Re: The IE migrations and the Black Sea

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "aquila_grande" <aquila_grande@...>
wrote:

>
> In all the treaties and discussion I have seen about the early IE
> migrations, the Black Sea is concidered as a hinderance or even a
> fence for the migration. The question of how the IE tribes got
> around to Anatolia (or the other way) allways pop up. In the same
> way the Caspian sea is considered a fence for the migration eastward
> that had to be circumvented.
>
> I think tink is a wrong way of thinking. It is higly probable that
> the IE tribes around the Anube delta or in Anatolia could use boats,
> and effectively migrate across these seas or at least along the
> shores, and probably great groups of IE people could migrate
> simultanously at these seas. The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl
> did show that it is possible to even migrate across the Atlantic
> Ocean and the Pacific in simple fleets, and that the Sea in fact
> made long distance migration easier.

Conventional wisdom has it that PIE speakers came from landlocked
areas and as such were unfamiliar with oceans or large bodies of
water. There has been considerable debate about whether Poseidon is a
land God or sea God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poseidon

"Given Poseidon's connection with horses as well as the sea, and the
*landlocked situation of the likely Indo-European homeland*, some
scholars have proposed that Poseidon was originally an aristocratic
horse-god who was then assimilated to Near Eastern aquatic deities
when the basis of the Greek livelihood shifted from the land to the
sea (emphasis added)"

Some scholars (Witzel 2002) have also proposed that Rig Vedic Samudra
doesn not mean ocean but a lake.

M. Kelkar

>
> Then the Black sea or Caspian Sea would not be any problem for
> migration. On the contrary, they would facilate the migration, and
> make mass migration, colonization and trading easier.
>
> I therefore think the migation to or from Anatolia, and the
> migration down to Greece likely occured by boat and most likely
> streightacross the sea.
>
> If migration by boat is considered as the most likely form of
> migration in this area, I think it will be easier to establish a
> theory about a migration pattern that explaines the structural
> groupings of the IE languages.
>