesis testing 10. Conclusion Discussion APPENDIX: A. A. Kovalev. Scythian-Iranians from Dzungaria and the Chemurchek culture. Chapter II. Indo-Aryans 1. Indo-Aryans as aliens in India 2. Rig Veda and archeology 3. Indo-Aryans in Western Asia 4. Proto-urban and Andronovo hypotheses 5. Catacomb cultures and their Indo-Aryan features 6. Contact with the Finno-Ugrians in language and archeology 7. Evaluation of evidence 8. Territorial coincidences 9. Indo-Aryan heritage among the Scythians 10. Consequences for the analysis of contact situations Discussion Chapter III. Aryans and Proto-Aryans 1. Linguistic grouping and archaeological communities of the Bronze Age 2. The path to the original unity from the Srubnaya-Andronovo cultures 3. The path to the original unity from the Catacomb cultures 4. Linguistic situation 5. The problem of archaeological correspondence 6. The Yamnaya culture is the culture of the Aryans? 7. Horse and Chariot 8. Burials with ocher in the West 9. Sphere of Yamnaya influence Discussion Chapter IV. The problem of Greco-Aryan unity 1. Linguistic kinship of the Aryans with the Greeks 2. Roots of the Yamnaya culture 3. Megalithic background 4. Maykop and its surroundings 5. European character of the Novosvobodnaya culture 6. Unexpected parallels to the Indo-Aryans and Greeks 7. Aryans in Maykop and Tripoli? APPENDIX: Yu. E. Berezkin. On the ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans: some motives of comparative mythology Chapter V. Grecoarias and their origin 1. Anthropomorphic steles 2. Dancing men and the Nalchik tomb (excursion to the Caucasus) 3. Chalcolithic sanctuaries 4. Sredny Stog

3 5. Khvalynsk culture 6. Kurgan cultures of the early Chalcolithic 7. Roots of the Yamnaya (Repinsk) culture and Western contribution 8. The problem of combining cultural filiation with linguistic 9. Implications for linguists 10. Grecoarian unity in mythologies: centaurs 11. Gandharvas and Kinnars 12. “Kernosov Idol” Chapter VI. Migrations of the Phrygians and the origin of the Armenians 1. Origin of the Armenians 2. Historical tradition 3. Phrygians bhrigi mushk 4. Chronology of the invasion of Asia Minor 5. Archaeological identification of migrants 6. Nosed vessels and Nasatya 7. Middle Danubian Bronze Age cultures in India 8. Source source in the Middle Danube 9. Ethnic identification in India Bhrigu 10. Linking the Phrygians of Asia Minor with the Danube 11. The place of Phrygian migration in history Chapter VII. Greeks and Thracians 1. The arrival of the Greeks? 2. Argumentation of autochthonists 3. Choice of migration 4. Aliens in Mycenaean culture 5. Substrate or superstrate? Question about the Thracians 6. Thracian destinies 7. Archaeological correspondences 8. Identification of the Proto-Thracians 9. Ethnogenesis of the Thracians 10. Heritage of the Proto-Thracians Chapter VIII. Greeks and Hittites 1. The desired change of culture 2. The problem of the original focus of migration 3. The problem of the true substrate 4. Once again about the original focus: the Baden culture 5. The Hittites and others 6. Catastrophes in Asia Minor 7. Hittite-Luvian expansion in Europe 8. The problem of the Hittite-Luvian heritage among the Greeks 9. Hittites and Aryans 10. Summary Chapter IX. Elusive Proto-Greeks 1. Problem and range of possible solutions 2. Invisible migrations 3. The closest analogy is the arrival of the Dorians 4. Traces of the Proto-Greeks 5. Who were the Greeks? 6. Fan of hypotheses Chapter X. Migration of the Tocharians in the light of archeology 1. Under the name of the Tocharians 2. Sers on the Silk Road 3. Europeoid neighbors of China 4. Indo-European contribution to Chinese language and culture 5. The choice of archaeological culture for the Tocharians in Asia - Karasuk 6. Forest past of the Tocharians and Fatyanovo culture

4 7. Criticism of my hypothesis and my objections Conclusion: concepts and implications 1. Results and three concepts 2. Three ancestral homes 3. Esoteric archeology 4. Methods of overcoming temptations 5. Politicized archeology 6. Fan of hypotheses 7. Some perspectives Literature List of discussion participants Indexes nominal and subject List of drawings

5 Preface This book was written by me in 2006 and was discussed chapter by chapter from November 2006 to June 2007 in a series of reports at meetings of the School of Indo-European Studies chaired by Corresponding Member. RAS prof. N. N. Kazansky and prof. L. G. Herzenberg at the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Employees of the Institute of Linguistic Research and the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Hermitage and the State University took part in the meetings and discussions. Museum of the History of Religions, teachers and students of St. Petersburg University. I am grateful to the leadership of the School and the director of the Institute of Linguistic Research for their support, and to the participants in the discussions for their valuable advice and comments. I must especially thank the constant help of student of the Department of Archeology S.V. Voronyatov in preparing illustrations for reports and the book. A discussion of the chapters is published here (in abbreviation), after each chapter. Colleagues generously suggested that I omit their private criticisms, with which I agree, and simply introduce amendments to the text. This would certainly improve my writing and perhaps make it easier to read, but I would consider such a quiet appropriation of others' contributions to be dishonest. In addition, I know from myself that not only knowledge of truths is useful, but the path to it is also very interesting for the reader. Therefore, I decided not to change the original text of my reports (with the exception of minor amendments that are not related to the essence), so that the presentations of my colleagues do not lose their motivation, and the discussion does not lose its liveliness. The reader, having the fullness of the discussion, will figure out for himself which version of the decisions should be considered the last word.

6 Introduction Ethnogenesis and the family tree model: the problem of cooperation between archeology and linguistics 1. Archeology: illusions and reality. Linguists have one illusion about archaeology that many archaeologists share. Having built a beautiful family tree of the origin of languages ​​(from the proto-language to the daughter and “grandchildren”), linguists expect to find an exact correspondence to this tree in archeology in the family tree of the origin of archaeological cultures. This is so that, by superimposing one on top of the other, you can obtain for your tree the missing coordinates of place and time. If modern archeology cannot provide linguistics with such a tree, then this is seen as an unfortunate but temporary delay, due to the underdevelopment of archeology, the lack of collected materials or imperfection of methods, lack of effort or ill will (adherence to a priori concepts in favor of national ambitions of various kinds). It is assumed that with the further accumulation of materials and their more advanced processing, with an increase in objectivity, archaeologists will definitely build such a tree. That this is about to happen. And archaeologists are trying to justify these hopes. But they come up with dozens of mutually exclusive variants of the tree (there are a lot of hypotheses about the origin of the Indo-Europeans), and there are no objective criteria for establishing one variant that corresponds to reality. This situation has no prospects for a positive solution. On the contrary, there is no single tree of cultures, built on independent foundations and corresponding to the tree of languages, and will never be built. This is fundamentally impossible. Ethnogenesis and cultural genesis do not coincide. The fact is that language is inherited mainly as a whole and changes only very gradually, otherwise it cannot function. In all situations of interaction and mixing of languages, one remains the basis, and the other gives admixtures, more significant in phonetics, less in vocabulary (weakly affecting the main fund), and even less in morphology. Culture can be transmitted in parts, can be assembled from components of different origins, taken from different sources, in any combinations and proportions, and can change quickly and radically. Every few hundred years it undergoes sudden and radical transformations. At each stage, essentially new cultures are formed, each with not one root, but several; they go in different directions, and it is impossible to choose an ethnically “main” one. This is impossible because neither quantitative nor qualitative criteria can be taken as a basis: ceramics, burial methods, housing arrangement, etc. d. are unable to determine which of the contributions is associated with linguistic continuity. In each case this happens differently. Therefore, the threads of cultural continuity form not a tree, but a network from which archaeologists cut their trees at will, mainly to please linguists. Linguists do not have disputes about the origin of any Indo-European language if it is sufficiently fully represented. There is no dispute whether the Polish language belongs to the Iranian branch or to the Slavic or Germanic branch. Disputes about the origins of cultures are not the exception, but the rule. There are several hypotheses about the origin of each archaeological culture. For the most part, they are all correct; it is impossible to choose “the most correct one.” In fact, archaeologists, moving retrospectively along the lines of cultural continuity and trying to find the correspondence of linguistic continuity, are forced every few steps to stop at a fork and wonder which of several roads to take (Klein 1955: 271; 1969: 30). For selection, they can only use extra-archaeological criteria, because there are no such criteria within archeology. Only in exceptional cases, under particularly favorable circumstances (long-term isolation, or sudden and complex relocation, etc.), can archaeologists, on their own, using their own data, make a reliable judgment about continuity. Usually, consciously or unconsciously, they turn to linguistics for Ariadne's thread.

7 There is another illusion associated with archeology that linguists should take into account. Linguists know that in linguistics they have only a very weak ability to organize material according to absolute chronology - this is Suodesh glottochronology. But archeology, linguists believe, has the true opportunity to build an absolute chronology and offers linguistics reliable support in this. In fact, in archeology there is no support for absolute chronology at all. Archeology has within itself only the ability to construct relative chronology. It is impossible to construct something analogous to the Suodesh glottochronology in archeology. After all, if a language has a stable grammatical system and even in vocabulary cannot change either too quickly or too slowly, then material culture is not a system and is capable of changing at any rate, changing rates and changing at different rates in its different parts. Therefore, archeology takes all its absolute supports from the outside in written sources, paleontology, geology, radiochemistry, dendrochronology, etc. Another thing is that it has become skilled in this search for external supports, in ordering its relative dates and reducing them into complex systems, and then in putting these systems on the outer supports of absolute chronology. But these are not her own supports, and she changes her chronology when these external supports change. Such cases are the two radiocarbon revolutions: the first occurred in the 1950s, when the radiocarbon method deepened many dating by hundreds of years, and the second in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when dendrochronology columns stretching ten thousand years were built, and radiocarbon dates have become verified (calibrated) according to dendrochronology. This deepened the dates even further, for the Chalcolithic - by a good thousand years. And for the fourth decade now, archaeologists have been building chronology in this new way. 2. Linguistics: overcoming illusions. Just as linguists rely on archeology, archaeologists, in turn, harbor naive hopes that linguists are doing well. That the family tree of the Indo-European languages, having undergone a hundred years of processing, took on an optimal form and could not grow to others. And this is also an illusion. Disagreements remain on the issue of the number of branches, and their relative position (which is higher on the trunk, which is lower), and about the juices that are transferred to the leaves along them, and about the grafts where and from what they were made. It seems that these are not accidental and easily removable disagreements, but inevitable disagreements, rooted in the contradiction between the living variability of linguistic material and the rigidity of the family tree model. The family tree ideally presupposes a classification of languages ​​that corresponds to the Aristotelian principles of consistent division of the scope of concepts: everything is sorted into boxes based on a single criterion, without remainder, without overlap. The scheme more or less corresponds to the results of biological evolution. In fact, in linguistic material we have rather not a classification, but a typology in the Goethean sense: the material swarms in a multidimensional field of features, clusters are identified, and they can be delimited in different ways, depending on the selected criteria. This is a consequence of the complexity and intertwined history of human groups - ethnic groups. In nature, species do not interbreed or exchange characteristics. Human collectives and their languages ​​are a different matter. Yes, languages ​​interact as systems, but when closely related dialects collide, systems become open. The history of the Indo-Europeans, as shown by K. Brugman and A. Meillet, was for a long time a history of interacting dialects. Hence the confusion of isoglosses. The areal school of linguistics, which discovered this confusion, began to study individual phenomena, behind which languages ​​and families disappeared altogether for it. Attempts were also made to change the model of the genesis of language families: the theory of geographical variation of G. Schuchardt, the theory of waves of I. Schmidt, the pyramid of N. Ya. Marr, the model of N. S. Trubetskoy, which is close to it, the linguistic union of the Prague School, the linguistic continuity of Bubrikh Tolstov. They did not stay in science. For the most part, linguists remain committed to the traditional concept and continue to believe that the model of the proto-language from which the family tree grows retains its significance and its appearance, albeit with adjustments for the blurred boundaries and the original division of the proto-language into dialects. This is in theory.

8 In practice, when reconstructing the early history of the Indo-European massif at the level of dialects and closely related languages, linguists of recent decades adhere to a completely different model. In their studies we find dialects changing their connections. First they form one community, then, having regrouped, others, and isoglosses settle in the linguistic material from these groupings: media passive in -r versus media passive in -oi/moi, relative pronoun k ho is versus ios, etc. These are the works of B Georgieva, V.V. Martynova, O.N. Trubacheva. Instead of the dynamics of a family tree, these studies present something that could be called a country dance model: everyone interacts in a slow dance, forming pairs, threes and fours, and every few steps, almost without moving, the gentlemen change ladies. But it happens that they run over to completely different formations. This corresponds well to what archeology finds in its materials. It insists less and less on the fundamental coincidence of culture and ethnicity (as in Bryusov 1956) and increasingly talks about the ambiguity of the concept of “archaeological culture.” They talk about the possibility of interpreting archaeological cultures differently (ethnicity, political unity, religious community, etc.), about multi-ethnic cultures (meaning multilingual), about population regroupings in a new way in new cultures (Knabe 1959; Mongait 1967; Klein 1991 :). Of course, culture reflects a certain community of the population at a certain stage, but how strong it is difficult to judge. Of course, this community probably left an imprint in the language, a certain bunch of isoglosses, but it is difficult to say whether a single special dialect or language has developed within this framework. Thus, in the country dance model, archaeological culture in principle corresponds not to a dialect or language, but to a bundle of isoglosses. I am not saying here with V. Pisani that “only isoglosses are real for us” (Pisani 1947: 62). There were undoubtedly languages ​​and language families. But what corresponds to archaeological culture is not a language from a specific language family, not a cut from one of the branches of the family tree, but, so to speak, a bunch of threads that in further history can be tied differently, in a different combination, into different bundles. The task of linguists is to determine the relative chronology of such connectives (through the diachrony of sound laws, trends in grammatical development, etc.). The task of archaeologists is to clarify the territory and the relative, and, if possible, absolute chronology of the formation of these isogloss bundles, taking into account the fact that subsequent migrations may have changed the environment in which these isogloss bundles were imprinted. To apply the family tree model, only the later stages of glottogenesis remain, when it was no longer dialects that interacted, but related languages. But here, too, significant caveats are required. 3. Migrations. Migrations not only change the subsequent environment, not only expand (or narrow) the field of events. They can make drastic changes in the very arrangement of participants, shuffle them and separate neighbors to distant edges and, conversely, close dialects that were previously very distant from each other. Reconstruction of migrations by archeology is a very difficult, but rewarding task. It is difficult because the criteria for archaeological recognition of migrations are shaky, archaeological markers (signs, traces) of migrations are unstable and varied. The American Hugh Henken, in his review of linguistic and archaeological research on the Indo-Europeans, came to a pessimistic conclusion: “In short, no rules can be made in advance, because each case has to be judged by its own criteria, depending on what facts are presented, and they often very meager" (Hencken 1955: 2). But the signs of migration are diversified by type of migration. Taking this circumstance into account also conceals the possibility of objective recognition and reconstruction of migrations (Klein 1973, 1999). The benefits of identifying migrations are very great. Firstly, the identified migrations make it possible to trace the true development of society, figuratively speaking, to read history that is not glued together from different books.

9 After all, development did not take place within a certain locality, but within the framework of a certain human society where this society lived. If it has moved, then development has moved too. Blindly following developments in one area, we will imperceptibly switch from one development to another. True, usually when the population changes, some part of the old one always remains, but still it will be a different development, which has a different logic behind it. To avoid this failure, I introduced the concept of sequences into archeology (Klein 1973). I called a sequence a sequence of cultures. The essence of the concept is to distinguish between two types of sequences: I distinguish column ones from trace ones. By columnar I mean rows of cultures successively replacing each other in one area. In this form the material appears before us, and there is a temptation to interpret it as the sequential development of one population, although this is not always the case. By route sequence I mean a chain of cultures of one specific society unfolded in time, regardless of the territory occupied by it at different stages of its existence. These cultures are linked by continuity, although not always on the same territory. Development must be traced in a trace sequence, and not in a column. This axiom is very difficult to inculcate in archeology, although it is still instilled (Shchukin 1979; Manzura 2002: 245). And to identify trace sequences, you need to recognize migrations. Secondly, in a static existence, ethnic groups are often difficult to distinguish for an archaeologist due to the diffuseness of borders and the possibility of spreading culture to neighbors. It is long-distance migrations that allow archaeologists to better recognize such ethnic groups. In long-distance migrations, ethnic groups that are obviously alien to each other collide, and their demarcation and opposition appears very clearly (Klein 1988). Another thing is that the connection of the migrated ethnic group with the original territory and culture is not as easy as it seemed until recently. Gradually, archaeologists began to get rid of the illusion that the entire old culture moves with an ethnos in an unchanged form. And associated with this belief were super-strict criteria for identifying migrations: it was absolutely necessary to find and show an exact and complete similarity of the aliens’ culture to their culture in their old place, and such places are usually not found. A people rarely migrates in its entirety and with its entire culture; more often it is, say, only young male warriors or (with contacts of neighboring peoples) only women entering into marriage, or some kind of religious sect. And migration is such a shake-up that culture changes greatly and quickly during migration. 4. Family tree and river delta. A significant flaw in the family tree model was that this model included the unconscious idea of ​​a uniform expansion of the Indo-European territory by ray-shaped, radially diverging and non-intersecting migrations, like spilled sour cream spreading. Back in 1911, Kosinna painted 14 campaigns of the Indo-Germans in the Neolithic, carrying the Indo-Germanic culture and language to all corners of Europe, and he was imitated by Bryusov (1957), only he moved the original focus from Germany to our steppe. And before him this was done by Ernst Vale, G. Child and T. Sulimirsky, after him by M. Gimbutas. This centrifugal migrationism did not stray very far from autochthonism, no matter how distant the migrations it postulated may seem. Firstly, the core in the original focus remained unchanged (Kosinna in Germany was called an autochthonist, not a migrationist), and secondly, the movement seemed very correct; it was not a transfer, it was an expansion of the area. Already Meillet (1938: 420) said: “the grouping of languages ​​closest to each other indicates their original location: the spread of these languages ​​took place, not their movement.” This picture was consistent with the prevailing ideas in archeology about the unreality of long-distance one-time migrations, about the reliability of only a slow, “creeping” spread (brought to the ideal in Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1979; cf. Neustupny 1982). This commitment was abandoned by many Russian archaeologists three or four decades ago (Klein 1968; 1971; 1973; Merpert 1978, etc.), and now the fear of long-distance migrations has begun to disappear in foreign archeology (Anthony 1990;

10 Champion 1990; Chapman 1997; Harke 1998). It becomes clear that the Indo-Europeans have always been a very mobile population, that in fact they also had unexpected transfers from one end of the Indo-European area to the other, opposite. It is enough just to recall the Tocharians, Galatians, Goths and Vandals. What significant contribution does this neglected possibility make to the interpretation of linguistic facts? Firstly, when determining borrowings, long-distance coincidences are usually excluded as obviously unrealistic; they are classified as random. It is not right. No contacts can be ruled out, everything is possible. Secondly, when thinking about the prevalence of certain local phenomena, linguists naturally consider only those located in adjacent territories as interconnected entities. But those peoples who are now separated could have been neighbors in the past. For example, the movement of consonants that unites the Germanic languages ​​with Thracian, Phrygian and Armenian suggests that all their ancestral dialects were located in the center of Europe. Including Armenians. Like the Tocharians. Thirdly, how is the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary carried out? Forming its principles, Meillet understood that the preservation of one lexeme in all groups of Indo-European languages ​​is rare, “therefore,” he wrote, “we have to understand by IE words words that are common to several IE dialects, provided that they represent all the phonetic and morphological changes that characterize those dialects to which they belong, and so that historical evidence does not indicate their later appearance” (Meye 1938: 382). But these conditions cannot always be guaranteed. Therefore, in practice, in determining the antiquity of lexemes and rare phenomena in general, their distant scattering is considered evidence of ascent to the general fund. It is enough for only a few of the Indo-European languages, but scattered at opposite ends of the Indo-European area, to have similar forms for these forms to be declared as going back to the Indo-European proto-language. But this territorial distance of similar forms from each other may be the result of later migrations, which transferred these forms from a position of isolation of peoples to a position of contact. That is, these forms can be local. And from here there may be very important adjustments in the picture of Indo-European glottogenesis: what is usually attributed to the common Indo-European fund and what, in the eyes of linguists, characterizes Proto-Indo-European culture and environment, may in fact belong to a later time. To be the result of long journeys, so to speak, flights from one end of Europe to the other. Added to this is the fact that the same projection of later phenomena onto Proto-Indo-European times also occurs in the history of culture, but usually those phenomena that are common to all Indo-Europeans at a later time are projected there. Thus, cremation as the main method of burial and war chariots are attributed to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Meanwhile, both phenomena arose too late to be Proto-Indo-European. They arose when separate Indo-European languages ​​already existed. A good example is the Ashvamedha ritual of the king's sacrifice of a white horse. It is recorded among the Indo-Aryans, Italics and Celts (Dumont 1927; Dumézil 1070). It reconstructs the participation of the right horse from the harness, and the pairing itself is associated with the twin cult through the Ashvins, Dioscuri and the German Khorsu and Hengist. But, as Mallory noted, the use of horses in paired teams dates back no earlier than the mid-3rd millennium BC. e., and the division of the Indo-Europeans is now attributed to a much earlier time. He finds a contradiction in this (Mallory 1989: 136). This contradiction can be resolved only by separating the contacts in which this ritual took shape from the common Indo-European past and by assuming a close proximity of peoples now separated by large territories. Therefore, it would be better to imagine the origin of Indo-European languages, even at later stages, not in the form of a tree, but in the form of a river delta, the branches of which divide and merge in a new way (Fig. 1). A visual image is sketched in my popular essay on the Indo-Europeans (Klein 1984, but the specification of development paths there is arbitrary). And the image of the delta is not enough; one must also imagine that these branches can

11 be transferred from one edge of the delta to the other via tunnels or aqueducts. And if we imagine a tree, then with very intertwined and merging branches, such things do not happen in nature. David Clarke (1968, fig. 20) illustrated this distinction between natural and cultural development in a visual table, comparing the diagrams of the anthropologist A. Kroeber and the biologists R. R. Sokal and P. H. E. Sneath and adding his own diagram (Fig. 2). There is no need to imagine history as a diligent worker, obediently following the laws prescribed to it by Marx, Jaspers, Toynbee, or, at worst, Gumilyov. History is a capricious lady, sometimes observing the laws, but often doing such tricks that you are amazed. 5. Combination method and retrospective method. These are the difficulties that arise when trying to reconcile the data of archeology and linguistics on the basis of a family tree model. Therefore, there remain two possibilities for reconstruction, one of which is risky: to immediately go back to the origins and identify the environment and time of habitation of the Indo-Europeans, based on their vocabulary and glottochronology. E. E. Kuzmina (1994: 265) calls this the “combination method.” This is a jump straight to the ancestral people, ancestral people and ancestral homeland. I would call this the pole vault method, because when using it (and the pole is linguistics), you have to fly through a series of eras from modern times directly to the era of the Indo-European ancestral people. Because of this, and also because of the inherent errors of linguistic reconstruction, the method has its limitations. The risk of this leap is that glottochronology does not guarantee the accuracy of its definitions; the names of plants and animals passed from one to another and became taboo; cultural vocabulary has been borrowed, and borrowings cannot always be distinguished from their own fund; finally, several completely different cultures existed in one environment. It is very difficult to reconstruct a pure proto-language, and it never existed in such a clear form. It is difficult to determine its territory and area, because since then the geographical characteristics have changed (climate, nature, sometimes the outlines of rivers and seas), and the meanings of words have changed. Recently, Kiev researcher S.V. Koncha (1998; 2002; 2004a) has rehabilitated some important foundations of linguistic paleontology, but even in his interpretation the result remains probabilistic. It is even more difficult to associate a language and this people on such vague grounds with a specific archaeological culture, because there is no certainty about the ethnic character of the existing cultures, and often there are several of them in the area. As a result, today we have not just one reconstruction, but a number of linguistic hypotheses about the origin of the Indo-Europeans, and each has its own advantages and weaknesses. Which one should archaeologists take? Concha reasonably chose this method to determine the origin of the Indo-Europeans, but his result can be disputed. In my opinion, the placement of this center in Central Europe sounds solid, but the time of the spread of Indo-European speech to the steppes of Eastern Europe (early Neolithic or even Mesolithic) cannot be proven by this method and seems too early. The second opportunity is to retrospectively advance from each historically attested Indo-European people , as far as the materials allow, back centuries, taking into account prehistoric migrations. Thus, the method of direct combination is opposed to the retrospective method of moving from historically known languages ​​and peoples back into the centuries, tracing continuity gradually, step by step, until somewhere in ancient times the roots of related languages ​​unite into one proto-language. Many consider this method to be the main one and put it in first place (Kuzmina 1994: 264). At one time, Soviet archaeologists exclusively used a variant of this method, called “localist” by L. A. Gindin and N. Ya. Merpert (1984: 7) - they limited the action of the method to the territory of the current location of the people whose ancestors were being sought. As Kuzmina (1994: 63) gently puts it, the essence of the option “is to prove the continuous sequence and continuity of archaeological cultures in a certain territory with the preservation of the main complex to known historical ethnic groups.” Kuzmina herself (1994: 64) insists on the need to combine this method with the “method of ethnicizing characteristics”, which are not functionally determined, but recognizes the “retrospective method” as the main one.

12 Rejecting the hypothesis about the Indo-Iranian affiliation of the carriers of the Catacomb and Abashevo cultures, Kuzmina (1994: 222) argues her position as follows: the hypotheses are rejected, “firstly, because the retrospective method, which we recognize as decisive, cannot be used, since their direct descendants have not been established and their tongues." It is possible to move retrospectively into the depths of centuries only as long as peoples are traced by historical evidence. Linguists can penetrate further with this method, bringing together linguistic branches into one family tree and moving from the branches along the trunk to the roots. The catch is that this is only possible in linguistics, and linguistics provides very little opportunity to establish the time and, most importantly, the place of existence of the ancestral people. In culture, it is completely impossible to trace continuity in this way, because, unlike a language, which is united by a grammatical system and is forced to change very gradually, culture is capable of undergoing radical and rapid changes, it accepts different contributions and it has many roots, there is no main root. Each of the roots left some trace in the language, but which of the roots is associated with the main linguistic continuity is unknown. Therefore, if there is usually no debate about the kinship of a particular Indo-European language, the origin of each culture is always controversial, and the archaeologist is forced at every step to stop at a fork in the road and guess which of the roots to prefer. In this fortune-telling, the determining factor is often a look at national pride and political needs. For archaeologists, the retrospective method as applied is useless. As I already explained at the beginning, each culture has many roots, which one to choose? If linguists have at their disposal many branches and must (often by touch) move towards the trunk, then archaeologists have in their hands the trunk of one culture, and they need to move to the roots, always by touch, and find the one on which the desired tuber is not clear how, but only by eating him, you will see the language tree. The trunk is in their hands, but there are many roots and they diverge in different directions; which of them was associated with the transmission of the main language is not clear. Theoretically, anyone could be paired. There is no correlation between the intensity of linguistic and cultural contributions. Here both archeology and linguistics are insufficient. The Normans dominated all Russian cities, their contribution to culture is very noticeable, the self-name of the people comes from them, and a handful of words entered the language. The Volga Bulgars captured the lands of the Danube Slavs, and only three words entered the language, including their self-name. On the other hand, Dorian dialects invaded at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. e. all of Greece, historians talk about the Dorian invasion, but in archeology migration from the north is not traced for this time. Nevertheless, archaeologists still have no desire to work using the retrospective method, and only this method. The basis for this is, on the one hand, the illusion that one can act according to the example of linguistics, and on the other, the realistic idea that close cultures are easier to recognize than distant ones, and it is easier to go deeper gradually. I have more than once criticized the retrospective method of archaeological research, showing its futility for archeology in the form in which it is applied (Klein 1955; 1969). At the same time, I understood that in ethnogenesis archaeologists should undoubtedly begin their journey using a retrospective method while they move along with historians relying on written sources. In India up to the period illuminated by the Rig Veda, in Iran by the Avesta and the reports of cuneiform tablets, in Greece up to the limits of the Kritomycenaean writing. In each of these areas it is necessary to find archaeological cultures that correspond to the picture painted by written sources. Only by creating this base - so to speak, by moving the springboard forward as far as possible - can you take the leap. Already without the support of written sources. Or more precisely, several jumps to successive articulations of the branches of the tree, increasingly close to the pan-Indo-European trunk. But isn't it still the same retrospective method? And he has the indicated vices. I thought for a long time about how to avoid this contradiction. And I came to the conclusion that the only way would be to replace written sources with some other support for archeology. And such support can be, first of all, linguistics. Not only her. There is also anthropology, which has now acquired paleogenetic methods and has become an extremely powerful educational tool. Her already made contribution to the study of the Neolithization of Europe is invaluable. Now we can confidently say that with

With the onset of the Neolithic, a significant part of Mesolithic Europe was repopulated from Western Asia. And it is possible to find out which areas of Europe were inhabited by newcomers from Western Asia, and which were neolithized in the order of influences and assimilation (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984; Renfrew and Boyle 2000; Zvelebil ans Lilley 2000; Novak 2001; Bentley et al. 2002; Gkiasta et al. 2003). But since we are talking about the fate of languages, we cannot do without linguistics. Here I explore only the cooperation of archeology with it. When moving backwards, it is important to recognize that at each step several paths are possible and the choice is not determined by the archaeological data themselves. Therefore, the principle of “regressive purism” in the synthesis of different sources, put forward by German archaeologists (in particular G.-J. Eggers and R. Hachmann) and expressed in the phrase of German strategists getrennt marschieren, zusammen kämpfen (Eggers 1959: ; Hachmann 1970: 10-11, 473). According to this strict methodological principle, each discipline must work through the material independently, and only compare the result with the result of another discipline so that there is no self-deception or involuntary adjustment of the results. I have criticized this principle separately (Klejn 1974; Klein 1974), but here I must once again emphasize its unrealism. In order not to be blind in groping for the right root, the archaeologist needs to know in which direction to look, that is, take into account the linguistic relationship suggested by linguists. And do this at every step. This is also a promotion that is, in general, retrospective in nature. But in such an advance, all the articulations of the language tree ahead are simultaneously visible, so that archaeologists, stopping at each fork of their oppositely oriented tree, will have the entire language tree before their eyes and will be able to choose on their tree the path leading to the Indo-European trunk. This is no longer the same retrospective method. This is, so to speak, a retrospective method with an eye. One can expect that he will narrow the circle in which to look for the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, and this will facilitate the work by combining the ancestral language constructed by linguists with archaeological data. Moreover, he may also correct the construction of the proto-language itself. 6. Southeastern Indo-Europeans on tree diagrams. Here I set out to explore this possibility, taking as starting points several Indo-European languages ​​of one large branch, called either central or southeastern. The task is very difficult. This branch began to form from the very beginning of the history of identifying Indo-European kinship and the model of proto-languages ​​and family trees. Already in Schleicher (1863) in his family tree, the Iranian and Indian languages ​​stand side by side and, growing from a large branch, form one branch, and next to the same large branch there is a branch with Greek and Italo-Celtic; Slavic, Baltic and Germanic on the opposite flank (Fig. 3-4). But back in 1853, Max Müller, and in 1858, E. Lottner and in 1871, A. Fick, built the tree differently, putting Iranian and Indian as a separate branch, and all the rest - another, from which Greek and Latin are next separated (Fig. 5 7). Fick's Greek and Latin became closer to Germanic because he discovered the division of languages ​​into groups later called "centum" and "satem". F. Müller (1873) uses the result of this division even more in his tree of languages, the trunk of which is divided in two, and Greek with Italic and Celtic grow on one branch, and Iranian with Indian on the second, together with Germanic, Slavic and Baltic, only separately from them (Fig. 8). Still, Schleicher’s scheme remained the most authoritative for a long time. Neogrammarians switched to another model of kinship, best represented by the wave theory of J. Schmidt (1872) and expressed in formal linguistic terms by bundles of isoglosses (in fact, graphically, Schmidt’s model represents bundles of isoglosses). In these bundles we find the Indo-Iranian languages ​​in one circle of isoglosses, covered by a wider circle in which Armenian, Thracian and Phrygian languages ​​are located next to them, and on the other side nearby Balto-Slavic and Albanian. The languages ​​Germanic, Celtic and Greek are in the center of other circles, only slightly touching the Indo-Iranian circle (Fig. 9 10).

14 B. Delbrück in 1880 even questioned all groupings of Indo-European languages ​​into families, except Indo-Iranian. K. Brugman in 1886 recognized some others, but considered the main one to be the division of languages ​​according to the fate of their palatals, whether they turn into hissing and whistling ones or not. This divided the Indo-European languages ​​into Eastern and Western. P. von Bradtke in 1888 called these groups according to the sound of the word one hundred languages ​​“satem” and “centum”. At the beginning of the twentieth century, A. Meillet built a scheme for the division of Indo-European languages ​​based on the analysis of isoglosses as a scheme for territorial expansion. For him, the entire totality is divided in two - into eastern and western languages ​​- vertically precisely according to the principle of “satem” - “centum”. But dividing this totality in half and the diagonal in this case, on one side there will be just the languages ​​that interest us: Greek, Armenian, Iranian and Indian (though also Albanian). For him, Armenian and Albanian are in the center of the entire totality (Fig. 11). In 1921, B. Terracini introduced the division into center and periphery as the basic principle of division. He proceeded from the fact that all innovations spread from the center, and conservatism dominates on the periphery. Therefore, the languages ​​that developed from the central dialects are more advanced in their departure from Proto-Indo-European norms, while the peripheral ones are closer to Proto-Indo-European (a principle opposite to the nationalist view of the German ultra-patriots). This principle was supported by Bonfante, Devoto and others. Bonfante still attaches more importance to the east/west division, but the emphasis on the center is also noticeable (Fig. 12). I.A. Kearns and B. Schwartz (Fig. 13) placed Germanic with Balto-Slavic and Greek with Aryan in the center, the rest were located on the periphery (with Bonfante it’s the other way around). By this time the tree had grown. The Indo-European languages ​​of Asia Minor were discovered and identified: Hittite, Luwian, Palayan, which, according to almost all linguists, separated from the Indo-European tree very early and ended up quite far to the southeast in Asia Minor. Then, by analyzing the substrate vocabulary of the Balkans, toponymy, onomastics and a few inscriptions, ideas about the Paleo-Balkan languages ​​Thracian, Phrygian, and Carian were obtained. These languages ​​turned out to be, on the one hand, close to Greek (“centum”), and on the other to Indo-Iranian (“satem”). Then the Tocharian languages ​​were discovered and studied, which were close in vocabulary and morphemes to Central European ones, but inexplicably turned out to be much further than Hittite far to the east of Indian. The division according to the criterion “satem” - “centum” turned out to be uncorrelated with other differences and was recognized as a late local innovation, although widespread. He and the division into center and periphery were rejected in 1933 in Pisani. It was he who first rejected the genealogical meaning of the division into the groups “centum” and “satem”. According to him, the Proto-Indo-European language was not originally divided into these two groups. The transformation of palatals into sibilants arose in one place and spread through dialects from there. The transformation into whistling was in another place and spread from there independently. In general, many correspondences considered as Indo-European heritage are not such, but originate from later contacts. This is a very important point, but it was not consistently implemented by Pisani himself. In his diagram, he places the dialects in Proto-Indo-European according to their current geographical location (Fig. 14). As can be seen from further variants of the division of the Indo-European family (i.e., models of branching of the tree of languages), this division, since the time of the neogrammarians, has increasingly acquired the character of geographical stability. That is, the branches diverged in such a way as to transform into the modern geographical distribution of languages ​​with a minimum of changes. It was accepted that since the time of the Indo-European proto-language the territory of the Indo-Europeans had greatly expanded, but it expanded gradually, and in the narrow original area immediately after the division the individual branches occupied approximately the same sectors that the languages ​​of these branches occupy in the present large area of ​​\u200b\u200bfinal settlement. That is, the Proto-Germans sat in the north of the area, the Proto-Slavs in the northeast, the Proto-Celts in the west, the Proto-Greeks in the south, the Proto-Iranians in the east, the Proto-Indians even further to the east. This is the methodological principle of simple centrifugality, simple radial divergence. This is how it all looks in the diagrams of Porzig and Krahe, created closer to modern times and distinguishing “ancient European unity” from the central or, rather, western

15 languages ​​(Krahe 1954; 1959; Porzig 1954; Porzig 2002). (Curiously, both avoided the need to display their concepts graphically in any way.) Porzig (2003: 81) asks the question: “does the historical placement of Indo-European languages ​​reflect, as it were, a magnified view of the position of the Indo-European tribal dialects in their ancestral home?” And the answer to this question is positive: the division into two groups, eastern and western, has been preserved, and those languages ​​that were eastern remained in the east, and those that were western remained in the west. Anthropologist B. Lundman (Lundman 1961) depicted this principle of settlement very clearly in a radial diagram (Fig. 15). Porzig emphasized that the peripheral languages ​​(Indo-Aryan, Baltoslavic and Lithuanian) retained very archaic features not only in grammar, but also in vocabulary (2003;). But others proceeded from the opposite principle: the central ones are the purest. In 1978, Wolfgang Schmid (Schmid 1978: 5, diagram) even built a theoretical model of the kinship (respectively, settlement) of the Indo-Europeans in the form of concentric circles, suggesting the Baltic proto-language in the center as the closest to the original one (Fig. 16). Exactly one hundred years after I. Schmidt, a book by R. Antilla (Antilla 1972) was published in America, the author of which restored the theory of waves and built relationships between families of Indo-European languages ​​on the basis of 24 isoglosses (Fig. 17). The densest clusters of isoglosses separate Greek from Italo-Celtic and Hittite from Tocharian, but not so many isoglosses connect it with Indo-Iranian and Armenian. In 1982, Francesco Adrados (1982a) practically returned to the Schleicher family tree, integrating into it the Hittite and Tocharian languages, which had separated early. Simultaneously with the separation of Tocharian, the rest of the population at Adrados split into two blocks: the northern (uniting the future Western languages ​​with the Baltic and Slavic) and the southern Greco-Thracian-Armenian-Aryan (Fig. 18). Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1984, 1: 415, diagram 3) repeated this scheme, and, like Adrados, “Aryan-Greek-Armenian” they have one branch (fig). Renfrew in 1987 proposed a similar concept (an ancestral home in Anatolia), but he also assumed a model of gradual spreading of languages, so he needed Greek to split off early from the rest soon after Hittite, and Indo-Iranian languages ​​much later and from the same branch with Proto-Slavic . He did not give a diagram of the tree, but this is the only way to understand his map of the distribution of languages ​​from Anatolia (look at the arrows and read the explanations in the text, see below). rice. 21). Marek Zvelebil published an extremely interesting article in 1995 with a modification of Renfrew's theory based on Trubetskoy's ideas that there was no Indo-European language, and the process of Indo-Europeanization proceeded in parallel with the process of neolithization of Europe and was carried out in large part through fusion upon contact (creolization). Basically, his concept is directed against the ubiquity of migration. But the spread of language from one original source (Anatolia) is not rejected, only the division of the ancestral people is rejected. The final diagram still very much resembles a tree (Fig. 22). On this tree, the branch of the Indo-Iranians is far removed from the branch of the Greeks (and naturally: having recognized the Anatolian ancestral home, one cannot do without such a scatter). Invented in the mid-twentieth century, Morris Swadesh's glottochronology initially placed the division of the northern branches of the Indo-European tree in the 18th century BC. e. ± 4 centuries, which closely coincided with the then fashionable Gimbutas scheme (Suodesh happily reported this). And working with a similar method, but measuring according to the historically earliest states of languages, Ifreim Cross obtained a date 5 centuries deeper (Swadesh 1953). Meanwhile, the measurements were carried out on the same languages. And in those cases where it can be verified, for example, in the collapse of the Romance and Germanic proto-languages, Suodesh's glottochronology was greatly mistaken. After the first fascination with objectivity and absolute chronology of its versions of the tree, glottochronology was actually removed from solving this problem. But even after going through a period of testing and improvement, it began to produce solutions that were also not always possible to agree with. So in 2003, New Zealand biologists Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson (Gray and Atkinson 2003) published their version of the tree, calculated with all possible corrections and using the latest statistical techniques. They examined 87 Indo-European languages ​​using Isadora Dayen's improved database. Based on the calculations, millions of potential trees were generated and

16 of them were selected by random criterion for analysis, and they were checked for compliance with the conditions of the real existence of the tree. For them, the collapse of the Indo-European proto-language did not happen in the 6th millennium BC. e., as happened with most of their predecessors, and approximately between the years and BC. e. (Fig. 23). The first language to separate from the common trunk was Hittite, the second (approx.) Tocharian, third (approx.) Greco-Armenian, fourth (approx.) Indo-Aryan. Balto-Slavic separated from the remaining community (ca.). Etc. The innovations are not only the deepening of the age of the entire tree, but also the fact that instead of Greek and Armenian, Albanian was placed on the same branch with the Aryans. The scheme looks more realistic than the previous ones, but a number of doubts still remain. What confuses the substantiation of this scheme is precisely the abundance of corrective factors that are difficult for me to control, and the qualifications of the linguists on whom the authors relied are unknown to me. Let's say they previously removed borrowed words from the database. But I’m not sure that the diagnosis of borrowing was correct, and the deletion affects the calculation of percentages and, accordingly, chronology. They establish how the rate of change changed during evolution by analyzing the topology of the tree of languages ​​(Markov chains are mentioned). A relationship smoothing algorithm is also used to correct these changes. It is desirable that the legality and correctness of the use of all these means be verified by qualified linguists and statisticians. The authors were captivated by the closeness of their dating scheme to the Renfrew scheme, and they announced that their conclusions indirectly confirm the Anatolian ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, although nothing directly says this. After all, high dates and the first separation of the Hittite language are also present in some schemes with a different localization of the ancestral home. They simply took to check for compliance only two linguistic concepts of the origin of the Indo-Europeans - the two most fashionable: the “Kurgan” concept of Gimbutas and the Anatolian concept of Renfrew. All others were not affected by the check. Perhaps, in addition, Gray and Atkinson believed in the idea that the first branch to separate should remain in the original hearth (as in the case of the African ancestral home of humanity). But this is not an immutable law, but only a probability. For example, we can consider the second step of the same division scheme (the separation of the Tocharian languages) as the first. After all, Sturtevant proposed to consider the first step as a division of the Indo-Hittite proto-language, and only the second step to be interpreted as a division of Indo-European (Sturtevant 1942). And what? The separated branch went far, but the tree remained in its old place. Of course, the structure of the presented diagram and dating deserve attention. It is important, however, that glottochronology makes all calculations for an ideal decay model, without taking into account spatial transfers. 7. Alternative. Meanwhile, real prehistory was far from being so regular and schematic. The Goths from their northern dwellings penetrated to the southeast and created their own state on the Dnieper, and even in the Middle Ages the Gothic language was spoken in the Crimea, and the Visigoths ended up in Spain. Vandals have entered North Africa. The idea of ​​dolmens was brought to the North Caucasus from the far west (from the Iberian Peninsula and Central Europe), as well as to Jordan and, perhaps, to Bulgaria. The culture of bell-shaped beakers from the extreme west of Europe reaches Ukraine. With the invasion of the “Sea Peoples” into Palestine and Egypt, it was not the neighboring Hittites who arrived there, but much more northern Europeans. The phenomenon of Tocharian languages ​​is also very important because it finally discredits the principle of simple radial divergence accepted in the construction of areal schemes. This principle was accepted tacitly and naturally at a time of struggle against migrationism, at a time of rejection of any long-distance migrations if there is no direct and indisputable historical information about them. It was forbidden to reconstruct long-distance migrations. V. Milojčić ironically called this “Siebenmeilenstifeltypologie” - “typology of seven-league boots.” The undoubted long-distance migration of the Tocharians to the east from an area that was by no means the easternmost in the area of ​​Proto-Indo-Europeans, throws off all constructions based on the principle of simple centrifugality, and many reliable analogies of this

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Part 1. IN SEARCH OF THE HOMELAND

Preface

This work is an attempt at a popular presentation of complex problems of Indo-European studies to a wide range of educated readers. Since the early 90s of the last century, when the author of this work became interested in Indo-European studies, several of his articles have been published. Most of them are intended not for a narrow circle of professional Indo-Europeanists (linguists, archaeologists), but for a wide audience of readers interested in ancient history and, above all, students of historians and archaeologists from history departments of universities in Ukraine. Therefore, some of these texts exist in the form of separate chapters of textbooks for history faculties of Ukraine. One of the incentives for this work was the unprecedented explosion in the post-Soviet space of fantastic quasi-scientific “concepts” of countless myth-makers.

The fact that most modern researchers, to one degree or another, include the territory of Ukraine in the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, also played a role, and some even narrow the latter to the steppes between the Southern Carpathians and the Caucasus. Despite the fact that archaeological and anthropological materials obtained in Ukraine are actively interpreted in the West, Indo-European studies has not yet become a priority issue for Ukrainian paleoethnologists, archaeologists, and linguists.

My vision of the problem of the origin and early history of the Indo-Europeans was formed on the basis of the developments of many generations of Indo-Europeans from different countries. Without in any way claiming to be the author of most of the points raised in the work and having no illusions regarding the final solution to the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans or an exhaustive analysis of all the vast literature on Indo-European studies, the author tries to give a critical analysis of views on the origin of the Indo-Europeans from the standpoint of archeology and other sciences.

There is a huge literature in different languages ​​of the world dedicated to the search for the country from where the ancestors of related Indo-European peoples 5-4 thousand years ago settled the space between the Atlantic in the west, India in the east, Scandinavia in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south. Considering the limited amount of work aimed at a wide audience, the bibliography of the article is narrowed to the most important works on the topic. The specific genre and limited volume of the work excludes the possibility of a full historiographical analysis of the problems raised in it, which would require a full-fledged monographic study.

The direct predecessors of this article were the author’s works published over the last quarter of a century (Zaliznyak, 1994, pp. 78-116; 1998, pp. 248-265; 2005, pp. 12-37; 1999; 200; 2012, pp. 209- 268; Zaliznyak, 1997, p.117-125). The work is actually an expanded and edited translation into Russian of one of the two chapters of a course of lectures for history faculties of Ukraine dedicated to Indo-European studies, published in 2012 ( Leonid Zaliznyak Ancient history of Ukraine. - K., 2012, 542 pp.). The full text of the book can be found on the Internet.

The term Ukraine is used not as the name of a state or ethnonym, but as a toponym denoting a region or territory.

I would like to sincerely thank Lev Samoilovich Klein, a classic of modern archeology and ancient history that I deeply respected from my student days, for the kind offer and the opportunity to place this far from perfect text on this site.

Discovery of the Indo-Europeans

The high level of human development at the beginning of the third millennium was largely predetermined by the cultural achievements of European civilization, the founders and creators of which were, first of all, the peoples of the Indo-European language family - the Indo-Europeans (hereinafter referred to as I-e). In addition, the settlement of other peoples largely predetermined the modern ethnopolitical map of Europe and Western Asia. This explains the extreme scientific significance of the problem of the origin of the Indo-European family of peoples for the history of mankind in general and for the primitive history of Ukraine in particular.

The mystery of the origin of i-e has been worrying scientists in many countries for more than two centuries. The main difficulty in solving it lies, first of all, in the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the problem. That is, to solve it it is necessary to involve data and methods from various scientific disciplines: linguistics, archeology, primitive history, anthropology, written sources, ethnography, mythology, paleogeography, botany, zoology, and even genetics and molecular biology. None of them separately, including the latest sensational constructions of geneticists, are able to solve the problem on their own.

The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 coincided with the 200th anniversary of the great discovery of Indian Supreme Court Justice Sir William Jones, which Hegel compared to the discovery of the New World by Columbus. Reading the book of religious hymns of the Aryan conquerors of India, the Rig Veda, W. Jones came to the conclusion about the relatedness of the genetic predecessors of other languages ​​- Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Germanic, Slavic. The work of the English lawyer was continued by German linguists of the 19th century, who developed the principles of comparative analysis of languages ​​and finally proved the origin of i-e from one common ancestor. Since then, both modern and dead languages ​​have been thoroughly studied. The latter are known from the sacred texts of the Rig Veda of the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, later written down in Sanskrit, the hymns of the Avesta at the turn of the 2nd-1st millennium BC, the proto-Greek language of ancient Mycenae of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writings Hittites of Anatolia of the 2nd millennium BC, Tocharian sacred texts of Xinjiang of Western China.

Classification of Indo-European languages ​​and peoples

In the middle of the nineteenth century. German linguist A. Schleicher proposed the principle of reconstructing Proto-Indo-European vocabulary using the method of comparative linguistic paleontology. The use of comparative linguistics made it possible to develop a diagram of the genetic tree of languages. The consequence of centuries of efforts by linguists was the classification of languages, which basically took shape by the end of the 19th century. However, to this day there is no consensus among experts about the number of not only languages, but also linguistic groups and peoples. Among the most recognized is the classification scheme, which covers 13 ethno-linguistic groups of peoples: Anatolian, Indian, Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Illyrian, Phrygian, Armenian, Tocharian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic (Fig. 1). Each of these groups consists of many closely related living and dead languages.

Anatolian(Hittite-Luwian) group includes Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, as well as the so-called “minor languages”: Pisidian, Cilician, Maeonian. They functioned in Asia Minor (Anatolia) during the 2nd millennium BC. The first three languages ​​are known from the texts of 15,000 clay cuneiform tablets obtained by the German archaeologist Hugo Winkler in 1906. During the excavations of the capital of the Hittite kingdom, the city of Hattusa, east of Ankara. The texts were written in Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) cuneiform, but in an unknown language, which was deciphered in 1914 by the Czech B. Grozny and was called Hittite or Nesian. Among the mass of ritual and business texts in the Hittite language, a few records were found in the related Hittite languages ​​Luwian and Palayan, as well as in the non-Indo-European Hattian. The autochthons of Asia Minor, the Hutts, were conquered at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. the Hittites, but influenced the language of the Indo-European conquerors.

The early Anatolian Hittite, Luwian, and Palalayan languages ​​functioned in Asia Minor until the 8th century. BC. and in ancient times gave rise to the Late Anatolian Lydian, Carian, Cilician and other languages, the speakers of which were assimilated by the Greeks in Hellenistic times around the 3rd century. BC.

Indian(Indo-Aryan) group: Mithani, Vedic, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Urdu, Hindi, Bikhali, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Sindhi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Bhili, Khandeshi, Pahari, Kafir or Nuristani, Dardic languages, Gypsy dialects .

The Mittani language was spoken by the ruling elite of the Mittani state, which in the 15th–13th centuries. BC. existed in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. The Indian group of languages ​​comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. advanced from the north into the Indus Valley. The oldest part of their hymns was recorded in the 1st millennium BC. Vedic language, and in the III century. BC. – IV Art. AD - literary language Sanskrit. The sacred Vedic books of the Brahmanas, Upanishads, sutras, as well as the epic poems Mahabharata and Ramayana are written in classical Sanskrit. In parallel with literary Sanskrit, living Prakrit languages ​​functioned in early medieval India. From them come the modern languages ​​of India: Hindi, Urdu, Bykhali, Bengali, etc. Texts in Hindi have been known since the 13th century.

Kafir, or Nuristani, languages ​​are common in Nuristan, a mountainous region of Afghanistan. In the mountains of Northern Afghanistan and the adjacent mountainous regions of Pakistan and India, the Dardic languages, which are close to Kafir, are widespread.

Iranian(Irano-Aryan) group of languages: Avestan, Old Persian, Median, Sogdian, Khorezmian, Bactrian, Parthian, Pahlavi, Saka, Massagetian, Scythian, Sarmatian, Alanian, Ossetian, Yaghnobi, Afghani, Mujan, Pamir, New Per, Tajik, Talysh, Kurdish, Baluchi, Tat, etc. The Iranian-Aryan group is related to the Indo-Aryan group and comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. settled Iran or Airiyan, which means “country of the Aryans”. Later, their hymns were recorded in the Avestan language in the sacred book of the followers of Zarathustra, the Avesta. The ancient Persian language is represented by cuneiform writings of the Achaemenid period (VI–IV centuries BC), including historical texts of Darius the Great and his successors. Median is the language of the tribes that inhabited Northern Iran in the VIII–VI centuries. BC. before the emergence of the Persian Achaemenid kingdom. The Parthians lived in Central Asia in the 3rd century. BC e. – III Art. AD, until their kingdom was conquered in 224 by the Sassanids. Pahlavi is the literary language of Persia during the Sasanian era (III–VII centuries AD). At the beginning of our era, Sogdian, Khorezmian and Bactrian languages ​​of the Iranian group also functioned in Central Asia.

Among the North Iranian languages ​​of the Eurasian steppe, the dead languages ​​of the nomadic Sakas, Massagetae, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans and direct descendants of the last Ossetians of the North Caucasus are known. The Yaghnobi language of Central Asia is a direct continuation of the Sogdian language. Many modern Iranian languages ​​are descended from Farsi, the language of early Middle Ages Persia. These include Novopersky with literary monuments from the 9th century. AD, close to it Tajik, Afghan (Pashto), Kurdish, Talysh and Tat of Azerbaijan, Baluchi, etc.

In history Greek There are three main eras of the language: Ancient Greek (XV century BC – IV century AD), Byzantine (IV–XV centuries AD) and Modern Greek (from the XV century). The ancient Greek era is divided into four periods: archaic (Mycenaean or Achaean), which dates back to the 15th–7th centuries. BC, classical (VIIII–IV centuries BC), Hellenistic (IV–I centuries BC), late Greek (I–IV centuries AD). During the Classical and Hellenistic periods, the following dialects were common in the Eastern Mediterranean: Ionian-Attic, Achaean, Aeolian and Dorian. The Greek colonies of the Northern Black Sea region (Thira, Olbia, Panticapaeum, Tanais, Phanagoria, etc.) used the Ionian dialect, since they were founded by immigrants from the capital of Ionia, Miletus in Asia Minor

The most ancient monuments of the Greek language were written in the Cretan-Mycenaean linear letter “B” in the 15th–12th centuries. BC. Homer's poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", describing the events of the Trojan War in the 12th century. BC. were first recorded in the 8th–6th centuries. BC. the ancient Greek alphabet, which laid the foundation for the classical Greek language. The classical period is characterized by the spread of the Attic dialect throughout the Greek world. It was on it that during the Hellenistic period the pan-Greek Koine was formed, which, during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, where it dominated in Roman and Byzantine times. The literary language of Byzantium strictly corresponded to the norms of the classical Attic dialect of the V–IV centuries. BC. It was used by the court of the Byzantine emperor until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The modern modern Greek language was finally formed only in the 18th–19th centuries.

Italian(Romance) group of languages ​​includes Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin and the Romance languages ​​derived from the latter: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Sardinian, Romansh, Provençal, French, Romanian, etc. Inscriptions related to Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin, appeared in Central Italy in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. During the process of Romanization of the provinces in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. Latin dialects spread throughout the Roman Empire. In the early Middle Ages, this “kitchen Latin” became the basis for the formation of the Romance group of languages.

Celtic the group of languages ​​consists of Gaulish, Irish, Breton, Equine, Welsh, Gaelic (Scottish), and the O.Men dialect. Ancient sources first mention the Celts in the 5th century. BC. in the territories between the Carpathians in the east and the Atlantic coast in the west. In IV–III centuries. BC. There was a powerful Celtic expansion to the British Isles, to the territory of France, the Iberian, Apennine, and Balkan peninsulas, to Asia Minor, in the central regions of which they settled under the name of the Galatians. The La Tène archaeological culture of the 5th–1st centuries is associated with the Celts. BC, and the area of ​​their formation is considered to be the northwestern foothills of the Alps. As a result of the expansion of first the Roman Empire, and later the Germanic tribes (primarily the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), the Celts were forced out to the extreme north-west of Europe.

The language of the Gauls assimilated by the Romans from the territory of France at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. known very little from a few inclusions in Latin texts. The Breton, Cornish, and Welsh languages ​​of the Breton peninsulas in France, Cornwall and Wales in Great Britain descended from the language of the Britons, who dispersed under the onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th–7th centuries. The Scottish and Manx languages ​​are close to Irish, which is recorded in written sources of the IV, VII, XI centuries.

Illyrian the group of languages ​​covers the Balkan-Illyrian, Mesapian, Albanian languages. The Illyrians are a group of Indo-European tribes, which, judging by ancient sources, at least from the 7th century. BC. lived in the Carpathian Basin, on the Middle Danube, in the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula (Fig. 2). Its archaeological correspondence is the so-called eastern Hallstatt VIII–V centuries. BC. The Illyrian tribes were assimilated by the Romans and later by the South Slavs. The Albanian language is an Illyrian relic that has been significantly influenced by Latin, Greek, Slavic and Thracian dialects. Albanian texts have been known since the 15th century. Mesapian is a branch of the Illyrian language massif of the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula, which is preserved in the form of grave and household inscriptions of the 5th–1st centuries. BC. in the east of the Apennine Peninsula in Calabria.

In Phrygian The group includes the Thracian dialects of the Dacians, Getae, Mesians, Odrysians, and Tribalians, who in ancient times lived in Transylvania, the Lower Danube and the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula. They were assimilated by the Romans in the 2nd–4th centuries. and the Slavs in the early Middle Ages. Their Romanized descendants were the medieval Volochs - the direct ancestors of modern Romanians, whose language, however, belongs to the Romance group. The Phrygians are a people whose ancestors (flies) in the 12th century. BC. came from the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula to Asia Minor. I.M. Dyakonov believed that they took part in the destruction of Troy and the Hittite kingdom (History of the Ancient East, 1988, vol. 2, p. 194). Later, the state of Phrygia with its capital Gordion arose in the north of Anatolia, which was destroyed by the Cimmerians around 675 BC. Phrygian inscriptions date back to the 7th–3rd centuries. BC.

Armenian a language related to Phrygian, and through it connected with the Thracian dialects of the Balkans. According to ancient sources, the Armenians came to Transcaucasia from Phrygia, and the Phrygians came to Asia Minor from Thrace, which is confirmed by archaeological materials. I.M. Dyakonov considered the Armenians to be the descendants of the Phrygians, some of whom, after the fall of Phrygia, moved east to Transcaucasia to the lands of the Huritto-Urartians. The Proto-Armenian language was partially transformed under the influence of the aboriginal language.

The oldest Armenian texts date back to the 5th century, when the Armenian alphabet was created by Bishop Mesrop Mashtots. The language of that time (grabar) functioned until the 19th century. In the XII–XVI centuries. Two dialects of modern Armenian began to form: Eastern Ararat and Western Constantinople.

Tocharian language is the conventional name for dialects, which in the 6th–7th centuries. AD functioned in Chinese Turkestan (Uighuria). Known from religious texts of Xinjiang. V.N. Danilenko (1974, p. 234) considered the ancestors of the Tocharians to be the population of the Yamnaya culture, which in the 3rd millennium BC. reached Central Asia, where it was transformed into the Afanasyev culture. In the sands of Western China, mummies of light-pigmented northern Caucasians of the 1st millennium BC were found, the genome of which shows similarities with the genome of the Celts and Germans of northwestern Europe. Some researchers associate these finds with the Tocharians, who were finally assimilated in the 10th century. Uyghur Turks.

Germanic languages ​​are divided into three groups: northern (Scandinavian), eastern (Gothic) and western. The oldest Germanic texts are represented by archaic runic inscriptions of Scandinavia, which date back to the 3rd–8th centuries. AD and bear the features of the common Germanic language before its dismemberment. Numerous Old Icelandic texts from the 13th century. preserved rich Scandinavian poetry (Elder Edda) and prose (sagas) of the 10th-12th centuries. From about the fifteenth century. The collapse of the Old Icelandic, or Old Norse, language began into the West Scandinavian (Norwegian, Icelandic) and East Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish) branches.

The East Germanic group, in addition to Gothic, known from the translation of the Bible by Bishop Ulfila, included the now dead languages ​​of the Vandals and Burgundians.

The West Germanic languages ​​include Old English (Anglo-Saxon texts of the 7th century), Old Frisian, Old Low German (Saxon texts of the 9th century), and Old High German. The most ancient monuments of West Germanic languages ​​are the Anglo-Saxon epic of the 8th century. “Beowulf”, known from manuscripts of the 10th century, the High German “Song of the Nibelungs” of the 8th century, the Saxon epic of the 9th century. "Heliad".

Among the modern Germanic languages ​​is English, which in the 11th–13th centuries. was significantly influenced by French, Flemish is a descendant of Old Frisian, Dutch is a branch of Old Low German. Modern German consists of two dialects - in the past separate languages ​​(Low German and High German). Among the Germanic languages ​​and dialects of our time, mention should be made of Yiddish, Boer, Faroese, and Swiss.

Baltic The languages ​​are divided into Western Baltic languages ​​- dead Prussian (disappeared in the 18th century) and Yatvingian, which was widespread in the Middle Ages in the territory of North-Eastern Poland and Western Belarus, and Eastern Baltic languages. The latter include Lithuanian, Latvian, Latgalian, as well as common until the 17th century. on the Baltic coast of Lithuania and Latvia the Curonian. Among the dead are the Selonian and Golyad languages ​​of the Moscow region, and the Baltic language of the Upper Dnieper region. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Baltic languages ​​were widespread from the Lower Vistula in the west to the Upper Volga and Oka in the east, from the Baltic in the north to Pripyat, Desna and Seim in the south. The Baltic languages ​​have preserved the ancient Indo-European linguistic system more fully than others.

Slavic languages ​​are divided into Western, Eastern and Southern. East Slavic – Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian. West Slavic are divided into three subgroups: Lechitic (Polish, Kashubian, Polabian), Czech-Slovak and Serbologian. The Kashubian language, related to Polabian, was widespread in Polish Pomerania to the west of the Lower Vistula. Lusatian is the language of the Lusatian Serbs of the upper reaches of the Spree in Germany. South Slavic languages ​​- Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian. Slavic languages ​​are close to each other, since they come from one Old Slavic language, which collapsed relatively recently in the 5th–7th centuries. Presumably, the speakers of Old Slavic before its collapse were the Antes and Sklavins of the territory of Ukraine, whose archaeological counterparts were the population of the Prague-Korchak and Penkovka cultures.

Most modern Indo-Europeanists, recognizing the existence of the 13 mentioned groups of Indo-European languages, abandoned the simplified scheme of the ethnogenesis of Indo-European peoples according to the principle of the genetic tree, proposed back in the 19th century. Obviously, the process of glottogenesis and ethnogenesis occurred not only through the transformation or division of the mother language into daughter languages, but, perhaps to a greater extent, in the process of interaction of languages ​​with each other, including with non-Indo-European ones.

Scientists explain the high degree of relatedness of Indo-European languages ​​by their origin from a common genetic ancestor - the Proto-Indo-European language. This means that more than 5 thousand years ago, in some limited region of Eurasia, there lived a people from whose language all Indo-European languages ​​originate. Science was faced with the task of searching for the homeland of the Indo-European peoples and identifying the routes of their settlement. By Indo-European ancestral home, linguists mean the region occupied by the speakers of the ancestral language before its collapse in the 4th millennium BC.

History of the search for the Indo-European ancestral home

The search for this ancestral home has a two-hundred-year dramatic history, which has been repeatedly analyzed by various researchers (Safronov 1989). Immediately after the discovery of William Jones, the ancestral home was proclaimed India, and the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda was considered almost the ancestor of all languages, which supposedly retained all the features of the Indo-European proto-language. It was believed that due to the favorable climate of India, population explosions occurred, and the surplus population settled west into Europe and Western Asia.

However, it soon became clear that the languages ​​of the Iranian Avesta are not much younger than the Sanskrit Rigveda. That is, the common ancestor of all i-e peoples could live in Iran or somewhere on Middle East, where great archaeological discoveries were made at this time.

In 30-50 years. XIX century Indo-Europeans were derived from Central Asia, which was then considered the “forge of nations.” This version was fueled by historical data on migration waves that periodically arrived from Central Asia to Europe over the past two thousand years. This refers to the arrival in Europe of the Sarmatians, Turkic and Mongolian tribes of the Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Torks, Cumans, Mongols, Kalmyks, etc. Moreover, at this time, European interest in Central Asia grew, since its colonization by Russians began from the north and the British from the south.

However, the rapid development of linguistic paleontology in the middle of the 19th century. showed the discrepancy between Asia and the natural and climatic realities of its ancestral home. The common I-e language reconstructed by linguists indicated that the ancestral home was located in a region with a temperate climate and its corresponding flora (birch, aspen, pine, beech, etc.) and fauna (grouse, beaver, bear, etc.). In addition, it turned out that most I-e languages ​​were localized not in Asia, but in Europe. The vast majority of ancient Indo-European hydronyms are concentrated between the Rhine and the Dnieper.

From the second half of the 19th century. many researchers transfer their ancestral home to Europe. The explosion of German patriotism in the second half of the 19th century, caused by the unification of Germany by O. Bismarck, could not but influence the fate of Indo-European studies. After all, most of the specialists of that time were ethnic Germans. Thus, the growth of German patriotism was stimulated by the popularity of the concept of the origin of i-e from German territory.

Referring to the temperate climate of the ancestral home established by linguists, they begin to localize it precisely in Germany. An additional argument was the Northern European appearance of the ancient Indo-Europeans. Blonde hair and blue eyes are a sign of aristocracy both among the Aryans of the Rigveda and the ancient Greeks, judging by their mythology. In addition, German archaeologists came to the conclusion about the continuous ethnocultural development on the territory of Germany from the archaeological culture of linear-band ceramics of the 6th millennium BC. to modern Germans.

The founder of this concept is considered to be L. Geiger, who in 1871, relying on the argument of beech, birch, oak, ash eel and three seasons in the reconstructed language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as well as on the evidence of Tacitus about the autochthony of the Germans east of the Rhine, proposed Germany as possible ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans (Geiger, 1871).

A significant contribution to the development of the Central European hypothesis of the origin of i-e was made by the famous German philologist Hermann Hirt. He came to the conclusion that German is a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European. The languages ​​of other peoples allegedly arose in the process of mixing the language of the Indo-Germans who arrived from the north of Central Europe with the languages ​​of the aborigines (Hirt 1892).

The ideas of L. Geiger and G. Hirt were significantly developed by Gustav Kosinna. A philologist by training, G. Kossinna analyzed enormous archaeological material and in 1926 published the book “The Origin and Distribution of the Germans in Prehistoric and Early Historical Times” (Kossinna 1926), which the Nazis used as a scientific justification for their aggression to the east. G. Kosinna traces the archaeological materials of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages “14 colonial campaigns of megalithic Indo-Europeans east through Central Europe to the Black Sea.” It is clear that this politicized pseudoscientific version of resettlement failed along with the Third Reich.

In the 70s of the twentieth century. P. Bosch-Gimpera (1961) and G. Devoto (1962) derived it from the culture of linear band ceramics. They made an attempt to trace the phases of development of i-e from the Danube Neolithic of the 5th millennium BC. to the Bronze Age and even to the historical peoples of the Early Iron Age. P. Bosch-Zhimpera considered the culture of Tripoli to be Indo-European, since, in his opinion, it was formed on the basis of the culture of linear band ceramics.

Fig.3. Steppe mound

Almost together with Central European concept of origin and-e was born and steppe. Its supporters consider it the ancestral home of the steppe from the Lower Danube to the Volga. The founder of this concept is rightfully considered to be the outstanding German scientist, encyclopedist of Indo-European studies Oswald Schrader. In his numerous works, which were published between 1880 and 1920, he not only summarized all the achievements of linguists, but also analyzed and significantly developed them using archaeological materials, including from the Black Sea steppes. The linguistic reconstruction of the pastoral society of the ancient Indo-Europeans has been brilliantly confirmed by archaeology. O. Schrader considered the pastoralists of the Eastern European steppe of the 3rd–2nd millennium BC to be Proto-Indo-Europeans, who left thousands of mounds in the south of Eastern Europe (Fig. 3). Since both languages ​​are widespread in Europe and Western Asia, then, according to O. Schrader, their ancestral home should be located somewhere in the middle - in the steppes of Eastern Europe.

Gordon Childe, in his 1926 book “The Aryans,” significantly developed the ideas of O. Schrader, narrowing the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans to the steppes of Ukraine. Based on new archaeological materials, he showed that burials under burial mounds with ocher in the south of Ukraine (Fig. 4) were left by the most ancient Indo-European pastoralists, who began to settle throughout Eurasia from here.

As a follower of G. Child, T. Sulimirsky (1933; 1968) expressed the idea that the Corded Ware cultures of Central Europe were formed as a result of the migration of the Yamniki from the Black Sea steppes to the west.

In his 1950 book, G. Child supported T. Sulimirsky and concluded that the Yamniki from the south of Ukraine through the Danube migrated to Central Europe, where they laid the foundation for Corded Ware cultures, from which most researchers derive the Celts, Germans, Balts, and Slavs. The researcher considered the Yamnaya culture of the south of Eastern Europe to be undivided i-e, which advanced not only to the Upper Danube, but also to the north of the Balkans, where they founded the Baden culture, as well as to Greece and Anatolia, where they laid the foundation for the Greek and Anatolian branches of the i-e.

A radical follower of Gordon Childe was Maria Gimbutas (1970, p.483; 1985), who considered the Yamniki to be Proto-Indo-Europeans, “who moved west and south in the 5th-4th millennium BC. from the lower Don and Lower Volga." By the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, the researcher understood the settlement of militant carriers of the Kurgan culture of the steppes of Eastern Europe to the Balkans and Western Europe, inhabited at that time by non-Indo-European groups of the Balkan-Danubian Neolithic and the Funnel Beaker culture.

Due to schematism, ignorance of linguistic data and some radicalism, the works of M. Gimbutas were criticized, but her contribution to the development of the ideas of O. Schrader and G. Child is unconditional, and the steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans remains quite convincing. Among her followers we should remember V. Danilenko (1974), D. Mallory (1989), D. Anthony (1986; 1991), Yu. Pavlenko (1994), etc.

Middle Eastern version of the origin of i-e was born at the dawn of Indo-European studies. In 1822 G. Link and F. Miller placed their homeland in Transcaucasia. Under the influence of Pan-Babylonism, T. Momsen believed that they originated from Mesopotamia. However, the most detailed argument about the origin of i-e from the Middle East, more precisely from the Armenian Highlands, was presented in their two-volume encyclopedic work of 1984 by G.T. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov. Based on an in-depth analysis of a huge array of linguistic material and a generalization of the developments of predecessors, the researchers gave a broad picture of the economy, life, material culture, beliefs of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the natural landscape characteristics of their ancestral home.

At the same time, the location of the ancestral home on Armenian Highlands and the attempt to argue for the settlement of Europe by Indo-Europeans bypassing the Caspian Sea from the east does not stand up to criticism. Plants (aspen, hornbeam, yew, heather) and animals (beaver, lynx, black grouse, elk, crab) that are typical for their homeland are not typical for Transcaucasia. Corresponding hydronymy is also very scarce here. The journey around the Caspian Sea through Central Asia, the Lower Volga region and the steppes of Ukraine to the west is also not confirmed by archaeological material.

Colin Renfrew (1987) places his homeland within the fertility crescent - in the south Anatolia. This assumption is fundamental to his concept because it is based on the obvious fact of the migration of early farmers of the Middle East west to Europe and east to Asia. The researcher started from the Nostratic concept of V. Illich-Svitych (1964, 1971), according to which the linguistic kinship with the peoples of the Afroasiatic, Ellamo-Dravidian, Ural and Sino-Caucasian families is explained by their common ancestral home in the Middle East. Pointing out that the speakers of the mentioned languages ​​are also related genetically, K. Renfrew argues that their resettlement from a common ancestral home took place in the 8th-5th millennium BC. in the process of spreading the reproducing economy (Renfrew, 1987). Without refuting the very fact of the mentioned migrations, most Indo-Europeans doubt that there were Indo-Europeans among the migrants from the Middle East.

Balkan the concept of the origin of i-e is associated with the discovery in the first half of the twentieth century. Balkan-Danube Neolithic proto-civilization of the 7th-5th millennium BC. It was from here that, according to archaeological data, the Neolithization of Europe took place. This gave grounds to B. Gornung (1956) and V. Georgiev (1966) to suggest that Proto-Indo-Europeans formed on the Lower Danube as a result of mixing of local Mesolithic hunters with Neolithic migrants from the Balkans. The weak point of the concept is the extreme poverty of the Mesolithic Lower Danube. I. Dyakonov also considered the Balkans to be his ancestral home (1982).

The ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans according to paleolinguistics

The realities of the ancestral home must correspond to the natural landscape, socio-economic and cultural-historical characteristics reconstructed using linguistic analysis of the most ancient common elements of the basic vocabulary of different languages.

The 19th century was an era of bold reconstructions of the society, economy, culture, spiritual world, and natural environment of the early Indo-Europeans with the help of so-called linguistic paleontology. The successful works of A. Kuhn (Kuhn, 1845) and J. Grimm (Grimm, 1848) provoked numerous paleolinguistic studies, the authors of which did not always adhere to strict rules for the comparative analysis of languages. Criticism of attempts to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European realities using linguistic analysis made it possible for A. Schleicher (1863) to introduce such reconstructions within the framework of strict rules. However, the real discovery of the world of Proto-Indo-Europeans belongs to O. Schrader (1886), who summarized the results of the reconstructions of his predecessors, clarifying and checking them using materials from the Bronze Age, which at that time became available to researchers.

Using the method of linguistic paleontology, scientists were able to reconstruct the stages of the formation of the proto-language. Based on the developments of F. Saussure and A. Meillet, M.D. Andreev (1986) suggested the existence of three stages of its formation: boreal, early and late Indo-European.

The proto-language reconstructed on the basis of the general i-e vocabulary at the stage preceding its collapse in the 4th millennium BC. T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov (1984) analyzed them into separate language groups. The Proto-Indo-European dictionary indicates that its speakers lived in a temperate zone, albeit with a sharply continental climate, with cold winters and warm summers. They lived in both mountainous and flat areas, among rivers, swamps, coniferous and deciduous forests. They were well acquainted with the natural and climatic specifics of the steppes.

The economy of the Proto-Indo-Europeans at the time of the collapse was of a pastoral and agricultural nature. However, the significant development of cattle-breeding terminology indicates the dominance of this particular industry in the economy. Domestic animals include a horse, a bull, a cow, a sheep, a goat, a pig, and a dog. Transhumance cattle breeding for meat and dairy production dominated. Proto-Indo-Europeans possessed advanced methods of processing livestock products: hides, wool, milk. The cult of the horse and the bull occupied an important place in ideology.

Agriculture has reached a fairly high level. There was a transition from hoeing to the early form of arable farming, using a rawl and a plow pulled by a pair of oxen. They grew barley, wheat, and flax. The harvest was harvested with sickles and threshed, the grain was ground with grain grinders and millstones. They baked bread. They knew gardening (apples, cherries, grapes) and beekeeping. They made a variety of pottery. They were familiar with the metallurgy of copper, bronze, silver, and gold. Wheeled transport played a special role: bulls and horses were harnessed to carts. They knew how to ride a horse.

The significant role of cattle breeding in the economy determined the specifics of the social system. It was characterized by patriarchy, male dominance in the family and clan, and belligerence. Society was divided into three strata: priests, military aristocracy and simple community members (shepherds, farmers, warriors). The warlike spirit of the era was reflected in the construction of the first fortified settlements - fortresses. The uniqueness of the spiritual world consisted in the sacralization of war, the supreme warrior god. They worshiped weapons, horses, war chariots (Fig. 5), fire, and the sun-wheel, the symbol of which was the swastika.

An important element of mythology is the world tree. By the way, this indicates that the ancestral home was a fairly forested region. Plants and animals whose names are present in the Late European language recreated by linguists help to localize it more precisely.

Plants: oak, birch, beech, hornbeam, ash, aspen, willow, yew, pine, walnut, heather, rose, moss. Animals: wolf, bear, lynx, fox, jackal, wild boar, deer, elk, wild bull, hare, snake, mouse, louse fish, bird, eagle, crane, crow, black grouse, goose, swan, leopard, lion , monkey, elephant.

The last four animals are atypical for the European fauna, although lions and leopards lived in the Balkans for another 2 thousand years. back. It has been established that the words denoting leopard, lion, monkey and elephant came into the I-e proto-language from the Middle East, most likely from the Afrasians of the Levant (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 506, 510).

Thus, the flora and fauna of their ancestral home correspond to the temperate zone of Europe. This gave the basis for most modern researchers to place it between the Rhine in the west, the Lower Volga in the east, the Baltic in the north and the Danube in the south (Bosh-Gimpera, 1961; Devoto, 1962; Grossland, 1967; Gimbutas, 1970; 1985; Häusler, 1985; Gornung, 1964; Georgiev, 1966; Mallory, 1989; Childe, 1926; Sulimirski, 1968, Zaliznyak, 1994, 1999, 2012, Pavlenko, 1994, Koncha, 2004). L.S. Klein places the ancestral home within the same limits in his fundamental monograph of 2007.

The reconstruction of the unified vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-Europeans gave grounds to assert that before their collapse they already knew agriculture, cattle breeding, ceramic dishes, copper and gold metallurgy, the wheel, that is, they were at the Eneolithic stage. In other words, the collapse occurred no later than the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 667-738, 868-870). The same is evidenced by the discovery of Hittite, Palai, Luwian and individual languages ​​due to the decipherment of texts from the library of the capital of the Hittite kingdom, Hatusa, 2nd millennium BC. Since there is convincing archaeological evidence that the Hittites came to Anatolia at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, the collapse of the Proto-Indo-Europeans into separate branches began no later than the 4th millennium BC.

G. Kühn believed that Proto-Indo-European unity existed in the Upper Paleolithic, and associated it with the Magdalenian culture of France (Kühn, 1932). S.V. Koncha sees undivided Indo-Europeans in the early Mesolithic lowlands between the Lower Rhine in the west and the Middle Dnieper in the east (Koncha, 2004).

Linguistic contacts of Proto-Indo-Europeans

Archaic i-e hydronymy is concentrated in Central Europe between the Rhine in the west, the Middle Dnieper in the east, the Baltic in the north and the Danube in the south (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, p. 945).

Traces of contacts with the Finno-Ugric peoples, Kartvelians and the peoples of the Middle East (Prahattas, Prahurites, Afrasians, Sumerians, Elamites) make it possible to more accurately localize the ancestral homeland. Linguistic analysis indicates that the Proto-Finno-Ugrians, before their collapse in the 3rd millennium BC. borrowed from them a significant amount of agricultural terminology (pig, piglet, goat, grain, hay, hammer ax, etc.). A variety of i-e vocabulary is present in the Kartvelian languages ​​(Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan) (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, p. 877). Particularly important for the localization of their ancestral home is the presence in their languages ​​of parallels with the languages ​​of the peoples of the Middle East.

The famous linguist V. Illich-Svitych (1964) noted that a certain part of the agricultural and livestock vocabulary was borrowed from the proto-Semites and Sumerians. As an example of Proto-Semitic borrowings, the researcher named the words: tauro - bull, gait - goat, agno - lamb, bar - grain, cereal, dehno - bread, grain, kern - millstone, medu - honey, sweet, sekur - axe, nahu - vessel , ship, haster - star, septm - seven, klau - key, etc. According to V. Illich-Svitych, the following words were borrowed from the Sumerian language: kou - cow, reud - ore, auesk - gold, akro - cornfield, duer – doors, hkor – mountains, etc. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 272–276).

However, especially a lot of agricultural and livestock terminology, names of food products, and household items were borrowed from the Prakhatti and Prahurites, whose ancestral homeland is located in Anatolia and in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. S. A. Starostin (1988, pp. 112–163) believes that the roots of klau, medu, akgo, bar and some others given by V. Illich-Svitych are not at all Proto-Semitic or Sumerian, but Hatto-Huritic. In addition, he provides numerous examples of Hatto-Huritic vocabulary in both languages. Here are just a few of them: ekuo - horse, kago - goat, porko - pig, hvelena - wave, ouig - oats, hag - berry, rughio - rye, lino - flion, kulo - stake, list, gueran - millstone, sel - village, dholo - valley, arho - open space, area, tuer - cottage cheese, sur - cheese, bhar - barley, penkue - five and many others. Analysis of these linguistic borrowings indicates that they occurred in the process of direct contacts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the more developed Prahatto-Hurites no later than the 5th millennium BC. (Starostin, 1988, pp. 112–113, 152–154).

The nature of all these expressive linguistic parallels between the Proto-Indo-European, on the one hand, and the Proto-Ugro-Finnish, Proto-Kartvelian, languages ​​of the mentioned peoples of the Middle East, on the other, indicates that they are a consequence of close contacts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with these peoples. That is, the sought-after ancestral homeland had to be located somewhere between the homelands of these ethnic groups, which makes it possible to more accurately localize it. It is known that the ancestral home of the Finno-Ugric peoples is the forest-steppe between the Don and the Urals, and the Kartvelians are the Central Caucasus. Regarding the mentioned Middle Eastern borrowings in other languages, their source, in our opinion, could be the Balkan-Danube Neolithic, including the bearers of the Trypillian culture of Right Bank Ukraine. After all, the Neolithic colonization of the Balkans and Danube region took place in the 7th - 6th millennium BC. from Asia Minor, the homeland of the Hatto-Hurites.

Analysis of modern versions of the ancestral home

In our time, five regions claim the honorable right to be called their ancestral home: Central Europe between the Rhine and the Vistula (I. Geiger, G. Hirt, G. Kosinna, P. Bosch-Zimpera, G. Devoto), the Middle East (T. Gamkrelidze, V. Ivanov, K. Renfrew), the Balkans (B. Gornung, V. Georgiev, I. Dyakonov) and the forest-steppe and steppe zones between the Dniester and Volga (O. Schrader, G. Child, T. Sulimirsky, V. Danilenko , M. Gimbutas, D. Mallory, D. Anthony, Y. Pavlenko). Some researchers combine Central Europe with the Eastern European steppes up to the Volga into their ancestral home (A. Heusler, L. Zaliznyak, S. Koncha). Which of these versions is more plausible?

Origin concept Central Europe(lands between the Rhine, Vistula and Upper Danube) was especially popular at the end of the 19th - in the first half of the 20th century. As noted, its founders were L. Geiger, G. Hirt, G. Kosinna.

The constructions of the mentioned German researchers are based on the coincidence of the natural and climatic realities of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with the nature and temperate climate of Central Europe, as well as the Northern European appearance of the early I-e (Fig. 6). Also important is the fact that the main area of ​​hydronymy coincides with the territories of several archaeological cultures. This refers to the cultures of linear-band ceramics, funnel-shaped beakers, spherical amphorae, and corded ceramics, which from the 6th to 2nd millennium BC. successively replaced each other in the indicated territories of Central Europe.

No one now doubts the Indo-European nature of the Corded Ware cultures. Their genetic predecessors were the Funnel Beaker and Globular Amphorae cultures. However, there is no reason to call the culture of linear band ceramics Indo-European, since it lacks the defining features reconstructed by linguists: the pastoral direction of the economy, the dominance of men in society, the warlike nature of the latter - the presence of a military elite, fortresses, the cult of war, weapons, war chariots, horse, sun, fire, etc. The bearers of the traditions of the linear-band ceramics culture, in our opinion, belonged to the Neolithic circle of the Balkans, the non-Indo-European nature of which is recognized by most researchers.

The location of the ancestral home in Central Europe is hampered by the presence in the I-e languages ​​of traces of close linguistic contacts with the Proto-Kartvelians of the Caucasus and the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland was the forest-steppe between the Don and the Southern Urals. If the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in Central Europe, then how could they have contacted the inhabitants of the Caucasus and Transdon?

Most modern scientists consider Central Europe to be the birthplace of the Corded Cultures of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, whose bearers were the ancestors of the northern branches of the Ie: Celts, Germans, Balts, Slavs. However, Central Europe could not be the homeland of all I-e peoples because the southern I-e (Illyrians, Phrygians, Greeks, Hittites, Italics, Armenians), as well as the eastern (Indo-Iranians) cannot be derived from the Corded People either linguistically or archaeologically . In addition, in the forest-steppes and steppes of Ukraine, the i-e appeared earlier than the most ancient corded people - no later than the end of the 5th millennium BC. (Sredny Stog residents).

Near East it also could not have been its ancestral home, because here was the homeland of non-Indo-European ethnic groups: the Hattic, Khuritian, Elamite, Afroasiatic linguistic communities. Mapping of the I-e languages ​​shows that this region was the southern periphery of their ecumene. The Hittites, Luwians, Palayans, Phrygians, and Armenians appeared here quite late - in the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, that is, after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European language in the 4th millennium BC. Unlike Europe, there is almost no hydronymy here.

The cold continental climate of the ancestral home with frosty snowy winters does not correspond to the realities of the Middle East. Almost half of the plants and animals that appear in the language are missing here (aspen, hornbeam, linden, heather, beaver, black grouse, lynx, etc.). On the other hand, the I-E dictionary does not contain the names of typical representatives of the Middle Eastern fauna and flora (cypress, cedar, etc.). As for the lion, leopard, monkey and elephant, their names turned out to be borrowed from Proto-Semitic. If these animals were typical of their ancestral home, then why was it necessary to borrow them from their southern neighbors? Proto-Indo-Europeans could not live in the Middle East because the strong influence of their language can be traced to the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland is located too far north of the Middle East, which excludes the possibility of contacts with them.

Assuming that both happen to Balkan, we will ignore their linguistic connections not only with the Finno-Ugric peoples, but also with the Kartvelians of the Caucasus. It is impossible to remove their eastern branch, the Indo-Iranians, from the Balkans. This is contradicted by data from both archeology and linguistics. Both hydronyms are known only in the north of the Balkans. Most of them are distributed to the north, between the Rhine and the Dnieper. The hypothesis about the origin of the i-e from the Balkan Neolithic farmers is also contradicted by the fact that the appearance of the first i-e on the historical arena in the 4th–3rd millennium BC. e. coincided with the aridization of the climate, the separation of cattle breeding into a separate industry and its spread across the vast expanses of Eurasia, and, finally, with the collapse of the agricultural Neolithic itself in the Balkans and Danube region. What gives grounds for some researchers to consider the Balkan Peninsula as their ancestral home?

The famous researcher Colin Renfrew rightly believes that the grandiose linguistic phenomenon of the spread of languages ​​must be met by an equally large-scale socio-economic process. According to the scientist, such a global phenomenon in primitive history was the neolithization of Europe. This refers to the settlement of ancient farmers and livestock breeders from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe.

A reasoned criticism of K. Renfrew's attempts to derive i-e from the Middle East from the standpoint of new genetic research was given by R. Solaris (1998, p. 128, 129). Biomolecular analysis of paleoanthropological and paleozoological remains demonstrates the correspondence of genome changes between Europeans and domesticated animals of Near Eastern origin. This strongly suggests that Europe was colonized by Neolithic populations from the Middle East. However, substrate phenomena in Greek and other i-e languages ​​indicate that i-e came to the Balkans after they were explored by Neolithic colonists from Anatolia. The genetic kinship of the peoples of the Nostratic family of languages ​​of Eurasia is explained, according to R. Sollaris (1988, p. 132), by the existence of common ancestors of the population of Eurasia, who settled from the Western Mediterranean to the west and east at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic 40 thousand years ago.

The fact that the “surplus” of the early agricultural population flowed from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe is beyond doubt. However, was it Indo-European? After all, archeology shows that from the first centers of the productive economy in the south of Anatolia, in Syria, Palestine, in the Zagrosu Mountains, it was not the Elamite, the Hattian, the Huritian, the Sumerian and the Afrasian communities that grew up. It is in the latter that the material and spiritual culture and economy of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans have direct parallels. Their anthropological type is close to the type of Neolithic inhabitants of the Middle East and differs significantly from the anthropology of the first reliable Indo-Europeans who lived in the 4th millennium BC. e. in Central Europe (Corded Ware culture) and in the forest-steppes between the Dnieper and Volga (Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures). If the Neolithic population of the Balkans and the Middle East was a bearer of the southern European or Mediterranean anthropological type (gracile, short Caucasians), then the mentioned Indo-Europeans were massive, tall northern Caucasians (Potekhina 1992) (Fig. 6). Clay figurines from the Balkans depict people with large noses of a specific shape (Zaliznyak, 1994, p. 85), which are an important defining feature of the Eastern Mediterranean anthropological type, according to V.P. Alekseev (1974, pp. 224, 225).

The direct descendant of the Neolithic proto-civilization of the Balkans was the Minoan civilization, which formed on the island of Crete around 2000 BC. According to M. Gimbutas, the Minoan linear letter “A” comes from the sign system of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans of the 4th millennium BC. e. Attempts to decipher the texts of the Minoans showed that their language belongs to the Semitic group (Gimbutas 1985; Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 912, 968; Renfrew 1987, p.50). Since the Minoans were descendants of the Balkan Neolithic, the latter could not possibly be Indo-European. Both archaeologists and linguists came to the conclusion that before the appearance of the first i-e in Greece in the 2nd millennium BC. e. non-Indo-European tribes lived here.

Thus, culturally, linguistically, anthropologically and genetically, the Balkan Neolithic was closely related to the non-Indo-European Neolithic proto-civilization of the Middle East. It seems that the mentioned significant number of agricultural terms of Middle Eastern origin in the I-e languages ​​is explained by the intense cultural influence of Balkan farmers, genetically related to the Middle East, on the ancestors of the I-e - the aborigines of Central and southern Eastern Europe.

Steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans

The most well-reasoned and popular in our time versions of the location of the ancestral homeland of the I-e peoples include the steppe version, according to which the I-e originated in the steppes between the Dniester, the Lower Volga and the Caucasus. Its founders were the aforementioned O. Schrader (1886) and G. Child (1926, 1950), who at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. expressed the idea that the first impetus for the Indo-Europeanization of Eurasia came from the ancient pastoralists of the Northern Black Sea steppes and forest-steppes. Later, this hypothesis was fundamentally substantiated and developed by T. Sulimirsky (1968), V. Danilenko (1969; 1974), M. Gimbutas (1970; 1985), D. Mallory (1989), D. Anthony (1991). Its supporter was Yu. Pavlenko (1994).

According to this version, the oldest i-e were formed in the south of Ukraine as a result of complex historical processes that led to the separation of cattle breeding into a separate branch of the primitive economy. Due to the long-term agrarian colonization of the Balkans and Danube region by Middle Eastern hoe farmers, the reserves of hoe farming in Central Europe were exhausted. Further expansion of the reproducing economy in the steppe and forest zones required an increase in the role of cattle breeding. This was facilitated by the progressive aridization of the climate, which led to a crisis in the agricultural economy of the Balkans and Danube region, while at the same time creating favorable conditions for the spread of various forms of livestock farming. This was also facilitated by the clearing of deciduous forests of Central Europe and Right Bank Ukraine by Neolithic farmers in the 4th-5th millennium BC. e., since wastelands on the site of former fields became potential pastures.

Neolithic hoe farmers grazed their few animals near villages. When the harvest ripened, they were driven away from the crops. Thus, the oldest transhumance form of cattle breeding arose. It is common for her to graze animals in the summer on pastures remote from permanent settlements. It was this ancient type of cattle breeding that made it possible for societies with a reproducing economy to colonize not only the Eurasian steppes, but also to move into the forests of central Europe.

The separation of cattle breeding from the ancient mixed agricultural and livestock economy of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic into a separate industry began in the south of Ukraine, on the border of the fertile black soils of the Right Bank of the Dnieper occupied by hoe farmers and the Eurasian steppes, which from that time became the home of mobile and warlike pastoral peoples. Thus, in the 4th millennium BC. e. the territory of Ukraine became the border between the sedentary, peace-loving farmers of the Danube region and the mobile, warlike pastoralists of the Eurasian steppes.

It was in the south of Ukraine that the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and Danube region, through its northeastern outpost - the Trypillian culture - directly influenced the ancestors of the most ancient pastoralists - Mesolithic and Neolithic hunters and fishermen of the forest-steppes of the Dnieper and Seversky Donets basins. The latter received from the Balkan-Danube descendants of the ancient farmers and pastoralists of the Middle East not only the skills of reproducing farming, but also Middle Eastern agricultural terminology, traced by linguists in other languages ​​(Illich-Svitych 1964; 1971; Starostin, 1988). The localization of the first shepherds-pastoralists in the steppes and forest-steppes between the Dniester, Lower Don and Kuban is in good agreement with the three main directions of Proto-Indo-European linguistic contacts. In the west they directly bordered with the speakers of agricultural vocabulary of Middle Eastern origin (Trypillians), in the northeast - Finno-Ugric, and in the southeast - Kartvelian vocabulary of the Caucasus (Fig. 2).

M. Gimbutas placed the birthplace of cattle breeding and its first carriers in the Middle Volga region, which is difficult to agree with. After all, cattle breeding was born from complex hoe farming in the process of separation into an independent branch of the economy. That is, this could only happen if the first pastoralists had direct and close contacts with large agrarian communities, such as the early agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and Danube region.

There was nothing like this in the Volga region. The nearest center of agriculture lay 800 km south of the Middle Volga region behind the Great Caucasus Range in the basins of the Kura and Araks rivers. If the first pastoralists had borrowed the productive economy along with agricultural terminology from there, then the latter would have been mainly Kartvelian. However, a significant number of common Indo-European pastoral and agricultural terms are not of Caucasian, but of Anatolian origin. Thus, they were directly borrowed by the Proto-Indo-Europeans from the Neolithic population of the Balkans and Danube - the direct descendants of the Neolithic colonists from Anatolia, most likely the Proto-Hurites.

The cattle-breeding skills acquired from the Trypillians took root and quickly developed into a separate industry in the favorable conditions of the steppes and forest-steppes of Left Bank Ukraine. Herds of cows and flocks of sheep moved intensively in search of pastures, which required pastoralists to live an active lifestyle. This stimulated the rapid spread of wheeled transport, domestication in the 4th millennium BC. e. horses, which, together with bulls, were used as draft animals. The constant search for pastures led to military clashes with neighbors, which militarized society. Pastoral farming turned out to be very productive. One shepherd was tending a flock that could feed many people. In conditions of constant conflicts over pastures and cows, the surplus of male labor was transformed into professional warriors.

Among pastoralists, unlike farmers, it was not a woman, but a man who became the main figure in the family and community, since all life support lay with the shepherds and warriors. The possibility of accumulating livestock in one hand created the conditions for property differentiation of society. A military elite appears. The militarization of society determined the construction of ancient fortresses, the spread of the cults of the supreme god of the warrior and shepherd, the war chariot, weapons, horses, the sun-wheel (swastika), and fire.

Rice. 7. Yamnaya pottery (1-4), as well as dishes and war hammers (vajras) of the Catacomb cultures of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC. South of Ukraine. Catacomb vessels and axes - Ingul culture

These ancient pastoralists of the south of Eastern Europe of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. were not yet real nomads who spent their entire lives on horseback or on a cart in constant migrations for herds and herds of animals. Nomadism, as a way of nomadic life and a developed form of pastoral economy, was finally formed in the steppes only at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. The basis of the economy of the steppes of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. there was less mobile transhumance. It provided for more or less settled living of women and children in permanent settlements in river valleys, where they grew barley, wheat, raised pigs, goats, and fished. The male population spent more and more time with herds of cows, sheep and horses on the summer steppe pastures. In the spring, the animals, accompanied by shepherds and armed guards, were driven far into the steppe and only returned home for the winter in the fall. This semi-sedentary way of life quickly acquired more and more mobile forms due to the increasing role of cattle breeding.

These early semi-nomadic pastoralists left few settlements, but a large number of burial mounds. Especially many of them were poured by the pitmen (hundreds of thousands) in the 3rd millennium BC. e. Archaeologists recognize them by the so-called steppe burial complex. Its most important elements are the burial mound, placing the deceased in a burial pit in a crouched position, and filling the buried person with red ocher powder. Rough clay pots, often decorated with cord marks and impalations, and weapons (stone war hammers and maces) were placed in the grave (Fig. 7). Wheels were placed in the corners of the pit, symbolizing the funeral cart, and often its parts (Fig. 4). Stone anthropomorphic steles are found in the mounds, which depict a tribal patriarch with the corresponding attributes of a warrior leader and a shepherd (Fig. 8). An important feature of the first and southern Ukraine is the domestication of the horse, traces of which can be traced in the forest-steppe Dnieper region from the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. (Telegin 1973).

The unprecedented scale of settlement of the ancient I-e from the south of Ukraine to the endless steppe expanses to the Middle Danube in the west and to Altai in the east is explained by the pastoral economy, the spread of wheeled transport - carts and war chariots (Fig. 9), draft animals (bull, horse) , and later horsemanship, which determined the mobile way of life, militancy and the grandiose scale of expansion of the early I-e (Fig. 2).

From Rhine to Donets

However, limiting the I-e ancestral home to only the steppes and forest-steppes of Ukraine does not explain why the main body of the most ancient I-e hydronymics lies in Central Europe between the Rhine and the Dnieper. Such natural realities as mountains, swamps, the spread of aspen, beech, yew, heather, beavers, black grouse, etc. also do not fit with the south of Ukraine. These elements of the natural environment are more typical for the temperate and cool climate of Central Europe than for the sultry steppes of the Black Sea region. And the northern European appearance of the first i-e, as evidenced by the most ancient written sources, does not fit with the Black Sea region.

These contradictions are resolved if we assume the existence of a single ethnocultural substrate between the Lower Rhine and the Donets, on which in the 5th-4th millennium BC. The ancient Indo-Europeans of the Black Sea region and Central Europe began to form. Such a substrate began to emerge in the last third of the 20th century. during studies of Mesolithic monuments in the North German, Polish, Polesie lowlands, in the Neman and Donets basins.

The Central European lowlands, which stretch from the Thames basin through northern Germany, Poland, Polesie to the Middle Dnieper, from the final Paleolithic until the Middle Ages, were a kind of corridor through which migration waves rolled from west to east. The reindeer hunters of the Lingby culture were the first to travel this route from Jutland to the Dnieper 12 thousand years ago (Fig. 10). They settled the Central European lowlands that had just been liberated from the glacier, giving rise to related cultures of reindeer hunters of the last millennium of the Ice Age: Arensburg of Northern Germany, Svider and Krasnoselye of the Vistula, Neman, Pripyat, Upper Dnieper basins.

Rice. 10. Map of the distribution of monuments of the Bromme-Lingby type, about 11 thousand years ago. back. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p.45) Conventional signs: 1- sites of the Lingbi culture, 2- locations of the Lingbi tips, 3- directions of migration of the population of the Lingbi culture, 4- southern and eastern border of the outwash lowlands.

The Mesolithic of the Central European Lowlands began with a new wave of settlers to the east, which led to the formation of the Duvensi cultural region. It includes the related Early Mesolithic cultures of Star Car of England, Duvensey of Germany, Klosterlund of Denmark, Komornitsa of Poland, Kudlaevka of Polesie and the Neman basin (Fig. 11, 12).

The migration of carriers of the Maglemose culture traditions of the South-Western Baltic was especially powerful in the Atlantic period of the Holocene. In the boreal in the 7th millennium BC. Maglemose was transformed into the Svadborg culture of Jutland, whose population was due to the Baltic transgression around 6000 BC. migrated to the east, where it took part in the formation of the Janisławice culture of the Vistula, Neman and Pripyat basins (Fig. 13) (Kozlowsky 1978, p. 67, 68; Zaliznyak 1978, 1984, 1991, pp. 38-41, 2009, p. 206 -210). At the end of the 6th millennium BC. bearers of the Yanislavitsky traditions advanced through the Dnieper valley to Nadporozhye and further east into the Seversky Donets basin (Fig. 15). This is evidenced by the map of the distribution of characteristic Janisławice points (Fig. 14).

Rice. 13. Map of the distribution of monuments of the Janislavice culture of the 6th-5th millennium BC. Neman basin (Zaliznyak, 1991, p. 29)

Rice. 14. Map of the distribution of points with microincisal chips on plates on the territory of Ukraine. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p. 109) Conventional signs: 1-sites with a series of points, 2-points with 1-3 points, 3-direction of migration from the South Baltic in the 7th-5th millennium BC, 4-border Polesie, the 5th southern border of forests in the Atlanticum.

Rice. 15. Points on plates with microincisal chips from Ukrainian sites. Janislavitz type and the like. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p. 110)

The process of penetration of forest hunters of the Maglemose cultural traditions from Polesie to the south was probably stimulated by the movement in a southerly direction along the river valleys of broad-leaved forests in connection with the general warming and humidification of the climate at the end of the Mesolithic. As a result of the spread of forest and forest-steppe biotopes with the corresponding fauna along river valleys up to the Black and Azov Seas, conditions were created for the advance of forest hunters of the Yanislavitsa culture to the south and southeast of Ukraine.

So, in the VI-V millennium BC. The Late Mesolithic post-Maglemosis cultural community was formed, which covered the low-lying areas from Jutland to the Seversky Donets (Fig. 16). It included the Mesolithic post-Maglemosis cultures of the Western and Southern Baltic states, Janislavitsa of the Vistula, Neman, and Pripyat basins, as well as the Donetsk culture of the Seversky Donets basin. The flint inventory of these cultures convincingly testifies to their relationship and genesis on the basis of the Baltic Mesolithic. Numerous finds of microliths characteristic of the Mesolithic Baltic and Polesie in Nadporozhye and even on the Seversky Donets indicate that migrants from the Baltic reached the Donets (Zaliznyak, 1991, pp. 40, 41; 2005, pp. 109–111).

In the 5th millennium BC. on the basis of post-maglemosis, but under the southern influence of cultural communities of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic, a group of forest Neolithic cultures was formed: Ertebølle of the South-Western and Tsedmar of the Southern Baltic, Dubichay of the Neman basin, Volyn of the Pripyat and Neman basin, Dnieper-Donetsk of the Middle Dnieper and Donetsk of the Seversky Donets (Fig. . 16). Among the Neolithic donors of the mentioned forest Neolithic cultures of the German, Polish, Poloska lowlands and the Middle Dnieper region, a special role was played by the cultures of linear-band ceramics and Cucuteni-Trypillia.

The existence of a cultural and genetic community on the plains from the Lower Rhine to the Seversky Donets is confirmed not only by archeology. The above-mentioned autochthonous hunting communities of the Central European lowlands and the Dnieper region were connected not only by a single type of forest hunting and fishing economy and material culture, but also by an anthropological type of population. Anthropologists have long written about the penetration of northern Caucasoids from the Western Baltic to the Middle Dnieper and South-East Ukraine in the Mesolithic and Neolithic (Gokhman 1966, Konduktorova 1973). Comparison of materials from Mesolithic and Neolithic burial grounds of the Dnieper region of the 6th-4th millennium BC. with the synchronous burials of Jutland indicates both a certain cultural and genetic relatedness of the population that left them. Not only the funeral rites were similar, but also the anthropological type of those buried (Fig. 4). These were tall, very massive, broad-faced northern Caucasians, buried in an extended position on their backs (Telegin 1991, Potekhina 1999). In the 5th millennium BC. this population advanced through the forest-steppe strip to the Left Bank Ukraine and to the east of the Middle Volga region (Syezzhee burial ground), forming the Mariupol cultural community, represented by numerous Mariupol-type burial grounds with numerous osteological remains of massive northern Europeans (Telegin, 1991). The population of early Indo-European communities of the 4th millennium BC comes from this anthropological massif. – Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures of forest-steppe Ukraine.

Thus, in the VI-V millennium BC. The northern European hunting population, which since the end of the Ice Age lived in the lowland forest expanses of the Southern Baltic and Polesie, moved along the Left Bank of the Dnieper to the Seversky Donets basin. A huge ethnocultural community was formed, which stretched from Jutland to the Donets for two thousand km and consisted of related cultures of hunters and fishermen. Under the influence of the agricultural cultures of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic from the south, the post-Maglemesian Mesolithic community moved to the Neolithic stage of development. Due to the spread of steppes due to climate aridization, these aboriginal societies of northern Europeans began to switch to cattle breeding and transformed into the most ancient cultures of the 4th millennium BC. (Srednostogovskaya on the Left Bank of the Dnieper and funnel-shaped cups in Central Europe).

Thus, the ancient Indo-Europeans of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. The carriers of the Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures (arose on the basis of the Dnieper-Donets and Mariupol cultures) in the east and the funnel-shaped beaker and spherical amphorae cultures (descendants of the Ertebelle culture) in the west belonged to the North European anthropological type. At the same time, the bearers of these early Indo-European cultures exhibit some gracilization of the skeleton, which indicates their formation on the basis of local northern Caucasians under the conditions of a certain influx of a more graceful non-Indo-European population from the Danube region colonized by farmers. Massive northern Caucasians, according to E.E. Kuzmina (1994, pp. 244-247), were also carriers of the Andronovo culture of Central Asia (Fig. 9).

The Northern European appearance of the early I-e is confirmed by written sources and mythology, which indicate the light pigmentation of the Indo-Europeans of the 2nd millennium BC. Thus, in the Rig Veda, the Aryans are characterized by the epithet “Svitnya”, which means “light, fair-skinned”. The hero of the famous Aryan epic "Mahabharata" often has eyes the color of "blue lotus". According to Vedic tradition, a real Brahman should have brown hair and gray eyes. In the Iliad, the Achaeans have golden blonde hair (Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus), the Achaean women and even the goddess Hera have blonde hair. The god Apollo was also depicted as golden-haired. On Egyptian reliefs from the time of Thutmose IV (1420-1411 BC), the Hittite charioteers (Mariana) have a Nordic appearance, in contrast to their Armenoid squires. In the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Blonde-haired descendants of the Aryans allegedly came to the king of Persia from India (Lelekov, 1982, p. 33). According to the testimony of ancient authors, the Celts of Central and Western Europe were tall blonds. The legendary Tocharians of Xinjiang in Western China, not surprisingly, belonged to the same Northern European type. This is evidenced by their mummified bodies, which date back to approximately 1200 BC. and Tocharian wall paintings of the VII-VI centuries. AD Ancient Chinese chronicles also testify to blue-eyed blonds who in ancient times lived in the deserts of Central Asia.

The fact that the oldest Indo-Europeans belonged to the Northern Caucasians is consistent with the localization of their ancestral home between the Rhine and the Seversky Donets, where by the 6th-5th millennium BC. According to modern archeology, an ethnocultural community was formed (Fig. 16), on the basis of which the most ancient cultures arose (Mariupol, Sredny Stog, Yamnaya, funnel-shaped beakers, spherical amphorae).

To sum up, we can assume that the ancestral home of I-e was probably the German, Polish, Dnieper lowlands and the Donets basin. At the end of the Mesolithic in the 6th–5th millennium BC. these territories were inhabited by massive northern Caucasians from the Baltic states. In the 5th millennium BC. on their genetic basis, a group of related Neolithic cultures is formed, which developed under the progressive influence of the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans. As a result of contacts with the latter, in conditions of climate aridization and expansion of the steppes, the transformation of the autochthons of Proto-Indo-Europeans into the actual Indo-European early pastoral mobile society took place (Zaliznyak 1994, pp. 96-99; 1998, pp. 216-218, 240-247; Zaliznyak, 1997, p .117-125; 2005). An archaeological marker of this process is the beginning of formation in the Azov and Black Sea steppes at the end of the 5th–4th millennium BC. pastoral burial mound burial rite (mound, burials with skeletons crouched and painted with ocher, anthropomorphic steles with images of weapons and shepherd attributes, traces of the cult of the horse, bull, wheeled vehicles, weapons, etc.).

If the author of these lines considers the post-Maglemez ethnocultural community he identified to be the 6th–5th millennium BC. (Fig. 16) by Proto-Indo-Europeans, the substrate on which the Indo-Europeans themselves were formed, then another Ukrainian researcher S.V. Koncha considers the carriers of post-maglemosis as already established Indo-Europeans before their collapse into separate ethno-linguistic branches. According to S.V. Koncha, “there are strong reasons to date the Indo-European community to the early Mesolithic (VIII-VII millennium BC), and associate the beginning of its collapse with the resettlement of the Yanislavitsky population to the east, in Polesie, and further, to the Donets basin in the 6th–5th millennium BC.” The researcher believes that the cultural complex that was defining for the early I-E (mobile pastoral cattle breeding, burial mound rites, cults of the horse, bull, sun-wheel, weapon, patriarch shepherd-warrior, etc.) was acquired by the I-E later, already after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European community in the 4th–3rd millennium BC. (Concha, 2004, pp.191-203).

One way or another, in the lowlands from the Lower Rhine in the west to the Middle Dnieper and Seversky Donets in the east, a cultural and historical community can be traced archaeologically, which began to form with the end of the Ice Age and which may have been the ethnocultural basis of the Indo-European group of peoples.

The problem of the Indo-European homeland is far from its final solution. The considerations expressed above will undoubtedly be adjusted and clarified as new facts become available and the latest scientific methods are applied to solving the problems of Indo-European studies.

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The stories of all peoples go back to ancient times. People often traveled long distances in search of suitable conditions for their homes. You can learn more about who the Indo-Europeans are and how they are related to the Slavs from this article.

Who is this?

Speakers of an Indo-European language are called Indo-Europeans. Currently this ethnic group includes:

• Slavs
• Germans.
• Armenians
• Hindus.
• Celts.
• Grekov.

Why are these peoples called Indo-European? Almost two centuries ago, great similarities were discovered between European languages ​​and Sanskrit, the dialect spoken by Indians. The group of Indo-European languages ​​includes almost all European languages. The exceptions are Finnish, Turkic and Basque.

The original habitat of the Indo-Europeans was Europe, but due to the nomadic lifestyle of most peoples, it spread far beyond the original territory. Now representatives of the Indo-European group can be found on all continents of the world. The historical roots of the Indo-Europeans go far into the past.

Homeland and ancestors

You may ask, how is it that Sanskrit and European languages ​​have similar sounds? There are many theories about who the Indo-Europeans were. Some scientists suggest that the ancestor of all peoples with similar languages ​​were the Aryans, who, as a result of migrations, formed different peoples with different dialects, which remained similar in the main. Opinions also differ about the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans. According to the Kurgan theory, widespread in Europe, the territories of the Northern Black Sea region, as well as the lands between the Volga and Dnieper, can be considered the homeland of this group of peoples. Why then does the population of different European countries differ so much? Everything is determined by differences in climatic conditions. After mastering the technologies of domesticating horses and making bronze, the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans began to actively migrate in different directions. The difference in territories explains the differences in Europeans, which took many years to form.

Historical roots

• The first option is Western Asia or Western Azerbaijan.
• The second option, which we have already described above, is certain lands of Ukraine and Russia, on which the so-called Kurgan culture was located.
• And the last option is eastern or central Europe, or more precisely the Danube Valley, the Balkans or the Alps.

Each of these theories has its opponents and supporters. But this question has still not been resolved by scientists, although research has been ongoing for more than 200 years. And since the homeland of the Indo-Europeans is not known, it is also not possible to determine the territory of the origin of the Slavic culture. After all, this will require accurate data about the ancestral homeland of the main ethnic group. The tangled tangle of history, which contains more mysteries than answers, is beyond the power of modern humanity to unravel. And the time of the birth of the Indo-European language is also shrouded in darkness: some call the date 8 centuries BC, others - 4.5 centuries. BC.

Traces of a former community

Despite the isolation of peoples, traces of commonality can be easily traced among the various descendants of the Indo-Europeans. What traces of the former community of Indo-Europeans can be cited as evidence?

• Firstly, this is the language. He is the thread that still connects people on different parts of the planet. For example, Slavic people have such general concepts as “god”, “hut”, “axe”, “dog” and many others.
• The commonality can also be seen in the applied arts. The embroidery patterns of many European nations are strikingly similar to each other.
• The common homeland of the Indo-European peoples can also be traced by “animal” traces. Many of them still have a cult of the deer, and some countries hold annual holidays in honor of the awakening of the bear in the spring. As you know, these animals are found only in Europe, and not in India or Iran.
• In religion one can also find confirmation of the theory of community. The Slavs had a pagan god Perun, and the Lithuanians had Perkunas. In India, the Thunderer was called Parjanye, the Celts called him Perkunia. And the image of the ancient god is very similar to the main deity of Ancient Greece - Zeus.

Genetic markers of Indo-Europeans

The main distinguishing feature of the Indo-Europeans is their linguistic community. Despite some similarities, different peoples of Indo-European origin are very different from each other. But there is other evidence of their commonality. Although genetic markers do not 100% prove the common origin of these peoples, they still add more common characteristics.

The most common haplogroup among Indo-Europeans is R1. It can be found among the peoples who inhabited the territories of Central and Western Asia, India and Eastern Europe. But this gene was not found in some Indo-Europeans. Scientists believe that the language and culture of the Proto-Indo-Europeans were transmitted to these people not through marriage, but through trade and socio-cultural communications.

Who applies

Many modern peoples are descendants of Indo-Europeans. These include the Indo-Iranian peoples, Slavs, Balts, Romanesque peoples, Celts, Armenians, Greeks and Germanic peoples. Each group, in turn, is divided into other, smaller groups. The Slavic branch is divided into several branches:

• South;
• Eastern;
• Western.

The South, in turn, is divided into such famous peoples as Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Slovenes. Among the Indo-Europeans there are also completely extinct groups: the Tocharians and Anatolian peoples. The Hittites and Luwians are considered to have appeared in the Middle East two thousand years BC. Among the Indo-European group there is also one people who do not speak the Indo-European language: the Basque language is considered isolated and it has not yet been precisely established where it originates.

Problems

The term "Indo-European problem" appeared in the 19th century. It is connected with the still unclear early ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. What was the population of Europe like during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages? Scientists have not yet come to a consensus. The fact is that in the Indo-European languages ​​that can be found on the territory of Europe, sometimes elements of non-Indo-European origin are found. Scientists, studying the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, combine their efforts and use all possible methods: archaeological, linguistic and anthropological. After all, in each of them lies a possible clue to the origin of the Indo-Europeans. But so far these attempts have led nowhere. More or less studied areas are the territories of the Middle East, Africa and Western Europe. The remaining parts remain a huge blank spot on the archaeological map of the world.

Studying the language of Proto-Indo-Europeans also cannot provide scientists with much information. Yes, it is possible to trace the substrate in it - the “traces” of languages ​​supplanted by Indo-European ones. But it is so weak and chaotic that scientists have never come to a consensus about who the Indo-Europeans are.

Settlement

The Indo-Europeans were originally sedentary peoples, and their main occupation was arable farming. But with climate change and the coming cold, they had to begin to develop neighboring lands, which were more favorable for life. From the beginning of the third millennium BC it became the norm for the Indo-Europeans. During the resettlement, they often entered into military conflicts with the tribes living on the lands. Numerous skirmishes are reflected in the legends and myths of many European peoples: Iranians, Greeks, Indians. After the peoples inhabiting Europe were able to domesticate horses and make bronze items, the resettlement gained even greater momentum.

How are Indo-Europeans and Slavs related? You can understand this if you follow their spread. Their spread began from the southeast of Eurasia, which then moved to the southwest. As a result, the Indo-Europeans settled all of Europe as far as the Atlantic. Some of the settlements were located on the territory of the Finno-Ugric peoples, but they did not go further than them. The Ural Mountains, which were a serious obstacle, stopped Indo-European settlement. In the south they advanced much further and settled in Iran, Iraq, India and the Caucasus. After the Indo-Europeans settled across Eurasia and began to lead again, their community began to disintegrate. Under the influence of climatic conditions, peoples became more and more different from each other. Now we can see how strongly anthropology was influenced by the living conditions of the Indo-Europeans.

Results

Modern descendants of Indo-Europeans inhabit many countries of the world. They speak different languages, eat different foods, but still share common distant ancestors. Scientists still have many questions about the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans and their settlement. We can only hope that, over time, comprehensive answers will be received. As well as the main question: “Who are the Indo-Europeans?”

Indo-European languages ​​(aka Aryan) are divided into groups (from east to west)
- Indian: the actual language of the Aryans who came to India in the 15-12 centuries BC, main. monument - hymns of the Rig Veda, also known as the Book of Hymns. Later, the Vedic language was transformed into Sanskrit (a language that was always literary! and not colloquial), and even later a bunch of different Indian dialects and languages ​​developed, of which you are most interested - Gypsy. Yes, it is an Indo-European language of the Indian group.
- Iranian. Persia, "Avesta" and this is exactly what Zarathushtra said, and not as Nietzsche wrote. From the republics of the Soviet Union, the language of the Iranian group is Tajik, in the Caucasus the language of the Iranian group is Ossetian. The Iranian people were Scythians(but not any other nomads!)
- Armenian. What language it is presented in - guess for yourself ;-)
- Slavic. Let's talk about it separately. You can read about the division into Eastern, Southern and Western Slavs on Wikipedia.
- Baltic. Very close to the Slavic, of all the Indo-European groups, these two separated most recently. Baltic languages ​​- Lithuanian And Latvian(but not Estonian - it is from the Finnish group), several more have become extinct.
- Albanian. Presented in one language. Perhaps it would be useful to clarify that Albanians do not live in the Belarusian city of Bobruisk, but in the west of the Balkan Peninsula, bordering the Montenegrin Slavs and other fragments of Yugoslavia.
- Greek. It is represented by two main languages: Ancient Greek and Modern Greek. In fact, there were more of them, but that’s for linguists.
- Romanesque. This Italy, from Latin to the present day, Spain with the one joining her Portugal, France, Romania, Moldova(sorry, Moldova).
- Germanic. Well, what is the most common language of the Germanic group? No, not German. Who said "English"? Student, let's take your record book, your grade is excellent. Everyone also belongs to the German group Scandinavian(for the list - again on Wiki). Let us remember separately that the language of the Germanic group is Yiddish(and that is precisely why Hebrew was revived in Israel, because it is indecent for them to actually chat in German).
- Celtic, dear to the heart of every lover of the Middle Ages. If you love The Romance of Tristan and Isolde as much as I do, the list of Celtic languages ​​is very easy to remember: it only takes place in Celtic lands. That is, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (the Cornish language is extinct) plus the Brittany peninsula in France.
That's it, there's an ocean next :-)
I haven't mentioned a few extinct groups that aren't particularly relevant to non-philologists.

Now about the resettlement. There are several hypotheses about where the Indo-Europeans began to settle around the world, but one way or another this is the territory of southern Russia, Ukraine and the surrounding area. It happened quite a long time ago - 7000 years ago. Therefore, although the ancestral home is located in modern Slavic lands, to say that “everyone descended from the Slavs” is a little frivolous. At this time, all these groups do not yet exist, there are only Proto-Indo-Europeans.
Gradually they begin to spread out and after a couple of thousand years the Indo-Iranians are already beyond the Caspian Sea, the ancestors of the Greeks are in the Balkans, and in Central Europe too - either the ancestors of the Celts or the Italians...
In the historical year 2000 (BC, of ​​course), a great event happened - the chariot was invented. As for the date - you know, I’m joking, but this is really the period. And then the settlement of the Indo-Europeans became more fun. The Indo-Iranians quickly divided into Iranians themselves and those who rode off to India in chariots, becoming, logically, Indians. In the west, the Celts also gave the autochthons a light - there is such a colorful Celtic text “War chariot with sickles.” It is, of course, much later, but terribly impressive. As a result, some swallowed almost the entire Hindustan, while others swallowed all of Europe right up to Ireland.
A noble thing is the chariot.
But you also asked me about the Slavs.
A logical question: after all, someone lived in the same Dnieper-Black Sea region - were they Slavs? Or at least the ancestors of the Slavs?
The answer is something like this. Herodotus in the 5th century BC wrote about neuroses (they turn into wolves and all that), and many consider this information about the ancestors of the Slavs. Your humble servant also wrote that the testimony of Herodotus should be understood as a ritual dressing up in skins, and the wolf is the ancestor of the Slavs (for me, but also for wolves, Slavs and... mat).
But this is a hypothesis. There is something about the Slavs in the 1st-2nd centuries AD, but I am not familiar with these texts. But everything really begins in the fifth century, when the Slavs clearly act as a people with their own language and culture.

On the similarities between the Slavs and Indian Aryans. Yes, it's big. Yes, “An Indian is a brother to a Russian,” as they bawled during the time of Khrushchev. But. We must understand that the “similarity between Sanskrit and Russian” is a dozen roots that appeared in newspaper publications about 30 years ago, and other similarities are understandable only to a philologist. Well, for example, what Russian word is related to the name of the Indian goddess of sacred speech Vach? Answer: the verb “to blather”, that is to say “to speak”. Will you see this similarity at first sight? Well, that's all there is to it...

The True History of the Russian People

Yu. D. Petukhov

BY THE ROADS OF THE GODS

Ethnogenesis and mythogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. Resolution of the main problem of Indo-European studies.

Metagalaxy 1998

UD K 931 "The True History of the Russian BBK 63.3(0)3 People." Index 45898

Compiled by Dm. Andreev Photos by N. I. Tsepeleva and Yu. D. Petukhov

P31 Petukhov Yu. D. On the roads of the Gods: Ethnogenesis and mythogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. Resolution of the main problem of Indo-European studies: Monograph. - M.: Publishing house "Metagalaktika", 1998. - 256 p., ill., photo, incl. - (series "The True History of the Russian People", issue 1).

The monograph of the famous historian Yu. D. Petukhov sets out the essence of his discovery in the field of Indo-European studies and the entire ancient history of mankind: the ancestral group of Indo-Europeans, who gave birth to almost all the peoples of Europe and many peoples of Asia, were the Proto-Slavs-Russians who lived in the 15th-2000s BC . e. in Asia Minor, in the Balkans, the Apennines, in Central Europe, throughout the Mediterranean, in the Northern Black Sea region... All, without exception, the languages ​​of the Indo-European language family, including “ancient Greek” and Sanskrit, developed from the single language of the Proto-Russians. There are also the origins of all mythologies, including “ancient”, Indo-Aryan, Germanic, Celtic, etc.

The monograph is written vividly, imaginatively, captivatingly, and is supplied with many illustrations and photographs. It is of undoubted interest not only for specialists - linguists, historians, ethnologists - but also for the widest layers of readers interested in the secrets and mysteries of History.

"On the Roads of the Gods" is an intellectual bestseller of the late 20th century.

ISBN 5-85141-022-1 UDC 931

BBK 63.3(0)3 (c) Yu. D. Petukhov, 1998 (c) Design "Metagalaxy", 1998

Index 45896

Preface

You are holding in your hands not just a book, not just another scientific treatise, which presents yet another version of another author on the most complex problem of historical science. No! Before you is a Discovery that has no analogues in world practice in terms of its significance. None of the discoveries in physics, chemistry, astronomy and many other sciences can have the same significance as the solution to the origin and formation of humanity itself, since for us, the bearers of reason, man, homo sapiens, and his race are primary. Everything else is secondary: the Universe exists outside of us and without us. But we make discoveries in Him and we make them for ourselves. A person has not yet fully figured out who he is, where his roots are... many “links” are missing, the research apparatus and search methodology are imperfect... And the more significant is the contribution of the author of the monograph, the author of this discovery to modern science: now we can We can safely say that the genesis of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, moreover, the Boreals, that is, the process of human formation in the last thirty thousand years is known to us. Yes, we have every reason to talk about this, because in his research the author used material that cannot be falsified or varied. And therefore, its discovery gives us a picture of the True History of Mankind, it allows us to connect together and arrange into a logical diagram thousands of previously unconnected facts of the history of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Along the way, this discovery resolves hundreds of other problems that currently exist in history, archeology, anthropology, linguistics and related disciplines - problems generated by the absence of a basic historical doctrine, based not on the conclusions of historians and not on subjective chronicles, but on the real course of History. Now such a base exists. World science has received not only a fulcrum and a reference point, but also a lever with the help of which much can be turned around in our worldview, bringing it closer to the objective, the real.

Yu. D. Petukhov devoted about twenty years to the study of the Proto-Indo-European community and the ethnic groups that emerged from it. And not in vain. The results are more than impressive. You will see this for yourself after reading the monograph. Unlike the overwhelming majority of domestic and foreign scientists, he managed to conduct his scientific research not only in the quiet of offices and libraries, but also directly on the ground, in the centers of the origin and existence of Proto-Indo-Europeans - in Jericho, Catal-Uyuk, Alache, Khirokitiya, Hattussa , Yazylykae, etc. He walked, rode, sailed along the paths, roads, paths of ancient settlers who scattered all over the world, taking away from their distant ancestral home the roots of their language, their mythology... taking away their gods. That's why the book is called "Roads of the Gods." Linguistic and mythological analysis made it possible to penetrate into depths inaccessible to any chronicles and annals - language cannot be falsified, just like the very archaism of the original ethnicity, preserved by its direct descendants.

The irrefutability of Yu. D. Petukhov’s conclusions in his scientific work allows us, even before widespread discussion in the world academic press, to assert that he made a discovery of a global nature. The problem of Proto-Indo-Europeans and Bo-Reals, the main problem of Indo-European studies, has been resolved. Only one question remains - is the scientific community of the world ready to accept the perfect discovery.

Editorial

Our path leads to the goddesses of Persephone, To the blind springs, under the canopies of mournful groves of Rain and willows, where ferns, horsetails and black yew clothed the forest slopes... There we go, to the sunsets of dark days In the meeting of yearning shadows.

Maximilian Voloshin

For almost two centuries, the scientific world of the planet has been struggling with an “unsolvable” riddle: the ancient Indo-Europeans - who are they, where are they from? In scientific, pseudo-scientific and pseudoscientific discussions, tens of thousands of crossed copies have been broken, hundreds of hypothetical buildings have been built and destroyed, dozens of the most authoritative opinions have been trampled upon, and countless works of varying importance have been published. But with all this, it would be wrong to say that “academic science” is confidently approaching the solution to one of the most complex and confusing questions in history. Almost two centuries of Indo-European studies! And the “academics” are still trampling at the very foot of the mysterious and incomprehensible Sphinx.

During all this time, the scientific sieve has eliminated about two dozen of the most reliable hypotheses about the origin of the Indo-Europeans and their future paths. And although some of these hypotheses have now acquired the right of almost immutable dogmas and wander from publication to publication, accompanied by more and more new comments, it must be admitted that at this stage they remain just assumptions. And to be more precise, some hypothetical schemes built by the authors using, of course, completely reliable factual material that fits within the framework of these schemes and does not destroy the structure. And no matter how attractive such schemes may be, we must be aware of the fact that, say, even the most carefully drawn plan of a city is not yet the city itself, or - an example from another area - no matter how satisfied we are with the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom , it is very far from the atom itself, it is only an extremely simplified diagram of this incomprehensible microscopic object. But if we take a plan or a map of the city, draw it up, having the city itself as a completely real object in front of us, and study the properties of the atom with the help of instruments that again mark phenomena that actually exist today, then, taking on the construction of an “Indo-European” hypothetical tower, even The author, burdened with scientific titles, should probably remember that many of the stones laid in the foundation may turn out to be only ghosts or diagrams built in turn. Scheme multiplied by scheme! Schematics squared. And it is difficult to do anything, because not every day science brings us new and completely reliable discoveries - the door of history is open only in one direction.

Schematicism leads us to one-sidedness and a black and white vision of the world: either this way or that way! either only according to scheme number one, or only according to scheme number two! either Normanism or anti-Normanism! etc. ad infinitum. Schools and schemes are fighting each other, not wanting to give an inch. And thus they lose! In life there is no “only this way” or “only that way”. In life there is “this way and that,” to put it simply. “The homeland of the Indo-Europeans is in Asia Minor!” states one researcher. "No, only in the Balkans, and nowhere else!" - the other one repeats. “It’s not like that,” says a third, “in Central Europe!” And everyone finds an innumerable number of arguments to prove their particular scheme.

For us, who have undertaken to summarize some data on Indo-European studies and the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, and also trying, in turn, to express some thoughts and assumptions, it would be good to adhere to the wise advice of F. M. Dostoevsky, who once said that life is much more complicated than even the smartest of schemes , into which we are trying to squeeze it.

But this does not mean at all that we will push away the time-tested models of human history, no. Without taking into account the accumulated experience of generations, without the knowledge that our predecessors gave us, there is no way forward. Another thing is to separate genuine knowledge from naked, purely mental constructions and false stereotypes. This is not an easy matter! For example, how can one prove to a contemporary that primitive man never lived in caves, that these caves were temples, storage facilities, temporary shelters, but in no case housing? How to do this if the false stereotype about the “caveman” has been hammered into the brains of generations for decades and continues to be hammered to this day?! And false generalizing schemes are built on such false stereotypes. Serious researchers from time to time try to protest against such profanation. But how can they compete with the media and textbooks, which present ideas from a hundred years ago year after year!

Let's not talk about organizing history education in our country; this is a hopeless undertaking. It is not from textbooks or lectures that our contemporary learns about discoveries and discoveries, not just new, recent ones, but ten, twenty, forty and sixty years ago, but from small-circulation scientific and popular science books and brochures, from rare historical periodicals. And therefore, he, a contemporary, is to this day not just in the dark, but for the most part in captivity of erroneous or outdated ideas, which, of course, facilitate the perception of some historical processes, but are infinitely far from the true events of history.

Here is the basic scheme, familiar to us from an early age, from high school. Stages of development of human society: primitive darkness and ignorance - Ancient Egypt - Ancient East - Ancient Greece - Rome - barbarians, mainly Gauls and Germans, and barbarian kingdoms - the European Middle Ages, etc. We will not go far to the East or to the South, and within the framework of the problem that interests us, let’s take a closer look at the places of settlement of the peoples of the Indo-European language family and their closest neighbors. So, what do we have from the textbooks? Yes, almost a periodic system similar to the system of D.I. Mendeleev, where each nation-element is assigned a strictly indicated place in a certain tablet - temporal and geographical. Well, everything is so clear and strict that you are amazed! And naturally, in Ancient Egypt - the Egyptians, in the Ancient East - Sumerians, Assyrians, Phoenicians and Jews, in Greece - the Greeks, in Rome - the Romans, between the last two ethnic groups, in a half-line, the Etruscans were generally incomprehensible and unexplained for a schoolchild, by the way, completely erased from the latest edition, then in Europe the Franks, Alemanni, Angles... Somewhere from the very edge the Slavs loom slightly, and even then the southern ones, appearing only in the 5th-6th centuries. n. e. only with their resettlement to the Balkans, and then the Avars, Huns, Hungarians... And all - in groups, groups, periods, classes and subgroups. May the reader forgive me for the involuntary comparison, but it feels like you are walking along some kind of time axis through a schematically built zoo, or rather an anthropological park, in which everyone sits strictly in their own cages and enclosures without the right to go outside and in each such cage-enclosure sign: such and such, from such and such a time to such a time! At best, the same sign indicates: then and then he repelled (or did not repulse) the attack of the inhabitants of the neighboring cell. I don’t argue, perhaps it is precisely this simplified breakdown that contributes to a better assimilation of the material by schoolchildren, as well as by students, but it is precisely this that makes it impossible to see historical reality as a complex and multi-ethnic process.

At the final stage of the formation of ancient Greek culture, we see the “classical” Greeks and somehow spontaneously attribute priority to them, the Greeks, in all previous stages. It’s the same with the Romans and other “classical” peoples. Instead of multidimensionality (tm) and polyphony in textbooks there are continuous planes, sometimes intersecting, but this does not cease to be planes.

Everything is classified in the scheme, everything is distributed and delimited, each people is assigned a sort of serial number, each is assigned its own not only ecological, but also historical “niche.”

Somewhere at the end of the 8th, or even the 10th century. It is unclear from where the figure of a wild and bestial Eastern Slav appears, as if he had fallen from the sky onto his land. So we see in the picture from the textbook a certain creature in a long shirt, picking the ground with a rough wooden stick, and in appearance it does not even look like a plow. This creature also collects mushrooms, hangs tubs and beats fish in the river with a pointed twig. This is the idea a young man gets about his ancestors - an idea that is not ten or sixty years old, but turns two hundred years old at lunchtime, which was suitable for Miller-Schletzer times and which is stubbornly dragged from textbook to textbook to this day. Truly an immortal scheme!

We will not go into details now and refute those false stereotypes that do not stand up to the slightest criticism. Let’s just say that beings who appeared out of nowhere in one or two centuries could simply not, under any circumstances, have created Gardarika - a “country of cities” - on a vast area and the most ancient literature in Europe, second in antiquity only to the literature of ancient times *, but superior in the same respect to English, French, German, etc. literature. And all these are immutable facts. But the scheme lives! It is replicated, imposed. But within the framework of this very scheme there is no life!

And you can fight inside the cage-scheme, like an animal beats and rushes in its enclosure, like a fish in a cage, and still not understand, not see, not comprehend anything. What to do, what to do? Yes, it’s very simple - you need to get out of the cage-scheme, move away from it and, without losing sight of well-known models and schemes, take a closer look at life in all its diversity.

* Currently, more and more serious researchers are coming to the conclusion that “ancient” works were written in the Middle Ages. And therefore, Russian literature in antiquity is not inferior to them (editor's note).

That's what we'll try to do. And to begin with, let us remind the reader a little of the basics of Indo-European studies, that little that is quite reliable and practically beyond doubt.

Most researchers agree that the Indo-Europeans, as a single linguistic and ethnic community, existed within the chronological boundaries of the V-IV millennia BC. e. Sometimes the borders are expanded in one direction or the other for a whole thousand years. But if the search towards the ancientization of the problem gives results at least in terms of elucidating the roots of the Indo-Europeans themselves (that is, in the question of the origin of the Proto-Indo-Europeans), then rejuvenation, as a rule, does not bring the desired fruits, because already in the 3rd millennium BC. e. we come across a divergence of Indo-European dialect groups, and consequently, a divergence of the ethnic groups themselves, which stood out from the general Indo-European one.

One mighty root gave rise to many branches and even more shoots. We obviously do not now touch on an important detail of our “plant” - the trunk, which will be discussed below.

But we must pay tribute to the linguists who, perhaps, have achieved the greatest success in Indo-European studies. Thanks to them, we can quite clearly navigate this spreading tree, or at least not get too lost, because we have proven and clear milestones. But let us immediately add that we are talking about the Indo-European language family. And therefore, one should not always unambiguously identify language and people, since it happens that these concepts do not correspond: a non-Indo-European ethnic group that fell under the influence of Indo-Europeans can be a native speaker of their language, and vice versa. In each specific case, you need to remember this.

So, over the five to seven thousand years of existence of the peoples of this family, it has grown extraordinary. Let's name the main branch groups. From the Italic branch came Latin, Ocian and Umbrian languages. The first of them served as the basis for French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, and Italian. From the Celtic branch came Breton and Welsh, Irish and Scottish shoots. The Hittite-Luwian and Tocharian branches limited themselves to the languages ​​contained in the names of the branches themselves. The same can, perhaps, be said about the Armenian, Albanian and ancient Greek branches - lush shoots did not come out of them. But the Indian branch blossomed with all its might - Sanskrit, Bengali, Nepali, Hindi, Punjabi, Assamese, Gypsy and other languages. The Iranian branch gave almost the same flowering - it is decorated with Avestan, Kurdish, Persian, Ossetian, Pashto, Tajik, Scythian languages. There are three shoots on the Baltic branch - Latvian, Lithuanian and Prussian. Two more mighty branches that could rightfully be called trunks now. This is the Germanic one, which gave the languages ​​English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese. And the Slavic branch with its Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian languages. Just listing not all the languages ​​of the family took up quite a lot of space. The territory occupied by their carriers is completely vast, even if you do not include the New World and Australia in it, but limit yourself only to the ancestral lands occupied by Indo-European peoples at the beginning of our era.

But they did not occupy these territories immediately, because the process of settlement lasted for thousands of years, and there was some starting point, if not a point, then a very real and tangible place where the original community was formed. That is, the question arises about the ancestral home, one of the key questions of Indo-European studies and all historical science in general. Where is this promised land for most of the current European nations?! There is no answer, at least not a sufficiently convincing and unambiguous one. The mysterious and mysterious ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans - will we ever find it?

And then there are riddles that are no less complex and impossible to solve, stretching in a whole chain. How did they settle? In what directions and in what order? How? And what traces did you leave on your way? Which peoples were swallowed up during their unstoppable movement? What part of themselves, where and when, was absorbed? And the main question is - who were they, after all, these mysterious ancestors of ours - the Indo-Europeans?

Initially, the ancestral home was sought in the East and Central Asia; researchers were attracted to those places for some reason, mainly by their proximity to Iran and India. It was assumed that it was located in the Caspian Sea region or in ancient Bactria, on its land. There were absolutely fantastic theories about a snow-covered and high-mountain ancestral home somewhere in the Himalayas. All these assumptions disappeared by themselves when linguists got down to business more thoroughly and established that in the Proto-Indo-European language there were no designations for Central Asian animals and plants, much less for the Himalayan or other equally exotic ones. And the search immediately moved to South-Eastern Europe: from the Danube to the Caspian Sea. There were, however, searches in the far west of Europe and in its north. But the presence there of fairly thick substrate layers, layers of pre-Indo-European languages, as well as traces of the late penetration of the Indo-Europeans themselves, made such searches fruitless:

Spain and Iceland with all adjacent regions immediately fell out of the sphere of interest of Indo-Europeans. The northeast of Europe was densely populated by Finno-Ugric peoples, this was evidenced by hydronyms - the names of rivers, lakes, swamps, streams, and tributaries. The central and eastern parts of Europe, as well as its entire vast South, remained. Since ancient times, the Balkan-Carpathian region, together with Asia Minor, has been an area distinguished by numerous cultural connections. Most researchers have focused their attention on it. But neither Western Asia, nor the Aegean, nor the Northern Black Sea region, which is part of the larger Circumpontic zone and also covered by research, were left without attention.

There is no need to retell the contents of countless volumes compiled by search engines. We can only say one thing: Central Europe and Western Asia somehow gradually faded into the background, without disappearing from view, however. And the main efforts of researchers turned to the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. At this point the matter stalled. The debate continues. No answer.

But, despite this, research was carried out in parallel on another problem: how did the Indo-Europeans settle? The times of overly self-confident German scientists who declared their land to be the navel of the Universe, from which culture-trader civilizers spread to all corners of the earth, are long gone. The fables about the warlike proto-Teutons, who, under the name of the archaeological culture of “battle axes,” allegedly brought civilization to the Proto-Slavic peoples by force, have been forgotten. It turned out that this completely genuine culture had nothing to do with the “Teutons”, and many even believe that it spread in the opposite direction. But German historians, archaeologists, and linguists have also done something to solve the problem, despite the obvious nationalist approach. And in particular, they were able to find the strength in themselves to recognize the existence of the Proto-Slavs in those days, which our textbook compilers simply cannot decide to do. In other words, the theory of German culture-trade has not justified itself over the past decades.

Yes, the days of romanticism are gone! The romantic theories of “Aryan conquests” have also sunk into oblivion. They looked too beautiful - armadas of conquerors, armed to the teeth and united not only by extraordinary discipline, but also by some incredible national spirit for those times - in the language of L.N. Gumilyov, some frantic super-passionaries - conquered one unknown with fire and sword and exotic country after another, everywhere they established their own strict but fair order, simultaneously introducing the natives to culture. Sheer romance of feat and achievements! All this was best suited for novels and films, tickled the nerves of enthusiastic dreamers, but had nothing to do with life. Life was much simpler. No romance, no sentimentality! Only the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth poured into it a stream of the romantic genre, which reached the twentieth century and subsided under the pressure of practicality.

There were no warlike beasts. This has been established quite accurately. And there were nomadic pastoralists who moved from place to place, if not at a snail’s pace, then in any case not at the speed of military formations or the nomadic Turks of the Middle Ages with their rapid raids. These same cattle breeders, who raised cows, bulls, pigs, and also, which is extremely important, horses, moved from pasture to pasture in families, clans, tribes, moving away from some center in different directions. Of course, they also had clashes with the local population of the regions that they developed. There was everything: skirmishes, battles, and protracted strife. But there was one thing that was missing - the systematic and purposeful conquest of lands with the aim of subjugating the tribes and peoples living on them. That is why, from the most ancient Proto-Indo-European terminology, not the names of weapons came down to us, but words denoting harness, livestock, vegetation of pastures and surrounding areas, names of fish caught in rivers, animals living in forests. This resettlement took very long periods of time, during which languages ​​managed to change beyond recognition and the appearance of people changed - the latter due to mixing with the aborigines.

There is, however, another theory about the spread of Indo-European languages ​​not through the settlement of the speakers themselves, but through the transfer of languages ​​and dialects from neighbor to neighbor, that is, as a result of peaceful convergence, the infusion of individual speakers into neighboring peoples. Of course, such a method of transmission existed. And we have no right to exclude him. But here we need to remember the dangers of schematism and that there is no “either this or nothing!” We can say with a huge degree of confidence: languages ​​were spread by all existing methods, and those who, wittingly or unwittingly, insist only on the “only correct” theory of theirs are simply misleading us. After all, it is quite difficult to imagine that a language on its own, without a native speaker, would spread from, say, the Balkans to the Hindustan Peninsula - the likelihood of such an “independent journey” is negligible. Of course, the Indo-Europeans moved around. There is no subject for dispute here. Another thing is - did they all move, maybe some of them remained in place, at least not too far from this place? Let us remember this point in our reasoning; we will have to return to it more than once. As, indeed, with many other key provisions contained in this introduction.

How many Indo-Europeans were there, at least roughly? We can’t even name the order! Everything is hidden by the veil of centuries and millennia. But time is not the only thing to blame here. The fact is that this question was faced at the dawn of Indo-European studies. Researchers who asked this question immediately came to the conclusion that it was impossible to determine this number without anthropological data. And in order to identify the anthropological type of the Indo-European, it is necessary to find its ancestral home. The ring was closing. Through long comparisons and accumulation of statistics in the places of the most dense settlement of Indo-European peoples, studying the remains found there, comparisons with the main European races living today, it was possible to clarify only one thing: no special Indo-European anthropological type existed. It could be distinguished by comparison with neighboring large races, for example, Western Asian, Ethiopian, Laponoid. But it was not possible to isolate him from the European races. The legend about some special pranation crumbled into the smallest pieces, leaving no hope for any one of the modern peoples, or rather, a group of explorers representing this people, for the priority of their tribe, their nation in terms of direct inheritance. Except for one people...

Apparently, the ancient Indo-Europeans were already there, in the V-IV millennia BC. e., a mixed people, consisting of representatives of many European, and perhaps not only European, ethnic groups. And the single core around which a community, new at that time, took shape, was probably not only consanguinity, but primarily language and culture. There is also no doubt that the primary mixedness, if it can be called that, was, as settlement progressed, overlapped by the secondary mixedness, which came from the infusion of other ethnic groups into the community. It was this ability to assimilate and assimilate that was, perhaps, the most characteristic feature inherent in the Indo-Europeans. This ability served them well, since unlike closed, closed ethnic groups, sooner or later doomed to extinction, they were unusually resilient and had a social antidote to any cataclysms. This ability, one must think, is largely due to the current representatives of the world's largest language family. And what is especially important for us who have undertaken this research is that it is this feature, precisely this property that will help us understand a lot in the European history of the last five to seven thousand years. There is something to think about: after all, this is a considerable period of time, and it was not a separate ethnic group that arose in that distant time that made its way through the thickness of millennia and preserved itself to some extent - no, they have long since disappeared from the face of the earth, but made its way to us, in modernity, so to speak, is a human alloy. An alloy baked in the crucible of time.

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