between Indo-Iranian and Greek are as strong as those between Armenian and
Greek.^42 Because the Indo-Iranian, Greek and Armenian languages have a genetic
relationship, and because Indo-Iranian was fully fledged by ca. 1500 BC, we must
suppose that the roots of Greek and Armenian go back to a much earlier stage of
Indo-Iranian.
Relics of the wider subgroup have been found in poetic language. Calvert
Watkins found “sharp-winged eagle” in similes in Homeric Greek and Vedic
Sanskrit, and also in one of the few scraps of Armenian oral poetry that survived
long enough to be quoted in writing.^43 Most famously, as Indo-Europeanists have
known since Adalbert Kuhn pointed it out in 1853, the formula “imperishable fame”
was inherited both by Homeric Greek (κλέος ἄφθιτον) and by Vedic Sanskrit
(śrávas... ákṣitam).^44 The formula was especially meaningful for a warrior who
died young, and at Iliad9.413 Achilles recalls how Thetis once told him that he
would need to choose between a long life and imperishable fame. According to
Watkins, that choice is “perhaps thecentral Indo-European theme.”^45 Because
the people who brought the proto-Greek language into Greece also brought
with them the idea of “imperishable fame,” we must here observe once again that
militarism—or a warrior tradition—seems to have come to the Greek mainland
along with what was to become the Greek language. That this could have happened
in the third millennium BC, many centuries before the first weapons of war made
an appearance in Greece, is difficult to imagine.
Still another language that once belonged to the subgroup in question is
Phrygian, which died out more than 1500 years ago (no Phyrgian version of the
Bible was ever attempted) and is known only from several hundred inscriptions,
most of them funerary and very short. As summarized by Shane Hawkins in
his review of the Iron Age languages of Asia Minor, “Phrygianis an Indo-Euro -
pean language and shares a few distinguishing features with Greek, Armenian and
Indo-Iranian. It is not well understood, but several elements of the grammar have
been worked out.”^46 The kinship of Phrygian and Armenian was noticed by the
Classical Greeks. Eudoxos of Knidos (ca. 370 BC) wrote in his Ges periodosthat
the Phrygian and Armenian languages had much in common.^47 Although Classical
Greeks did not notice Phrygian’s close kinship to their own language, it has not
escaped the notice of philologists despite the narrow range of the Phrygian
language available for study.^48 Phrygian’s relationship to Greek can best be
explained, I believe, as a result of the divergence of a single language on the two
sides of the Aegean, leading to Greek on the European side and to Phrygian in
the Troad.
Where did people speak a language that was descended from an early stage of
Indo-Iranian and that was ancestral to Greek, Armenian and Phrygian? Because
in the second quarter of the second millennium BCpeople who spoke Indo-Iranian
evidently lived not far from Hurrian speakers, and because cuneiform texts locate
Hurrian speakers in and around Mittani (probably extending to some communities
north of the Bitlis-Zagros mountains) a plausible locale for the wider subgroup
would be southern Caucasia. There are good arguments in favor of locating the
Indo-Iranian homeland in the Andronovo, the Sintashta-Petrovka, or the BMAC
226 The question of origins