Illiterate IE: 4th millennium BCE

I am appending a long extract from Muhly's article on the Bronze Age
Setting in view of its importance. While discussing the evolution of
early bronze age from the 4th milennium BCE, he notes that an
illiterate Europe was not the source for the transfer of metallurgical
technologies very rapidly from western Mediterranean to the Indus
Valley. He also notes that theories of the long-distance migrations of
ethnic groups such as Indo-Europeans and Hurrians should be rejected.

If so, how could IE be linguistically isolated from the influences of,
say Elamite or Sumerian?

Sarasvati Sindhu Valley civilization (SSVC) was literate as was
proto-Elam and Mesopotamia in 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. This link
between literacy and rapidity of metallurgical developments should be
seriously considered.

Writing System and Metallurgical advances in ancient times

"…by 2600 BC the jewelry and other metalwork from the Royal Cemetery
at Ur were so sophisticated that, as Cyril Smith has stated, the work
"reveals knowledge of virtually every type of metallurgical phenomenon
except the hardening of steel that was exploited by technologists in
the entire period up to the end of the 19th century AD". (CS Smith,
Art, technology and science: notes on their historical interaction,
Technology and Culture 11 (1970): 493-549, p. 499). The question is,
of course, why all this work took place in the 3rd millennium BC…It
seems to me that any attempt to explain why things suddenly took off
about 3000 BC has to explain the most important development, the birth
of the art of writing. The invention of writing had not been given
proper attention by prehistorians because most of the scholars who
have dealt with the third millennium BC in recent years have been
specialists either in European or in Aegean prehistory. These worlds
are illiterate (or preliterate to be most polite) and they are not
accustomed to dealing with written texts or in thinking about the
significance of such texts
Yet in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, to a lesser extent the Indus Valley
and perhaps even China we are dealing with literate record-keeping
civilizations. The ability to write is the most significant
intellectual achievement of ancient Egypt and Sumer. Recent attempts
to see the birth of civilization in Europe, or even in the British
Isles, based upon a revised chronology derived from calibrated
radiocarbon dates, flounder on this point. (This is based upon the
assumption that Europe remained without any written history or native
system of writing until contact with the Greco-Roman world. Some
believe in an Old European Linear Script, in existence in the 6th
millennium BC (cf. M. Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe,
7000-3500 BC [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974], pp.
85-88. I do not believe that the identified signs represent any real
system of writing and, again, they certainly led nowhere. This is not
the place to discus the problems raised by the Tartaria tablets; the
date of that material is still much in question). In spite of much
recent literature to the contrary there is still good case to be made
for the primacy of the ancient Near East. It was here that the
important technological and artistic discoveries were made culminating
in the invention of writing and the emergence of the proto-urban world
in the late 4th millennium BC…

'Recent finds of so-called proto-Elamite tablets from late 4th
millennium contexts at Susa, Godin Tepe, Tepe Yahya, and
Shahr-I-Sokhta indicate that a form of written notation was developing
in Iran at least as early as in Iraq. (For recent finds see H. Weiss
and T. Cuyler Young Jr., The merchants of Susa: Godin V and
Plateau-Lowland relations in the Late fourth millennium BC, Iran 13
(1975): 1-17; W. Sumner, Excavations at Tall-I Malyan (Amshan), Iran
14 (1976) 103-15; and CC Lamberg-Karlovsky, Urban interaction on the
Iranian Plateau excavations at Tepe Yahya, 1967-1973, Proceedings of
the British Academy 54 (1973) 1-43 (pagination of separate reprint).
Yet in Iran that development came to a dead end while in Iraw ancient
Sumer created a remarkable written language that went from simple
account texts and lexical lists to the Vulture Stele inscription of
Eannatum within the course of several hundred years. The current
Italian excavations at the Syrian site of Tell Mardikh, ancient Ebla,
are now making clear just how pervasive and powerful these
Mesopotamian developments really were.

'I believe that the extraordinary development of metallurgy during the
course of the 3rd millennium BC must be seen in these terms, as a
response to developments within the area of Greater Mesopotamia. Here
material from sites such as Tell Asmar in the Diyala, from Tepe Gawra
in the north, beginning with the remarkable electrum wolf's head in
Gawra X (Jemdat Nasr period) and culminating in the rich collection of
objects from Gawra VI, and from Kish and the Royal Cemetery at Ur
provide the background for developments throughout Syria, Anatolia,
and the Eastern Mediterranean.

'I do not maintain that Aegean metallurgy was a direct import from
Mesopotamia. I would like to suggest that the stimulus ultimately came
from Mesopotamia, through Syria, Cyprus, and Anatolia, and that the
international world that developed in the 3rd millennium was a
response to the stimulus provided by the expansion of Mesopotamian
civilization in the Early Dynastic and Presargonic periods…

'Many theories have been presented to account for the spread of
metallurgy in the 3rd millennium BC…Such theories involve large-scale
migration of peoples over vast distances, migrations often identified
with one ethnic group such as Indo-Europeans or Hurrians. It is
probably best to reject all such theories, along with the elaborate
archaeological reconstructions that have accompanied them. There is no
evidence to support the existence of any specialized group of
metalworkers in the Early Bronze Age, and it has not been possible to
substantiate any theory of migrations or colonization at this time.
Even the famous Indo-European migration into Greece and Anatolia is in
need of a complete reinvestigation. It is a complex period but a
recent study of the Italian Copper Age sums up the current consensus
very well: "Nothing is to be gained by inventing immediate solutions,
either invading Indo-Europeans in south-east Europe, or Levantine or
Aegean colonists and traders in Italy. Any theory needs at least a few
supporting facts." (C. Renfre and R. Whitehouse, The copper age of
Peninsular Italy and the Aegean, Annals of the British School of
Archaeology in Athens 69 (1974): 343-90, p. 381)…

'It cannot be denied that all this is part of a basic pattern within
scholarship over the past ten years. Everywhere the emphasis is upon
local origins and independent development. Much of this is a healthy
reaction to the basic methodology of past years, where every new style
and every new technique was seen as brought in from the outside by a
specific group of people…The truth must lie somewhere in the middle
ground.'

[Jamess D. Muhly, The Bronze Age setting, in: Theodore A. Wertime and
James D. Muhly (eds.), The coming of the age of iron, New Haven, Yale
University Press, pp. 25-67; pp. 26-29].