with the vast uninhabitable desert region of eastern Iran, they divided right
and left: one group headed west between Mt Elbruz and the sea and eventu-
ally made its fortune in Mitanni, while the main body proceeded east through
Afghanistan and reached the Punjab before the middle of the millennium.
An Iranian migration followed some centuries later, again moving south
and dividing at the desert. The ones who turned right camped in the Zagros
mountains and eventually expanded further south to become the Medes and
Persians, peoples first mentioned in Assyrian records in the ninth and eighth
centuries. The ones who turned left became the East Iranians of Bactria and
Sogdiana. Other Iranians stayed in the north and roamed widely across the
steppes, to appear in the mid-first millennium as Scythians and Sarmatians.^27
If Indo-Iranian already had a distinct identity in central Asia in the last
quarter of the third millennium, and mello-Greeks were entering Greece
at the same period, we must clearly go back at least to the middle of the
millennium for the postulated Graeco-Aryan linguistic unity or community.
This was presumably situated in the east Balkan and Pontic regions.
We are beginning to get a sense of overall chronology, or at least a set of
termini ante quos: divergence of Anatolian from the rest of Indo-European by
2900 at latest, perhaps some centuries earlier; emergence of a distinct eastern
dialect (Graeco-Aryan) by 2500; individuation of Greek, Indo-Iranian, and
no doubt other languages in the group by 2300; differentiation of Indic and
Iranian by 1600.
It is more difficult to reconstruct developments in other parts of the Indo-
European world. Historical evidence for the northern and western peoples ––
Balts and Slavs, Germans, Celts, Italics, and the rest –– becomes available
much later than it does for the Anatolians, Indics, and Greeks. By the seventh
century we can see that a clear differentiation of Italic languages
has occurred; a common Italic must surely be put back into the second
millennium.^28 We may assume that at least a proto-Celtic and a proto-
Germanic also existed by the same date. But this is more than a millennium
after the epoch when MIE began to break up. To bridge the gap we are
reduced to poring over the archaeological record, trying to identify pre-
historic cultures that might have evolved by continuous development into
what we know to have been a Celtic culture, an Italic one, and so on.
(^27) On Indo-Iranian migrations cf. R. Heine-Geldern, Man 56 (1956), 136–40; P. Bosch-
Gimpera, JIES 1 (1973), 513–17; T. Burrow, JRAS 1973, 123–40; D. W. Anthony, JIES 19 (1991),
203; EIEC 308–11; A. Hintze in Meid (1998), 139–53. On the Iranianness of the Scythians cf.
Kretschmer (1896), 214 f.; Sergent (1995), 429.
(^28) Cf. H. Rix in Alfred Bammesberger and Theo Vennemann (edd.), Languages in Prehistoric
Europe (Heidelberg 2003), 147–72.
10 Introduction