Re: How to make Indo-Aryans

George wrote:
<<Of course it could be that we're reading a bit too much into this abstract.
After all it does not rule out the possibility that there were "prestige
elites" much earlier than Sintashta (ca.2250-1750 BC) operating east of the
Urals.>>

The abstract reflects I think Anthony's inability to look beyond the horse
which makes him a theorist of extremely limited vision when it comes to
language and social history.

As far as, any prestige elite roaming around east of the Urals, it's also
just as possible that any such elite would not have been IE speakers.

I suspect that food production came early to central Asia from different
sources, but that the initial and most effective influence came from Europe.
So I think that there's just as good a chance that Anthony's hypothetical
elites could have as easily ended up, like the Varangians, speaking the
language of the folk whom they were trying to be elite to. But I really don't
believe anyone had the firepower at the time to bully central Asian pasto
ralists into any kind of a feudal European kingdom.

More likely, the coming of domestication, food production and the long
distance trade in metals, ideas, etc., caused a widely dispersed groups of
"nomads" to come together in new centers and start communicating with one
another and the bringers of the new technologies. And IE -- the language of
domestication, metals and long distance trade -- would have provided the
common language to answer that local Tower of Babel effect. Resource and
trade centers attract diverse peoples.

People don't congregate to elites, they congregate to get a piece of the pie
- and that may require learning a new language. How they would have later
organized themselves for order and to protect themselves or even eventually
be agressors hardly requires Anthony's traveling IE elite show. It did not
in Egypt, Mesopotamia or China.

<<There is another abstract in that Esslingen conference which derives
this "elite"(as per Anthony) culture from the Near East and Transcaucasia.. Wh
ich doesn't seem to fit any model except (perhaps) that of Gamkrelidze and
Ivanov(?)>>

I'll look for the abstract. But the linguistic implications of the Near East
elite in Central Asia would only suggest that it was not the language of the
elite that ended up being the language of the people, but the other way
around.

Steve