It is to be noted that these levels are stemmatic, not synchronic. A significant
parallel observed between Homer and the Rigveda should take us back to
Level 3 and (according to the argument presented earlier) to about 2300 ,
the time of the Sixth Dynasty in Egypt; one between Italic and Celtic will
likewise take us to Level 3, but perhaps only to 1300 , contemporary with
Mycenaean Greece or early Vedic India. An agreement between Celtic and
Iranian will take us back to Level 2, sometime in the first half of the third
millennium. To get back to the deepest level, to PIE, we shall require a com-
parison involving Anatolian.
An archaeologist is interested not only in the deepest layer of his site but
in all the others too. ‘Indo-European’ in the title of my book is a shorthand
term. I am not concerned only to reach the PIE stratum, throwing aside
whatever does not fulfil the criteria for reaching it. Levels 2 and 3 are just as
interesting, indeed more so, as the finds are more abundant, varied, and
coherent. In practice it will not be very often that we can reach Level 1: it
requires the PIE material to have survived on both sides of the stemma for
two thousand years or more from the time of the Anatolian secession to
the time of our earliest direct evidence, and much of the Indo-European
heritage was lost on the Anatolian side under the influence of alien cultures.
Most of the time, therefore, the evidence will take us no further than Level 2
or 3. It would be very tiresome if I were to point this out explicitly on every
occasion, so I ask the reader to note it and not to impute my economy to
negligence.
Sometimes I am aware, or the reader may discover ahead of me, that
certain things which I attribute to Indo-European (PIE or MIE) are also to be
found in Semitic or other non-Indo-European cultures. That does not lessen
the value of the results, as my object is to identify whatever is Indo-European,
not just what is distinctively or exclusively Indo-European. As another
researcher in the field has written, ‘since the aim of the present work lies
solely in the reconstruction of a culture and not in its evaluation in com-
parison with other cultures, the question whether individual features of Indo-
European culture can or cannot also be found among non-Indo-European
20 Introduction