CONCLUSIONThe history of the ancient world in the second millennium B.C.
is a patchwork of light and darkness. For a few major topics we
have reasonable documentation, but on other topics of equal
importance we have virtually no evidence at all. Although "the
coming of the Indo-Europeans" falls (not coincidentally) in one
of the darkest squares, this historic episode is slightly illumi-
nated by adjacent topics. Since the episode itself will perhaps
always remain undocumented, it must be reconstructed so as
to accommodate what few and slender clues we have, and that
is what I have tried to do in this essay.
Some dubious assumptions about the PIE speakers are inter-
locked and of long standing. One of these assumptions is that
when poised on the threshold of history, the PIE speakers were
a numerous people, making up a fair portion of the world's
population. For such a multitude, a spacious home must be
imagined, and a second assumption is that the Indo-European
homeland was a vast territory, perhaps covering much of east-
ern Europe or the Eurasian steppe. From this homeland, the
Indo-Europeans are supposed to have set out, in prehistoric
times, in a series of massive Volkerwanderungen; eventually,
they came to rest in the lands in which during historical times
the Indo-European languages were spoken. The beginnings of
these mass migrations are placed between ca. 4500 and ca.
2000 B.C., and the reasons for the migrations are seldom
stated.
An alternative picture is more likely. At the end of the third
millennium, the PiE-speaking community was no larger than
the Hurrian, the Sumerian, the Hattic, or the Proto-Anatolian