The Indo-Europeans

    In the city parks of many countries the man on horseback is a common sight, as in the case of the statue in Washington, DC of Philip Sheridan, a ruthless Civil War hero (and resident of Somerset, Ohio). While the equestrian statue is a common cultural motif, it might seem to have little to do with any specific language, much less with English. Yet with the spread of the equestrian genre around the world has also come the spread of a family of languages known as Indo-European. The many languages (including English) of this single family are spoken by about half of the world’s people.

The history of Indo-European is often schematized in the form of a tree. Controversies abound as to exactly what the tree should look like (and even if a tree is the most appropriate representation). Even so, a good deal of credible archeological work suggests the following interpretation. About six thousand years ago people spoke a language now termed Proto-Indo-European in an area that today constitutes the southern part of Ukraine as well as, perhaps, parts of southern Russia. In the next two thousand years speakers of Indo-European migrated in different directions, some moving east and some moving west: the division is often represented as the centum and satem branches on the tree (though there are controversies about this split). Those who moved east eventually reached points as far east as India and the approaches to China, while those who migrated the farthest west reached the areas known today as Spain and the British Isles. Those migrants who reached India probably had ancestors who passed through Iran and Afghanistan, and the word designating the former is thought by some to be a name for Indo-Europeans more generally. Some of those who reached Spain, Britain, and Ireland spoke Celtic languages, while the Germanic languages directly ancestral to English were probably first spoken in what today are Denmark, Sweden, and the northern part of Germany.

    Although many of the details remain disputed, there is a wide scholarly consensus that the Indo-Europeans migrated to widely separated areas. The single biggest factor accounting for these migrations is probably the horse. A good deal of archeological work indicates that in the same period as the hypothesized spread of the Indo-Europeans, there were more and more groups able to ride horses in the same areas. Moreover, work in the Dnieper river valley of Ukraine indicates that the first groups to domesticate the horse lived there.

Some archeologists believe that the development of horsemanship led to an economic change, allowing for small groups of people to move large herds of sheep and other animals to wider and wider areas. Some feminist scholars such as Marija Gimbutas believe that the passing of a matriarchal Old Europe reliant on agriculture coincides with the arrival of patriarchal Indo-Europeans reliant on herding. In any case, the pastoralists left behind some intriguing monuments of their power: kurgans, which are burial mounds similar in some ways to those built by Native Americans.

One commonplace has it that "History is written in the footsteps of the horse." The spread of the Indo-Europeans seems to support that, and their development of horsemanship eventually spread to groups who spoke non-Indo-European languages yet who also influenced history in major ways: for example, the Huns, Turks, and Mongols. Moreover, myths that developed in this equestrian culture spread far beyond the original Indo-European homeland. For example, an early account of the invasion of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons identifies two of their leaders as Hengest and Horsa. The former name is a term for ‘stallion,’ and the names reflect the myth of horse twins found in other Indo-European societies (e.g., Castor and Pollux in ancient Greece).

    Archeology, comparative mythology and linguistics have all contributed to helping us understand who the Indo-Europeans were, and fittingly, another man on horseback, Peter the Great, deserves some of the credit for what we know today. In the early eighteenth century the Russian Czar claimed rights to recently excavated treasures in his empire. The stunning gold work he claimed formed the nucleus for what became the vast collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and it depicts vividly much about the daily life of the Scythians, a group of fierce Indo-European pastoralists active some 2,500 years ago.This essay began with a discussion of "the man on horseback," but of course women also ride horses, and the practice is nothing new, as attested in the legends about the Amazons. While some might be tempted to dismiss these stories as unhistorical myths, archeological work also substantiates the reality of female warriors not so different from the Scythians.

Source for this page: In Search of the Indo-Europeans, by J.P. Mallory. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.