The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

Bactria. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, as we

have also seen, the racial argument had promoted more north-

erly and westerly lands for the location of the Indo-European

cradle. Early enthusiasts for an Indo-European race placed it in

the Pripet Marshes of eastern Poland and western Russia,' but

that region was little recommended by its later history and

accomplishments. More popular was Paul Kretschmer's iden-

tification of the cradle with Thuringia, or central Germany,

and the identification of the original Indo-Europeans with an

archaeological population known as the Schnurkeramik people.

Others placed the Indo-European homeland in Scandinavia, or

along the Baltic, or the North Sea.

This "northern European" hypothesis was slightly under-

mined by V. Gordon Childe's The Aryans. 2 Childe surveyed

much of Eurasia in search of the most probable Indo-European

cradle and concluded with a non liquet: archaeological and phil-

ological considerations, he thought, both pointed to southern

Russia (specifically, to the steppes that run from above the

Black Sea to the Lower Volga and the Caspian), but a homeland

in Scandinavia could not be ruled out. Perhaps a more damag-

ing blow to the "northern European" hypothesis was struck,

ironically, by a German scholar during the heyday of Nazi ra-

cial doctrines. In the middle of the 19305, Gertrud Hermes

published studies on the history of the "tamed" horse, 3 and

eventually these studies (which we shall look at in some detail

1. The racial or the "anthropological" argument was pioneered by
   Th. Poesche, Die Arier: Bin Beitrag zur historischen Anthropolologie (Jena:
   H. Costenoble, 1878). PoeschewasconvincedthattheoriginalIndo-Europeans
   were an exceptionally white race, and he surveyed the world to find a place
   where albinism, or depigmentation, is pronounced. This place he found in
   the Pripet Marshes, or the Rokitno swamp, between the Pripet, the Dnie-
   per, and the Beresina rivers.


2. V. G. Childe, The Aryans (New York: Knopf, 1926).


3. G. Hermes, "Das gezahmte Pferd im neolithischen und
   fruhbronzezeitlichen Europa?" Anthrofos 30 (1935): 803—23; "Das ge-
   zahmte Pferd im alten Orient," Anthropos 31 (1936): 364-94, and "Der
   Zug des gezahmten Pferdes durch Europa," Anthropos 32 (1937): 105-46.

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