Conclusions
However obscure, the linguistic relationships discussed above lead to the con clusion
that shortly before 1600 BCthe most valuable parts of Greece and the Carpathian
basin were taken over by military forces that came from two widely separated
regions in the east. Although in both regions an Indo-European language must
have been spoken, it would not have been the same Indo-European language. Greek
and Phrygian evolved from an Indo-European subgroup that includes Armenian
and that apparently had Indo-Iranian roots. The language that was brought to the
Carpathian basin, and that seems to have evolved into Keltic, Italic and Germanic,
did not belong to that subgroup. The Wellenbanddecoration and the Scheiben -
knebelbrought to the Carpathian basin suggest that the expedition that took over
the best parts of the basin originated in the steppe, probably between the Don
and the Volga. The expedition that took over the Troad and the most desirable
coasts of Greece is more likely to have come from southern Caucasia.
Because the new rulers in Greece seem initially to have exchanged goods and
styles with the new rulers in the Carpathian basin, we must suppose that at that
time at least a few people knew both of the Indo-European languages in question.
Both of those languages must soon have changed significantly, however, because
both in Greece and in the Carpathian basin the military class must have been vastly
outnumbered by the indigenous population. By 1400 BCthe two ruling groups
were going very separate ways. Those in Greece had come into the fringe of the
civilized world, where the Cretan palaces provided a model of political
organization, of literacy, and of extensive trade with the Near East. In contrast,
the military class in the Carpathian basin controlled a land rich in natural resources
but far away from palaces or states of any kind. As a result, while a Mycenaean
civilization formed and flourished, apparently including even a Great Kingdom,
nothing comparable would appear in the Carpathian basin for the next millennium
and a half.^55
The Greek terminology for the parts of a wheeled vehicle, along with the absence
of earlier evidence for wheeled vehicles in Greece, makes it quite certain that the
military takeover ca. 1600 BCbrought to Greece an Indo-European language that
in its new setting would become Greek. Because military events of the same kind
and at the same time seem to have happened in the Carpathian basin we can
propose—here the argument depends on parallels with Greece—that an Indo-
European language also came to the basin at that time. A hundred years later
chariots seem to have come from the Hungarian plain to northern Italy, and to
have brought with them the vehicular terms that would eventually make their
appearance in the Latin language. At about the same time a military force from
the Carpathians arrived in southern Scandinavia, possibly leading to the evolution
there of the Germanic subgroup of Indo-European. If that is what happened, we
would be left with the probability that Keltic evolved in situfrom the language
brought to the Carpathian basin ca. 1600 BC. The linguistic possibilities and
impossibilities are far beyond my ability to see, and I must hope that an Indo-
Europeanist will explore them. What is fairly clear is that in the middle centuries
The question of origins 229