Around 6500 years ago, a group of seminomadic warriors arose on the treeless steppes north of the Black Sea. They herded sheep and goats, and they tamed the wild horse. Their language was rich with words reflecting their pastoral way of life. When one of their warrior-chiefs died, he was buried with great ceremony under a large earth mound called a kurgan. After about 1000 years of restless existence on the barren steppes, the story goes, these nomads went in search of new grazing land, riding out of their homeland between the Dnieper and Volga rivers armed with bows and arrows, spears, and bronze daggers. Over the next 2 millennia, the horsemen swept into eastern and central Europe, Anatolia, and much of western Asia, bringing their culture and colorful language with them. Before long, the hills of Europe and Asia echoed with the gallop of horses' hooves and the strongly enunciated vowels and consonants of a new language, which linguists today call Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
The "Kurgan hypothesis," as this dramatic account of the spread of the Indo- European language family during the Early Bronze Age is known, was the dominant paradigm among linguists and archaeologists during much of the 20th century. It is most closely associated with the late Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose visions of prehistory were often filled with romantic pageantry. She argued that the Kurgans overrode existing matriarchal, Mother Goddess- worshipping societies, imposing their warrior religion as well as their patriarchal culture throughout Europe and western Asia. But the theory caught on for much more pragmatic reasons: It seemed to solve the long-standing mystery of the origins of Indo-European, a closely related group of 144 tongues that today are spoken on every continent. The family includes English as well as all of the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indian, and Iranian languages.
In 1973, however, Cambridge University archaeologist Colin Renfrew proposed that the driving force behind the propagation of the Indo-European languages was not the fast gallop of horses' hooves but the slow adoption of farming. Renfrew argued that the gradual expansion of the agricultural way of life, which originated in the Near East some 10,000 years ago, carried the language family into new territories together with the seeds of wheat and barley. Because archaeologists widely agreed that farming had spread from Turkey to Greece and southeast Europe, Renfrew's "farming-dispersal hypothesis" pointed to the Anatolian plateau, which makes up most of modern Turkey, as a better candidate for the original Indo-European homeland (see sidebar p.1324 and Book Review, p. 1298).
At first, most linguists and many archaeologists reacted with hostility to Renfrew's hypothesis, in part because they thought that it put the initial dispersal of Indo-European languages far too early. But in recent years, an accumulation of new evidence has considerably weakened support for the Kurgan hypothesis. Some archaeologists have challenged the notion that the Kurgans rode horses at all, and others have questioned the original linguistic analyses that put the Indo-European homeland north of the Black Sea. "Confidence in the Kurgan theory is waning," comments historian Robert Drews of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "But," he adds, "the alternatives are not yet very attractive."
Indeed, Renfrew's analysis has certainly not swept the field. Although new and highly controversial dating of PIE, based on the techniques of evolutionary biology, supports a very ancient origin for the first appearance of the language family--8000 or more years ago--many linguists continue to insist that such early dates cannot be right. Wherever the first Indo-Europeans came from, they argue, reconstructions of the PIE vocabulary indicate that they could not have been the early farmers of Anatolia. "PIE was the language of a society which was very familiar with wheeled vehicles" and copper metallurgy, says Lawrence Trask, a linguist at the University of Sussex, U.K. "This obliges us to date the split of PIE no earlier than about 6000 years ago"--long after Anatolian farmers had dispersed.
两只黄鹂 发表评论于
Fredirik Kortlandt
The publication of Mallory's book(1989) has rendered much of what I had to say in the present contribution superfluous. The author presents a carefully argued and very well written account of a balanced view on almost every aspect of the problem. Against this background, I shall limit myself to a few points which have not received sufficient attention in the discussion.
First of all, the relation between archaeology and linguistics is a precarious and asymmetrical one. ...
从这里已经看到,即使写这些文章的人都承认这个说法存在太多的主观观点,随人而异,所以最好别再引申
两只黄鹂 发表评论于
By René Grousset
"Le fait capital dans l'histoire de l'humanité est la pression que ces nomades ont exercée sur les empires civilisés du sud, pression qui est allée à diverses reprises jusqu'à la conqu阾e. La descente des nomades est une loi presque physique, dictée par les conditions de l'habitat steppique." (p. 22)
My translation:
The capital fact in human history is the pressure that these nomads exercised on the empires of the south, a pressure that on various occasions ended in conquest. The descent of the nomads is a law almost physical in character, dictated by the environmental conditions of the steppe.
Commentary:
The nomads that Grousset refers to were primarily the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols, and the "empires of the the south" were those of Byzantium, Iran, China, and other lands culturally different but close enough to nomadic societies to experience repeated invasions. It is certainly debatable whether there is any one "capital fact in human history" as Grousset assumes. Nevertheless, the French historian would probably consider himself all the more vindicated in his claim by recent archeological work done in the steppe regions of Ukraine and Russia, work suggesting that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans was there. Speakers of Indo-European languages constitute about half of the world's people today, and many of their languages are associated with prestige and power, including English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Hindi.
Source:
René Grousset. L'empire des steppes: Attila, Gengis Khan, Tamerlan, fourth edition. Paris: Payot, 1965.