Chapter XXIII: Part 23

The first treatise in which an attempt was made to work out the
primitive Indo-European civilisation in detail was Adolphe Pictet's
_Les Origines indo-européennes ou les Aryas primitifs_ (1859-1863).
The idyllic conditions in which, according to Pictet, early
Indo-European man subsisted were accepted and extended by many
enthusiastic successors. The father, the protector of the family
(_pater_ from _pa_, protect), and the mother (_mater_ from _ma_, to
produce) were surrounded by their children (Skt. _putra_), whose name
implied that they kept everything clean and neat. The daughter was the
milkmaid (Skt. _duhita_ from _duh_, milk), while the brother (Skt.
_bhratar_), derived from the root of _ferre_, "bear," was the natural
protector of his sister, whose name, with some hesitation, is decided
to mean "she who dwells with her brother," the notion of brother and
sister marriage being, however, summarily rejected (ii. p. 365). The
uncle and aunt are a second father and mother to the family, and for
this reason _nepos_, Skt. _napat_, is both nephew and grandson. The
life of such families was pastoral but not nomad; there was a
farmstead where the women were busied with housewifery and
butter-making, while the men drove their flocks afield. The ox, the
horse, the sheep, the goat and the pig were domesticated as well as
the dog and the farmyard fowls, but it was in oxen that their chief
wealth consisted. Hence a cow was offered to an honoured guest, cows
were the object of armed raids upon their neighbours, and when a
member of the family died, a cow was killed to accompany him in the
next world. Even the phenomena of nature to their naive imaginations
could be represented by cows: the clouds of heaven were cows whose
milk nourished the earth, the stars were a herd with the sun as the
bull amongst them, the earth was a cow yielding her increase. Before
the original community, which extended over a wide area with Bactria
for its centre, had broken up, agriculture had begun, and barley, if
not other cereals, and various leguminous plants were cultivated. Oxen
drew the plough and the wagon. Industry also had developed with the
introduction of agriculture; the carpenter with a variety of tools
appears to construct farm implements, buildings and furniture, and the
smith is no less busy. Implements had begun with stone, but by this
time were made of bronze if not of iron, for the metals gold, silver,
copper, tin were certainly known. Spinning and weaving had also begun;
pottery was well developed. The flocks and herds and agriculture
supplied food with plenty of variety; fermented liquors, mead,
probably wine and perhaps beer, were used, not always in moderation. A
great variety of military weapons had been invented, but geographical
reasons prevented navigation from developing in Bactria. Towns existed
and fortified places. The people were organized in clans, the clans in
tribes. At the head of all, though not in the most primitive epoch,
was the king, who reigned not by hereditary right, but by election.
Though money had not yet been invented, exchange and barter
flourished; there were borrowers and lenders, and property passed from
father to son. Though we have no definite information as to their
laws, justice was administered; murder, theft and fraud were punished
with death, imprisonment or fine (_Résumé général_ at end of vol.
ii.).

Further investigation, however, did not confirm this ideally happy
form of primitive civilization. Many of Pictet's etymologies were
erroneous, many of his deductions based on very uncertain evidence. No
recent writer adopts Pictet's views of the Indo-European family. But
his list of domesticated animals is approximately correct, if
domestication is used loosely simply of animals that might be kept by
the Indo-European man about his homestead. Even at the present day
domestication means different things in the case of different animals.
A pig is not domesticated as a dog is; in areas like the Hebrides or
western Ireland, where cattle and human beings share the two ends of
the same building, domestication means something very different from
the treatment of large herds on a farm extending to many hundreds of
acres. In other respects the height of the civilization was vastly
exaggerated. That the Indo-European people were agricultural as well
as pastoral seems highly probable. But as Heraclides says of the
Athamanes (_Fragmenta hist. Graec._ ii. 219), the women were the
agriculturists, while the men were shepherds. Agriculture begins on a
very small scale with the dibbling by means of a pointed stick of a
few seeds of some plant which the women recognize as useful either for
food or medicine, and is possible only when the people have ceased to
be absolutely nomad and have fixed settlements for continuous periods
of some length. The pastoral habit is broken down in men only by
starvation, if the pasture-lands become too cramped through an
excessive increase of population or are seized by a conqueror. As has
been well said, "of all the ordinary means of gaining a
livelihood--with the exception perhaps of mining--agriculture is the
most laborious, and is never voluntarily adopted by men who have not
been accustomed to it from their childhood" (Mackenzie Wallace,
Russia, new ed. i. p. 266, in relating the conversion of the Bashkir
Tatars to agriculture). Even the plough, in the primitive form of a
tree stump with two branches, one forming the handle, the other the
pole, was developed, and to this period may belong the representations
in rock carvings in Sweden and the Alps of a pair of oxen in the
plough (S. Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_, i. 205; Dechelette,
_Manuel d'archéologie_, ii. pp. 492 ff.). The Indo-European
civilization in its beginnings apparently belongs to the chalcolithic
period (sometimes described by the barbarous term of Italian origin
_eneolithic_) when copper, if not bronze had come in, but the use of
stone for many purposes had not yet gone out. While primitive
Indo-European man apparently knew, as has been said, the horse, ox,
sheep, goat, pig and dog, it is to be observed that in their wild
state at least these animals do not all affect the same kind of area.
The horse is an animal of the open plain; the foal always accompanies
the mother, for at first its neck is too short to allow it to graze,
and the mare, unlike the cow, has no large udder in which to carry a
great supply of milk. The cow, on the other hand, hides her calf in a
brake when she goes to graze, and is more a woodland animal. The pig's
natural habitat is the forest where beech mast, acorns, or chestnuts
are plentiful. The goat is a climber and affects the heights, while
the sheep also prefers short grass to the richer pastures suited to
kine. To collect and tame all those animals implies control of an
extensive and varied area.

What of the trees known to primitive Indo-European man? On this the
greater part of the arguments regarding the original home have turned.
The name for the _beech_ extends through a considerable number of
Indo-European languages, and it has generally been assumed that the
beech must have been known from the first and therefore must have been
a tree which flourished in the original home. Now the habitat of the
beech is to the west of a line drawn from Königsberg to the Crimea.
The argument assumes that its distribution was always the same. But
nothing is more certain than that in different ages different trees
succeed one another on the same soil. In the peat mosses of
north-east Scotland are found the trunks of vast oaks which have no
parallel among the trees which grow in the same district now, where
the oak has a hard struggle to live at all, and where experience
teaches the planter that coniferous trees will be more successful. On
the coast of Denmark in the same way the conifer has replaced the
beech since the days of the "kitchen middens," from which so much
information as to the primitive inhabitants of that area has been
obtained. But with regard to the names of trees there are two serious
pitfalls which it is difficult to avoid. (a) It is common to give a
tree the name of another which in habit it resembles. In England the
oriental plane does not grow freely north of the Trent; accordingly,
farther north the sycamore, which has a leaf that a casual observer
might think similar, has usurped the name of the plane. (b) In the
case of the beech (Lat. _fagus_), the corresponding Greek word [Greek:
phêgos] does not mean _beech_ but _oak_, or possibly, if one may judge
from the magnificent trees of north-west Greece, the chestnut. It has
been suggested that the word is connected with the verb [Greek:
phagein] to eat, so that it was originally the tree with edible fruit
and could thus be specialized in different senses in different areas.
If, however, Bartholomae's connexion of the Kurd _buz_, "elm" (_Idg.
Forschungen_, ix. 271) be correct, there can be no relation between
[Greek: phagein] and [Greek: phêgos], but the latter comes from a root
*_bhaug_, in which the _g_ would become _z_ among the _satem_
languages. The birch is a more widely spread tree than the beech,
growing as luxuriantly in the Himalayas as in western Europe, but
notwithstanding, the Latin _fraxinus_, which is almost certainly of
the same origin, means not _birch_ but _ash_, while the word akin to
ash (Gr. [Greek: oxuê]) appears in Latin without the _k_ suffix as
_os_- in Latin _ornus_, "mountain ash," for an earlier *_osinos_, cp.
Old Bulgarian _jasenu_ (the _j_ has no etymological value), Welsh and
Cornish _onnen_, from an original Celtic *_onna_ from *_os-na_. One of
the most widely spread tree names is the word _tree_ itself, which
appears in a variety of forms, Gr. [Greek: drys], Goth _triu_; Skt.
_daru_, [Greek: dory], &c., which is sometimes as in Greek specially
limited to the oak, while the Indian _deodar_ (_deva-daru_) is a
conifer. O. Schrader, who in his remarkable book, _Sprachvergleichung
und Urgeschichte_ (1883, 3rd ed., 1906-1907), locates the original
home in southern Russia, would allow the original community (ii. p.
178) to be partly within, partly without the beech line. The only
other tree the name of which is widely spread is the willow: the
English _with_, _withy_, Lat. _vitex_, Gr. [Greek: itea] for [Greek:
witea], Lithuanian _wytis_, Zend _vaeti_. Otherwise the words for
trees are limited to a small number of languages, and the meaning in
different languages is widely different, as Gr. [Greek: elatê],
"pine," Old High German _linta_, "linden," with which go the Latin
_linter_, "boat," and Lithuanian _lentà_, "board." The lime tree and
the birch do not exist in Greece, and the Latin _betula_ is a
borrowing from Gaulish (Irish _bethe_), the native word _fraxinus_, as
we have seen, being used for the _ash_. The equation of the Latin
_taxus_, "yew," with Gr. [Greek: toxon], "bow," is no doubt correct;
Schrader's equation of Skt. _dhanvan_, "bow," with the German _tanne_,
"fir," must, if correct, show at least a change of material, for no
wood is less well adapted for a bow than fir. The only conclusion that
can be drawn with apparent certainty from the names of trees is that
the original settlements were not in the southern peninsulas of
Europe.

Some of the names for cultivated plants are widely spread, but like
the names of trees do not always indicate the same thing. This is not
surprising if we consider that the word _corn_, within the Teutonic
languages alone, means wheat in England, oats in Scotland, rye in
Germany, barley in Sweden, maize in the United States of America. Thus
the Skt. _yáva_ means corn or barley, in Zend corn (modern Persian
_jav_, barley, but in the language of the Ossetes _yeu_, _yau_ is
millet), the Gk. [Greek: zea] is spelt, the Lithuanian _jawai_ corn,
the Irish _éorna_ barley (Schrader, _Sprachvergleichung_[3] ii. p.
188). The word bere or barley itself is widely spread in Europe--Latin
_far_, spelt, Goth, _barizeins_, "of barley," Old Norse _barr_, Old
Slav, _buru_, a kind of millet (ibid.). But the original habitat of
the cultivated grain plants has not yet been clearly established, and
circumstances of many kinds may occasion a change in the kind of grain
cultivated, provided another can be found suitable to the climate. In
early England it is clear that the prevalent crop was _barley_, for
_barn_ is the _bere-ern_ or barley-house.

The earliest tree-fruits found in Europe are apparently those
discovered by Edouard Piette as Mas d'Azil in a stratum which he
places between palaeolithic and neolithic. They included nuts, plums,
birdcherry, sloe, &c., and along with them was a little heap of grains
of wheat. If Piette's observations are correct, this find must go back
to a date long preceding the fruits found by Heer in the
pile-dwellings of Switzerland. Here also cherry-stones were found,
though the modern cherry is said to have been imported first by
Lucullus in the first century B.C. from Cerasus in Pontus, whence its
name. In the pile-dwellings a considerable number of apples were
found. They were generally cut up into two or three pieces, apparently
to be dried for winter use. In all probability they were wild apples
of the variety _Pirus silvatica_, which is found across the whole of
Central Europe from north to south (Buschan, _Vorgeschichtliche
Botanik_, p. 166). The original habitat of the apple is uncertain, but
it is supposed to be indigenous at any rate south of the Black Sea
(Schrader, _Reallexikon_, s. v. _Apfelbaum_). The history of the name
is obscure; it is often connected with the Campanian town Abella,
which Virgil (_Aeneid_, vii. 740) calls _malifera_, "apple-bearing."
Here also the material for fixing the site of the original habitat is
untrustworthy.

The attempt has been made to limit the possible area by a
consideration of three animals which are said not to occur in certain
parts of it--(a) the eel, which is said not to be found in the Black
Sea; (b) the honey bee, which is not found in that part of Central
Asia drained by the Oxus and Jaxartes; (c) the tortoise, which is not
found in northern areas. From evidence collected by Schrader from a
specialist at Bucharest (_Sprachvergleichung_,[3] ii. p. 147) eels are
found in the Black Sea. The argument, therefore, for excluding the
area which drains into the Black Sea from the possible habitat of the
primitive Indo-European community falls to the ground. Honey was
certainly familiar at an early age, as is shown by the occurrence of
the word *_medhu_, Skt. _mádhu_, Gr. [Greek: methy] (here the meaning
has shifted from mead to wine), Irish _mid_, English _mead_, Old Slav,
_medu_, Lithuanian _medùs_ honey, _midùs_ mead. Schrader, who is the
first to utilize the name of the tortoise in this argument, points out
(_op. cit._ p. 148) that forms from the same root occur in both a
_centum_ and a _satem_ language--Gr. [Greek: chelús, chelonê], Old
Slav. _zily_, _zeluvi_--but that while it reaches far north in eastern
Europe, it does not pass the 46th parallel of latitude in western
Europe. This argument would make not only the German site for the
original home which is supported by Kossinna and Hirt impossible, but
also that of Scandinavia contended for by Penka.

From the foregoing it will be seen that the arguments for any given
area are not conclusive. In the great plain which extends across
Europe north of the Alps and Carpathians and across Asia north of the
Hindu Kush there are few geographical obstacles to prevent the rapid
spread of peoples from any part of its area to any other, and, as we
have seen, the Celts and the Hungarians, &c., have, in the historical
period, demonstrated the rapidity with which such migrations could be
made. Such migration may possibly account for the appearance of a
people using a _centum_ language so far east as Turkestan. But our
information as to Tocharish is still too fragmentary to decide the
question. It is impossible here to discuss at any length the relations
between the separate Indo-European languages, a subject which has
formed, from somewhat different points of view, the subject of
Kretschmer's _Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache_
and Meillet's _Les Dialectes indo-européennes_.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Besides the articles on the separate languages in this
Encyclopaedia the following works are the most important for
consultation: K. Brugmann (phonology and morphology) and B. Delbrück
(syntax), _Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen
Sprachen_ (1886-1900), ed. 2, vol. i. (1897); of vol. ii. two large
parts, including the stem formation and inflexion of the noun, the
pronoun and the numerals, have been published in 1906 and 1909. A
shorter work by Brugmann, _Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der
indogermanischen Sprachen_, dealing mainly with Sanskrit, Greek,
Latin, Germanic and Slavonic, appeared in three parts in 1902-1903. A
good but less elaborate work is A. Meillet, _Introduction à l'étude
comparative des langues indo-européennes_ (1903, 2nd ed. 1908). For
the ethnological argument: W. Z. Ripley, _The Races of Europe_ (1900);
G. Sergi, _The Mediterranean Race_ (English edition, 1901). Other
works, now largely superseded, which deal with this argument are K.
Penka, _Origines Ariacae_ (1883), and _Die Herkunft der Arier_ (1886),
and I. Taylor, _The Origin of the Aryans_, N.D. (1890). The
ethnologists are no more in agreement than the philologists. For the
arguments mainly from the linguistic side see especially O. Schrader,
_Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte_ (3rd ed., 2 vols.,
1906-1907)--the second edition was translated into English by Dr F. B.
Jevons under the title _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_
(1890); _Reallexikon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde_ (1901); M.
Much, _Die Heimat der Indogermanen_ (1902, 2nd ed. 1904); E. de
Michelis, _L'Origine degli Indo-europei_ (1903); H. Hirt, _Die
Indogermanen_ (2 vols., 1905-1907); S. Feist, _Europa im Lichte der
Vorgeschichte und die Ergebnisse der vergleichenden indogermanischen
Sprachwissenschaft_, 1910, in W. Sieglin's _Quellen und Forschungen
zur alten Geschichte und Geographie_. Important for special sections
of this question are S. Müller, _Nordische Altertumskunde_ (2 vols.,
1897-1898), and _Urgeschichte Europas_ (1905); V. Hehn,
_Kulturpflanzen und Haustiere_ (1870), 7th ed. edited by O. Schrader,
with contributions on botany by A. Engler (1902); J. Hoops, _Waldbäume
und Kulturpflanzen im germanischen Altertum_ (1905). Delbrück has
devoted a special monograph to the I.-E. names of relationships, from
which he shows that the I.-E. family was patriarchal, not matriarchal
(_Die idg. Verwandtschaftsnamen_, 1889). E. Meyer, from Tocharish
being a _centum_ language, has revived with reserve the hypothesis of
the Asiatic origin (_Geschichte des Altertums_,^2 I. 2, p. 801).
(P. Gi.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] E. Meyer, _Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie_ (1908, pp. 14
ff.), and more fully in _Kuhn's Zeitschrift_ (xlii. pp. 17 ff.); also
_Geschichte des Altertums_ (i. 2, 2nd ed. pp. 807 ff.).

[2] Sieg und Siegling, "Tocharisch, die Sprache der Indoskythen"
(_Sitzb. d. Berl. Ak._ 1908, pp. 915 ff.).

[3] No. xix. p. 255, "Another ancient and extensive class of
languages, united by a greater number of resemblances than can well
be altogether accidental, may be denominated the Indo-European,
comprehending the Indian, the West Asiatic, and almost all the
European languages."

[4] Leo Meyer, "Über den Ursprung der Namen Indogermanen, Semiten und
Ugrofinner," in the _Göttinger gelehrte Nachrichten,
philologisch-historische Klasse_, 1901, pp. 454 ff.

[5] The vocative is not strictly speaking a case at all, for it
stands outside the syntax of the sentence. It was originally an
exclamatory form consisting of the bare stem without case suffix. In
the plural the nominative is used to supply the lacking vocative
form.

[6] For the history of the controversy see the excellent summary in
Salomon Reinach's _L'Origine des Aryens: Historie d'une controverse_
(1892). Max Müller's latest views are contained in his _Biographies
of Words and the Home of the Aryas_ (1888). See Schmidt's _Die
Urheimat der Indogermanen und das europäische Zahlsystem_ (1890).

[7] "Geographische Prüfung der Tatsachen über den Ursprung der Völker
Europas" (_Berichte der k. sächsischen Ges. d. Wissenschaften_, 1900,
pp. 34 ff.).

[8] See the essay on "Evolution and the Science of Language," in
_Darwin and Modern Science_ (1909), p. 524 f.