The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

i Map of the Near East (physical features after Burchard Brentjes, Dm

Jahrtausende Armenien).

specifically the Aurignacian period.' 5 Altogether, scholarly
opinion both on the Indo-European homeland and on the time
and the nature of the Indo-European movements is in some
disarray.
A new direction, however, may have been given to Indo-
European studies by a massive study published in 1985. Two
Soviet linguists—T. V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov—have
presented an uneven but plausible case for identifying the land
of the PIE speakers with the area just south of the Caucasus: the
lands roughly corresponding to what was once Armenia, and
to what is now northeastern Turkey, the northwestern tip of
Iran, and the Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and
Georgia (see map, Fig. i). Gamkrelidze and Ivanov outlined
their rather remarkable thesis in two articles in Vestnik drevmj

15. H. Kiihn, "Herkunft und Heimat dcr Indogermanen," Proceed-
    ings of the First International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences
    (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), 237-42.