archaeological evidence shows clearly enough the militarization of the Carpathian
basin late in the Bz A2 period, and not long thereafter of two other parts of
temperate Europe that were rich in natural resources. Circumstantial evidence
suggests, although it cannot prove, that this militarization represents a takeover
of these areas by intruders from the east. It has often been supposed that chariot
warfare was “borrowed” by one population from another, in somewhat the same
way that styles of pottery or methods of weaving were borrowed. But until it had
become widely familiar chariot warfare could hardly have been borrowed without
also “borrowing” not only the horses but also the men on whom it depended:
grooms, veterinarians, trainers, drivers and archers.
Before plunging into the murk of prehistory, it will be helpful to recall that in
historical times the replacement of one language by another has usually been a
consequence of military domination. Until the early nineteenth century languages
normally survived and evolved within natural topographical boundaries, such as
rivers, mountain ranges, deserts, large bodies of water and other physical features.^7
The remarkable survival of many Basque dialects in the Pyrenees, of various
Nuristani dialects in the Hindu Kush, and of several dozen languages in the
Caucasus is a result of the isolation of the mountain valleys in which they have
been spoken.^8 The displacement of one language by another, in contrast, has
regularly been due to factors other than topography. A hundred years ago it was
supposed that in prehistoric times language displacement was typically the result
of a national migration, but such an explanation has lost its credibility. In historical
times the displacement of one language by another was occasionally the result
of inherent advantages of the triumphant language community. The spread of Ara -
maic in the Fertile Crescent during the first millennium BC, for example, seems
to have been largely a consequence of the language’s utility in trading and of the
alphabetic script in which it was written. And I have argued in Chapter 1 that
Indo-Hittite languages spread across western Anatolia and into southeastern
Europe in the agricultural “wave of advance” proposed by Renfrew, Mesolithic
Europeans learning the language of their Neolithic neighbors and eventually
forgetting their own. The spread of PIE far to the east and far to the west of the
Volga apparently continued this wave of advance, with wagons and pastoralism
instead of agriculture as its motivating force.
More often, the replacement of one language by another was the result of a
military conquest or takeover. Such replacement was never immediate, but came
about gradually because the language of the rulers enjoyed a much higher status
than that of the subjects.^9 From the fifteenth century through the eighteenth the
Russian language spread as the tsars extended their rule from Muscovy to a Russian
empire. Arabic is spoken throughout the Middle East and North Africa because
Arabian armies conquered those lands in the seventh century: by the tenth century
millions of the caliph’s Jewish and Christian subjects had learned to speak Arabic
at least as a second language. The thousand languages spoken in the pre-Columbian
Americas have given way to the languages of four European imperial powers:
Spain, Portugal, England and France. Several hundred indigenous languages of
Australia were likewise replaced by English, as British colonists extended British
Militarism in temperate Europe 133