They enjoyed their biggest advantage at the outset, when PIE bareback riders invaded a Europe entirely without domestic horses.
There was another difference between these later recorded invasions and the earlier unrecorded PIE invasion. The later invaders were no longer Indo-European speakers from the western steppes, but speakers of Turkic and Mongol languages from the eastern steppes. Ironically, horses were what enabled Turkish tribes from central Asia in the Eleventh Century AD to invade the land of the first written Indo-European language, Hittite. The most important innovation of the first Indo-Europeans was thus turned against their descendants. Turks are largely European in their genes, but non-Indo-European (Turkish) in their language. Similarly, an invasion from the east in 896 AD left modern Hungary largely European in its genes but Finno-Ugric in its language. By illustrating how a small invading force of steppe horsemen could impose their language on a European society, Turkey and Hungary provide models of how the rest of Europe came to speak Indo-European.
Eventually, steppe peoples in general, regardless of their language, ceased to win in the face of Western Europe's advancing technology. When the end came, it was swift. In 1241 AD the Mongols achieved the largest steppe empire that ever existed, stretching from Hungary to China. But after about 1500 AD the Indo-European-speaking Russians began to encroach on the steppes from the west. It took only a few more centuries of tsarist imperialism to conquer the steppe horsemen who had terrorized Europe and China for over 5,000 years. Today the steppes are divided between Russia and China, and only Mongolia remains as a vestige of steppe independence.
Much racist nonsense has been written about the supposed superiority of Indo-European peoples themselves. Nazi propaganda invoked a pure Aryan race. In fact, Indo-Europeans have never been unified since the PIE expansion of 5,000 years ago, and even PIE speakers themselves may have been divided among related cultures. Some of the most bitter fighting and vilest deeds of recorded history pitted one Indo-European group against another. The Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs whom the Nazis sought to exterminate conversed in languages as Indo-European as that of their persecutors. Speakers of proto-Indo-European merely happened to be in the right place at the right time to put together a useful package of technology. Through that stroke of luck, theirs was the mother tongue whose daughter languages came to be spoken by half the world today.
Owis Ekwoosque
Gwrreei owis, quesyo wlhnaa ne eest, ekwoons espeket, oinomghegwrrum woghom weghontm, oinomque megam bhorom, oinomque ghmmenm ooku bherontm.
Owis nu ekwomos ewewquet: 'Keeraghnutoi moi ekwoons agontm nerm widntei.
Ekwoos tu ewewquont: 'Kludhi, owei, keer ghe aghnutoi nsmei widntmos: neer, potis, owioom r wlhnaam sebhi gwhermom westrom qurnneuti. Neghi owioom wlhnaa esti.
Tod kekluwoos owis agrom ebhuget.
[The] Sheep and [the] Horses
On [a] hill, [a] sheep that had no wool saw horses, one [of them] pulling [a] heavy wagon, one carrying [a] big load, and one carrying [a] man quickly.
[The] sheep said to [the] horses: 'My heart pains me, seeing [a] man driving horses.
[The] horses said: 'Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see [this]: [a] man, the master, makes
[the] wool of [the] sheep into [a] warm garment for himself. And [the] sheep has no wool.
Having heard this, [the] sheep fled into [the] plain.
In order to provide some sense of how proto-Indo-European (PIE) might have sounded, I have included the fable above, in reconstructed PIE, together with an English translation. The fable was invented over a century ago by the linguist August Schleicher. The revised version given here is based on one published by W.P. Lehmann and L. Zgusta in 1979, which takes account of the deeper understanding of PIE gained since Schleicher's time. This version has been slightly altered from that of Lehmann and Zgusta to make it more 'user-friendly' for non-linguists, with the advice of Jaan Puhvel.
While PIE initially looks strange, many words will prove familiar on scrutiny because of similar English or Latin roots derived from PIE. For instance, owis means 'sheep' (cf. 'ewe', 'ovine'); wlhnaa means 'wool'; ekwoos means 'horses' (cf. 'equestrian', Latin equus) , ghmmenm means 'man' (cf. 'human', Latin hominem); que means 'and', as in Latin; mega means 'big' (cf. 'megabucks'); keer means 'heart' (cf. 'core', 'cardiology'); moi means 'to me'; and widntei and widntmos1 mean 'see' (cf. 'video'). The PIE text lacks definite and indefinite articles ('the' and 'a') and places the verb at the end of the clause or sentence.
While this sample text will show what some linguists think PIE was like, it cannot be taken as an exact sample. Remember: PIE was never written; scholars differ on details of how to reconstruct PIE; and the fable itself is imaginary. 249-
SIXTEEN
IN BLACK AND WHITE
Genocide, often considered a human hallmark confined to rare perverts, actually has many animal precedents and used to be considered socially acceptable or admirable. Whether we will succeed in curbing our modern power to commit it depends on our coming to recognize its frequency in human history, the potential for it in all of us, and the ways in which ordinary people try to rationalize becoming killers.
While the anniversary of any nation's founding is taken as cause for its inhabitants to celebrate, Australians had special cause in 1988, their bicentennial year. Few groups of colonists faced such obstacles as those who landed with the First Fleet at the future site of Sydney in 1788. Australia was still Terra Incognita: the colonists had no idea what to expect or how to survive. They were separated from their mother country by a sea voyage of 15,000 miles, lasting eight months. Two-and-a-half years of starvation would pass until a further supply fleet arrived from England. Many of the settlers were convicts who had already been traumatized by the most brutal aspects of brutal eighteenth-century life. Despite those beginnings, the settlers survived, prospered, filled a continent, built a democracy, and established a distinctive national character. It is no wonder that Australians felt pride as they celebrated their nation's founding.
Nevertheless, one set of protests marred the celebrations. The white settlers were not the first Australians. Instead, Australia had been settled around 50,000 years ago, by the ancestors of people now usually referred to as Australian Aborigines and also known in Australia as blacks. In the course of English settlement, most of those original inhabitants were killed by the settlers or died of other causes, leading some modern descendants of the survivors to stage bicentenary protests instead of celebrations. The celebrations focused implicitly on how Australia became white. I shall begin this chapter by focusing instead on how Australia ceased to be black, and how courageous English settlers came to commit genocide. Lest white Australians take offence, I should make clear that I am not accusing their forefathers of having done something uniquely horrendous. Instead, my reason for discussing the extermination of the Aborigines is precisely because it is not unique: it is a well documented example of a phenomenon whose frequency few people appreciate. While our first association with the word 'genocide' is likely to be the killings in Nazi concentration camps, they did not constitute the largest-scale genocide even of this century. The Tasmanians and hundreds of other peoples were modern targets of successful smaller extermination campaigns. Numerous peoples scattered throughout the world are potential targets in the near future. Yet genocide is such a painful subject that either we would rather not think about it at all, or else we would like to believe that nice people do not commit genocide, only Nazis do. But our refusal to think about it has consequences: we have done little to halt the numerous episodes of genocide since the Second World War, and we are not alert to where it may happen next. Together with our destruction of our own environmental resources, our genocidal tendencies coupled to nuclear weapons now constitute the two most likely means by which the human species may reverse all its progress virtually overnight.