Odp: proto-Indo-European geography.

----- Original Message -----

From: markodegard@...

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 1999 12:19 AM

Subject: [cybalist] proto-Indo-European geography.

I see there are quite a few Eastern Europeans on this list. I'd be interested in their personal observations of what their own local geography and the kind of geography they were taught in school teaches them about the IE migrations. Here in the US, we are taught very little about European geography, and in particular, Eastern European and Central Asian geography. I doubt very much that you'd find more than 1 in 100 college freshmen who've every heard of the Yenisey River.

My main questions concern what is possible in terms of migration routes. When moving from Eastern European into 'Middle Europe' (west of the Carpathians), my impression is there are only three real possibilities.

The first is via the Bug or Dneister to the Tisza -- i.e., into Hungary. By my understanding, the Transylvanian Alps are not what you would think of as a migration route; the Iron Gate of the Danube was an impassable cataract. A secondary route would have been at the far south, in modern Bulgaria/Thessaly. The third route, the most difficult of all, would be along the coast of the Baltic Sea. A transit of the Pripet marshes, while not impossible, was always difficult; you'd need a 'native guide'.

One on the plains of Hungary, the routes are then via the Danube west (and via the Seine, to the Atlantic) or south on the Danube to modern Belgrade, and then via the Morava (the southern one, the one that goes up near Skopje), and then down the Vardar to Aegean Sea.

The second big question is exactly what the word 'steppe' means, especially to a Russian. In English, it refers to a relatively flat treeless expanse covered with seasonal grasses. An analogous region is the US Great Plains, ranging from just west of the Mississippi clear to the foot of the Rocky Mountains: historically, "an ocean of grass", just as the Russian steppe has been described. At the same time, however, you encounter the term 'forest-steppe', which seems contradictory, even oxymoronic: exactly what does 'forest-steppe' mean to you? I imagine it to mean a transition zone between grasslands and the dense Northern (Boreal) Forest, but I could be wrong.

How difficult is the 'coastal route' along the Eastern shore of the Black Sea? Is it wide and flat, with lots of fresh water, or is it steep and rocky, difficult to move along, particularly if you have a herd of cattle with you, without being harassed by natives up in the hills?

There are other questions too. I have only the vaguest idea of how easily one enters the Russian river valleys as you cross from east to west. In the US Great Plains, you can encounter some pretty steep, cliff-lined valleys, but on the whole, it's a gentle rise from the level of the river to the highest ground -- undulating, low hills, easily traversed by livestock.

What I'm looking for are the logical late neolithic - eneolithic -early bronze age routes the PIE's would have taken.

---

Dear Mark,

 

From an Eastern or Central European perspective, some American (and even British) maps do look funny. For some unfathomable reason the Pripet Marshes, which actually cover a little more than 100 sq miles in the basin of the River Pripyat' (still admittedly the largest swamp in Europe), tend to loom larger than life on many of them, sometimes beginning just east of the Vistula and disappearing into the legendary lands beyond the right-hand border of the map of Europe.

 

Our Ukrainian and Russian friends will no doubt provide first-hand descriptions of their respective countries. I can tell you a few things about the geography of Poland. Except for its southern extremities, which belong to the Carpathian and Sudeten mountain systems, and a belt of geologically old uplands in the southern one-third of the country, Poland is part of the North European Plain, pressed out by the glaciers of the late Pleistocene -- that is, either completely flat or gently undulating. Undulation, especially in northern Poland, is usually combined with the presence of lakes filling post-glacial troughs. River valleys are wide and their edges gently sloping. Mazovia, the part of Poland where I was born (around Warsaw), is about as picturesque as a table top.

 

Over such terrain, travel is easy. As you go east to west, you have to cross an occasional river, but few of them are big enough to qualify as serious obstacles. The mountains in the south, however, must have been a formidable barrier for a neolithic-style traveller. Archaeological data show that neolithic cultures came to Poland via entry routes which were few and quite narrow: the Moravian Gate between the eastern end of the Sudeten and the West Carpathians, the route round the western end of the Sudeten (at the water gap of the Elbe, which separates the range from the Erzgebirge), and the corridor along the Dniester and San valleys, by which the Vistula can be reached quite conveniently from the Pontic region.

 

Once on the North European Plain, neolithic peoples would have been free to roam around, if it hadn't been for the forests. The Ukrainian forest-steppe is a mosaic in which grasslands cover the drier parts, interspersed with woods, which grow mainly along the rivers. In Central Europe things were different. In the first millenia of the Holocene the defrosted lands were conquered by taiga-like pine forests, but as the milder Atlantic phase approached, the pines were partly replaced by the oak, the elm, the hornbeam and the lime-tree, especially in the most fertile parts of the plain. The forests were rather dense, and if not literally impenetrable, they were at least difficult to traverse or to clear with the technologies then available. They abounded in large animals like the aurochs and the European bison, red deer, elk (what you'd call moose), the wild woodland pony (closely related to the ancestor of the domestic horse), bears, wolfs, lynxes and wildboars. Human settlements clustered along the main rivers and were scattered over the large lakeland stretching between the lower Vistula and the Oder system.

 

As more millennia passed and metal tools appeared, entire tracts of woodland were gradually removed. Goods, inventions, ideas, ethnic groups and languages circulated easily across the continent. Merchant routes and trading posts, such as those comprising the so-called Amber Road (from the Baltic to the Adriatic), connected northeastern Europe with the adjacent regions. By the time of Iranian forays, Celtic colonisation, and then of Germanic, Hunnish and Slavic migrations and conquests the land was freely accessible from many directions.

 

Piotr Gasiorowski