The Coming of the Greeks
level." 20 The same seems to be true for the most recently pro-
posed homeland in Armenia. In the steppes that run along the
Kura and the Aras (Araxes) rivers, and around Lakes Sevan,
Urmia, and Van, a homogeneous chalcolithic culture from the
third millennium has recently come to light. 21 The alternative
possibility—that *ayos denoted bronze—would place the
splintering of the Proto-Indo-European community in the sec-
ond millennium, since bronze did not come into common use
in any of the putative Urheimat locations until ca. 2000 B.C.
The view that the Proto-Indo-European community broke
up no later than ca. 2500 B.C. depends in part on some ven-
erable assumptions about the rate and mechanics of linguistic
change. Observing that ca. 1000 B.C. Sanskrit and Greek (as
attested in the Vedas and in the Homeric epics) had diverged
quite far from each other, nineteenth-century scholars assumed
that the dispersal of the Indo-European race must have oc-
curred a very long time before 1000 B.C. It was supposed that
each Greek dialect represented one temporal stage in the evo-
lution of the Greek language; since several centuries must have
been required for each stage, the earliest Greek dialect (Arca-
dian, Aeolic, "Achaean," and Ionic were all possibilities) could
- R. A. Grassland, CAM i, 2: 828.
- Archaeological work in this area has barely begun, but what is
known suggests a chalcolithic culture lasting at least until the end of the
third millennium and perhaps well into the second. James Mellaart notes
little more than the obscurity of the area in the third millennium (CAH i,
2: 367—69; on page 690 of the same volume, Mellaart indicates that even
less is known of eastern Anatolia in the first half of the second millennium).
After Mellaart's chapters went to press (his bibliographies include nothing
written after 1962), a survey of the relevant material was presented by
T. N. Chubinishvili, Ancient Culture of the Twin Rivers Kura and Araxes (Tbi-
lisi: Sabchota sakartvelo, 1965; in Georgian, with Russian summary). More
accessible for English-speaking scholars is S. Piggott's excellent but very
brief summary of this material in "The Earliest Wheeled Vehicles and the
Caucasian Evidence," PPS 34 (1968): 2y4ff. For a fuller survey, see C. Bur-
ney and D. M. Lang, The Peoples of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 14-85.
36
