Linguistics and Archaeologyplex, far-reaching and fully supported of this century and the
discussion of them will go on well into the future."'^8 At the
least, the new thesis will need to be taken into consideration
when archaeologists and historians attempt to reconstruct the
movements of PIE speakers into the lands where Indo-European
languages were spoken in historical times. According to
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, the Greeks came to Greece not from
the north but from the east.
On the question of chronology, Indo-European linguistics
has less to offer. In the days of Beloch, Breasted, and Meyer, as
indicated in Chapter One, the dispersal of "the Indo-European
nations" was placed around the middle of the third millen-
nium. In part, a date ca. 2500 B.C. was based on the belief
that in its material culture the Indo-European community had
not risen above a "Copper Age" level: the initial assumption
was that Proto-Indo-European ayos was the word for copper,
and that no other metal was known to the original Indo-Euro-
peans. That assumption, however, has long since been replaced
by the more cautious identification of Proto-Indo-European
ayos with either copper or bronze. '^9 In general, the "metal:> ·
argument no longer necessarily points to a very early date for
the dispersal of the PIE speakers. Even if one interprets *ayos
as "copper," one can date the dispersal to the end of the third
millennium. For it now appears, as Crossland has observed,
that even at the end of the third millennium all of the various
areas that have traditionally been proposed as the Indo-Euro-
pean homeland were "at a neolithic or chalcolithic cultural
r8. From J. Greppin's review of the two-volume work, in TLS
(March 14, 1986, p. 278).
- H. Hirt, Die lndogermanen. lhre Verbreitung, ihre Urheimat und
ihre Kultur (Strasburg: Tri.ibner, 1905), r: 358-59, conceded that the word
could have stood for either copper or bronze, but he proposed that because
copper was in use earlier than bronze, the Proto-Indo-Europeans' *ayos
probably denoted copper. On the ambiguity of the word, see the entry aes
in A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de Ia langue Ia tine
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1939).
35