On the Horse in Italy, pt 1

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/9/2000 4:35:46 AM, g_sandi at hotmail.com wrote:

>Let me concentrate on the word for horse in Latin: equus.
>Where do you think it comes from? Let me assume that you accept the reality
>of PIE - if you don't, it is difficult to continue any kind of debate. So -
>I can think of four possibilities:

>Equus is derived linearly, with one generation of speakers following
>another, from a PIE word reconstructed by linguists as *ek^uos.
...[snipped]
>Now, if this etymological explanation is correct, the
>word *ek^uos or its linear descendants all the way to 'equus' must have
>existed at all stages in the development of PIE > Latin, as - before the
>invention of writing and written traditions - there was no way for words to
>disappear and then reappear in a language, unless by borrowing (for which
>see later).

>If this was the case, the word must have referred to something, presumably
>to a horse-like creature. The problem is that there is no evidence of
>horses, wild or domesticated, in Italy before the Polada culture (ca. 2600
>BC, if I am not mistaken).  If Renfrew's Indo-Europeans arrived in Italy
>around 5000 BC, or even earlier, they presumably encountered no horses
>there....

>The only weakness in this argument is that maybe horses were present in
>Italy at the time, we have just found no evidence for them. I ask
>archaeologists: is this likely? Italy is well covered by archaeological
>sites from many eras.

Let's stop here.

I'd like to address borrowing and other such things in another post.  If I
may, I'd just like to address this issue of the horse in Italy here.  I don't
have my best references with me, but I think I have enough to make it clear
what the problem is with this sort of quick-shot analysis.

1. I can't contradict the statement that earliest identifiable horse
(caballus equus) bones date to 2600BC.  (Polada, I believe, comes a millenium
or a half later.)  I'll assume that's true for the area that today
constitutes mainland Italy.

2. HOWEVER, what's also important here is what is going on in the areas
immediately adjacent to Italy by land or sea.

Note that agriculture or agriculturalists do NOT simply arrive from across
the Adriatic and then go into isolation.  There is in fact a steady record of
exchange going on throughout the period from roughly 6000BC - 2000BC -
especially back AND forth between Iberia, Italy, the Balkan peninsula and
North Africa.  Just after 4000BC, for example, metallurgy has not only come
to Sardinia but also advanced early into making arsenical bronze.  From the
west, there is evidence that the domesticated poppy - originating in western
Europe - has moved east across Italy and the Mediterranean.

3. The fact that these areas were in regular contact is important to this
whole issue of <equus>.  Because the absence of direct evidence of the
domesticated or the wild horse would not necessarily MEAN LACK OF AWARENESS
OF THE HORSE.  Horsehide - for example - simply does not preserve as an
artifact well in the European climate.  (And up until the horse was
domesticated, it's main use to these humans would have been in the form of
by-products.)

How would these early Italians know about the horse?  The same way and from
the same places that they learned of copper smelting, poppy seeds or other
things not 'native' to the area.

4. The odd assumption made in most arguments concerning the horse that it was
not present in most areas in mainland Europe prior to domestication.  But
even in Greece, for example, the evidence at Franchthi Cave shows that the
wild horse was the main diet of its occupants into the mesolithic -
@8000-7000BC - when it is suddenly replaced by other things, including the
red deer.  The disappearance of the wild horse from many areas in Europe is
often attributed to climatic change, though it is clear that there was a
certainly over-hunting.  Whole herds of wild horses have been found driven
off cliffs in late paleolithic sites.

What's important here however is that there is clear evidence that the "true"
wild horses did not disappear from Europe west of the Ukraine after 6000BC.

5. In fact, there is strong evidence that the wild horse survived and thrived
in the many areas in Europe throughout this period.

In The Przewalski Horse: Morphology, Habitat and Taxonomy, Colin P. Groves
describes the process of identification of wild versus the domesticated equid
that have been developed over the years.  This paper is on the web and very
much worth reading.
(http://www.onthenet.com.au/~stear/cg_przewalski_horse.htm)  What is clear
from it is that wild horse strains were not only preserved in northcentral
Europe, but that even in Roman times there were identifiably wild (non-equus
caballus) horses in Iberia, North Africa, Germany, Poland and possibly
southern France (the Camargue delta region).

6.  And it should be said that although the evidence is that the horse was
first domesticated in the Ukraine, there is very strong evidence that it was
also domesticated not much later in other parts of Europe.

The evidence seems to strongly suggests multiple origins, "with Central Asia,
Eastern, Central and South-Western Europe being more or less independent
regions of domestication" :

Here again is an abstract entitled The Domesticafion of the Horse by Dr.
Norbert Benecke (from an Abstracts of papers presented at the 30th
WAHVM-congress, 9-12 September 1998 ):
"On the basis of subfossil bone remains, archaeological findings and artistic
representations the current state of research concerning the domestication of
the horse is discussed. 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....

In Central and South-Western Europe the controlled keeping and breeding of
horses started around 3000 B.C. One of the oldest Neolithic cultures in
Central Europe with unambiguous evidence for the presence of domestic horses
is the Bernburg Culture...."

(Bernburg is BTW a middle TRB culture (3800-3200BC) located about 300 miles
as the crow flies from the modern Italian border.)

7. Evidence of wild horse domestication in Iberia is extensive.  Here are
some excerpts:
"The Origins of the Lusitano Horse by Juan Valera-Lema, Ph.D.
Archaeological evidence in the Iberian Peninsula, modern day Spain and
Portugal, indicates that the origins of the Lusitano horse date back the form
of its primitive ancestor, the Sorraia breed.... The Sorraia is believed to
have developed from crosses between native Iberian Proto Draft Horses (Equus
Caballus Caballus of Western Europe) and ancient strains of Oriental/North
African horses.
The Sorraia remained isolated for several millennia in the southern part of
Iberia, the Alentejo and Andalusian regions of modern Portugal and Spain.
Noted Portuguese historian Mr. Ruy d'Andrade suggested that by the Neolithic
period (@4000 B.C.) the native tribes of the area may have used horses in
war."

"Dr. d'Andrade's extensive studies documented the Sorraia horse as a direct
descendant of one of the four forms of primeval wild horses from which all
our domestic breeds derived, namely form III, which inhabited the south of
the Iberian peninsula. That the Sorraia represents the indigenous South
Iberian horse was acknowledged by the other premier prehistorians of the
horse, Speed (Scotland), Etherington (Scotland), Ebhardt (Germany),
Skorkowski (Poland), Zeeb (Germany) and Schaefer (Germany).... Paintings of
horses on the cave walls at La Pileta, Spain, dated between 30,000 and 20,000
B.C., already show the subconvex heads and arched necks typical of
Andalusians, Lusitanos and their ancestor, the Sorraia, as do ancient
sculptures.... However, man-made Iberian breeds have in their veins, besides
some non-Iberian blood, that of another kind of wild equid also indigenous to
the Iberian peninsula: the Garrano, a wild pony inhabiting the mountainous
regions in the north."

8. Across north western and central Europe, a slightly different wild horse
has been identified.  The distinction is made between "the lighter, more
refined Tarpan of Eastern Europe and the Ukranian Steppes, which is
exemplified by the famous herd maintained at Popielno in Poland; and the
heavy, slow-moving horse of the northern European marshlands known as Equus
silvaticus, from which our heavy horse breeds derive...  (Horse Type 4, while
smaller than the others, was much more refined, with a concave profile and
high-set tail. It came from western Asia and its present equivalent is the
Caspian pony. It is postulated as the prototype Arabian.)"

Perhaps, 600 miles as the crow flies north from the modern Italian border,
these European wild horses were obviously around just BEFORE the
domestication process began and were even a part of the Danish diet at the
time - just as agriculture was being adopted.  "During the Atlantic period,
7000-3900 BC, the sea level rose so much that the northern parts of Denmark we
re divided into islands, and deep fiords cut into the landscape. A dense
forest dominated by limetrees spread across the land. The population was
found mostly near the coasts and lived on fish and shellfish, supplemented by
hunting... Settlements were often situated near the edges of lakes which have
since become bogs. In the east of Denmark, the peat in these bogs has
preserved a rich variety of weapons and tools, bones from slaughtered
animals, including bison, wild horses, elk and aurochs...."

9. There is also evidence about wild horses being present in the area of the
Danube basin and North Africa at this time that I will get to later.

It should be evident from the above that even if we assume that there were no
wild or domesticated horses in Italy until 2600BC, there is still very good
evidence that there were plenty enough wild horses - as well as horses in the
process of being domesticated - quite near-by.  In my next post, I'll give
some evidence that Italy was in contact with this areas throughout the period
from 6000- 2600BC.

I should say that I - like some others on this list - do not necessarily
agree with Renfrew that IE came to Italy with Cardial Ware (@6000-5500BC).
Cardial Ware culture is not Bandkeramik and shows evidence of influences
outside the Balkans and Anatolia.  But for the sake of this matter, I'm
assuming IE was in Italy from that early neolithic period.

One more thing I noticed in passing:
g_sandi at hotmail.com wrote:

>So: what did *ek^uos refer to? Either a mythical beast, or the
>donkey (were there actually donkeys around?), or maybe the sheep or the cow?

>I don't like any of these explanations, and I find it hard to believe that
>when the pre-Latins encountered the horse after 2600 BC, they pointed at it
>and said: aha, here is this mythical beast that our ancestors in Anatolia
>called 'equos', nice to find it again after so many millennia.

With regard to:
---here is this mythical beast that our ancestors in Anatolia called
'equos'...

I believe there is no real evidence of <ekwos> as a native word in any of the
Anatolian (Hittite, Luwian) languages.  So it is quite possible that their
Anatolian ancestors called it something borrowed, like <onus>.

What <ekwos> actually meant 7000 years ago - 4000 years before it is first
attested - is another matter that I will try to get to.

Regards,
Steve Long