Origins of the Question
itself from its Proto-Indo-European parent, was that the Indo-
European homeland was in south-central Asia, between the
Caspian and the Himalayas. By the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, however, a rival school of thought favored northern Eu-
rope as the Indo-European Urheimat. The principal support for
the rival theory seems to have been the belief that there once
was an "original Indo-European race" and that the people of
this race were tall and white-skinned. Such a race, it was gen-
erally assumed, must have been indigenous to northeastern Eu-
rope. 2
The question—"Where did the Greeks come from?"—was
obviously much affected by the philologists' discoveries. Quite
clearly, whether they came from central Asia or from northern
Europe, they came from far away. They had not been aborigi-
nal inhabitants of the Greek mainland after all. Further philo-
logical inquiry showed that many of the place names in the
Aegean had been given by a non-Greek people, a people whom
the Greeks must have conquered or driven out. Thus in the
second half of the nineteenth century, historians were obliged
to say much more about the origins of the Greeks than George
Grote had said.
It is an unfortunate coincidence that studies of the Indo-
European language community flourished at a time when na-
tionalism, and a tendency to see history in racial terms, was on
the rise in Europe. There was no blinking the fact, in the nine-
- J. P. Mallory, "A Short History of the Indo-European Problem,"
JIES i (1973): 21—65, nas traced the evolution of opinion on the Indo-Eu-
ropean homeland. A good review of what was then called the "Aryan ques-
tion" was presented by I. Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans (New York: Hum-
boldt Publishing Co., 1890), 1—31. The term "Aryan" as a synonym for
"Indo-European" was popularized by Max Miiller in the 18505, when cen-
tral Asia still seemed the most likely Indo-European cradle ("Aryans," of
course, is what both the Persians and the Rigveda warriors called them-
selves, and it survives in the name "Iran"). Isaac Taylor himself believed
that the "Aryans" were originally a northern European race, of unusual tal-
ents and energy, and that their language was eventually disseminated
among peoples of very different racial stock.
