See "centers of civilization." Link here.
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney, c. 2025. Bloomsbury Publishing.
This is where I first saw mention of this book: link here. The lede:
This is one of the three best books I read in 2025 (the others being
Orbital and
Playground).
As the title indicates, this book elucidates in extensive but clear
detail how one early proto-language radiated from the area north of the
Black Sea outward toward what is now Europe and southeast into what is
now the Indian subcontinent.
An analysis like
this requires more than just linguistic skills. Understanding the
processes involved requires familiarity also with the anthropology of
the movements of people, their occupations, their trading networks,
their social behaviors, and also an understanding of archaeological
findings, including DNA extracted from ancient bones. The author,
Laura Spinney,
is not a professional linguist, anthropologist, or archaeologist.
Instead (and presumably for the better), she is a professional science
writer, able to compress immense volumes of information into a form
suitable for the general public. After reading this book, I immediately
placed a request at our library for her previous work -
Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed The World.
Link here to interview with Laura Spinney. This interview was recorded in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. I would love to see Ms Spinney write a similar book on Covid-19.
Influenza:
Proto. Notes.
From pages 16 - 17, historical linguists would eventually tease out twelve main branches of the Indo-European language family: Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Italic, Celtic, Germani, Slavic, Baltic, Indic and Iranic.
To write them in a list like that is to do violence to them, though, because each one hides not one but many worlds of human odyssey and thought.
Anatolian, a clutch of long-dead languages oce spoken on the Turkish peninsula and including that of the great Hittite Empire, is considered the oldest branch, though it was one of the last to be recognized.
Tocharian is another prodigal child, one no one expected to welcome into the fold, though the evidence that it belongs there is overwhelming. As a dead langauge, or rather two, it was once spoken in the Silk Road trading posts of what is now northwest China, making it the family's easternmost branch.
The Indic and Irani branches are considered so closely related, by most linguists, that they are usually combined into one: Indo-Iranian. By far the largest in terms of both geographical range and number of speakers, this branch also includes the lesser-known Nuristani languages that are spoken in remote valleys of the Hindu Kush. The Irani branch comprises extinct Avestan, Zarathustra's mother tongue, and Sogdian, spoken by the merchants who plied the early medieval Silk Roads -- the trade routes that connected Europe and China -- but also Farsi (Modern Persian), Pashto and Kurdish. Their dead cousin Sanskrit, the language of the earliest Indian and Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, might be the most prolific of all the Indo-European languages. Among its many living offstpring are Hindi, Urdu, Romani and the Sinhalese language spoken in Sri Lanka.
Greek, Albanian and Armenian are origial enough that each one has a branch to itself. Their very orphan nature hints at a bevy of ghost languages, a clamour of long-dead relatives that might have travelled through time with them before expiring one by one and leavin gonly these three.
The two surviving Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian, have history entwined with the languages of the Slavs, judging by the closeness. But the Slavi tongues tell a tale of their own, falling out into western (including Polish and Czech), southern (such as Bulgarian and Slovenian) and eastern (notably Ukrainian and Russian) sub-branches.
At the other end of Europe, the Celtic languages divide north-south. Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx took a different path from Welsh and Cornish, which show more affinity with Breton and extinct Gaulish across the channel. Italic embraces Latin and its brood, from Portuguese to Romanian, but also Latin's dead sisters Umbrian and Oscan. Oscan was the language of the Sabines, whose women, legend has it, were raped by Rome's founder and his gang. Last but not least, German spans the languages of Scandinavia along with English, Dutch and German, but also extinct Gothic, which was one spoken as far east Crimea and southern Russia.
Those were the twelve.
Though it may seem like it, the Indo-European domination of Europe was never complete. Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian belong to the Uralic language family, while Basque survives as a rare pearl of an anachronism: an island of something older in a sea of Indo-European. In the first millennium CE, conquering Visigoths tried to update the Basques, and every Visigoth king trumpeted domuit Vascones. The expression, in the Latin language that the initially Germanic-speaking Visigoths took up as they moved west, means "he tamed the Basques." Except he didn't.
Indo-European and Uralic are two separate families but some suggest there is a "super-family" that embraces both.
So, the theme for this book:
"No sooner had the link between Indic and European languages been demonstrated than people began to wonder where their common ancestor had been spoken. Locating the Indo-European homeland has been the Holy Grail for many iintellectuals and many not-so intellectuals for two hundred and fifty years. Enlightenment thinkers rushed to claim India as the birthplace of the Indo-European languages, believing Sanskrit to be the most archaic of them. You could be forgiven for thinking that anywhere would do, for some of those champions of rational enquiry, as long as it wasn't biblical. The North Pole was a candidate, as was the lost city of Atlantis, vanished uder the Black Sea. Practically every land bordering that sea has been on the table at one time or other. Some of them still are."
Geography:
two big seas: B and C --- Black and Caspian (at one time, joined)
two "M" seas: Marmara (very, very small;
Bosporus Strait: from B to M; sometimes called the Istanbul Strait; opposite Turkey -- Bulgaria
Dardanelles (Canakkale Strait): a long, long, long strait, from Sea of M to Mediterranean Sea:
Odessa: northwest corner of Black Sea
Istanbul: southwest corner of Black Sea
Chapter 1 centers around Varna, west coast of Black Sea, between Odessa to the north and Istanbul to the south.
Four rivers, north to south, that drain into the Black Sea's west coast:
Dnieper (actually the very north, but on the west; key city: Kyiv
Dniester: just south of Odessa; both Dnieper and Dniester on north side of Carpathian Mountains
Moscow: well north of the Black Sea, about midway west-east; between the Volga River (east) and the Dneiper River (west) -- Moscow 1/3rd of the way to the Dneiper; 2/3rds of the way to the Volga River
Danube: middle of the west coast of the Black Sea
North of the Black Sea, three major rivers:
Dneiper -- west of Moscow, feeds into the Black Sea
Don -- south of Moscow, feeds into Sea of Azov which is small lake just north of the Black Sea
rises in a town just southeast of Moscow
Volga-Don Canal: Moscow became the "Port of Five Seas";
White Sea; Baltic Sea; Caspian Sea; Sea of Azov; and Black Sea.
Volga -- east of Moscow, feeds into the Caspian Sea
Introduction
Chapter 1: Genesis -- Lingua obscura
The "Kurgan Theory" -- The horse, the wheel, and language. Wiki. David W Anthony.
Chapter centers on Varna (now inside Bulgaria), west coast of Black Sea, about 1/2-way between northwest and southwest corners of Black Sea;
Varna: among other things, oldest gold treasure in the world; discovered 4500 BC
Deluge Theory: 1997 -- William Ryan and Walter Pitman
author discusses migration pattern between 8,000 BC and 4500 BC
farming: 10,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent;
farming in the Balkans between 6000 BC and 5000 BC
4500 BC seems to be an important milestone
Harmangia: among the first farmers to settle this area, around 5500 BC -- p. 43; well before Varna.
Harmangia culture lasted for a 1,000 years.
Neolithic culture west of Black Sea, Bulgaria and to the north
Around 4500 BCE, the region near the Black Sea (specifically the Pontic-Caspian Steppe) became crucial
as a source of massive migrations, notably the Yamnaya culture, who spread farming, new technologies (like wagons), and ultimately, Indo-European languages into Western Europe, causing huge genetic shifts and shaping modern European populations. This period marks the beginning of major post-Neolithic population movements from the East into Europe, interacting with existing farming communities.
Varna
gold, using fleeces, page 46
4500 BC, Varna region, the birth of the Copper Age (out of the Stone Age)
Copper Age societies in SE Europe reaching their zeniths by 4500 BCE
in the process of smelting gold, came pure copper
p. 46
Kurgans, small earthen mounds, overlaid burial grounds; p. 48. Kurgan and Kurgan culture.
The lingua franca for trading: unknown. p. 51.
But most agree that the ancestor to the Indo-European family of languages began here. This would be exactly the midpoint between India (the East) and western Europe (the West).
Two saves of migration
one across Strait of Bosporus (Istanbul)
one across the Aegean Sea to the south
All of a sudden those in this area, the beginning of the Copper Age, disappeared -- completely disappeared, about 4400 BC.
Amazing: between 4500 BE and 4400 BC. Happened very, very quickly. Page 52.
Tel Karanova, page 52.
Beginning on page 52 and extending several pages: the disappearance of Karanova, Varan, site of Copper Age beginnings.
Then the Mesopotamian villages began to appear; first "modern" cities, page 56.
First wheeled vehicle: between 4000 and 3500 BC -- page 52. Perhaps the oxen domesticated by now
Goat: second animal domesticated by humans. First, of course, the dog, 15000 years ago; the goat, 10,000 years ago, preceding farming. After the goat, came sheep (9000 BC), and then pigs (8300 BC, middle East), and then finally castrated cattle --> oxen (8,000 BC, from wild aurochs).
[3500 BC -- the horse, Central Asia.]
Page 56: shortly after appearnce of first megasites in the Ukraine, Mesopotamian villages (Uruk, southern Irak; Tell Brak, northern Syria) began to appear. Between 3800 and 3700.
By 3500 BC, the "megasites" completely disappeared, p. 58.
A reminder, Abraham of the Bible, middle Bronze Age, 2000 - 1800 BC. Born in Ur; God called him to found a great nation in Canaan.
Chapter 2: Sacred Spring -- Proto-Indo-European
Begins with the geography of the steppe.
The Yamnaya culture.
Chapter 3: First Among Equals -- Anatolian
Page 97: Marija Gimbutas was the leading proponent of the theory (see below), discussed in the last chapter (chapter 2), that the steppe nomads had spread those languages.
The chapter begins with Bedřich Hrozný (6 May 1879 – 12 December 1952), also known as Friedrich Hrozny, was a Czech orientalist and linguist. He contributed to the decipherment of the ancient Hittite language, identified it as an Indo-European language, and laid the groundwork for the development of Hittitology.
Cambridge, England: Lord Colin and Lady Jane Renfrew. Marija Gimbutas.
"Old Europe."
Old Europe is a term coined by the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to describe what she perceived as a relatively homogeneous pre-Indo-European Neolithic and Copper Age culture or civilization in Southeast Europe, centeredd in the Lower Danube Valley.
Old Europe is also referred to in some literature as the Danube civilisation.
Chapter 4: Over The Range -- Tocharian
Back to 1906, Hungarian-born archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein had just discovered Niya, one of the oasis cities that once encircled the Taklamakan Desert like a strong of mala beads; it is now known as Xinjian, northwest China.
Besides the world's oldest printed text, the Diamond Sutra, and the Jade Gate -- the frontier post where caravans once entered China -- Stein would discover much of the Silk Roads on behalf of his adopted country, Britain.
Directly east of the Caspian Sea; abuts the Gobi Desert on the east. Southwest of Mongolia; directly north of India. The "Stan" brothers to the west.
Explanation for how the name "Tocharian" came to be. Page 123.
Okay, the eldest daughter of PIE was Anatolian.
The second eldest daughter of PIE was Tocharian (wrongly named, by the way), same page, page 123.
The language was translated / discovered by the German scholars (1908 and thereabouts) Emil Siet and Wilhelm Siegling.
Page 127: Indo-European family falls out into centrum and satem languages, depending on whether words like the one for a 'hundred' (centum in Latin, satem in Avestan) are pronounced with a hard k or a soft s sound at the front.
Afanasievo culture: p. 131.
Chapter 5: Lark Rising -- Celtic, Germanic, Italic
This will be interesting -- Celtic, again.
Chapter 6: The Wandering Horse -- Indo-Iranian
Begins with the ancient Indian ceremonies, the ashvamedha or horse sacrifice.
Chapter 7: Northern Idyll -- Baltic and Slavic
Begins again with Marija Gimbutas, 1962, almost 20 years after fleeing her native Lithuania. In 1962 she published The Balts.
Page 220: the Proto-Slavic homeland, between the headwaters of the Dniester and the Middle Dneiper; falls within the borders of modern Ukraine.
Chapter 8: They Came From Steep Wilusa -- Albanian, Armenian, Greek
Begins with the Trojan War, The Iliad.
Conclusion: Shibboleth
A shibboleth is a word, phrase, or custom that identifies someone as an insider or outsider of a particular group, originating from the Biblical story where the inability to pronounce "sh" in "shibboleth" revealed Ephraimites as enemies.
In modern usage, it's a linguistic or behavioral marker (like saying "petrol" vs. "gasoline") or a trite, outdated saying. It can also refer to the Shibboleth Consortium, an identity management system for web applications.
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Much of the book is, understandably, centered in Ukraine. Ironically, Ukraine is in the news now, 24/7, for the past three years -- going into the fourth year now. Russia is still losing 25,000 men / month, in the Ukraine-Russian War.
