Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

by Laura Spinney

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, c. 400CE

As far as we know, the alphabet was only invented once, in or near Egypt.

Bosporus plug could no longer hold back the Mediterranean came, in one telling, between nine and ten thousand years ago. Water roared over that giant weir with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls, triggering a tsunami that surged through estuaries and lagoons and flooded an area the size of Ireland.

The Bosporus Valley might have roared at full spate for decades rather than months, a wondrous sight and sound in itself.

The two American geoscientists who proposed the deluge theory in 1997, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, speculated that the tales told by traumatised eyewitnesses might have been passed down orally over generations, until eventually they inspired the flood myths of the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

They are wels catfish, where wels, the common name of the species in German, shares a root with English ‘whale’.)

The farmers were smaller, with dark hair and eyes and, probably, lighter skin. The hunter-gatherers had that now rare combination of dark hair and skin and blue eyes.

The two economic models bred two different mindsets: one that prized self-sufficiency and lived for the present, the other that valued collective decision-making and planned for the future. Both the Bible and the Qur’an recount how this clash of worldviews led to the first murder, that of the shepherd Abel by his farmer brother Cain, but the clash is much older than the Abrahamic scriptures.

But only one of those animals would go on to replace almost all of the world’s wild horses, and that was the one from the west of the Urals (Equus caballus). The last descendants of the Botai’s line are the Przewalski’s horses (Equus przewalskii) that still roam the Mongolian steppe and were once thought to be wild, but are in fact feral (having once been domesticated, that is, they have reverted to the wild state).

The people responsible for domesticating the western line, though the process may have begun before them and certainly continued after them, were probably the Yamnaya.

Having analysed the genomes of thirteen of the oldest mummies, they reported that those individuals were a genetic vestige of the hunter-gatherers who had inhabited the eastern end of Eurasia since before the last ice age. They had not interbred with any of the populations around them – not the Afanasievo, nor the Afghan farmers, nor the herders of the mountain corridor. If they looked European, it was more likely to be because their ancestors had bequeathed genes shaping skin and hair colour to ancient Europeans, than because Europeans had come east.

David Anthony, ever the bold thinker, has gone further than most, proposing that the first group crossed in as little as two years.

(the word ‘utopia’ contains that disappointment within it, since it means ‘nowhere’).

The foreign or ‘social’ wife might have brought prestige and connections, while the local one bore the children.

Scholars therefore hazard that the Rig Veda was written down between 1500 and 1200 BCE, at least four hundred years after the earliest Hittite texts.

In the thirteen hundreds BCE, a Mitanni assussani or master horse-trainer named Kikkuli wrote a plan for rearing and training horses that is still quoted today because of the superb horses it turned out.3

Zarathustra was a reformer, and the Gathas can be seen partly as a critique of the Rig Veda. Though their age is also debated, because it’s not certain when Zarathustra lived, it’s generally thought that he composed them around 1000 BCE – a few centuries after the Rig Veda was compiled.

An Iranic word for ‘river’ was danu, which is the root of both Don and Danube. Dniester comes from *Danu nazdya, ‘river to the front’, and Dnieper from *Danu apara, ‘river to the rear’. These names were the legacy of the Scythians who inhabited those parts in the Iron Age (leaving a burial mound in Alexey Nikitin’s natal village) and who spoke languages not unlike the Pashto of modern Afghanistan.

The same study that suggested that the Yamnaya had had a hand in domesticating Equus caballus showed that the fully domesticated lineage exploded out of the Sintashta heartlands a little before 2000 BCE. Almost every one of the estimated sixty million domesticated horses presently roaming the planet can trace its origins back to those reared in the rainshadow of the Urals at around that date.

Among the oldest songs that Indo-European poets sang, mythologists tell us, is one about a smith who makes a pact with a devil. Having swapped his soul for the power to weld any materials together, the smith cunningly welds the devil to an immovable object. The Brothers Grimm collected variations on this theme in rural Germany in the nineteenth century. It is the kernel of Faust, a story reworked by Marlowe, Goethe and Mann. If the mythologists are right, however, it is at least six thousand years old – old enough to have been inspired by the smiths at Varna, those alchemists who, wreathed in flame and acrid smoke, transformed rock into gold.

The Hittite Empire was no more, and they built their capital, Gordion, over the remains of a Hittite city. Gordion was named for its founder, Gordias, whose son Midas was immortalised in Greek mythology for turning everything he touched to gold. In a less well-known episode of his mythologised life, Midas was slapped with a pair of donkey ears for marking the god Apollo down in a music competition.

It was more likely to belong to his father, namesake of the fabled Gordian knot (the one that Alexander of Macedon sliced through in 333 BCE).

English has expanded mainly as a lingua franca.

Elizabeth the First was particularly sensitive to new linguistic usages around her, and regularly ploughed them back into her own speech. She helped English do away with the double negative (‘I did not do nothing’) and replace ‘ye’ with ‘you’.