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3.6 History of ideas

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Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Palaeolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia, with an excursus on Slavic ethnogenesis
by Mario Alinei
Expanded version of a paper read at the Conference Ancient Settlers in Europe, Kobarid, 29-30 May 2003. – Forthcoming in “Quaderni di semantica”, 26.

3.6 History of ideas
As many studies have now shown, the foundation of scientific IE research in the 19thcentury was deeply influenced by the contemporary Arian, Pangermanic and colonialist ideology, as first expounded in Count Joseph-Arthur De Gobineau’s, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-1855) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s, Die Grundlagen des XIX Jahrhunderts (1899), with their emphasis on Indo-Europeans racial superiority and their inclination to war and conquest (e.g. Poliakov 1974, Römer 1985, Trigger 1989, Renfrew 1987 etc.). Here is, for example, how Adolphe Pictet, the founder of the so called Linguistic Paleontology, in his book Les origines des Indo-européennes ou les Aryas primitif. Essai de paléontologie linguistique, Paris, 1859-63, described the “Arian race”: «a race destined by the Providence to dominate the whole world… Privileged among all other races for the beauty of its blood, and for the gifts of its intelligence, … this fertile race has worked to create for itself, as a means for its development, a language which is admirable for its richness, its power, its harmony and perfection of forms». This is why the first IE specialists – imbued with European colonialism of the 19th century – chose to see the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a superior race of warriors and colonizers, who would have conquered the allegedly “pre-IE” Neolithic Europe in the Copper Age, and brought their ‘superior’ (?) civilization to it. And since it was necessary for the Indo-European warriors to have weapons and horses, also the choice of the Copper Age was obligatory, because this was the context of Battle Axes, metallurgy and horse domestication. At the same time, while the concept of the Arian super-race gave shape to the myth of the Battle-Axe horse riding invaders, another myth, within the Arian larger myth, emerged: Pangermanism. Within the Arian superior race, the German father-founders of IE studies preferred to see the Germanic people as the supermen, the purest and the closest to the original blessed race. This is also why the continental Germanic area for a long time was believed to be the Urheimat of the PIEs (Kossinna!). In turn, the Pangermanic ideology and its political context gave rise to yet another important myth, the consequences of which are still dominating the field of IE studies: namely that of the extremely late arrival of the Slavs: if the Germanic people were the closest to the pure Arian race, then the Slavs must certainly be the farthest ones! Despite their enormous numbers (half of Europe is Slavic), the Slavs were thought of having hidden somewhere, magically leaving no archaeological trace whatsoever of their presence, until in the Middle Ages they unexplainably (and quite regretfully!) emerge and swarm over Eastern Europe…

7 The Slavic ethnogenesis in the framework of the PCT1

7.1 Introduction
Three preliminary remarks are in order:
(A) the Slavic area corresponds to almost half of Europe. As such it is the continent’s largest, and the only one that includes three climatic zones (subarctic, continental and Mediterranean) and almost all ecological zones: arctic, tundra, coniferous forest, mixed forest, steppe-forest, steppe, semi-desertic, Mediterranean, alpine.
(B) In spite of their huge extension, Slavic languages are much less differentiated than, for example, the Germanic or the Romance. 1 This section summarizes parts of the two chapters of my book (Alinei 2000) devoted to the Slavic area. 24

(C) Slavic languages have also a unique, asymmetric areal distribution: while Southern Slavic languages (Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian) form a homogeneous bloc, sharing several common features, for Northern Slavic languages it is necessary to distinguish between a Western branch (including Czech, Sorbian and Polish), and an Eastern one (including Russian, Ucrainian and Belo-Russian), as each of the two branches shares different features with Southern Slavic.
An adequate theory of Slavic ethnogenesis will have to provide a satisfactory and coherent explanation for these three fundamental aspects of Slavic: enormous extension, extraordinary homogeneity, and areal asymmetry between South and North.
7.2 The traditional theory of Slavic ethnogenesis
The old version of the traditional theory assumed, as is known, the ‘arrival’ of the Slavs in historical times, following their alleged “great migration” in the 5th and 6th centuries of our era, from an unknown area. It claimed that this is the reason for their large extension and phenomenal homegenity. Even though this radical thesis is now maintained only by a minority (represented by Schenkerwould)
Though – as we have seen in the preceding sections – the real cause for the assumption of such a short chronology for the origins of the Slavs lies in the ignorance of some basic modern developments concerning both linguistics and other historical sciences, Slavic specialists tend to justify it also by appealing to the recent dates of the earliest attestations of Slavic languages (9th century, when the missionaries Cyril and Methodius invented the glagolitic alfabet (from which derives the cirillic one), and translated parts of the Bible and of the orthodox lithurgy into what is called Church Slavic), as well as those of the earliest mentions of Slavic people, in the works of the historians of the 5th and 6th centuries.

However, overwhelming evidence, which I have illustrated in detail in my books (Alinei 1996, 2000), proves that the date of the earliest attestations and the earliest mentions of historians have absolutely no relevance for the problem of dating the ‘birth’ of a language or of a people. Writing is an entirely separate phenomenon from speaking, connected as it is to the forming of highly developed stratified societies, with a dominating elite needing writing to exercise its full power, and thus to a very recent development of European history. Its appearance can thus vary from place to place. To give only three examples: (i) Baltic and Finnic languages are attested much later than Slavic, yet nobody – even among traditionalists – has ever thought that Baltic has arrived into Europe around that time; (ii) for Finnic, the Uralic Continuity Theory now universally accepted (see above) claims a Palaeolithic origin…; (iii) even more absurdly, the first attestations or the first mentions in writings of most European substandard dialects belong to modern times, yet nobody dares think they have ‘arrived’ or formed so recently. Therefore, we cannot consider the argument of the earliest attestations and earliest mentions as a serious one. We will return to this point further.
To the North would live the Balts, and to the North of the Balts the Finnic people. To the South there would be Iranians (Scythians) and (from the 7th century on) Sarmatians. On the Black Sea the coastal cities would be Greek and to the East of the Slavs the Iranians would extend to the Uralic Mordvins, in the area of Tambov.

Let us now test this theory against the three points we have made at the outset: the enormous extension, the extraordinary homogeneity and the geographical asymmetry of the Slavic languages. And let us begin by the last point, which I think has gone unnoticed by traditional scholars.
7.3.1 The areal asymmetry of the Slavic areal distribution
As a specialist in geolinguistics, I have always been surprised by the fact that Slavic specialists have failed in noticing or appreciating the extraordinary diagnostic value – from a geolinguistic point of view – of the asymmetric configuration of the Slavic area. Even more so since the cause of this asymmetry is quite well-known, and explicitly stated in all handbooks for first-year students of Slavic: Northern Slavic does not form a single unit, but each of its two branchings – the Western and the Eastern – shares different features with Southern Slavic.

Now, from a geolinguistic point of view, there is just one explanation possible for this peculiar and transparent areal configuration: Southern Slavic must form the earlier core, while the two Northern branchings must be a later development, each with its proper history and identity. No other explanation is possible, unless one challenges the very raison d’etre of IE and Proto-Slavic reconstruction, besides common sense.
7.3.2 The Slavic enormous expansion
The only evidence for a great migration of Slavs in historical times that traditional scholars can possibly claim lies in a literal reading of the mentions of medieval historians, such as the Thracian Priscus of Panion (5th century), the Greek Procopius of Cesarea (6th century) and the Goth Jordanes (6th century), or those of the Church (e.g. Conte 1990, 33-34). But it is quite evident that such mentions do not point unambiguously to an ‘invasion’ or ‘migration’ of Slavs, but can just as simply be taken as to refer to pre-existing Slavs, the presence of which even traditional scholars now admit. When, for example, John of Ephesos, bishop of Constantinopolis under Justinian (527-65) mentions the innumerable raids into the Bizantine territori by “the damned people of the Slavs” he damns them because they were still pagan, and not because they are ‘arriving’! And when, in his De rebus Gethicis Jordanes describes the location of the Venedi, and writes that they inhabited the area “From the source of the Visla riverand on incommensurable expanses”, he does not give the slightest indication of a recent arrival of theirs, but simply describes a statu quo. And I challenge Slavic specialists to find any indication of a recent arrival of the Slavs in their area in other medieval sources.

Not only, but when earlier historians, living in the centuries preceding the supposed arrival of the Slavs, write that the population of the Carpatian Basin offered a drink called medos (Proto-Slavic medŭ ‘drink produced with honey”) the Byzantine ambassadors directed to the court of Attila (king of the Huns), and that a part of the funeral rituals for Attila’s death was called strava (medieval name of a Slavic funeral ritual), only a biased reader can find evidence in this for the “first infiltrations” of Slavs in the Carpatian area, especially as they seem to have left not trace of their coming!

(Neustupný-Neustupný 1963, 196).
The much simpler truth is that the Slavs were there from remote times. For,again, the first mention of peoples in writing depends on the birthday of writing, and not on the birthday of peoples!
In short, if such an enormous expansion of the Slavs both to the South and to the North from their alleged homeland in Middle-Eastern Europe had really taken place, the most important evidence we should expect to find would be archaeological. Which is entirely missing. Just as we miss any discussion of this point in Mallory’s book –and certainly not by accident, given the fact that Mallory is an archaeologist. I fail to see, then, how an archaeologist can advance the hypothesis of a massive expansion that involves half of Europe, and is capable of entirely changing its linguistic identity, without the slightest archaeological evidence.
Another fundamental objection to this thesis lies in the fact that, following the traditional scenario, we would have to assume that this ‘great migration’ involved also the Southern Slavic area: an absolute impossibility, as we have just seen. If there has been a ‘migration’, it must have proceded from South northwards.
A third, fundamental objection to this thesis is the contradiction between the idea of a medieval migration and the total disappearance of the presumed pre-existing languages. Not even modern mass migration and colonization, despite the enormous technological and cultural difference between the migrants and the indigenous people, have caused the total extinction of all autocthonous languages in the New World. The ideal of the extinction of all alleged pre-Indo-European languages because of a Copper Age IE migration is already hard enough to admit, given the same reason, plus the fact that research on pre-Indo-European has never produced any serious result (Alinei 1996, 2000). How can we accept such an idea for the Early Middle Ages, and for the highly civilized areas of Southern Eastern prehistoric Europe? What and where would the pre-Indo-European substrate be in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia? Unless we associate this late migration to a gigantic genocide – a phantascientific hypothesis – this hypothesis does not belong to serious scientific thinking.

In the postglacial scenario (that of human populations following the retreat of the ice, already admitted for Uralic people), we could immagine the Balts settling on the shores of the now formed Baltic Sea, with the Slavs behind them, and the Uralic people ahead of them proceding north-eastwards. The Slavic postglacial area would then form a kind of triangle, the Southern corner of which would correspond to Macedonia, the western frontier of which would pass along the Italid Dalmatia, and delimit the rest of ex-Yugoslavia, Hungary, ex- Czechoslovakia, and Southern Poland, and the Eastern frontier of which would delimit Bulgaria, Romania, Western Ukraine, Belorussia and parts of Middle Russia. Northern neighbors of the Slavs would be Balts and Uralic people, South-Western neighbors the Italids of Dalmatia, of the Eastern Alps and of a Po Valley much larger than now, emerging from Northern Adriatic. North-Western neighbors would be Germans, while on the Eastern side their neighbors would be Altaic and, much later, Iranian elites (parts of the Scythians).

7.5.2 The slight differentiation of Slavic languages and the demographic increase of Slavic people as consequences of the stability and the success of South-Eastern European Neolithic cultures

(1) The Thessalian and Southern Macedonian culture of Proto-Sesklo, followed by Sesklo and Dimini, identifiable with the Greek group;

(2) The ‘Painted Ware’ cultures of Anzabegovo-Vršnik in Northern Macedonia, Starčevo in Serbia, Körös/Criş in Hungary and Romania, and Karanovo I in Bulgaria; followed later by Vinča (Serbia, Hungary and Romania), Veselinovo (Bulgaria), Dudeşti e Boian (Romania), identifiable with Southern Slavic;

(3) The Albanian ‘Painted Ware’ cultures of Vashtemi-Podgornie e Kolsh, followed by those of Čakran and the more recent Maliq, to the last of which Albanian prehistorians themselves attribute the origins of Illyrian. 

The fact that these three cultural facies originally formed a unitary block, farfrom representing an objection to the identification of three different language groups, provides, rather, a further argument in its favour. Since this original block, in fact, represents the earliest neolithized area of Europe, where the impact of the new economy introduced by the Asiatic farmers must have been the greatest, the new Balkanic culture would have first submerged the pre-existing ethnolinguistic frontiers; and in a second phase, by the time the indigenous Mesolithic populations began to actively participate in the adoption of the new economy, the old ethnolinguistic frontiers would emerge again with the succcessive cultures. Which would of course reflect the original frontiers between Greeks, Slavs and Illyrians.

7.5.4 The Metal Ages
Also for the birth of metallurgy the Slavic Balkanic area must have played a fundamental role. And in this new context, the most ancient metallurgical cultures of Europe, that of the Balkanic area, must be seen as Southern Slavic; while Western Slavic will be the Czech metallurgical cultures, and Eastern Slavic Tripolye, which introduces metallurgy into the Altaic area. Summarizing, the linguistic Slavic area coincides first with the Painted Ware culture (excluding the Albanian one) and with its subsequent extensions to North-West and North-East, and later with the whole ‘Balkano-Carpatian Chalcolithic metallurgical Province’, to which also the Ukrainian culture of Tripolye participates.

Prodolzuva.....

http://www.continuitas.com/interdisciplinary.pdf

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