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In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth

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IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS is essential reading for those interested in the people who spoke the ancestor of most tongues of Europe and western Asia. While scholars have carefully reconstructed a proto-language, the identity of its speakers and their geographical origin remain a mystery, and J.P. Mallory shows what is currently thought in the field.

Mallory begins by tracing the historical development of European comparative linguistics, and then examines the various branches of the Indo-European language family first in Asia, then in Europe. However, the most useful portion of the book begins when Mallory attempts to reconstruct as well as one can the actual cultural and social traits of the Indo-Europeans based on the proto-language they spoke. He shows how horses must have been very important within such a culture, asserts that the people must have lived within certain geographical boundaries based on their common vocabulary, and even postulates Proto-Indo-European religious rituals. Unlike Watkin's HOW TO KILL A DRAGON, Mallory does not give much space to concepts of comparative Indo-European poetics.

The last third of Mallory's work is concerned with the Indo-European homeland problem, the eternal conundrum for those who would apply comparative linguistics to actual archaeology. Mallory favours the Russian steppes or Ukraine, as do most scholars, and argues quite well against the usual alternative theory of an Anatolian origin. I felt, however, that his placement of the Indo-Europeans could have been more substantial than it was if he had worked in more evidence of contact with speakers of the Uralic languages.

A downside of the book is that, while Mallory's entire topic is based on linguistic reconstruction, there is no passion for linguistics in this book. I was unhappy to see, for example, that while Mallory is well aware of laryngeal discoveries, he has chosen to give the older reconstructions of PIE roots in the interest of pronouncability. I don't think the benefits outweight the appearance of datedness and quaintness.

While introductions to comparative Indo-European linguistics abound, there are few volumes like IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS which apply reconstruction to substantial archeological exploration. Mallory's work should certainly be read by anyone interested in larger applications of Indo-European philology. I should note that this book should not be approached by the layman unfamiliar with comparative linguistics, and that a work like Szeremenyi's INTRODUCTION TO INDO-EUROPEAN LINGUISTICS is a necessary prequisite.

Who were the INDO-EUROPEANS? According to British linguist J.P. Mallory, their language was the proto-type of the languages spoken by over 2 billion people today. He also says the Indo-Europeans should not be confused with the `Aryans' claimed to be the progenitors of the Third Reich. Mallory suggests the Indo-Europeans appear to have been a pastoral nomadic group who lived in the Pontic-Caspian region (Steppes of Mother Russia) sometime between the second and fifth millenium BC from whence they diffused.

Mallory employs paleolinguistics to show how several dozen modern languages are descended from a `Proto Indo-European' mother tongue that came to dominate many other languages (not all) of the European-Asian land mass. He uses the work of archeologists to support of his theory. In a nutshell, he mostly disagrees with Colin Renfrew, while mostly agreeing with Marija Gimbutas. Renfrew apparently has posited the idea that the changes archeologists see in the successive layers of excavated sites are the result of internal innovation and successive technological change (folks keep reinventing the wheel), where Gimbutas seems to subscribe to the notion that hostile horse-riding kurgan-building invaders from the steppes mowed down the peaceful matriarchial civilizations of their neighbors. Mallory suggests paleolinguistics supports the idea that the languages of Europe and Asia which resemble each other did not spring up independently of one another and it is not likely that the civilizations that sustained them did either.

Mallory theorizes the diffusion of the proto Indo-Euopean language from a Pontic-Caspian homeland took three paths, one through Anatolia and the Balkans, one through Northern Europe, and one East toward Iran and India ( the case for Anatolia, Greece and parts of Southern Europe appears to be very strong). He also suggests that the diffusion may have in part been the result of internal changes such as excessive population growth and climatic change that made agriculture a losing proposition. The social change resulting from the adaptation of more successful strategies for survival, such as pastoral nomadism may have led to a greater acceptance of the people who brought it about and their language. Whatever brought about the change, Indo-European languages exist from Ireland to India today.

Readers of Rian Eisler's CHALICE AND THE BLADE, and Merlin Stone's WHEN GOD WAS A WOMAN, will find their ideas are fairly well supported by Mallory's work.

Mallory's arguments on behalf of his thesis are clear and compelling. He methodically builds his case using the work of many scholars from both the East and the West. Perhaps one of the wonderful outcomes from the `fall of the wall' in 1989, is the reunification of scholars from the old Soviet block with those of the West.

j p mallory follows the linguistic, archeological and historical trails in a stringently analytical, yet very readable fashion. The evidence is scattered over many languages, but Mallory appears to be very familiar with the Russian, German, French, English, and other monographs and scholarly articles. His erudition wears well, sprinkled with wit and insight over several hundred pages of close reasoning and informed speculation. Although he agrees essentially with the Gimbutas thesis that the kurgan steppe zone was the PIE homeland, he gives other theses a proper hearing. A book to read and re-read. It is on my night-table and very well-thumbed.

Dr. Mallory (who is an Amercan) is the Prof. of Archaeology at Queens University Belfast, and for many seasons has been leading the excavations of Eamhain Macha at Navan, which was the prehistoric capital of the province of Ulster in No. Ireland.

This book is a highly readable introduction to a subject that is extremely complex, difficult and controversial (as other reviewers have pointed out below). They have also noted that it is a few years old.

I suspect that those who wrote negative reviews may be working in the field and are well abreast of the very latest currents in thinking and "politics" regarding this subject. Such debates are always raging among scholars, and it is important that they do. However, they do not necessarily need to greatly concern the reader who is looking for a general and accessible introduction to the subject which discuses the major finds, the geography involved, and the central debates and problems concerning the subject, etc.

This book is a rare and vaulable find for the "educated amateur" who is so often faced with a choice of impossibly esoteric academic books, and works that are more of the coffee-table variety, lacking scholarly "meat". Prof. Mallory also has a very engaging and lively writing style that is effortless to read. While the author presumes intelligence and a high general level of education, he does not presume that the reader has a subtle and esoteric knowledge of Indo-European archaeology/anthropology. (I am not saying it is an "easy read", but that it is not tortuous, like many academic books).

This book is a classic, and it deserves to be.

Past racist misuse of the term "Aryan" notwithstanding, there is no more copiously documented and supported thesis in historical linguistics than the Indo-European hypothesis, with over 200 years of scholarship to back it up. Although this work was published before human genetic data published by Cavalli-Sforza which tantalizingly suggested an Anatolian origin for the Indo-European peoples, this book is an honest, well-informed introduction to the problem of Indo-European origins. The unfavorable reviews on this page astound me by their pettiness and ignorance, and I have to conclude that they simply have an unscientific, ideological objection to the concept of a Proto-Indo-European language or a people that spoke it, based on the silly notion that such a hypothesis is "racist."

Indo-European studies, like Representation Art, was adversely affected by the Nazi endorsement of Aryan studies. Only recently has this field of study started to truly recover from this setback. It is **not** race-theory, but language theory and related folk-movements that most affect the core of the discipline.

This is the best book written on the topic for a general reader. The common origins for the peoples of Europe, Iran, India is something that anyone wishes to have a good understanding of history needs to understand. Many of the particulars of history are still obscure, even to the experts of the field, but the relations between these peoples all go back in the recesses of ancient history.

One of the major problems of history is a simple issue, why is it so short? Human history appears to, at best, be about 10,000 years. But the human species has been around for at least ten times that long. Why the great gap there? Indo-European studies can be seen as an attempt to push things back further into the past by studying out languages. Sanskrit and Latin have a common source, that we can see by doing comparisons, so where is the common source? And who were those people that were the common source? People want to understand who they are and this discipline is an attempt to try and understand who we are.

Of course, the research and thinking on the subject is very much complicated by the interactions the Indo-European languages has with non-IE languages, and even by those interactions that sub-groups within the IE had with each other. None of these groups existed in a vacuum. Word bowering between speakers has happened throughout history, and this gives rise to many oddities.

The author only mentions the concept of Nostratic once. Nostratic linguistics is a theoretical idea that tries to ascribe the arising of, more or less, all language to one development or discovery at some point in the far distant past. It is a much broader approach to the concept of the Proto-Language, in so far as it is looking for a Proto-Proto-Language or a common source to the various Proto-Languages. It has a certain appeal to me because it seems to make sense on a very theoretical level.

The reason the good author avoids more than page length of discussion to the idea is that it is very, very, very theoretical. There is very little real evidence going for the Nostratic concept. Of course, science - even social ones like linguistics - must confine themselves to the evidence. Nostratic is thinking of things outside the box though, and can be helpful to think like that at times as long as one sees it as a useful exercise and not as a replacement for real scientific thinking.

All in all, this is a good book and I like it.

I came to this book as a result of reading evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond's book, The Third Chimpanzee. The Horses, Hittites, and History chapter in Diamond's book discusses the several main theories for the origin of the proto-Indo-Europeans, and cites this as a major reference and source for this chapter. Since I like to go to the horse's (or Hittite's) mouth myself, following up on Diamond's dicussion of the importance of the book in his bibliography, I thought I'd check out the original book.

For those wanting a more complete exposition of the proto-Indo-European theory, this book is probably still the best one out there on the subject. Although now almost 20 years old, it's still a well-written, detailed account, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone wanting a better understanding of this area of history.

Actually, you could just read the 26-page chapter in Diamond's book first, and then see if you want more detailed information. Diamond himself used both the present book and many others to write the chapter in his book, so it represents a good summary of present scholarship in the area. For those of you who want more books on the subject, I mention some of these below, which Diamond also cites in his bibliography.

I would follow the above up with Cavalli-Sforza's book discussing his fascinating data showing the relationship between dozens of genetic markers and their current geographical distribution and presence, or lack of them, in the different peoples in Europe, and what this shows about their origins, since this adds a further dimension to the PIE hypothesis. Sforza also discusses the genetic data for peoples outside of Europe, such as Polynesians and Australasians, but I found his conclusions about Europe, since they're relevant to the PIE question, the most interesting.

In addition to the above two books, the other most important recent book on this subject is Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language; also important are older but still useful books by George Cardona, Indo-European and Indo-Europeans; Indo-European Language and Society, by Emile Benveniste; The Indo-Europeans in the Fourth and Third Millenia, by Edgar Polome; Ancient Indo-European Dialects, by Birnbaum and Puhvel; Indo-European Philology, by W.B. Lockwood, and The Distribution of Indo-European Root Morphemes, by Norman Bird, which also came out somewhat later, around the time of Renfrew and Mallory's books.

And for those who really want to go to the horse's mouth, so to speak, there is also the Journal of Indo-European Studies, for those with a true scholarly bent (or masochistic bent, as the case may be, which probably includes me, since I've read a lot of academic journals in my life).

Interestingly enough, Cavalli-Sforza's research shows an origin for PIE in Anatolia, or what is modern Turkey. This is not that far off from the supposed origin of the proto-Indo-Europeans in the area north of the Caspian and Black Seas, but does push it further south.

Overall, a well-done discussion of a fascinating area of ancient history and archaeology for someone wanting a good introduction and grounding in the subject.

Recent attempts have been made, by researchers such as Colin Renfrew, to push back the date of the Indo-European expansions to the early Neolithic, as early as the seventh millenium BC. This book does a great job of describing precisely why this theory is untenable in light of both linguistic and archaeological evidence. For one thing, Proto-Indo-European has a reconstructed word for wheel, *kwelkwo. As the wheel was not invented until the fifth or fourth millenium BC, one wonders how Renfrew explains this discrepancy. It's not just the wheel, but many other vocabulary items, such as one for metal, that provide a picture of a Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age society far removed from Renfrew's Neolithic farmers. I have noticed that proposing prehistoric migrations has become somewhat taboo, which is why untenable theories such as Renfrew's have become as popular as they are. Often-repeated statements such as "There is no evidence for an outside migration into India in the second millenium BC," are simply false, as the Gandhara Grave culture of the Punjab indicates.
Archaeological evidence indicates a gradual expansion of steppe cultures from the Ukraine from the fifth millenium BC onward into the areas in which historical Indo-European languages later appear. Mallory does an excellent job of pointing out that the vocabulary of reconstructed PIE matches well what we would expect to be spoken in the Pontic-Caspian region at this time. Overall, a well-reasoned look providing a thorough synthesis of both archaeological and lingusitic data that reaches its conclusion after reviewing the evidence, not the other way around as Renfrew tends to do.

Mallory impresses me as an objective, thorough, and sensible scholar who has written a good book on the origins of the Indo-European languages. Mallory mixes linguistics and archaeology in coming to his conclusions.

Given the tendency of Europeans over the last two centuries to allege racial superiority, the question as to whether there was also an Indo-European, or Aryan, race is also important. Mallory deals with this issue in a post-script in which, among other things, he points out that the modern-day Gypsies (Roma) have a better claim to be "Aryan" than northern Europeans. Likewise, he debunks the silly notion that languages may be culturally superior or inferior to each other. The subject of the Indo-Europeans is, of course, controversial and over the years an enormous amount of nonsense has been published on the subject.

The bulk on the book is devoted to looking at the evidence and attempting to locate the origin of the Indo-Europeans in time and space. Mallory's conclusion is hardly new -- but it is well-reasoned. The proto-Indo-Europeans probably originated between 4500 and 2500 BC in an area roughly centered on the Russian city of Volgograd (Stalingrad). From there they spread in all directions and their language evolved into the dozens of Indo-European tongues spoken today. The author also evaluates alternative theories of Indo-European origins along the way, especially Colin Renfrew's that the Indo-Europeans originated in Anatolia.

This is a book that the general reader can understand, but not without careful attention as the author introduces an enormous amount of material in coming up with his conclusions. The topic is fascinating. Where did those of us who speak English, Russian, French, Farsi, Hindi, Greek, Armenian, or many other languages come from at the dawn of history? Mallory expands the frontier of our knowledge with peeks at the lives of our ancestors 6,000 years ago.

Smallchief

This is a good, thorough introduction to a complex and difficult subject matter. Dr. Mallory has assembled material from linguistics, archeology, and historical accounts to document the many aspects and issues in this hotly-contested area. While readers searching to fuel political programs will find little fodder here, serious students can trust both the majority of the details and the major conclusions of the author. He also follows the professional custom of summarizing major alternative interpretations when discussing issues still in dispute within the field.

Undoubtedly, some will find the entire concept of Indo-European origins offensive; for them the best course might be to look elsewhere. This book is not about polemics, but about rational, careful scholarship; even if the very premise of Indo- European language were called into question, the historical and archeological detail would be fascinating.