Pre-Greek languages (Horses and such)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/19/99 4:58:14 PM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<...cultures with written history predate the probable appearance of the
Hittites in Anatolian in Mesopotamia.  None of these written sources give
*any* indication of any likely pre-Anatolian people anywhere near
Mesopotamia.  (They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)>>

The lack of references to "pre-Anatolian people" seems a pretty important
point. Do those early records identify any "peoples" as living in central,
northeastern or southwestern Anatolia?

<<The first is made unlikely by the lack of IE-related cultural artifacts in
the Caucusus...>>

Given the early dates postulated for an IE presence in the area, by e.g.
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, what would we expect those IE-related artefacts to
be?

<<and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.>>

Again these are very early dates. Do we have a sense of when those non-IE
languages first appeared in the area?  And would a migration - as opposed to
settlements - by way of the Caucasus leave such traces.

<<the closest relative of Greek seems to be Old Macedonian
[and] ....there were peripheral populations of Greeks to the northeast of
Greece proper, whence came the Dorians after the collapse of the Mykenean
civilization.>>

But does this give us a definite "directional" sense?  Couldn't both
Macedonian and Dorian be as well explained as the expansion of Greeks
northward?  One of the striking things about the Dorian account (which we
rely upon to explain events before say 700 BC) is that it is fairly
consistently described as "the return of the Dorians."

In another message dated 10/19/99 4:03:14 PM, you wrote:
<<The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is
quite telling here. >>

But the bit does not appear in Myceneaen remains or in Homer and I don't
think evidence for it has been found in the Aegean area until after 1000BC.
This is a very large chronological gap with the evidence in the Ukraine,
especially with the hypothesized soft bits.  I believe earlier evidence of
advanced metal bits date from 1500BC in the Near East.    As a matter of
fact, evidence of the "true horse" - equus caballus - does not appear on the
Greek mainland until the end of the Early Hellanic - at more or less the same
time as evidence first appears in Troy.  This is about a thousand years after
the first apparent evidence in the Middle East.  And western European
evidence is even later.

It is a little difficult to see how the horse can be especially connected
with the more western Indo-European cultures with such relative late dates
compared to the eastern ones. I believe our best evidence (e.g., the Mitanni
horse manual translated into Hittite about 1400BC) is that the domesticated
horse was established in the Near and Middle East well before it reached the
Aegean and Greek mainland (or western/central Europe.)  There is no question
that the horse came from the northern steppes, but the evidence that it came
into Greece and Anatolia by way of the Balkans is I believe somewhat poor.

Not that this "absence of evidence" eliminates any theory.  But separating
the evidence from the theories does help us to know what evidence the
theories are being built on.

I'm having a bit of a problem seeing a pattern here.  And after looking at
Renfrew again, I have to wonder how much Indo-European cultures crisscrossed
back and forth over each other.  The notion that the Ukraine may have just
been a stop along the way - not for Proto-Indo-Europeans but for an early
group of IE speakers - keeps sneaking back as a possibility when you find
such a large potential range for IE when historical records show up.  And
when your first evidence of IE in the Ukraine is not Greek or western IE but
rather Scythian, which is most often associated with Iranian and the east.
(And Mycenaean or pre-Mycenaean Greek remains have not been found along the
north shore of the Black Sea.)

And this whole question of toponyms in Greece.  Why don't we encounter this
problem so extensively in northern and western Europe?  We know there was an
existing population there from well before 2000 BC or even 4000 BC.  What
happened to that substrate?  Why aren't there all these non-IE or unknown IE
place names distributed all over Europe?

There's a lot here that just doesn't seem to be answered by pointing to
isolated pieces of evidence.

Regards,
Steve Long