Movement: The Language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans
By Vineeth Rajan
The retracing of the movement of the Proto-Indo-Europeans in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age to their homeland has aroused great interest since the late 18th century. I argue that the horse both played a role in the rapid movement of this culture across Eurasia and gives us the most insight into the origin of this historic migration, pointing towards the Pontic steppe of western Asia.
Firstly, it is important to understand the concept of the Proto-Indo-Europeans; Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the ancestor of languages that form a language family with ‘more speakers than any other’. We have no texts in this language, but for centuries, an academic movement of linguists have been using cognates from the known Indo-European (IE) languages to reconstruct this ancient tongue. The speech community of PIE migrated in many a direction in prehistory and expanded across Eurasia, with their language diverging into as many 589 extant in text.
For as long as such a movement existed to reconstruct PIE, it has also sought after the location of the PIE urheimat, or homeland, from which this historic migration occurred, for which theories have varied from the North Pole to North Africa. The search for it must be based on something we can associate with a single geographical region, like analysing the distribution of the lifeforms that PIE has terms for or linking archaeological findings with IE cultures. However, PIE fauna and flora are found across Eurasia, at best ‘suggesting […] a temperate rather than a tropical or subtropical region.’ and for a long time, the movement could not integrate archaeologists to work together on this pursuit. However, an animal that can be associated with a specific region’s geography and archaeology has pushed the consensus to one majority theory for the urheimat’s location: the horse.
It is the unparalleled significance of the horse in the IE cultures, and so, in the PIE culture, that makes evidence from it valuable in this endeavour, because, being more likely to be preserved through history, it gives insight into its impact at the time of the migration.
PIE homeland over time
The PIE term *h₁éḱwos, meaning ‘horse’, has reflexes in every IE branch except Albanian, which shows that the horse was significant in PIE society, because few PIE terms are this well attested. Furthermore, the term often comes together with reflexes of *h₁eḱ- ‘quick, swift’ in Greek and Sanskrit poetic formulae, which are set phrases that are used in poetry to describe culturally important concepts, perhaps suggesting a PIE use of the horse as an effective mode of transport. Fortson (2010) discusses a PIE ritual of royal consecration involving ritual copulation with and sacrifice of a horse, seen in Indic, Roman and Irish traditions, all showing the religious and royal significance of the horse in PIE culture. Similarly, a myth of divine twins in PIE religion is found in the Graeco-Roman Dioskouroi, the Vedic Aśvins (from Ved. áśvas ‘horse’) and the Baltic Dieva dēli, which all seem to involve and indicate use of horses with wheel technology and yokes in PIE culture.
This incredible cultural significance and association with transport in IE cultures seems to be due to the horse’s impact on the Proto-Indo-Europeans’ mobilisation, and it is this that played a key role in the Indo-European movement. This means the urheimat needs to show archaeological evidence of the predominance and exploitation of the horse in transport, from which the IE cultural significance stems. This is found in the Pontic steppe, the region from north of the Black Sea until Kazakhstan, at c.5000BCE, well before the migration is thought to have happened, where 40 percent of horse bones in Eurasia are found. Horse remains are more common here than anywhere else at this time, indicating the origins of horse domestication, providing initial evidence of the horse’s predominance. Anthony (2007) states that ‘horses are supremely well adapted’ to the Pontic steppe, being able to graze in the snowy conditions where sheep and cattle could not and so, starve. He argues that horses were first domesticated ‘for a cheap source of winter meat’, with horse riding developing afterwards. The evidence from c.5000BCE could however represent a stage of horse riding, which will be discussed later.
However, archaeological evidence for a migration from Anatolia during the spread of farming in the 7th and 6th millennia BCE indicates an Anatolian urheimat, located at modern-day Turkey, supported by this region being closer to the earliest IE cultures, presupposing less movement. Key problems of the Anatolian hypothesis are the relative absence of the horse in Anatolia and surrounding areas at even 5000BCE and evidence of wheel technology only appearing three millennia after the archaeological record shows movement from Anatolia, as the secured IE reflexes of *h₁éḱwos ‘horse’ and *kʷékʷlos ‘wheel, circle’ means contact with horses and wheel technology cannot have occurred after the disintegration of PIE. The strong reconstruction of horse transport in PIE culture cannot be circumvented, rendering this theory untenable. Furthermore, the vast distances that were covered if the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrating from the Pontic steppe need not be explained by an Anatolian urheimat at all, because both horses and wheel technology were known to the steppe cultures by the 3rd millennium, thus facilitating long-distance movement.
Looking at the Pontic steppe, knowing when horse riding started gives key insight into the dating of the Indo-European movement; Anthony states that the earliest possible evidence for horse domestication dates to 4800BCE, when horse remains and carvings are found in human burials and bones respectively, being inconclusive at best, but he also shows that size-variability data suggests a dating of 2500BCE, assuming that selectively bred horses with a restricted diet would show more diverse and reduced sizes of bones. His most convincing evidence is based on bit microwear, the measurable erosion of horse teeth from wearing a bit, which shows that the oldest horses that show bit wear are not from the Pontic steppe, but from the steppe of northern Kazakhstan, dating to 3700-3000BCE. However, he believes that ‘horseback riding probably did not begin in northern Kazakhstan’, because of the evidence of horse exploitation in the Pontic steppe ‘a thousand years before 3700-3500BCE’. In fact, archaeological evidence of horse riding spread from this region from 3700-3000BCE into the Caucasus and Germany too, indicating a spread of riding from the steppe cultures, suggesting widespread use by this period.
It is also important to understand the mechanics behind horse riding’s contribution to movement across the steppe; Anthony discusses how the increased herding capacity and scale from domesticated horses intruded on tribe borders and encouraged military expansion across frontiers. In fact, he states that horse riding promoted mobilised raiding from quicker gathering of men too, supported by the spreading archaeological horizon of war weapons and ornaments c.5000-4200BCE, when horse riding seems to have began in the Pontic steppe. Thus, the culture that could exploit horse riding saw military expansion throughout and beyond the steppe: the Yamna culture.
One of the kurgan peoples, Bronze Age steppe cultures with burial mounds known as kurgans, called the Yamna culture, are archaeologically shown to have rapidly expanded across the steppe from c.3500BCE, through use of wheel technology that appeared at c.3500-3400BCE. The burials resemble those of IE cultures, holding remnants of worship and use of the horse, wheeled vehicles and other cultural indicators that all resemble IE cultures, supporting the Yamna people being the Proto-Indo-Europeans. This theory within the Pontic steppe theory explains why the horse is strongly associated with yokes and chariot use in IE cultures, because the Indo-European movement was triggered by the advent of wheel technology that could be used in conjunction with horses. Coinciding with the archaeological evidence for the spread of horse riding from the steppe from 3700-3000BCE, this could show the splitting off of the Anatolian branch, explaining why Fortson states this branch is ‘quite different from that of PIE’, having split off in the 4th millennium itself and undergoing more linguistic change than other branches.
To conclude, during the late Neolithic period, the horse played a central role in the rapid military movement of the Yamna culture across the Pontic steppe through horse riding and became central in their culture. The Anatolian branch having split off first, the Proto-Indo-Europeans expanded all across Eurasia by use of horses with wheel technology, preserving the horse’s cultural significance in the languages and cultures that they gave rise to after centuries of divergence and cultural intermixing. It was such striking cultural parallels associated with the horse that inspired a movement of people from disparate fields to work together to retrace this historic movement across the continent.
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