Re: Indo-European family tree (was Re: Celtic and Afro-Asiatic?)

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 19:22:50 -0500, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> wrote:

>Concerning Andreas' question about the two kinds of spread model:
>the motivations for two spreads is primarily archaeological in nature.
>We know the Steppe-peoples did spread into the Balkans and other parts
>of Europe around the time suggested as by the one-invasion model of
>Mallory.  It is also known that farming communities spread out of
>Anatolia much earlier.  The question is what these two waves spoke.
>In this sense, it would make sense if as Andreas says the demic
>wave of farmers formed what later became the centum languages,
>while the satem-languages resulted from the Steppe invasions. This
>would imply that the earlier centum languages of the Balkans had been
>wiped out by the satem-speaking invaders from the steppes.
It seems most likely to me that the Steppe-peoples spoke Indo-European and
the farming communities from Anatolia spoke something else.

>Anyways, as an addendum, I would like to add that just yesterday I was at
>a party at the Oriental Institute for new students (not me), and was
>talking to a guy over there who works on the Chicago Hittite Dictionary,
>as well as Theo van den Hout, the primary Hittitologist at the OI.  When
>asked, they seemed to think that it was entirely unclear what population
>was autochthonous in the most ancient times in Anatolia.  They said,
>though, that the Hittites called themselves based on the Hattians whom
>they considered to be autochthonous, much as modern people in Britain call
>themselves Britons, although they mostly now speak a language not
>(originally) native to Britain.  And it was also noted that the Kaskians,
>the northern barbarians who inhabited the area north of the Halys River,
>have names that are almost entirely Hattic in origin, and that the
>Hittites also have few names that are ultimately Hittite in origin.  These
>facts suggest that the Hittites indeed were perhaps not autochthonous to
>the central Anatolian plateau, but whether they came from somewhere else
>in Anatolia, or somewhere outside Anatolia, is completely unknown.
I thought it was rather common knowledge that the Hittites came to central
Anatolia from the outside (probably to the west).

What's also interesting to me is that the kingdom of Mitanni, in the
northern Middle East, had rulers who were apparently of Indo-Iranian
origin.  The question is, what direction did they come from -- the east or
the west?

- Rob

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