Odp: Cowboys on Horseback

What follows I also pertinent to some of the issues raised by Marc Verhaegen:

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

From: Marc Verhaegen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Monday, November 01, 1999 8:41 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: Cowboys on Horseback

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[Mark:] I don't think Piotr or I are in much disagreement. A matter of emphasis, perhaps. Much of what I write here is speculative. I am greatly influenced by Mallory and his demand that we keep the IE homeland within credible boundaries. Having an essentially undifferentiated PIE being spoken from the headwaters of the Yenisey to the mouth of the Seine before 3500 is not possible.

 

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[Piotr:] I think we respect the same principles while experimenting with various permissible interpretations of the same data. I absolutely subscribe to what Mallory stipulates. I don't propose that there was anything like an undifferentiated PIE smeared all over the map of Eurasia in the fourth millennium BC. I suggest, instead, that PIE was spoken as a relatively homogeneous language some 7500 years ago in the Danubian area (certainly "within credible boundaries"), from which the bearers of the Linear Pottery culture took its descendants to northern Europe, and from which its other descendants spread to Anatolia and to the steppes. By 3500 BC the IE languages -- whatever their geographical distribution -- would have been as differentiated as the Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages are today (with a comparable chronological depth).

 

The separation of Proto-Anatolian would have taken place well before 5000 BC. Early IE loanwords in Finno-Ugric suggest that the Satem languages were already a distinct group within the IE family about 2300 BC, and I bet they are much older than that, as some distinctly "Indic" Aryas were present in Anatolia and Babylonia before 1500 BC. As for northern Europe, I believe that many different or even quite distantly related IE languages were spoken there in the third millennium, though they did share some secondary similarities due to areal convergence.

 

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The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, in the article on 'Cow' states:

Domestication of of cattle began during the transition to the Neolithic economy, appearing earliest in Anatolia and Greece in the seventh millennium BC and subsequently throughout the rest of Europe, reaching northern and western Europe in the centuries before 4000 BC. Domestic cattle are also found by the sixth millennium BC north of the Caucasus as they spread through the steppe regions or were there locally domesticated from the native aurochs. [p.137]

Elsewhere it states (and this is new to me, but quite pertinent to our ongoing discussion) that *tauros meant 'aurochs' (of either sex) and then only later was the word transferred to male bovines.

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This is deduced from the fact that the Slavic word for 'aurochs' is a reflex of *tauros. Polish, for example, differentiates tur 'aurochs' (never used of domestic bovines), żubr (OPolish ząbr) 'European bison, wisent', byk 'bull', also = 'hart', wół 'ox', bydło 'cattle' and krowa 'cow', also colloquially = 'Bos taurus, of either sex'. The last aurochs (a cow) expired on a royal game reserve in central Poland in 1627, so one could assume that we Slavs should know best what a tauros is like (in Polish, we still say silny jak tur 'as strong as an aurochs'). This may be right but I've seen no corroborative evidence from Baltic or Germanic (the other ethnoi to whom the beast was familiar) to reduce the likelihood of tur being a wandering loanword in prehistoric Europe (the theory that it ultimately comes from Semitic is still favoured by many).

 

By the way, the neolithic cattle of central and northern Europe were derived from the native subspecies of the aurochs, different from the one domesticated in Anatolia and brought from there to Greece (while sheep and goats were simply imported).

 

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Attila's confederacy was a jumble of different tribes. It seems the Huns had both saddles and metal stirrups -- a technological innovation sufficient to devastate the Roman Empire, a devastation which was worse east of the Carpathians, and which led to the Slavs filling the cultural vacuum south and west of them.

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East and north of the Carpathians there was no Roman Empire or Roman influence. There was a Gothic "empire" in those parts -- a rather primitive political organism, which proved unable to resist the Huns. It was mainly the elimination of the Gothic elite (the defeated King Ermanaric committed suicide, others sought Roman protection in Moesia or accepted the dominance of the Huns) that created a vacuum filled by the opportunistic Slavs once the Huns had relaxed their grip on central Europe. The first step in the expansion of the Slavs was from the east into modern Poland and towards the Elbe, then across the Carpathians and the Danube towards the Adriatic and Aegean seas, into the disintegrating Roman provinces of the Balkan region.

Piotr Gasiorowski