The Coming of the Greekscan not be distilled from myths, and that the historian can
penetrate into the past only so far as the past was literate. For
Grote, then, where the Greeks came from, and who the Greeks
were, were unanswerable questions, subjects for speculation
but not for inquiry.
It was not long before the question was back in the histori-
ans' court. This came about because philologists had discov-
ered the Indo-European language family. In 1786 Sir William
Jones had observed that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the Celtic
and Germanic languages had so many similarities that they
must have had a common linguistic ancestor. This insight in-
spired a few scattered efforts to reconstruct the relationship of
the several languages (the term "Indo-European" was appar-
ently first used in 1813), but it was not until Franz Bopp pub-
lished his Vergleichende Grammatik in 1833 that Indo-European
philology was put on a firm footing. In addition to analyzing
the languages already mentioned, Bopp showed that Avestan,
Armenian, and the Slavic languages were also part of the Indo-
European family. The philologists' inevitable conclusion was
that there had once existed an "original" Indo-European lan-
guage, from which the historical languages of Europe, Persia,
and India were derived, and therefore also an "original" Indo-
European people.'
There were some clues indicating where the Proto-Indo-Eu-
ropean language had been spoken: the Indo-European lan-
guages shared words for certain flora and fauna (bears and beech
trees are well-known examples). By plotting on a map the nat-
ural environment of these diagnostic flora and fauna, philolo-
gists established that the Indo-European homeland was a fairly
primitive place in the temperate zone. An early supposition,
encouraged by the equation of Iran with Aryans and by the
belief that Sanskrit was the first language to have separated
I. For a brief but excellent description of the several languages and
of their relationship to Proto-Indo-European, see P. Baldi, An Introduction to
the Indo-European Languages (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press,
1983).