Renfrew and IE Overlords

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived.

-- by a few traders.  Are you suggesting that Latin would have spread over
the whole of Europe in the _absense_ of Roman conquest and subsequent
political power?

>Latin's main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship.

-- and Roman citizenship was important because the Romans had conquered a
huge area.  QED.

><<Slavic reached its present dimensions through a series of well-attested
>folk migrations and conquests starting in the 5th century AD.>>

>I don't know what this has to do with anything.  The point was that there
>have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing
>language.

-- _my_ point was that the spread of Slavic is an excellent illustration of
the sort of mechanism by which PIE probably originally spread --
folk-migration accompanied by establishment of political dominance.

This does _not_ require any elaborate state structure -- the Slavs didn't
have anything above a local chieftainship.  There are numerous African
examples in historic times; the Galla migrations into the Ethiopian
highlands, for instance.

>The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek
>or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of
>various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated
>by Russian.

-- quite true; I don't buy Renfrew's "elite dominance" model.  Something much
more substantial is required, especially in a pre-state and pre-literate
setting.

>Be assured I find your reply not absurd but very confusing.  "Every major
>Middle Eastern power" were NOT steppe invaders nor IE speakers.

-- to begin with, the Hittites _were_ IE speakers, and the elite of the
Mitannian kingdom were (originally) IE speakers too -- Indo-Aryan, to be
precise.  Even after they were assimilated by their Hurrian-speaking
subjects, they retained Indo-Aryan terms for chariot and horse technology (as
well as throne-names for their kings and the names of some gods, Indara,
Mitra and so forth).

Moreover, the chariot was invented _not_ in the Middle East, but in the
Eurasian steppe zone, by IE speakers.  They _introduced_ it into the Middle
East; we have more records of chariot warfare there because that was the zone
of literacy.

However, the Vedas (dating from the mid-2nd-millenium BCE) are full of
descriptions of chariot warfare -- archers shooting from moving chariots --
essentially identical to that in the Middle East.  The Shang Chinese also
adopted the chariot as their elite military arm.

Archaeological sources show it was common in barbarian Europe; so do later
written sources by Mediterranean observers.  There's a petroglyph of a
chariot from as far north as Sweden dated to about 1300 BCE.

the chariot was the dominant military arm from the early 2nd millenium on --
the battle of Kadesh would be an example, but there are hundreds of others.
We have more examples from the Middle East because

>I took your suggestion to heart and discovered that by all accounts the use
>of the chariot by archers was innovated by the Eygptians about 1200BC.

-- that is grotesque.  The chariot-born archer was a staple of warfare
centuries before that and all through the region.