The Greeks and the End of the Bronze Age

Homework

Read the sections below.  Use the Table of Contents above to navigate if you wish.

Questions to Ponder:

1.  Do you think Lazaridis' 2024 paper is the last word on the origin of the Hittites?  What other revelations might we expect in the future?  

2. How could the Hittite Sun-god arise from the sea?

3. What do you think of bull leaping as a sport?

4. Based on the language tree below, can you suggest how and when the Greek speakers separated from the other Indo-European branches?

5. What lessons does the Collapse of the Bronze Age have for us in our current time?

6. Reflect a little on what we've learned over the past ten weeks.  What do you find most remarkable?  What have we learned that's most applicable to our situation today?

If you hate reading on the web, you can CLICK HERE to open a 24 page pdf of this long web page which you can print out; however, you'll have to go back to this web page to click through to some of the attachments.

Introduction

In this last session, we'll look at the expansions of the Indo-Europeans southward: to Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Greece.  The origin of the Hittites in central Anatolia and the origin of the Greeks are shrouded in mystery and have been heavily debated among archeologists for many years.  In the past few years archaic DNA has shed some light, but not enough to fully understand how and when Indo-Europeans migrated there or to what extent Hittite and Greek were languages adopted by populations unrelated to the Indo-Europeans.   We'll close with another mystery: what caused the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean?  Some answers will just have to wait.

The Origin of the Hittites

The Hittites emerged into history around 1750 BCE, when they took over the non-Indo-European Hattic speakng city of Kanesh in central Anatolia and built it into an empire covering most of modern day Turkey and the Levant.  The royalty of the Hittite empire spoke Hittite, an Indo-European language that was preserved in the 25,000 clay tablets of the  Boğazköy archives in the capital city of Hattuša, while the regular folk spoke Hattic, a non-Indo-European language.  As David Anthony says,

"After Hittite speakers usurped the Hattic kingdom they enjoyed a period of prosperity enriched by Assyrian trade, and then endured defeats that later were dimly but bitterly recalled. They remained confined to the center of the Anatolian plateau until about 1650 BCE, when Hittite armies became mighty enough to challenge the great powers of the Near East and the imperial era began. The Hittites looted Babylon, took other cities from the Assyrians, and fought the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II to a standstill at the greatest chariot battle of ancient times, at Kadesh, on the banks of the Orontes River in Syria, in 1286 BCE.  A Hittite monarch married an Egyptian princess. The Hittite kings also knew and negotiated with the princes who ruled Troy, probably the place referred to in the Hittite archives as steep Wilusa (Ilios). The Hittite capital city, Hattušas, was burned in a general calamity that brought down the Hittite kings, their army, and their cities about 1180 BCE. The Hittite language then quickly disappeared; apparently only the ruling élite ever spoke it."  Anthony, David W.. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (p. 71). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Three related Indo-European languages, Luwian, Palaic and Lydian seem to have been more widely spoken in southern, northern and western Anatolia at the time.  The four languages together are grouped together as the Anatolian branch of Indo-European languages.  These four languages seem to be more archaic than the other Indo-European languages and most scholars think that they were the first to branch off from the Indo-European homeland.  As David Anthony says, "The Anatolian branch either lost or never possessed other features that were present in all other Indo-European branches. In verbs, for example, the Anatolian languages had only two tenses, a present and a past, whereas the other ancient Indo-European languages had as many as six tenses. In nouns, Anatolian had just animate and neuter; it had no feminine case. The other ancient Indo-European languages had feminine, masculine, and neuter cases. The Anatolian languages also lacked the dual, a form that was used in other early Indo-European languages for objects that were doubled like eyes or ears. (Example: Sanskrit dēvas ‘one god’, but dēvau ‘double gods’.)" Anthony, David W.. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (p. 75). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Another argument for an early departure of proto-Anatolian speakers is that the Anatolian languages seem to lack the vocabulary for wheels and parts of wheeled vehicles that the other branches of Indo-European possess.  Since wheeled vehicles were not common prior to 3500 BCE, this argues for a departure some time prior to that.

If the homeland of the proto-Indo-Europeans was on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, there are two routes to Anatolia: southwest through the Balkans or southeast through the Caucasus.  In David Anthony's book (2010) he suggests that the Suvorovo culture that built kurgans on the Danube delta on the west side of the Black Sea from 4300-4000 BCE were the ancestors of the speakers of Anatolian languages and they spent 2,000 years in the Balkans or western Anatolia before emerging as the Hittites.  Anthony cites a reference to the Sun-god arising from the sea in a Hittite invocation of the Sun-god (Muwatalli's great prayer, #20, section 66, p107), which could only happen from the west coast of a great body of water:

§66 (iii 13–17) Sun-god of Heaven, my lord, shepherd of mankind! You, Sun-god of Heaven, arise from the sea, and you take your stand in heaven.11 Sun-god of Heaven, my lord! You, Sun-god, give daily judgment over man, dog, pig, and the beast of the field.

§67 (iii 18–22) Here am I, Muwatalli the king, priest of the Sun-goddess of Arinna and of all the gods, pleading with the Sun-god of Heaven. Sun-god of Heaven, my lord, halt the gods on this day! And these gods whom I have summoned with my tongue on this day, in whatever plea,

§68 (iii 23–24) summon them, Sun-god of Heaven, from heaven and earth, from mountains and rivers, from their temples and their thrones!

The 'Hittites through the Balkans' theory seems to have been dashed by a 2022 archaic DNA paper by Lazaridis, et al, The genetic history of the Southern Arc: a bridge between West Asia and Europe.  The authors sequenced 727 ancient individuals from Anatolia and neighboring areas.  They found no genes from the Balkans entering Anatolia up to and through the Bronze age.  In addition, they found that ancient people of Anatolia through the Bronze age had no Eastern Hunter Gatherer (EHG) genes.  Since the Yamnaya were at least half EHG, with the rest mostly Caucasus Hunter Gatherer and a little bit (6%) of Neolithic farmer, they concluded that the ancestors of the Hittites did not come from the steppe.  Indeed, they argued that the little bit of Neolithic farmer in the Yamnaya did not come from the Cucuteni-Trypillians, but from Anatolian farmers migrating north.  In their view Hittite was brought to Anatolia either by cultural diffusion from the steppe with no gene flow, or the Anatolian languages originated in Anatolia or the Caucasus, and those speakers brought proto-Indo-European to the steppe peoples.  Their conclusions are summarized in the graphic below:

In 2024 the same authors, Lazaridis, et al, published a new paper with different conclusions.  In The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans, they did a very fine grained analysis of the DNA from 428 steppe people.  They found four individuals from the Berezhnovka II site on the lower Volga river dated to the late fifth millennium BCE with Caucasus Hunter Gatherer (CHG) genes which they call BPgroup for related individuals from cemeteries at Berezhnovka-II and Progress-2 in the north Caucasus.  You'll recall that the Khvalynsk cemetery on the middle Volga dating from 4400 BCE  had similarities to Yamnaya burials a thousand years later, including a supine burial position with knees raised, ocher on the floor of the grave, copper ornaments, sacrificed animals and stone mace heads.  The Berezhnovka people were buried under kurgans, and they shared an early steppe culture with Khvalynsk.

In the 2024 paper, Lazaridis found that Bronze age people living in central Anatolia had at least 10% of their genes in common with the BPgroup.  In addition, a particular R1b haplogroup, R-V1636, found at Khvalynsk, Berezhnovka II and Progress-2 was found in individuals buried in Anatolia and Armenia in the Caucasus.  The authors conclude that "People with Lower Volga ancestry contributed four fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya, but also, entering Anatolia from the east, contributed at least a tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age Central Anatolians, where the Hittite language, related to the Indo-European languages spread by the Yamnaya, was spoken. We thus propose that the final unity of the speakers of the “Proto-Indo-Anatolian” ancestral language of both Anatolian and Indo-European languages can be traced to [BPgroup] people sometime between 4400-4000 BCE."

Do you think that's the last word on the origin of the Hittites?  What other revelations might we expect in the future?  And how could the Hittite Sun-god arise from the sea?

The Minoans

We'll get to the origin of the Greeks but before we do, we have to cover the Minoans.  Neolithic farmers from Turkey migrated to Greece and Crete around 7000 BCE, around the time  Çatalhöyük was in its heyday.  The Minoan civilization started around 3100 BCE as settlements grew in size.  In the third millennium BCE trade picked up in the Mediterranean sea and Minoan ships began sailing beyond the Aegean Sea to Egypt, Canaanite cities in what is now Israel, Phoenican cities in Lebanon and Syria, Cyprus and Turkey.  From around 2600 to 1200 BCE, the Minoan civilization on Crete was at the center of a robust trade network linking the city-states of the Greek, Hittite, Assyrian, and Egyptian civilizations, together with trade networks northward to Europe and the Nordic Bronze Age.  Everything was traded on ships across the Mediterranean, including wine, olive oil and fragrant oils from the Levant, ostrich eggs from Libya,  linens, ivory and gold from Egypt, copper, tin,  and bronze ingots from Kazakhstan through the BMAC,  precious stones such as lapis lazuli, turquoise and carnelian from Iran, Tajikistan and western Pakistan, fine pottery from Greece, amber from the Baltic states and timber, cloth, finely crafted luxury goods and finished bronze swords, armor and metal vases from Crete and Santorini.

Society in Crete was organized around palace centered cities, including Phaistos, Hagia Triada, Malia, Zakros, and the largest, Knossos.  There was no money back then so the palace organized trade and redistributed food and materials to the tens of thousands of workers living around the palace of Knossos in an early form of a centralized command economy, similar to all the other cities around the Mediterranean.

The Palace at Knossos

The palace at Knossos was huge, with the main building alone covering three acres.  It had a large central courtyard with a monumental staircase leading to state rooms on an upper floor. It had bathrooms, toilets, and drainage systems.  A separate theatre had seats for 400 spectators.  The basement was a labyrinth of rooms used to store oil, wool, wine and grain.  The palace was decorated with elaborate colorful frescoes of thin waisted men and full busted women, creatures, marine animals and plants.  The Bull leaping fresco is shown below, next to a bull leaping fresco from Çatalhöyük in Turkey, 5,000 years earlier.  What other sport do you know of that lasted for 5,000 years?

Minoan Art

Minoan art is preserved in frescoes, pottery, sculpture and metalworkings.  

Minoan Women

The artistic representation of Minoan women in seeming positions of authority, combined with the lack of depictions of militaries have given rise to the idea that the Minoan civilization was either matriarchal or at least treated women equally with men.  While the evidence is circumstantial, the Knossos museum emphasizes the power of women in Minoan society and HERE is a 250 page book making the argument for Minoan matriarchy.

Minoan Language

The Minoan language was not an Indo-European language.  It was the first written language in Europe.  The Minoans invented Cretan hieroglyphs around 2000 BCE, most likely to help manage their palace economy.   Shortly afterwards, they invented Linear A, a script combining syllables and symbols for words, written on clay tablets.  Linear A has not been fully deciphered, in part because there are only 1400 samples found, and because many are simple lists of things with numbers, and most importantly, because it probably represents a dead language which would make no sense to us.  Despite these obstacles, there is a major new research effort aimed at cracking Linear A, using a machine intensive cryptanalytic approach, described HERE by Francesco Perono Cacciafoco.

Minoan Cataclysms and Transformations

Around 1600 BCE the island of Santorini/Thera, just north of Crete exploded in one of the largest volcanic explosions in recorded history, spewing cubic miles of material into the atmosphere and lowering global temperatures for a year or two.  Tsunami waves from the explosion destroyed settlements on northern Crete.  The Minoan city of Akrotiri on the island was preserved, like Pompei, by being covered in ash.  The memory of the explosion of Santorini/Thera may have given rise a thousand years later to the Greek myth of the lost island of Atlantis.

Shortly afterwards most of the cities and towns on Crete were destroyed.  While earthquakes in the past had destroyed buildings, the destructions around 1500 BCE seem to have been deliberate.  All the major cities were burned, but the palace at Knossos was spared.  The subsequent culture seemed to be dominated by Greeks: the material culture showed mainland influence and the writing changed from Linear A to Linear B.  Linear B was a syllabic writing system similar to Linear A, but Linear B was deciphered in 1952 and found to represent ancient Greek.  Michael Ventris and John Chadwick took the credit for the decipherment, although Alice Kober had done much of the foundational analysis.

With that foreshadowing, let us now turn our attention to the mainland of Greece.

The Greeks

The big unresolved mystery is the question of how the Greek language came to Greece.  Was there an invasion of Indo-European people, and/or did the indigenous people adopt the language?  When and how did this happen?  This mystery is traditionally referred to as 'The Coming of the Greeks'.   We'll look at the evidence below, starting with language, archeology and DNA.

Language

The Greek language is its own major branch of the Indo-European language family.  It has a relatively early attestation, with 6,000 Linear A clay tablets dating to 1400 BCE found in the ruins of  Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae.  Greek has a very deep corpus, including the Homeric epics, much Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature, up to Modern Greek today, making it an important language for the study of language evolution, as well as a window into proto-Indo-European languages.  As with Icelandic, the importance of Homeric, Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature has helped preserve syntax and structure of the language over 3,500 years.

A substantial part of the Greek vocabulary consists of non-Indo-European words.  Mallory points out that non-IE Greek words include words for fig, olive, hyacinth, cypress and laurel.  More surprisingly are the words for metal, tin, bronze, lead, and javelin, suggesting that the proto-Greeks may have left their homeland prior to the Sintashta industrialization of metallurgy.  Even prominent figures of Greek myth and religion have non-IE names, such as Odysseus, Theseus, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite and Hermes. The name Achilles may come from proto-Indo-European *Achi-lawos, meaning 'one who causes distress to the army.'

A number of Greek place names similarly have non-Indo-European roots, including Corinth, Knossos, Salamis, Laris, Samos and even Olympus and Mycenae.   Many of these place names and suffixes are similar to place names in Anatolia, suggesting that they may have been derived from the earlier Neolithic culture which spanned Greece and Anatolia.  Alternatively, some may be archaic Indo-European words, perhaps derived from Luwian spoken in western Anatolia.  Mallory concludes, "The linguistic evidence does seem to indicate that the Indo-Europeans who eventually emerged as Greeks were essentially intrusive into Greece and that they mixed there with a non-Indo-European population and possibly with earlier Indo-European-speaking peoples as well."

Greek Archeology

As in Crete, the Neolithic farming cultures moved from Anatolia into Greece around 7000 BCE.  The evolution of site sizes and pottery styles was roughly similar across Crete, Greece and Anatolia until the Early Helladic II period, from 2650-2200 BCE.  During this period bronze metallurgy was introduced, probably from the Balkans and site sizes grew larger with more evidence of social stratification.  Some kurgans were erected on the west coast of Greece, perhaps copying Balkan culture, or associated with metal traders.  This seems to be the earliest potential period which could have accomodated an invasion of proto-Greek speaking peoples.

Around 2200 BCE some but not all sites in Greece were destroyed, while Crete maintained continuity.   In the Early Helladic III phase, from 2200-2000 BCE, there were new cultural elements, such as many more kurgans, shaft-hole hammer axes, apsidal houses and burials within settlements.  Many scholars attribute these changes to a possible invasion by Indo-Europeans who introduced proto-Greek to the population.  However, some of the changes may be attributable to the 4.2 kiloyear aridification event that destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization.  There could also have been an outbreak of the plague, which was found in Crete at this time.

The subsequent Middle Helladic period from 2000 to 1750 BCE was a period of relative stagnation, especially compared to the Minoans in Crete.

From 1750 BCE onwards Greek civilization leaped forward into the Mycenaean period.  Named after the city of Mycenae, there were at least eight city-states including Athens, Pylos, Thebes and Knossos, ruled by kings living in spectacular palaces made with gigantic cyclopean stones.

The archeological record is inconclusive regarding the Coming of the Greeks.  There are several periods when Indo-Europeans may have staged mass invasions, or taken over existing political centers: during the Early Helladic II period, from 2650-2200 BCE as bronze entered society, at the Early Helladic II/III transition from 2200-2000 BCE when there seemed to widespread destruction and changes in society and with the advent of the Mycenaean period in 1750 BCE.  One archeologist, Oliver Dickinson, argues that each of these changes in Greece were indigenous developments.  He concludes, "Thus, there was no ‘coming of the Greeks’ in any meaningful sense, and when and how the Indo-European language that was to become Greek arrived in the Aegean remains a mystery that it may be impossible to answer satisfactorily."

Another researcher, J. Makkay argues on the basis of much archeological evidence that proto-Greek was brought to Greece in the late third or early second millennium BCE, but the Mycenaeans were a small group of Indo-Iranians, much like the Mitanni, who arrived around 1750 BCE and took over pre-existing cities.

Mycenaean Warfare

Mycenaean Greece was a war-like society, as evidenced by the takeover of Greece and Crete, the impressive defensive walls around their cities, numerous weapons unearthed and represented in art, and as recorded in Mycenaean and Hittite records.  Every rural community was obliged to supply men to serve in standing armies.  The use of chariots is known both from Homeric epics as well as Mycenaean art.  In the 14th century BCE, Hittite records refer to a Mycenaean king, Attarsiya, possibly related to the mythic character of Atreus, waging war in western Anatolia, memories of which may have sparked the myths of the Trojan War.  

Mycenaean Economy

The Mycenaeans grew wealthy on the basis of long distance trade, essentially taking over from the Minoans and expanding trade to Spain and the Black Sea.  As we saw earlier, Mycenaean weapons seem to have been traded to Hungary and the Nordic states, while Baltic amber and chariot parts were found in Mycenaean graves.  Similarities between the Nordic Bronze Age, Hungary and Mycenaean Greece also included shaving kits and tweezers, folding camp stools, and drinking vessels with solar symbols.  Even the chariot design, with four spoked wheels is common across these three cultures.  It is possible that there were trade alliances between kings or chiefs in each of these three areas, which may have extended into marriage or kinship alliances; we don't know. 

Mycenaean Religion

Our understanding of Mycenaean religion is murky, and it would be an easy mistake to project back the later Greek pantheon onto the Mycenaeans.  At the start of the Mycenaean period there  were no large cultic centers, such as later developed at Delphi, only a few small shrines and what could be sacred enclosures.  Records mention priests and priestesses who were responsible for shrines.  The priestesses seemed to have wielded some degree of wealth and power.  Sacrifices of wine, food, and animals were recorded. Poseidon seemed to be a chief god, connected with earthquakes and the underworld.  Goddesses, addressed as "ladies" or "mistresses" and sometimes known as Demeter and Persephone, seemed to have been more important than in classical Greece.  Some divinities which can be found in Classical Greece include Ares, Hephaestus, Erinya, Artemis, Dionysos, and Zeus, but Zeus was much less important than he later came to be.

We don't know, but it is possible that the Mycenaean pantheon was a mixture of some prior Neolithic gods with some emerging Indo-European gods.  Even as the Greek pantheon became more typically Indo-European in Classical Greece, there were definitely outside elements added to it, such as Aphrodite, who was probably adopted from the Phoenician/Semitic/Sumerian goddesses Astarte/Ishtar/Inanna.

Greek DNA

The most recent Greek DNA paper is Lazaridis' et al 2022 The genetic history of the Southern Arc: a bridge between West Asia and Europe.  This paper missed the steppe contribution of the central Anatolians so future work is necessary.  But Lazaridis' 2022 conclusions were that the Minoans and the Greeks prior to the Mycenaneans had a common genetic heritage which was mostly Anatolian Neolithic farmer but with 8-10% Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer ancestry.  This may be the same CHG ancestry which Lazaridis in 2024 attributed to a Lower Volga steppe ancestry in Central Anatolia, i.e. perhaps the same ancestry which led to the Hittities, led to the Minoans and early Bronze Age Greeks.  We don't know yet.

Lazaridis found that the Mycenaean Greeks had an additional 4.3% Eastern Hunter Gatherer and 4.3% Caucasus Hunter Gatherer component which would imply an additional 9% genetic contribution from a Yamnaya like steppe source.  Perhaps J. Makkay was right, that the Mycenaeans represented an Indo-Iranian elite takeover, similar to the Mitanni.  Stay tuned to future DNA findings.

The End of the Bronze Age

During the 12th century BCE a series of calamities befell the major city states of the Mediterranean which, over one hundred years, led to the destruction of most of the major cities and the collapse of the Mycenaean and Hittite empires.  Assyria and Egypt survived but in a much reduced state.  The story is told in the wonderful book, 1177B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, or on this Wikipedia page.

One after another of the great cities in the Middle East were attacked, sacked and burned.  Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions described the invaders as mysterious “Sea Peoples” but little is known about who they were or where they came from. King Ammurapi of the great port city of Ugarit in Northern Syria sent a plea for help:

My father, behold, the enemy’s ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka?… Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.

The ruler of Carchemish sent troops to assist Ugarit, but Ugarit was sacked. A letter sent after the destruction said:

When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it! May you know it!

The inscription on Ramses III mortuary temple, dated 1177 BCE,  reads as follows:

"The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at (one time). A camp [was set up] in one place in Amor. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjekker, Sheklesh, Denye(n), and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed!’”

The names of the Sea People tribes might have meant the following:

Peleset = Philistines

Tjekker = Levantine coast?

Sheklesh = Sicily?

Denyen = Deanans = Homer's Mycenaeans?

Weshesh = Troy, Wilusa?

Causes of the Collapse

The causes of the collapse have been long debated with no scholarly consensus thus far.  Some explanations include:

Drought:  There is some evidence of severe drought in Anatolia and the Levant, but the extent of drought is debated.  Widespread drought and famine could lead farmers to plunder the rich city states, leading to cascading hordes of invaders.  Drought could have been caused by a huge volcanic eruption in Iceland around this time.  A letter from the city of Emar in inland Syria in 1185: “There is famine in our house; we will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.” 

Changes in weaponry:  The shift from bronze to iron weapons which started around this time may have brought cheap and powerful Naue II swords to large numbers of infantry.  Large numbers of infantry with these swords could have overwhelmed the former chariot armies of the Middle East.  The timing is right, but there is no other evidence that this happened.

Earthquakes: An earthquake destroyed Mycenae in 1250 BCE, as deduced from crushed bodies buried in collapsed buildings.  Mycenae was rebuilt, only to be burned in 1190 BCE.  Earthquakes may played some factor in destabilizing some cities, although it can't be the only explanation.

Systems Theory: The centralized administrations of the palace centered economies together with the tight integration of trade may have been susceptible to network collapse, where the centralized economy couldn't cope and lost control as things went wrong.  Some of the cities may have been toppled by their own citizens in rebellion against their rulers.

What lessons does the Collapse of the Bronze Age have for us in our current time?

The Dark Age of Greece

After the collapse, there was some loss of population but we don't know how much.  The end of writing in Greece meant that nothing was recorded for 400 years.  Presumably people reverted to agricultural settlements and perhaps small towns or chiefdoms.  Presumably roving bards like Homer went from town to town entertaining the populace with myths and the stories of the fantastical golden days of the Heroic Age, told in oral poetry.

By 800 BCE the Greek alphabet was invented, writing resumed and the Homeric epics were written down.  By 480 BCE, the Classical period in Greece began, with incredible advances in mathematics, science, architecture, theatre, literature, philosophy, and the invention of Athenian democracy.  It was a remarkable spurt of innovation that set the stage for Western Civilization for the next two millennia.

Summary

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this course, starting on the Pontic Caspian steppes in the fifth millennium BCE, witnessing the explosive growth of the Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures in the fourth millennium BCE, and then charting their expansions into northern and western Europe, central and southern Asia, and Turkey and Greece.  After each expansion, history revealed extraordinary peoples: the Celts, Romans, Germans, Indo-Iranians, Greeks and Hittites. These people either replaced or dominated the populations of the entire Eurasian landmass from Iceland to India.   Each of these peoples retained significant aspects of the culture of their steppe forebears: their language, religion, and pastoral and metallurgical economies and war-like traditions.  

So a question arises: what were the primary factors that allowed these cultures to grow and dominate so successfully?  Some luck was involved, such as sudden climate changes that weakened the farmers and gave herders an advantage.  And perhaps plague played a role as well.  But that can’t explain the total domination over so large an area.  Horses and wheeled carts and chariots played a role, but that technological edge wasn’t permanent; all cultures quickly adopted those innovations, including China, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.  Metallurgy played a role, both in weapons and in trade, but again, that innovation was quickly adopted by all who saw it, and didn’t give a permanent advantage.  So we’re left pondering intangibles: What elements of Indo-European religion and culture led to their success?  The männerbund tradition of sending young men out to rampage and fight for a few years?  The strict religious control by priests over the population?  The guest/host contracts which allowed Indo-Europeans to rule over populations and obtain tribute?  The glorification of war with honor and booty that allowed a redistributive economy by chieftans based on conquest?  Slavery, as demonstrated by each of the Indo-European branches as they emerged into history?  Think about these aspects of culture and come to class with your opinions.

Another question that arises is:  to what extent has the core Indo-European culture and values persisted into modern day?  In the chapter on the Celts and Romans, I gave an argument that aspects of our legal system today were derived from Roman law, which in turn may have come from patron-host and guest-client relationship obligations from the steppes.  Do these societal obligations live on in Western Culture today?  Certainly Western Culture is very individualistic, especially when contrasted with the cultures of east Asia, which value subservience of an individual to their elders and community.  How much of our independent culture could have been retained from the steppes?

Similarly, war is common throughout history and across cultures, but it is more prevalent in Indo-European societies, such as the Romans, than say Chinese or Polynesian culture.  Why?  

Can we trace our military-industrial complex back to the maces, horses and chariots of the steppes?  Echoes of Indo-European myths and fairy tales have lasted for 5,000 years.  Can cultural traditions last that long?

So we end our course with more questions than answers.  While we have learned a lot, it seems that there are always more mysteries of prehistory to explore.