Odp: proto-Indo-European geography.

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

From: markodegard@...

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 1:52 AM

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

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.

[1] Interesting. Yes, we do tend see the Pripet marshes as a vast vaguely defined swamp starting at the headwaters of the Vistula, extending to the headwaters of the Volga and Dneister. I imagine it's been greatly reduced in extent by modern drainage, but your comments are corrective. Nonetheless, it is a barrier.

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),

[2] Yes. "The Moravian Gate" would be the gap created by the Morava River (of the north, the one that forms part of the boundary between Austria and Hungary, as well as Moravia and Bohemia). I have not heard of this term before.  I'm familiar with the Elbe valley approach. Both of these approaches are via Hungary or the Vienna Basin. 

and the corridor along the Dniester and San valleys, by which the Vistula can be reached quite conveniently from the Pontic region.

[3] This one I'm not really aware of. The books I've read make vague comments about going thru the Pripet Marshes, almost with a sense of wonder. This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for. No, we really do not learn Eastern European geography. This vagueness seems to infect just about every book on IE studies coming from West European and North American authors. I suspect we in the West would more appreciate the Eastern school's conclusions were we know the geographic realities.

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.

[4] Yes. The North European forest was a serious challenge. Even for later 'invaders'. The ancestors of Germanic and Balto-Slavic were left in relative isolation or were able to shrug off occasional instrusive linguistic elements.

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, wolves, 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.

[5] My reading of Mallory suggests he is moving towards a 'disturbingly' late date for non-Anatolian PIE. If we are to have an undifferentiated common Indo-European speech continuum that agrees at all with the approximate usual dates for the emergence of the various daughter languages, you have to have the ancestral groups in place more or less by 2500 BCE, ready to spread out from the common center towards the Ural and Yenisey in the east to the headwaters of the Elbe in west, and regions south at a remarkably rapid pace.< html>

---

Dear Mark,

Just a few additional remarks and necessary corrections. I have numbered your comments for easier reference.

 

[1] and [3]: It seems to me that the myth of the Pripet Marshes has never been properly debunked. The headwaters of the Vistula are on the northers slopes of the Western Carpathians, about 250 mi from whiere the real-world Pripet Marshes may ever have extended even in prehistorical times (so, incidentally, are the headwaters of the Volga and the Dniester, but the confluence of the Pripyat' and the Dnieper, approximately the site of the Chernobyl disaster, lies well within the primaeval swamp area).

 

As you set out from the upper Vistula towards the Marshes, you pass through the Vistula/San 'mesopotamia', a fertile plain with loess soils in which the neolithic farmers of the Linear Pottery culture took a lively interest as soon as the colonisation of Northern Europe had begun. Farther to the northeast lies a range of hills called Roztocze; behind them, the moderate Lublin Upland, also with a reputation for good soils and a record of neolithic farming (Lengyel culture sites). Then you walk down from the hills into the valley of the River Bug (the largest tributary of the middle Vistula), and it is there that the swamps really begin. The Pripyat' is a stone's throw on the other side of the Bug, across the divide between the Baltic and the Black Sea basins.

 

The important point is that between the Pripyat' system and the Carpathians there's plenty of space for travelling; and the watershed between the San (Baltic) and the Dniester (Pontic) can be crossed by a child, not to mention grown-up shepherds or farmers and their livestock.

 

[2] The Moravian Gate (Moravská Brána in Czech) was by far THE most important entrance into Poland in the earliest North European neolithic. The cultures radiating from the Danubian area usually took this approach before they tried others. The name derives from the Czech province of Moravia, not directly from the River Morava, which flows more to the south. The gap was actually created part by the upper Oder, part by the Beczva (a tributary of the Morava).

 

[4] It all depends on your chronology. If you mean Bronze Age Proto-Germani or Proto-Balto-Slavs, I'd say it's highly unlikely that they lived in splendid isolation. The first really indigenous neolithic culture of Northern Europe, the Funnel Beakers, already covered much of the region, including almost all of modern Poland. The same is true of the later Globular Amphorae; and the Corded Ware complex extended from the Volga to Scandinavia and the Rhine. This testifies to the existence of trading networks and lively contacts even before the advent of the bronze axe. The Bell Beakers of the Bronze Age are found from Iberia to the Ukraine. The languages of Northern Europe (Germanic, Baltic and Slavic) share a lot of vocabulary and display other similarities which are apparently due to areal convergence. There are numerous early loanwords from Iranian in Slavic, from Slavic in Baltic, from Germanic in both, and from Iranian, Baltic and Germanic in Finno-Ugric. The so-called Old European hydronymy is also remarkably uniform. The North European Plain must have been, in some sense, a single cultural area.

 

[5] That's why I prefer deeper chronologies, even at the cost of sacrificing the Pontic homeland. As a linguist, I'd feel more comfortable with dates like 6000-5000 BC for PIE (ancestral also to Anatolian, of course), so that the linguistic evolution of the family could be traced as a series of gradual splits, slow dispersals and secondary convergences rather than a single Big Bang. This is also why I find the theory that the Linear Pottery folk were already IE pretty attractive.

 

Yours,

 

Piotr