peoples is entirely outside our concern’.^50 Nor is the reconstructive method
invalidated by objections on the lines ‘the parallel motifs that you note in
this and that source need not imply a common Indo-European prototype,
because they occur all over the world’. If a motif is indeed universal, all the
more likely that it was also Indo-European.
There are of course standards to be applied. The parallels used must be
specific and detailed enough to indicate a historical connection; and we have
to discount those where the historical connection looks likely to be horizontal
rather than the result of common descent from primeval times. The Indo-
Europeans did not simply divide and divide into more and more separate
peoples who proceeded to develop in isolation from one another. Most
of them were in communication with neighbouring peoples over long
periods, and with different ones at different times. In some cases parts of their
populations undertook long migrations that brought them among quite new
neighbours. Wherever peoples were together, it was possible for elements of
language and culture to cross the frontiers by diffusion. In such cases philolo-
gists speak of a linguistic area or Sprachbund, and they describe a change
(such as the satem shift) that affects contiguous rather than cognate languages
as an ‘areal’ phenomenon.^51 They are usually able, on phonological or
morphological grounds, to identify elements that a language has acquired by
horizontal transmission and not by inheritance, for example Iranian loan-
words in Armenian or Celtic ones in German. It is not so easy in the case of
myths and motifs, unless they are tied to specific names.
According to our stemma, significant parallels between Homer and the
Rigveda ought to take us back to the time of the Graeco-Aryan language or
Sprachbund. The premise is that all contact between mello-Greeks and mello-
Aryans was severed by about 2300 . However, the archaeologist János
Makkay has marshalled a series of plausible arguments for the thesis that a
band of Iranian-speaking invaders from the steppes occupied Mycenae itself
at the beginning of the Late Helladic period, around 1600.^52 This would have
(^50) Campanile (1990b), 11. See also Müller (1897), 185–9.
(^51) Cf. Watkins (1995), 218 f.
(^52) J. Makkay, The Early Mycenaean Rulers and the Contemporary Early Iranians of the
Northeast (Budapest 2000). This might account for the presence in the Homeric language of
Iranian loan-words such as τξον‘bow’ (this already in Linear B) and γωρυτ‘bowcase’. So
Durante (1976), 30: ‘certo è che un ethnos iranico ha intrattenuto rapporti con la grecità nella
fase micenea, se non ancor prima. Testimonia in tal senso la voce τξον... La perfetta
corrispondenza con pers. taxsˇ“arco”, di cui si ha un antecedente nell’antroponimo scitico
Τξαρι, rivela che si tratta di un iranismo.’ Cf. ibid. 31, 36, on the name of the Dana(w)oi
and its possible relationship to Avestan da ̄nav-‘river’, Vedic da ̄ ́nav-‘dripping water’, and the
river-names Danube, Don, Dnestr, etc. According to myth (‘Hes.’ fr. *128), it was the Danaai
who made Argos well-watered. Danae and her son Perseus recall the names of Iranian tribes, the
Turanian Da ̄navas (Yt. 5. 72–4, 13. 37 f.) and the Persians.
Introduction 21