Horses - retracting the retraction?

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/17/00 8:09:31 PM, Sean Crist wrote:

**A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE
word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland,
since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it.

I want to retract that post.  Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or
domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew
claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has
corroborated this claim.  This is an important incongruity between the
firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits;
it is a strong argument against Renfrew.**

The retraction may not have been necessary.

See Russell and Martin, Catal Huyuk Bone Reports 1998 Br Arch Repts --
preliminary report can be found on the web at:
http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/Archive_rep98/martin98.html
(watch the wrap-around)
Summary states:

"A wide range of taxa have been identified from Çatalhöyük, including
sheep and goats, cattle, wild horses and asses,... Among the equid remains from
Çatalhöyük West, several bones were observed as belonging to 'large'
equids, which is likely to mean Equus caballus..."

Exposure to wild horses by Anatolians could be postulated in any case, based
on such earlier findings as those at Diana Kirkbride's excavation at Beidha
in southern Jordan (occupied in first half of seventh millennium (9000-8500
BP)) where animal remains included "aurochs, wild board, ibex, wild goats,
gazelle, hares, jackals, hyrax, and wild horses."  Extensive trade contacts
with Anatolia were established by the presence of large amounts of obsidian
brought from that area.  Wild horse remains have also been found in early
neolithic layers in the Nile Delta (BOESSNECK Y., Joachim und Angela von den
DRIESCH, Tell el-Dab'a VII. Ethnographisch-archäologische Zeitschrift 34
(1992)).  See also Norbert Benecke, The Domestication of the Horse/Abstract:
"On the basis of subfossil bone remains, archaeological findings and artistic
representations the current state of research concerning the domestication of
the horse.... New osteometric data from Early and Middle Holocene wild
horses, as well as from early domestic horses, support the assumption of a
polytope origin of the domestic horse, with Central Asia, Eastern, Central
and South-Western Europe being more or less independent regions of
domestication. In all those areas the domestication of the horse took place
within agrarian societies or at least in contact with them."  (30th
WAHVM-Congress, Veterinary Faculty, Munich 1998.) (This would suggest that
the technology being exchanged was not "the horse" - already present - but
rather domestication.)

On the otherside of Anatolia, at Franchthi Cave in the Argolid, the hunting
of wild horses as the main source of meat occurred right up until the end of
the mesolithic - so the memory of such animals might be fresh in the minds
(if not the stomachs) of those who would have adopted neolithicism and PIE on
its way to Europe where subspecies of wild horses (tarpan, equus ferus)
probably still existed.

I'm not familiar with Beekes approach to this issue, but I would question
something else.  The presence of wild equids - not equus caballus - in the
area could just as easily have given rise to a common name for equids that
was later transfered specifically to the horse.  I have a note here that
Gordon Childe in his 1954 article "Wheeled Vehicles" mentions that as early
as 3000BC the pictograph appears that would become the regular cuneiform
ideogram for horse - it is a compound of "ass" and "mountain", possibly
either referring to the special size or source of the "true horse."  Also,
the problem of the decent of the horse shouldn't obscure the fact that wild
horses (e.g., Przewalski's) may not have had all the characteristics of the
domesticated animal, including large size, that would have so clearly
distinguished it from other equids, especially as the object of a hunt.  (As
a parallel, I'm told that the Dakota gave the horse a name that was a
compound of their name for dog, "pte" - probably observing that it was also
domesticated.)

Furthermore, given the habit of Indoeuropean languages to generalize and
transfer the names of everything from body parts to colors over time, it
strikes me as a bit overzealous and overenthused to say that such evidence -
if it were accurate - would supply "a strong argument against Renfrew."  The
idea that there could be no "semantic" drift for such a word since 4000BC or
before seems somewhat implausible.  A reasonably objective approach could
even have suggested that the word could have been imported in the late stages
of PIE when Renfrew has it a short distance away from the northwest shore of
the Black Sea, where wild horses were apparently in abundance.

In any case, it really isn't all that clear that the horse needs to be there
when PIE occurs - there are certainly enough IE languages where *ekwos is not
the word for horse.  And one of them is Hittite.  But more on that later.

Regards,
Steve Long