Gods, Graves and Language

Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, (Princeton University Press, 2009), 472 pages, US$16.95.
David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language, (Princeton University Press, 2009), 553 pages, US$22.95. 

Studying English at university in the 1960s we learned that European languages had a family resemblance to each other and to Sanskrit. Named the Indo-European branch of languages, they were thought to have arisen somewhere vaguely between the Black Sea and northern India. The outburst of interest in mythology during the 1970s furthered our knowledge a little. Nora Chadwick’s The Celtic Realms, for instance, showed similarities between ancient Irish and Indian music and law. But precisely where the Indo-Europeans had their homeland, and how and when the different European languages branched off, remained a mystery.

Now two complementary books by David Anthony and Christopher Beckwith have appeared, filling in parts of an immense mosaic, and giving us a much clearer picture of the Indo-Europeans, and so of our own origins. They summarise the findings of specialist studies in linguistics, archaeology and anthropology over recent decades, as well as providing original syntheses of the material. Essential to these developments has been the work of researchers behind the Iron Curtain, now available for the first time since the collapse of communism, such as the Danubian archaeologist Florian Curta’s The Making of the Slavs.   

In the daily news we hear about Afghanistan, the Muslim Central Asian republics and the Uighurs of eastern China, but the vast land mass of Central Eurasia is one of the few areas of the world left on which we have little imaginative purchase. We may have read Marco Polo’s narrative of his travels and Peter Hopkirk’s recent books The Silk Road and The Great Game, but we find it hard to construct in our minds a coherent picture of this area. Samarkand, Tashkent and Bokhara are fabled cities known by repute for centuries, but how can we get a handle on less exotic places such as Merv, Karakorum and Umigar?

Beckwith provides a vast panorama over seven millennia of Central Eurasia, a land of immense prairie grasslands and wastelands stretching from the western steppe in Ukraine through to the eastern steppe abutting China, with Siberia to the north and India to the south. Central Eurasia was seen by outsiders from China and the West as a region inhabited by fierce, nomadic, warrior barbarians, likely to sweep out of their homelands on devastating raids, like the Vikings in western Europe. Beckwith seeks to correct this negative image by looking at Central Eurasia from the inside as a coherent civilisation in its own right, with its own habits, structures and cultures, the fulcrum of a continental landmass which runs from Calais to Shanghai. As well as nomads with their meat, milk, wool and other animal products, the area supported stationary pastoralists who grew grains and vegetables, and urban dwellers. Some parts of the region, like the Fergana Valley, are fertile. 

Another image Beckwith corrects is that of the silk road as merely an east–west route trading silk. There existed a vast network of trading roads which sustained an integrated economy, some north–south routes joining Siberia to India, and others the Uighur lands to Tibet and Burma. Much more than silk was traded—horses, precious metals and rich cloth for the courts of local kings. Externals raids were balanced by internal trade.

From at least 5000 BC a distinctive way of life flourished in this area, which Beckwith calls the “Central Eurasian Cultural Complex”. As its heart lay the band of warriors who formed a personal bodyguard and flying corps for their king, a blood brotherhood sworn on oath to defend their leader to the death. They pledged fealty to him personally rather than to their own clan. The ruler (khan) sent his principal beys to expand his realm in all directions—there were no border controls. The fortunes of the king’s armed retainers were totally bound up with his. Devoted to him, they accumulated great wealth and power while he flourished, but committed mass suicide on his death or demise (though this custom later declined). Like the priest in the grove of Nemi in Frazer’s Golden Bough, their enjoyment of power was overshadowed by the knowledge it would likely one day come to a gruesome end. The Germanic branch of the Indo-Europeans took this cultural complex with them to northern Europe, where it was described by Tacitus in Germania.  

This is a cyclical explanation of power, for as one ruler falls, another rises and the pattern repeats itself. Their own remote origins were explained by Central Eurasian peoples in a First Story or Foundation Myth whose lineaments are summarised by Beckwith: 

A rightful king is unjustly deposed; a heavenly spirit impregnates a maiden who gives birth to a gifted son, whom the king orders to be exposed to the elements; the wild beasts succour him so he survives and is eventually discovered; he grows up to be a skilled warrior; brought to court in a subservient position he is threatened with death but escapes, returning with a band of oath-taking warrior companions to overthrow the tyrant and established a new dynasty which dispenses justice to all.  

Parts of this pattern are evident in the biographies of such apparently disparate figures as Genghis Khan, Christ and Oedipus. Joseph Campbell summarised this ur-story of European and other mythologies in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The vast grassy steppes were marginal lands, which required great ingenuity on the part of their inhabitants to survive. Around 4500 BC steppe dwellers were the first people in the world to tame the horse, which was native to this area. Later, around 3500 BC, they learned to ride them and to use a bit. These people were primarily dependent on horses, which they ate, rode and used for transport and later for warfare. I was always puzzled why the horse was so important in European mythology, even in cultures where it was no longer central, as in some Celtic legends where there is a vestigial memory of the horse representing kingly power, but these books explain the deep origins of these beliefs. Central Eurasian peoples developed a cult of the ruler, with his personal guards, oaths and sacrifices, and a panoply of customs and rituals, including elaborate funeral ceremonies where warriors and horses were buried with the king in distinctive mound graves. Remnants of these customs can be found in Beowulf and in the Saxon ruler’s burial at Sutton Hoo. 

Connected with the taming of the horse was the invention of the wheel, also an innovation of this Central Eurasian culture. As the joke goes, the real genius was the person who invented the second wheel and put an axle between them to advance transport beyond the sled stage. Wagons, which appeared around 3500–3000 BC, developed over millennia, being slow, cumbrous and heavy, with fixed axles and spokeless wooden wheels. But the steppe dwellers could now move their habitations and worldly possessions, and as a result herding activities took place over a much greater range. The wagon also had a role as a ceremonial symbol of royal power. From the wagon developed the chariot, a light, fast vehicle used in raids and warfare, with a driver and archer on the platform. Anthony traces the remote Proto-Indo-European origins of five reconstructed words connected with parts of a wagon: wheel, rota, axle, tiller and ride, the last being wegheti, from which the Latin veho and the Old High German wegan derive. The nomads were now mobile and equipped to enlarge their domains. Nomads and cultivators had different advantages: cattle can be moved from invaders, or stolen by rustlers, but crops can’t. Crops can be destroyed, but can be replaced more quickly than cattle.

The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language were one of the constituent groups of Central Eurasia, occupying the western steppe homeland (the region north of the Black and Caspian Seas) from 4500 BC to 2500 BC. Anthony provides a summary version of their creation myth: 

There exist twin brothers Mano and Twin. Mano brings the world into being by sacrificing Twin, from whose body he creates the cosmic constituents of sun, moon, earth, fire and so on, and finally people. Mano becomes the first priest and offers sacrifice. After the creation the sky gods give cattle to a third man, Trito, but the cattle are stolen by a serpent monster. Trito with the help of the gods slays the serpent in its cave, frees the cattle and becomes the first warrior.  

This myth illustrates the Indo-European fascination with twos (as in the Romulus and Remus story) and threes, as in Celtic mythology. The basic division of this society, as many legends attest, was into the three functions of priest, warrior and husbandman. These two books throw a fascinating new light on the remotest origins of European mythology.

Jared Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs and Steel that the Eurasian land mass, being an east–west one, can transmit cultures readily since the same crops can grow in similar latitudes, in comparison with the north–south Americas, where cultures growing potatoes and maize were trapped in their own localities because of climatic conditions, and could not migrate north or south. The fertile crescent of the ancient Middle East was able to produce most of the world’s staple foods.

Anthony shows how the Indo-European-speaking people spread in many directions from their western steppe homeland after 4000 BC. The first hundred pages of his book are a tour de force where he lays out conclusions reached from a series of complex investigations. The Indo-European migrants were usually males who formed liaisons with local women and formed a new language with their partners. These daughter languages came into existence later and more quickly than previously thought, over hundreds rather than thousands of years—languages change more quickly than cultures, artefacts or races. Movements in languages can be traced by loan words, words for local flora, evidence from myth and archaeology, and by constructing tentative proto-vocabularies of earlier languages of which no written evidence exists. Some migration movements resulted in daughter languages being formed in Iran, northern India, central Asia, with traces as far as the Yellow River valley in China. Others moved west. 

Three waves of early Indo-European migrations have been identified. First were the pre-Anatolian and pre-Tocharian (central Asian) languages between 4000 and 3000 BC. The second wave included the pre-Celtic, pre-Italic and pre-Germanic groups from 2500 BC. The third wave was the pre-Slavic and pre-Baltic groups from 2000 BC. There is some debate over when the Indo-Iranian languages formed. These changes came from migrations which were not in the main warlike invasions. The migrants were multi-ethnic groups moving through porous borders. 

Beckwith traces changes in the Central Eurasian lands since historical times. The Scythians, an Iranian people of Indo-European origin who traded for gold on the western steppe, had fleeting contacts with classical civilisations. They had their own structures: the royal family, husbandmen, nomads and ploughing folk—they were not just nomads. From the peripheries, the Roman and Chinese empires began pushing into Central Eurasian territory, beginning its long slow decline. The Hsiung-nu, who exerted pressure on the eastern steppe and to the north, and traded with the Han dynasty, were replaced by the Mongols. Races like the Avars, Goths and Vandals expanded into Europe from the north and east. During the Dark and Middle ages, warfare in the Tibetan empire, and Turkic and Arab conquests, meant trade routes in Central Eurasia moved north to Russia and the Baltic, and the Chinese traded through Uighur territory. From each side agricultural people moved into the Central Eurasian land mass—Viking-Slavs on the west and Chinese on the east. The rise of the Mongol empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane on the eastern steppe created an international trade system, with European merchants such as the Polos involved. The great architectural achievements at Samarkand and Tashkent and in the Mughal empire in northern India were high points of this culture.

In parallel to the inland trade routes of the Silk Road there had always been a coastal shipping trade, with Arab and Indian boats making relatively short trips from port to port, after which goods were conveyed overland to the Levant. But when Vasco Da Gama arrived at India in 1498, things changed. New international sea trade routes—nomads of the sea—grew up, a rival to traditional land routes. West European nations were coastal states in contrast to Central Eurasian ones, which were fortified city states situated well inland. Europeans set up entrepots or factories at Bombay, Goa, Calcutta, Malabar, Batavia and so on, but at first did not venture inland. Old sea routes once unimportant now became transcontinental, and European empires emerged in Asia. The littoral and internal trade systems had lived together for millennia, but now they competed, at the expense of the Silk Road. Russian, British and other European adventurers encroached on Central Eurasia, whose structures and trade routes began to collapse as they came to be run by European imperial officials rather than by local rulers. Further degradation came with the onrush of modernity in the twentieth century, and finally with communism.

These two books enlarge our knowledge of seemingly obscure areas which tell us so much about who we are. 

Patrick Morgan’s latest book is Foothill Farmers: The Literature of Gippsland (Ngarak Press).