The Coming of the Greeks
looked like a Herrenvolk, lording it over Semites, Hurrians, and
the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe. Another school
of thought was not averse to seeing the chariot as one of several
means by which the PIE speakers prevailed, but was not in-
clined to believe that mastery of chariot warfare had motivated
them to embark on their expeditions. Such an explanation
seemed too simplistic, and perhaps too romantic. Better were
explanations that spoke of economic developments and imbal-
ances, of demographic pressures, or of factors too abstract to be
disproven. 20
It is time to put the PIE speakers back in their chariots. In
favor of such a revision is the thesis, newly constructed by
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, that the Proto-Indo-European lan-
guage was "initially" spoken south of the Caucasus, somewhere
in the area now covered by northeastern Turkey, the north-
western tip of Iran, and the Soviet republics of Azerbaijan,
Georgia, and Armenia. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov based their
argument primarily on linguistic evidence and analyses, and
on the relationship of the Indo-European to the Semitic and
the Caucasian language families. If we disregard their assump-
tions (and their too hastily drawn conclusions) about the chro-
nology and nature of "the Indo-European invasions," we are
left with an eminently usable thesis about the location of the
- D'iakonov, "On the Original Home of the Speakers of Indo-Eu-
ropean," 149-51, argues that a Proto-Indo-European homeland in the
northern Balkans is more likely than a homeland in Armenia because the
northern Balkans are more fertile than Armenia. The argument begins with
the statement that the PIE speakers would never have migrated had they not
been forced to do so by external circumstances. Overpopulation, D'iakonov
contends, must have been the principal factor. And overpopulation "can be
explained only by an unusual percentage of children's survival, and conse-
quently, by the growth of food production, especially such nutritious foods
as meat, dairy products, vegetables, wheat, and so on" (p. 149). The Ar-
menian plateau and Transcaucasia, however, could not have produced great
quantities of these foods. "The plateau itself consisted of isolated, poorly
connected mountainous valleys: the slopes were completely covered with
forests unfit for cattle pasture" (p. 151).
148
