In Search of the Indo-Europeans

Who were the INDO-EUROPEANS? According to British linguist J.P. Mallory, their language was the proto-type of the languages spoken by over 2 billion people today. He also says the Indo-Europeans should not be confused with the `Aryans' claimed to be the progenitors of the Third Reich. Mallory suggests the Indo-Europeans appear to have been a pastoral nomadic group who lived in the Pontic-Caspian region (Steppes of Mother Russia) sometime between the second and fifth millenium BC from whence they diffused. Mallory employs paleolinguistics to show how several dozen modern languages are descended from a `Proto Indo-European' mother tongue that came to dominate many other languages (not all) of the European-Asian land mass. He uses the work of archeologists to support of his theory. In a nutshell, he mostly disagrees with Colin Renfrew, while mostly agreeing with Marija Gimbutas. Renfrew apparently has posited the idea that the changes archeologists see in the successive layers of excavated sites are the result of internal innovation and successive technological change (folks keep reinventing the wheel), where Gimbutas seems to subscribe to the notion that hostile horse-riding kurgan-building invaders from the steppes mowed down the peaceful matriarchial civilizations of their neighbors. Mallory suggests paleolinguistics supports the idea that the languages of Europe and Asia which resemble each other did not spring up independently of one another and it is not likely that the civilizations that sustained them did either. Mallory theorizes the diffusion of the proto Indo-Euopean language from a Pontic-Caspian homeland took three paths, one through Anatolia and the Balkans, one through Northern Europe, and one East toward Iran and India ( the case for Anatolia, Greece and parts of Southern Europe appears to be very strong). He also suggests that the diffusion may have in part been the result of internal changes such as excessive population growth and climatic change that made agriculture a losing proposition. The social change resulting from the adaptation of more successful strategies for survival, such as pastoral nomadism may have led to a greater acceptance of the people who brought it about and their language. Whatever brought about the change, Indo-European languages exist from Ireland to India today. Readers of Rian Eisler's CHALICE AND THE BLADE, and Merlin Stone's WHEN GOD WAS A WOMAN, will find their ideas are fairly well supported by Mallory's work. Mallory's arguments on behalf of his thesis are clear and compelling. He methodically builds his case using the work of many scholars from both the East and the West. Perhaps one of the wonderful outcomes from the `fall of the wall' in 1989, is the reunification of scholars from the old Soviet block with those of the West.

Indo-European studies, like Representation Art, was adversely affected by the Nazi endorsement of Aryan studies. Only recently has this field of study started to truly recover from this setback. It is **not** race-theory, but language theory and related folk-movements that most affect the core of the discipline. This is the best book written on the topic for a general reader. The common origins for the peoples of Europe, Iran, India is something that anyone wishes to have a good understanding of history needs to understand. Many of the particulars of history are still obscure, even to the experts of the field, but the relations between these peoples all go back in the recesses of ancient history. One of the major problems of history is a simple issue, why is it so short? Human history appears to, at best, be about 10,000 years. But the human species has been around for at least ten times that long. Why the great gap there? Indo-European studies can be seen as an attempt to push things back further into the past by studying out languages. Sanskrit and Latin have a common source, that we can see by doing comparisons, so where is the common source? And who were those people that were the common source? People want to understand who they are and this discipline is an attempt to try and understand who we are. Of course, the research and thinking on the subject is very much complicated by the interactions the Indo-European languages has with non-IE languages, and even by those interactions that sub-groups within the IE had with each other. None of these groups existed in a vacuum. Word bowering between speakers has happened throughout history, and this gives rise to many oddities. The author only mentions the concept of Nostratic once. Nostratic linguistics is a theoretical idea that tries to ascribe the arising of, more or less, all language to one development or discovery at some point in the far distant past. It is a much broader approach to the concept of the Proto-Language, in so far as it is looking for a Proto-Proto-Language or a common source to the various Proto-Languages. It has a certain appeal to me because it seems to make sense on a very theoretical level. The reason the good author avoids more than page length of discussion to the idea is that it is very, very, very theoretical. There is very little real evidence going for the Nostratic concept. Of course, science - even social ones like linguistics - must confine themselves to the evidence. Nostratic is thinking of things outside the box though, and can be helpful to think like that at times as long as one sees it as a useful exercise and not as a replacement for real scientific thinking. All in all, this is a good book and I like it.

I came to this book as a result of reading evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond's book, The Third Chimpanzee. The Horses, Hittites, and History chapter in Diamond's book discusses the several main theories for the origin of the proto-Indo-Europeans, and cites this as a major reference and source for this chapter. Since I like to go to the horse's (or Hittite's) mouth myself, following up on Diamond's dicussion of the importance of the book in his bibliography, I thought I'd check out the original book.For those wanting a more complete exposition of the proto-Indo-European theory, this book is probably still the best one out there on the subject. Although now almost 20 years old, it's still a well-written, detailed account, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone wanting a better understanding of this area of history.Actually, you could just read the 26-page chapter in Diamond's book first, and then see if you want more detailed information. Diamond himself used both the present book and many others to write the chapter in his book, so it represents a good summary of present scholarship in the area. For those of you who want more books on the subject, I mention some of these below, which Diamond also cites in his bibliography.I would follow the above up with Cavalli-Sforza's book discussing his fascinating data showing the relationship between dozens of genetic markers and their current geographical distribution and presence, or lack of them, in the different peoples in Europe, and what this shows about their origins, since this adds a further dimension to the PIE hypothesis. Sforza also discusses the genetic data for peoples outside of Europe, such as Polynesians and Australasians, but I found his conclusions about Europe, since they're relevant to the PIE question, the most interesting.In addition to the above two books, the other most important recent book on this subject is Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language; also important are older but still useful books by George Cardona, Indo-European and Indo-Europeans; Indo-European Language and Society, by Emile Benveniste; The Indo-Europeans in the Fourth and Third Millenia, by Edgar Polome; Ancient Indo-European Dialects, by Birnbaum and Puhvel; Indo-European Philology, by W.B. Lockwood, and The Distribution of Indo-European Root Morphemes, by Norman Bird, which also came out somewhat later, around the time of Renfrew and Mallory's books.And for those who really want to go to the horse's mouth, so to speak, there is also the Journal of Indo-European Studies, for those with a true scholarly bent (or masochistic bent, as the case may be, which probably includes me, since I've read a lot of academic journals in my life).Interestingly enough, Cavalli-Sforza's research shows an origin for PIE in Anatolia, or what is modern Turkey. This is not that far off from the supposed origin of the proto-Indo-Europeans in the area north of the Caspian and Black Seas, but does push it further south.Overall,

j p mallory follows the linguistic, archeological and historical trails in a stringently analytical, yet very readable fashion. The evidence is scattered over many languages, but Mallory appears to be very familiar with the Russian, German, French, English, and other monographs and scholarly articles. His erudition wears well, sprinkled with wit and insight over several hundred pages of close reasoning and informed speculation. Although he agrees essentially with the Gimbutas thesis that the kurgan steppe zone was the PIE homeland, he gives other theses a proper hearing. A book to read and re-read. It is on my night-table and very well-thumbed.

Dr. Mallory (who is an Amercan) is the Prof. of Archaeology at Queens University Belfast, and for many seasons has been leading the excavations of Eamhain Macha at Navan, which was the prehistoric capital of the province of Ulster in No. Ireland.This book is a highly readable introduction to a subject that is extremely complex, difficult and controversial (as other reviewers have pointed out below). They have also noted that it is a few years old. I suspect that those who wrote negative reviews may be working in the field and are well abreast of the very latest currents in thinking and "politics" regarding this subject. Such debates are always raging among scholars, and it is important that they do. However, they do not necessarily need to greatly concern the reader who is looking for a general and accessible introduction to the subject which discuses the major finds, the geography involved, and the central debates and problems concerning the subject, etc. This book is a rare and vaulable find for the "educated amateur" who is so often faced with a choice of impossibly esoteric academic books, and works that are more of the coffee-table variety, lacking scholarly "meat". Prof. Mallory also has a very engaging and lively writing style that is effortless to read. While the author presumes intelligence and a high general level of education, he does not presume that the reader has a subtle and esoteric knowledge of Indo-European archaeology/anthropology. (I am not saying it is an "easy read", but that it is not tortuous, like many academic books). This book is a classic, and it deserves to be.