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New Vistas on the Distant Past

Horsemen of the steppes

Nomads play by their own rules. Mobility is built into their lifestyle.^{1H. Barnard and W. Wendrich (eds.), Archaeology of Mobility : Old World and New World Nomadism (2008).} Horse-riding stock-breeders can move themselves and their herds thousands of kilometers, and turn into instant cavalry. The grasslands of the steppe created a trans-continental highway for these horsemen. From the steppe there were natural corridors into the farmlands of Europe and China. At the west end the point of entry was the Danube Basin. On the east the Hexi or Gansu Corridor led from the Tarim Basin into Northern China. Settled farmers of Europe and China felt the mighty fist of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde in the Middle Ages. Centuries earlier chronicles wailed of the depredations of the Xiongnu, the Huns and the Turkic tribes. These herders of Central Asia could travel the vast steppes from Mongolia to Ukraine looking for greener pastures. A tribal territory could change in days. When bands united under a strong leader they swept across the plains creating huge empires.^{2Evgeny Chernykh, The "steppe belt" of stock-breeding cultures in Eurasia during the Early Metal Age, Trabajos de Prehistoria, vol. 65, no. 2 (July-December 2008), pp. 73-93.}

With new peoples came new languages. The steppe was a linguistic spread zone, which repeatedly experienced complete language replacement.^{3J. Nichols, The epicenter of the Indo-European linguistic spread, in Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and Language I: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations (1997), pp. 122-48; J. Nichols, The Eurasian spread zone and the Indo-European dispersal, in R. M. Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and Language II: Correlating Archaeological and Linguistic Hypotheses (1998), pp. 220-66.} It was also a trade route. The famed Silk Road was in fact several routes, the northernmost of which crossed the steppe.

The first people to domesticate the horse had the initial advantage. The latest research points towards a region near the Ural Mountains as the home of horse-riding.^{4D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), chap. 10; A. K. Outram et al, The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking, Science, vol. 323. no. 5919 (6 March 2009), pp. 1332-1335.} Just west of those mountains the forefather of the Indo-European languages developed at around the same time. Horsemen carried those languages from the European steppe into Asia, along with wheat, bronze, horses, sheep and chariots.

Or that is how we think of the process. Europe and Asia in fact form one landmass. The idea that they are separate continents was perhaps the vision of early Mediterranean civilisations who had not penetrated far enough north to grasp the geography. Europe is more of a huge peninsula. Yet the idea of separate continents stuck. So a notional boundary had to be hit upon, which was the Don River in antiquity. Today it is the Ural mountains. Proto-Indo-European was probably first spoken between the Don and the Urals. What a curious accident of history! From the shifting borderland of Europe and Asia came a family of languages that bridge that divide.

Tocharians

The first move east had all the boldness that would come to characterise the steppe nomads. A group set out from the Volga-Ural region to trek some 2000 km to the high steppe of the Altai Mountains c. 3,500 BC. There they created the first mobile pastoralist culture east of the Ural Mountains - the Afanasievo (or Afanasevo) Culture. They brought domesticated cattle, sheep and horses into the Altai. This new way of life sprang from a horse-loving culture known as Repin at the east end of the European steppe. By deduction we can work out that Repin folk spoke the parent of Indo-European languages. Repin contributed to the development of the Yamanaya Horizon, which seems to have spread Indo-Euopean languages in all directions. But one odd Indo-Europe language crops up millennia later along the Silk Road, in the Tarim Basin of what is now North-West China. When writings in this language were discovered, it was named Tocharian after a people known to the Greeks as Tokharoi, though this appears a faulty identification. The language is odd because it developed from such an archaic form of Proto-Indo-European, far earlier than the other Indo-European languages of Asia. The Afanasievo Culture is the only archaeological candidate for such an early move eastwards, and it is later linked to the Tarim Basin.^{5D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), pp. 64-65, 274-5, 307-11, 334, 336.} The language had been in the Tarim Basin long enough to develop into two versions by the time it is recorded in writing about 500 AD. In Tocharian A, the language is referred to as arsi-kantu and its speakers as Arsi.^{6G. Carling, G.-J. Pinault and W. Winter, Dictionary and Thesaurus of Tocharian A, Volume 1: A-J (2009), pp. 48-49.}

What enticed these pastoralists eastwards? The Afanasievo Culture colonised the Minusinsk Depression, a bowl between mountain ranges. It was empty of human life before they arrived. The local climate explains that. Higher up on the mountain slopes were local foragers whose ancestors probably came from around Lake Baikal, but until about 5,600 BC the lowland basin was too arid to be inhabited. Gradually the climate shifted to wetter conditions. Forest crept down the mountains to meet grassland. The pastoralists arrived as the humidity level was on the rise towards a maximum at c. 3,100 BC.^{7V.G. Dirksen et al., Chronology of Holocene climate and vegetation changes and their connection to cultural dynamics in Southern Siberia, Radiocarbon, vol. 49, no. 2 (2007), pp. 1103-1121.}

Despite having to travel so far to their virgin land, the Afanasievo people were not entirely cut off from their origins. People continued to trek back and forth between the colony and its motherland as the Yamanaya Horizon developed, bringing Yamanaya influences east, such as copper metallurgy. Gradually foragers to the north-east of the Afanasievo acquired metal objects and other Afanasievo influences. East had met West.^{8D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), pp. 310-11.} This contact may be the origin of bronze-making in East Asia. The technology appears in what is now north-west China in 2135 BC. ^{9J. Dodson et al., Early bronze in two Holocene archaeological sites in Gansu, NW China, Quaternary Research, vol. 72, no. 3 (November 2009), pp. 309-314; J. Romgard, Questions of Early Human Settlements in Xinjiang and the Early Silk Road Trade, with an Overview of the Silk Road Research Institutions and Scholars in Beijing, Gansu and Xinjiang, Sino-Platonic Papers, ed. V. Mair, vol. 185 (November 2008).} Other borrowings from Yamnaya probably included wool sheep and woollen clothing. Wool sheds rainwater and takes dyes better than any plant-fibre textile and was to become a staple of nomadic life. Mongol nomads still live in yurts made of felt. Genetic studies indicate that the breeding of long-wool sheep began in Southwest Asia and that modern Chinese sheep are their descendants.^{10B. Chessa et al., Revealing the history of sheep domestication using retrovirus integrations, Science, vol. 324 (24 April 2009), pp. 532-536.} Earlier kinds of domesticated sheep had spread into Europe with the first farmers, but sheep seem to be a late addition to Chinese farming, appearing around 2500 BC.^{11Y. Jing and R. Campbell, Recent archaeometric research on 'the origins of Chinese civilisation', Antiquity, vol. 83, no. 319 (March 2009), pp. 96–109.} Dawei Cai and his colleagues investigated sheep DNA from four Bronze Age archaeological sites in Northern China. All but one of their samples carried mtDNA A, the most common today in all Chinese sheep and most Mongolian sheep.^{12D. Cai et al., Early history of Chinese domestic sheep indicated by ancient DNA analysis of Bronze Age individuals, Journal of Archaeological Science, online 4 December 2010 prior to print.} This haplogroup is found in the Near East and seems to have undergone an expansion at around the time of domestication there.^{13J.R.S. Meadows et al., Five ovine mitochondrial lineages identified from sheep breeds of the Near East, Genetics, vol. 175, no. 3 (March 2007), pp. 1371-1379.} It is common in the North Caucasus and Middle Volga region.^{14M. Tapio et al., Sheep Mitochondrial DNA Variation in European, Caucasian, and Central Asian Areas, Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 23, no. 9 (2006), pp. 1776–1783.}

The Afanasievo Culture thrived in its sheltered niche until around 2400 BC. Then its people seem to have moved south. A related culture appears in the Altai foothills on the north side of the Junggar Basin from about 2000 BC. At around the same time, yet further south, the first settlers appear in the Tarim Basin. Within this basin the arid Taklamakan Desert has conserved bodies to a remarkable degree. A mass of them were found at Xiaohe, wrapped in woollen garments. These burials are very similar to those of the Afanasievo culture, and of the intervening site in the Altai foothills. From the early days of uncovering this culture, its mummies created a sensation. They had Caucasoid features.^{15J. Romgard, Questions of Early Human Settlements in Xinjiang and the Early Silk Road Trade, with an Overview of the Silk Road Research Institutions and Scholars in Beijing, Gansu and Xinjiang, Sino-Platonic Papers, ed. V. Mair, vol. 185 (November 2008).}

DNA analysis of the earliest mummies at Xiaohe has confirmed a western origin. All seven of the males from the oldest burials carried Y-DNA R1a1a - an Indo-European signature. However the mtDNA of both males and females was mainly the Eastern C4, though the Western Eurasian H and K were also present. So these early arrivals were already a genetic mixture of East and West.^{16C. Li et al., Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age, BMC Biology, vol. 8, no. 15 (2010).} The first contact had taken place in the Altai.

The presumed Tocharian-speakers also had contact westwards. In the arid Tarim Basin they preferred Bactrian camels to horses. The Bactrian camel is a native of the Central Asian steppe. It was domesticated by the oasis-based farmers in Bactria and Margiana of southern Central Asia, known as the Oxus Civilization or Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). This happened before 2500 BC, when figurines were made of camels pulling carts. Interestingly Tocharian borrowed certain words from a language which was probably spoken within the BMAC.^{17M. Witzel, Early loan words in Western Central Asia: Indicators of substrate populations, migrations and trade relations, in V.H. Mair (ed.), Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (2006), pp. 158-190.}

Aryans

The ethonym Aryan was so misused by Nazis that it has fallen into disrepute. However it rightly belongs to those who so described themselves in ancient times: the Iranians - the name Iran is derived from Aryan - and perhaps those who composed the Sanskrit Rig Veda. The word Aryan seems to derive from Proto-Indo-European *haeros or *haeryos, meaning member of one's own group. It appears in Hittite as ara- member of one's own group, peer, friend and another Anatolian language as arus, meaning citizen. It is quite common for an ethonym to arise from some means of denoting an insider as opposed to a outsider. As Indo-European speakers spread, they adopted various ethonyms to distinguish among themselves. That includes the speakers of Iranian outside Iran, who were known as Scythians or Saka by historic times. However the Iranian-speaking Alans appear to have taken their ethonym from the same source as Aryan, and one subdivision of their descendants in the North Caucasus, the Ossetes, is known as Iron.^{18J.P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), pp. 32, 266; J.P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams (eds.), The Encyclopedia Indo-European Culture (1997), p. 213.}

Indo-Iranians

An expansion from the eastern end of the European steppes to the Asian side of the Urals apparently set the Indo-Iranian languages on their way. Major attractions were the copper deposits in the Ural Mountains, and the marshlands vital for over-wintering cattle in a drying climate. Here the first fortified settlements appeared on the steppe, built on sites used earlier by herders and miners from west of the Urals. Sintashta and Arkaim (2100-1800 BC) housed communities of metal-workers. There are more than 20 fortified settlements of the Sintashta and Arkaim type in what has become known as the land of towns between the Ural and Tobol Rivers. These sites are the earliest phase of the more widespread Andronovo culture. The demand for metal probably came from the BMAC. The people of the BMAC were irrigation farmers, living in brick-walled villages and towns beside rivers and oases, both east and west of the upper reaches of the Amu Darya River (anciently known as the Oxus). The origin of their culture lay in the Near East and had arrived by way of what is now Iran. The earliest evidence of chariots has been unearthed at Sintashta. These light vehicles with spoked wheels were in demand by the princes of the BMAC, Iran and the Near East by 2000-1900 BC.^{19D.A. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), pp. 371-82, 389-411, 421-27, 452-57; E. E. Kuzmina, The origin of the Indo-Iranians (2007), p. 233.}

Thus contacts were made between the Indo-European speakers of Andronovo and the urban world of the BMAC, which seems to have introduced a new vocabulary into what became Proto-Indo-Iranian, and even more words into its daughter language of India - the Indo-Aryan Sanskrit. The language of the BMAC is lost; it was never recorded. So it can only be deduction that the borrowed words came from the BMAC; they certainly fit its culture. Terms borrowed include those relating to cereal-growing and bread-making (bread, ploughshare, seed, sheaf, yeast), water-works (canal, well), architecture (brick, house, pillar, wooden peg), tools or weapons (axe, club), textiles and garments (cloak, cloth, coarse garment, hem, needle) and plants (hemp, cannabis, mustard, Soma plant).^{20R. Blench, Re-evaluating the linguistic prehistory of South Asia, in T. Osada and A. Uesugi (eds.), Occasional Paper 3: Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past (2008), pp. 159-178; M. Witzel, Central Asian roots and acculturation in South Asia: linguistic and archaeological evidence from Western Central Asia, the Hindukush and Northwestern South Asia for early Indo-Aryan language and religion, in: T. Osada (ed.), Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past (2005), pp. 87-211; A. Lubotsky, The Indo-Iranian substratum, in C. Carpelan, A. Parpola and P. Koskikallio (eds.), Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations (2001), pp. 301-317.}

The Andronovo Culture borrowed more than just the vocabulary for water-works. People of Andronovo origin channeled the waters of the Amu Darya River delta, where it fed into the Aral Sea, to create irrigation agriculture after the BMAC pattern. The culture they created is known as Tazabag'yad. Around 1800 BC the BMAC fell upon hard times. Indeed this date is considered by some scholars to mark the end of the culture, though life continued within the crumbling walls of its strongholds. Pottery of the Andronovo-Tazabag'yab type appeared widely within and around the BMAC centres. In the highlands above the Bactrian oases in Tajikistan, kurgan cemeteries appeared with pottery that mixed elements of the late BMAC and Andronovo-Tazabagyab traditions. Here we can picture the Indo-Aryan language and culture developing. Over the next two centuries, the blended culture grew rich on control over the trade in minerals and pastoral products, and gained military control from chariot warfare, before abandoning the BMAC territory for pastures new in the Indian subcontinent and further afield. About 1500 BC a band of chariot warriors took control of a Hurrian-speaking kingdom in northern Syria which known to the Egyptians as Mitanni. The names of the Mitanni aristocracy are of Indo-Aryan origin. Their oaths referred to deities and concepts central to the Rig Veda, compiled in the Punjab at around the same date.^{21P. L. Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia (2007), chapter 5; D. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language (2007), pp. 452-56.}

Meanwhile pastoralists had moved into Iran and Baluchistan about 1700 BC, who presumably spoke Proto-Iranian. Since this branch of Proto-Indo-Iranian contained far fewer of the words borrowed, it seems, from the BMAC, we can conclude that it developed among those Andronovo people who had more limited contact with this urban culture. The earliest evidence of this language comes from the ancient liturgy of the Avesta usedby the Zoroastrian religion. The earliest part of this are the hymns reputed to be composed its founder Zarathushtra (known as Zoroaster to the Greeks). Though not written down until the 4th century BC, they preserved the early Indo-European language of North-Eastern Iran. From this language, Avestan, was derived Old Persian, first attested in the cliff-carved inscriptions of Darius the Great (550-486 BC).^{22J.P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), pp. 33-4; J.P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams (eds.), The Encyclopedia Indo-European Culture (1997), p. 303.} Two groups of Aryans moved from the North-East deeper into Iran. Around 1000 BC some spread along the line of what became known as the Khorasan Highway into the Zagros Mountains of Western Iran. They bred horses and long-horned cattle in the Zagros valleys. There they became known as the Medes. They were not a united people at this time. The Medes were tribes, each with its own chieftain, some probably a composite of Aryans and the farmers that they had encountered in the Zagros. The Assyrians who took over the region in the late 8th century BC marvelled at the stud farms of the Medes, with their numberless steeds and took some as tribute. Unfortunately for the Assyrians, the Medes grew dissatisfied with their overlords. United under Cyaxares in 615 BC, the Medes swooped upon Assyria, defeating the Assyrians and taking over a large part of its former empire. Meanwhile a tribe that the Assyrians had encountered in 843 BC in North-Eastern Iran, called the Parsua, established themselves in the ruins of the southern kingdom of Anshan, between the southern Zagros and the Gulf, where they became known as the Persians. Under Cyrus, the Persians defeated the Medes and created a united Persia. One of the most important indicators of the arrival of the Iranians is the spread of horse burials in Iran.^{23T. Holland, Persian Fire (2005), chapter one; E. E. Kuz'mina, The Origin of the Indo-Iranians (2007), pp. 371-3.}

Iranian languages were not just spoken in Iran, but by pastoralists who spread far across the Asian steppe. Andronovo people had reached the Tian Shan Mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan by 1610 BC. One of their settlements has been found in the Asi Valley, on the north face of the Zailiysky Alatau Range. Just 2–3 km to the north of the settlement are rock art carvings, including an image of a two-wheeled chariot with six spokes in each wheel.^{24I.P. Panyushkina et al., First tree-ring chronology from Andronovo archaeological timbers of Bronze Age in Central Asia, Dendrochronologia, vol. 28, no. 1 (2010), pp. 13-21.} Somewhat to the north, still within southeastern Kazakhstan, the Dzhungarian Alatau range, which forms the border with China, harbours remarkable concentrations of petroglyphs, including many Bronze Age scenes of chariots and cattle.^{25The petroglyphs of the Dzhungarian Alatau Mountains in Southeast Kazakstan, Past: The Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society, no. 33 (December 1999).} Descendants of the Andronovo culture followed the Ili (or Yili) River Valley from the steppe, and traversed the Chawuhu pass to enter the Tarim Basin about three centuries after the Tocharians.^{26J. Romgard, Ancient Human Settlements in Xinjiang and the Early Silk Road Trade, Sino-Platonic Papers, vol. 185 ( 2008), pp. 14-5, 24-9.}

The Apple

In the Ili Valley the Iranian-speakers encountered a species of tree unknown it seems to their PIE-speaking ancestors. The wild apple of this region (Malus sieversii) produces a large and edible fruit. DNA analysis has shown it to be the progenitor of the cultivated apples we eat today.^{27R. Velasco et al., The genome of the domesticated apple (Malus x domestica Borkh), Nature Genetics, vol. 42, no. 10 (October 2010), pp. 833–839.} Our English word apple has cognates in various western IE languages, such as Old Irish, Lithuanian and Russian, and possibly in Pashto, but cannot be extended back with certainty to PIE.^{28J.P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), pp. 157-8.} That is just what we would expect if the first Indo-European-speakers to taste an apple were Andronovo pastoralists. Apple seeds could have been transported westwards from Central Asia into Europe along two trade routes, the steppe corridor or via Iran and Anatolia. DNA studies suggest that the apple was domesticated early in Iran. There is high level of genetic diversity in Iran’s cultivated apple stock.^{29J. Farrokhi et al., Evaluation of genetic diversity among Iranian apple (Malus× domestica Borkh.) cultivars and landraces using simple sequence repeat markers, Australian Journal of Crop Science, vol. 5, no. 7 (2011), pp. 815-821.} Comparisons place Iranian apples in an intermediate position between the domesticated varieties and wild species.^{30A. Gharghani et al., Genetic identity and relationships of Iranian apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.) cultivars and landraces, wild Malus species and representative old apple cultivars based on simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker analysis, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, vol. 56, no. 6 (2009), pp. 829-842.} The apple was certainly cultivated in Europe by the time of the Ancient Greeks and today is one of the most widespread and popular fruit trees in the world.

Scythians

Those Iranian-speakers who retained a nomadic life as horsemen of the steppe first appear in history as the Cimmerians and Scythians. Herodotus describes how the Cimmerians were driven from the Pontic-Caspian steppe by the fierce Scythians from further east.^{31Herodotus, The Histories, book 4.} The Scythians appear to have cultivated trade, controlled the Silk Road from China to the West in its early days. This was the probable source of their wealth, expressed in spectacular royal kurgans, containing silk and gold, exquisitely worked to portray wild animals.^{32E. E.Kuzʹmina and V. H. Mair, The Prehistory of the Silk Road (2007); C.I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (2009), chap. 2.}

But as the Turkic tribes grew in strength and pushed westward, the descendants of Scythians could join them or flee west before them. Studies of ancient DNA indicate the point at which East Asian peoples came to predominate over Western Eurasian in Central Asia. In Kazakhstan there were Western Eurasian lineages prior to the 7th century BC, followed by East Asian lineages appearing. Assyrian archives and Greek historian Herodotus record the impact on the West of this turn of the tide. Scythians migrated from Asia to the homeland of their ancestors, settling in what is now Azarbaijan and Ukraine.^{33W.Vogelsang, The Afghans (2002), pp. 83-90; P.R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (1996), pp. 25-28.} The same trajectory across the steppe would later bring the Turks to Turkey, and the Huns and Mongols to Eastern Europe. The tide turned again as the Russians rose in power and pushed eastwards into Siberia. This shuttling between east and west wove a complex cultural and genetic tapestry. It will take the combined efforts of researchers in linguistics, archaeology, climatology, genetics and history to unravel its threads.^{34N.A. Bokovenko, Migrations of Early Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe in a Context of Climatic Changes, in E. Marian Scott, A., Yu. Alekseev and G. Zaitseva (eds.), NATO Science Series: IV: Earth and Environmental Sciences Impact of the Environment on Human Migration in Eurasia, vol. 42 (2005), pp. 1568-1238; C. Schuh et al, Mobility in the prehistoric western Eurasian Steppe – an interdisciplinary approach, 6th Bone Diagenesis Meeting 18-21 September 2009, University of Bonn: Abstract Volume (2009), p. 60; O. Gokcumen et al, Genetic variation in the enigmatic Altaian Kazakhs of South-Central Russia: Insights into Turkic population history, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 136 (2008), no. 3, pp. 278 - 293; B. Martínez-Cruz et al., In the heartland of Eurasia: the multilocus genetic landscape of Central Asian populations, European Journal of Human Genetics, (online 8 September 2010).}

Notes

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