South and west of the Kızılırmak, however, until late in the Bronze Age people
seem to have spoken one or another of the Anatolian languages. Of these Luwian
was far and away the most widespread, followed by Palaic and finally—and perhaps
only in the large city of Kanesh until the language was exported to Hattusha in
the Late Bronze Age—by “Hittite.” The number of Luwian speakers can only be
guessed, but as one can see by glancing at map B II 13 in the Tübinger Atlas des
Vorderen Orients, archaeologists have located hundreds of Early Bronze Age
settlements in western Turkey, and they are thickest in the triangle between
Konya, Burdur and Eskişehir.
In the Iron Age Luwian, Palaic, Hittite and perhaps other early Anatolian
languages evolved into a variety of regional vernaculars. Thanks to the work of
John Ray, Ignacio-Javier Adiego and other specialists, and to the 1996 discovery
of a Carian-Greek bilingual inscription at Kaunos, it has now become quite clear
that Carian belonged to the Anatolian language family.^38 We must therefore now
say that all the known Iron Age languages of southwest Anatolia—Carian, Lydian,
Lycian, Sidetic and Pisidian—were descended either from Luwian or from a
cognate Anatolian language of the Bronze Age. In fact, until Phrygian and Greek
were imported, in all of western and southern Anatolia no language other than
those belonging to the Anatolian family is attested.^39 That blanket statement
agrees with Onofrio Carruba’s study of the place-names in Anatolia. Carruba found
that southwest of a diagonal drawn from the Sea of Marmara to the Gulf of
Iskenderun none of the attested place-names can be assigned to any language other
than those of the Anatolian language family.^40 Place-names ending in –ss, –nd or
-nth were common southwest of the diagonal, as they were in Crete, Greece and
the southern Balkans. Theories about a migration of Proto-Anatolian or Proto-
Indo-Hittite speakers from southeastern Europe or the Pontic steppe into western
and southern Anatolia would necessarily need to assume an event both catastrophic
and undetectable: although leaving no archaeological trace, the migration would
have completely obliterated whatever languages had earlier been spoken there and
whatever place-names had earlier been in use.
We have, in short, neither linguistic nor archaeological evidence—and no
sound reason to think—that the Anatolian languages of western and southern
Anatolia had ever been superimposed on a non-Anatolian or pre-Anatolian
substrate. For more than 100 years the prehistory of Eurasia has been distorted
by illusions of Vōlkerwanderungeninto Anatolia of Hittite and Luwian nations
or of a mass of Proto-Anatolian speakers. That prehistory must finally be set
straight. The roots of the Anatolian languages in situgo back at least to the
beginning of the Neolithic period, when settled communities were first established.
The Indo-Hittite language family originated in southern and western Anatolia.
The origins of PIE
Although the argument continues to be made that PIE was spoken in southern and
western Anatolia in the eighth or seventh millennium BC,^41 the argument confuses
the Indo-Hittite theory and its terminology. If we agree that the “Hittite” side of
10 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European