closely related, and to show some affinities with Baltic.^14 Links have also been
seen between Thracian and the Anatolian languages Lydian and Luwian.^15
For the most part the pattern of affinities and distances between the
various Indo-European languages and language groups corresponds fairly
well to the geographical relationships of their earliest recorded speakers. The
striking exception is Tocharian, a language, or rather two kindred languages,
spoken in the second half of the first millennium around the Tarim basin
in Chinese Turkestan. It shows no close connections with the languages of the
east.
Chronological parametersIn Anatolia, from about 1650 , we find the earliest attested Indo-
European language, Hittite, together with two related languages, Luwian and
Palaic. The personal names attested in Assyrian traders’ records from Kültepe
(the ancient Kanesh, 20 km. north-east of Kayseri) show that the dominant
population of that area was already Hittite at the beginning of the second
millennium, and that Hittite already had a distinct profile separating it
from Luwian. Clearly these Indo-European peoples were well established in
Anatolia before 2000 . But they were hardly autochthonous, for there
were also many non-Indo-European speakers in the land. The native language
of the central region was Hattic, which is thought to have Caucasian affinities.
Further east there was a solid front of non-Indo-European languages,
Hurrian and Semitic. It was in the west and south of Anatolia that the lan-
guages of the Indo-European group prevailed. This geographical distribution
points strongly to the Indo-European speakers’ having entered the country
not from the east via the Caucasus, but from the west, from the Balkans, as the
Phrygians and Galatians did in later times.^16
We shall see shortly that Graeco-Aryan must already have been differenti-
ated from MIE by 2500 . We have to allow several centuries for the
development of MIE after its split from proto-Anatolian and before its
further division. The secession of proto-Anatolian, then, must be put back
at least to the early third millennium, whether or not it was synchronous
(^14) Kretschmer (1896), 213 f.; I. Duridanov, Thrakisch-dakische Studien (Sofia 1969), 99 f.;
M.-M. Ra ̆dulescu, JIES 12 (1984), 82–5 and 22 (1994), 334–40. Cf. also E. C. Polomé in
The Cambridge Ancient History, iii(1). 866–88; Gamkrelidze–Ivanov (1995), 805 f. (who claim
Albanian affinities with Graeco-Aryan); Sergent (1995), 94–9.
(^15) H. Birnbaum, JIES 2 (1974), 373.
(^16) G. Steiner, JIES 18 (1990), 185–214; Sergent (1995), 409. For the Kültepe tablets see
Annelies Kammenhuber, Die Arier im Vorderen Orient (Heidelberg 1968), 27–9; Gamkrelidze–
Ivanov (1995), 757–9.
Introduction 7