tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post3484538769175977423..comments2024-03-26T14:19:33.332-07:00Comments on Bench Grass: The Bronze Age Collapse, V: The Beloved of the God, Full of Life, Binds All Who Are LooseErik Lundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-64333648827665025682014-05-30T11:45:22.574-07:002014-05-30T11:45:22.574-07:00On the other hand, the fall of the Hittite state w...On the other hand, the fall of the Hittite state was not the fall of Anatolian states. Later heiroglyphic Luwian texts are "uttered by states," and ooh, ooh, ass-pull! might be stabilised by their official status. <br /><br />There are some difficulties in reconstructing Hittite history from the Bogazkoy/Hattusas archives, since tablet cuneiform libraries are continually recopied. The ones we have are the ones entombed by the collapse of the mud brick building housing them some time after the supposed caesura of 1177. They might be reproductions of earlier ones, but they might not be.<br /><br />But, if we take them as such, then we know that Mursili, "Man of Kussara," led an expedition down to sack Babylon in 1550BC per the short chronology (1595BC by the Middle). That stabilises our time reference for the emergence of a Hittite state. Much more speculatively, it stabilises its ideological references. At this point there are no cuneiform texts outside of Iraq, excepting the Kultepe letters found in the Assyrian trading colony at ancient Kanesh. The appearance of cuneiform archives outside of Iraq is a phenomena of the Late Bronze Age. If you want to be really, wildly romantic about it, you can visualise Mursili driving Babylonian scribes before him in his chariots back to Anatolia. <br /><br />That is, there exists already in 1550 (1595) a Hittite-speaking state and cult which has made whatever performative accommodations needs to be made with the already-existing goddess-oriented state cult. Whatever Hittite priests chant before their idols, it does not have to take account of the transformative effects of rendering Hittite into Akkadian cuneiform. <br /><br />To the west, though, things are very different. State-ordered society is emergent in the Mykenean cultural space (I want to be vague here because I suspect that the heart of the Mycenean language is to be found at Miletos on the Anatolian shore, not in the Argolid) simultaneously with the LBA problem of rendering the Mycenean state legible to itself with Akkadian cuneiform. In that sense, I am proposing Mycenean Greek as your non-Anatolian-branch-IE language along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia. It even has the advantage of being attested! (The only problem is an instinctive preference for quarantining Greek within the territory of the modern Greek state, which to my mind is explicable in terms of Nineteenth Century international affairs.) <br /><br />The suggestion that Celtic and German innovated the feminine gender separately I get from Jay Jasonoff's <i>Hittite and the Indo-European Verb</i>. Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-41174349413272981262014-05-29T14:33:11.278-07:002014-05-29T14:33:11.278-07:00Anatolian didn't disappear with the fall of th...Anatolian didn't disappear with the fall of the Hittite state; it lingered on well into the Classical era. If the feminine gender spread outwards from both sides of Anatolia at once, as far afield as Ireland and India, why didn't it spread to Lycian or Lydian, much closer by? And how did it get between Greece and Mitanni without influencing the languages in between? I suppose you could postulate some kind of early non-Anatolian-branch-IE dialect continuum along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, since that area's languages are conveniently unattested...<br /><br />The idea of an ideological origin for the feminine gender has a certain left-field appeal, but there's a simpler source right nearby: Afroasiatic. A masculine vs. feminine gender system is already attested for Akkadian and Egyptian right from the start, and is practically universal within Afroasiatic. On usual assumptions, this similarity is rather difficult to explain – but if you're assuming a late spread of IE from Anatolia, then contact with Semitic becomes the obvious explanation. Indeed, you might as well say they got it from those Assyrian traders, if it weren't for the problem of its presence in Mycenean Greek.<br /><br />Where are you getting that Celtic and Germanic innovated the feminine separately? Melchert is saying the opposite.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-46898497641575857712014-05-26T12:25:16.547-07:002014-05-26T12:25:16.547-07:00Oops. And it looks like I googled up the same arti...Oops. And it looks like I googled up the same article that Lameen did while trying to formulate my response. Teach me to respond before reading!Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-37887412820669551842014-05-26T12:23:50.692-07:002014-05-26T12:23:50.692-07:00It's probably an overstatement to say that we ...It's probably an overstatement to say that we have Indo-Iranian through Mittanni. What we have is deity names and the words for numbers. Deity names matter if you're buying what Dumezil has to sell. Otherwise, we have to consider other avenues of transmission. Clay tablets, lost Elamite monumental inscriptions, whatever. <br /><br />Second, Kikkuli's treatise on horse training gives phonetics for words which he feels he has to explain to Hittite readers. This need only reflect the fact that Hittite does not give us phonetics for numbers, etc. But...<br /><br />What seems allowable is that, in close proximity with the Anatolian languages are two other identifiable Indo-European languages: Mykenean Greek and some kind of Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan) language. Two hypotheses: a typical language cline; or spectacularly different languages inserted adjacent to each other by complicated prehistories of migration. <br /><br />The first theory strikes me as the more economical of speculation but hangs on the actual extent of difference between Anatolian and other Indo-European languages.<br /><br />Traditionally, our defence against the "Anatolian origins" hypothesis is the claim that hey are so different from other IE languages that they must be "first to split."<br /><br />The innovations are: (1) absence of a feminine gender. Anatolian makes do with an animate/inanimate distinction. <br />(2) Weird grammar in general.<br />Since the 1990s, historical linguists have swung around to thinking that some of this (feminine gender) is due to IE languages have undergone some shared innovation in which Hittite (Anatolian) has not taken part, while other bits are due to not understanding Anatolian well enough. <br /><br />So. First to split, or parent tongue? Here's a big ass PDF I found.<br />http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/The%20Position%20of%20AnatolianRevised3.pdf <br /><br />It comes around to the "first to split" theory but seems to be fighting not to admit a "parent language" model. <br /><br />Now I want to focus on that one significant "common innovation" (23, 50). Somehow, numerous different Indo-European languages, originally absent the feminine, acquired it; and quite recently, too, since Celtic and Germanic, for example, innovated separately. <br /><br />This strikes me as an ideological event, and one that is probably a state-ordering conscious change in the public language. I'm going to go with the idea of a feminine city god: Roma/Athena, what with Munn and now Connelly. Cities need goddesses, languages need ways of denoting that which pertains to the goddess.<br /><br />Now coming back to Lameen's gentle correction, here's a revised chronology:<br /><br />1800BC (but see below): Middle Bronze Age: Assyrian state traders are meeting at least some speakers of Indo-European across the Euphrates passes. Claim: a cline: a belt across Anatolia containing all already-existing distinctions within Indo-European as essentially preliterate dialects. Indo-Iranians are in place in the east to influence the Mittanni, Greeks are around Miletus in the west to influence the peninsula across the sea.<br /><br />1700/1550BC depending on your preferred chronology: The curtain falls on the Middle Bronze Age, perhaps because chariot armies destabilise power relations. <br /><br />c. 1300BC: Late Bronze Age. The Hittites are now players, and so are the Mykenean Greeks, and so are the Mittanni's Indo-Iranian-Aryan buddies. <br />c. 1100BC: state order collapses again. <br />900--600BC Assyrians increasingly hire cavalry instead of chariotry, mostly in Anatolia and Iran. <br /><br />c. 9-700BC A wave of linguistic innovation spreads from one community speaking Indo-European to the other. (Dating from putative era of Celtic-Germanic split). From now on, we shall have to remember whether it is "table" or "hat" that takes la/le der/die.<br /><br /> <br /> Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-34378065544456435022014-05-26T08:27:35.493-07:002014-05-26T08:27:35.493-07:00On the relationship between history and types of l...On the relationship between history and types of language change, this paper might be interesting - not necessarily the last word on the subject, but defensible: http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/Papers/SocLing.pdf "Divergence results from social fission and communicative isolation; it is found in all society types, though less so with states. Interference is a result of the three main loci of societal contact: marriage, trade and political integration. Extralinguistic exogamy can occasionally lead to significant borrowing. Trade involves different types of multilingualism depending on the society type; lingua francas and trade pidgins are associated with state societies and a few chiefdoms involved in long-distance riverine/marine trade. Intensive borrowing and stable mixed languages occur with incorporation into a state society in situ, and creoles with state-driven migration (including slavery); there may be examples in chiefdoms, where incorporation sometimes occurs. Thus, certain types of language change are a recent phenomenon in human history and the uniformitarian hypothesis for language change must be abandoned, at least for contact-induced change."<br /><br />Of course, language _change_ is only one way to get homogeneisation, and not a very effective one. What most effectively produces homogeneity is language _spread_, be it through speakers migrating or non-speakers learning or (normally) some combination of the two - a rather conspicuous phenomenon in the last 500 years of American history. (If the ratio of first-language speakers to learners is small enough, as in plantation slavery, then you get creolisation; otherwise, you generally don't.)<br /><br />Not being an Indo-Europeanist, I'm not going to comment on the time-depth of PIE, but Anatolian as we know it seems to share a number of common innovations absent from the other IE branches, in which case it can't be directly ancestral to them. Anyway, Mycenean Greek and Indo-Iranian in Mitanni are both attested in writing before 1177, and already both looked pretty different from Anatolian.<br /><br />Hamitic is definitely out, I'm afraid - for the good reason that there's no linguistic or other common factor linking Berber, Egyptian, Chadic, and Cushitic to the exclusion of Semitic. It could be an interesting exercise to see if the expansion of any other subgroups of Afro-Asiatic can be linked to the spread of iron, though (bearing in mind that horses don't work so well in the tropics).Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-399220677591788232014-05-25T08:43:35.711-07:002014-05-25T08:43:35.711-07:00Heh. Indo-European as the language of the Paleolit...Heh. Indo-European as the language of the Paleolithic "Atlantic refuge" in Spain:<br /><br />http://languagecontinuity.blogspot.ca/<br /><br />Lameen has been kind enough to send me the link to a non-technical review of variation within the Algonquin language families. It is an interesting illustration of variation and continuity in a group of widely geographically distributed languages. <br /><br />The question is: how does this happen? I've tepidly supported theorising based on the idea that the best historically known linguistic homgenisation phenomena are modern --pidgins, Creolisation, and such like. (I'm using weasel words to avoid being called to account on my ignorance of the subject.) Anyway, one idea is that these ought to be the models for prehistoric homogenisation phenomena. <br /><br />So: Algonquin is spread by the fur trade, perhaps even a still entirely theoretical Norse emporia-based fur trade. and represents the later stage of something seen in its nascent phase in Chinook. (But then what do we do with the 'western" Algonguin languages?)<br /><br />Indo-European is spread by the iron/horse-riding complex. This is much later than common theories, and I am hanging my hat on a perceived trend for Hittite to become more "norma" as we understand it better. That is, as Hittite and related Anatolian languages become less eccentric, they become better models for the immediate origin of a whole set of local variations that very rapidly become Celtic, German, Italic, Greek, Indo-Aryan between 1177 and "curtain raising" on the literate Iron Age. Am I allowing enough time depth here? I don't know. I'm just hurling provocations.<br /><br />Finally, as Lameen speculates, that Moorish/Berber --are we still allowed to say "Hamitic?"-- might be a parallel phenomena to the, in this model, very rapid spread and consolidation of Indo-European.Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-65296113578274307832014-05-21T06:48:40.314-07:002014-05-21T06:48:40.314-07:00Sorry, that should read - "at the earliest, t...Sorry, that should read - "at the earliest, the Neolithic."Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-77606230264798910092014-05-21T06:46:53.244-07:002014-05-21T06:46:53.244-07:00If by "homogeneity" you mean linguistic ...If by "homogeneity" you mean linguistic uniformity across a large region, I don't think anyone would claim that that was common before, at the latest, the Neolithic. In fact, the level of uniformity many First World states have now reached was impossible until the late 19th century, with the advent of centralised compulsory universal education. Linguists would, however, also usually assume that any given diverse, widespread language family derives from a much more homogeneous, localised source. It would be nice and democratic if a dozen unrelated languages across a vast area could slowly converge on a lingua franca with an even mixture of elements from all of them, but that just doesn't seem to happen; in almost all cases, one source clearly predominates, and the contribution of the others is rather limited.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-75592758060058516952014-05-20T14:41:56.767-07:002014-05-20T14:41:56.767-07:00As for linguistic homogeneity, if there is one dem...As for linguistic homogeneity, if there is one demic change that suits my no doubt completely unreasonable skepticism about the (prehistoric/preliterate) time depth at which homogeneity can be maintained, it has got to be the spread of iron use.<br /><br />I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that it is as much an economic change as a technical one, and can be retarded into near-modernity as long as we need for the purposes of a priori theorising. Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-72128722504925031132014-05-20T14:38:27.328-07:002014-05-20T14:38:27.328-07:00Of course, it's a reflexive change. It isn'...Of course, it's a reflexive change. It isn't just that axes make it easier to clear wooded land for pasture. It's also that cutting and burning produces charcoal, which is the limiting factor for iron production.<br /><br />That's why iron making tends to be an industry of the wild, at the margins. So there is going to be some kind of "demic wave of advance," inasmuch as people are going to be more inclined to adopt the mountain-pastoral-charcoal-burner liftestyle as the lowlands come to be more heavily settled with iron-consuming farmers.<br /><br />And, yes, it strikes me that as far as explaining Siwa's sudden prominence, the oracle is more likely to be effect than cause. Why isn't there earlier archaeology in the oasis? Surely there are Paleolithic remains!Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-67628209225184836972014-05-20T14:17:46.941-07:002014-05-20T14:17:46.941-07:00So it's not just any frontier full of axe-wiel...So it's not just any frontier full of axe-wielding pioneers, it's actually Vermont? (sorry – bad attempt at a trilingual pun)<br /><br />OK, seriously – if the iron axe is enough to cause significant changes in such a lightly forested region as Cyrenaica in 1100 BC, then imagine what it must have done when it got to the Atlas Mountains, presumably a bit later. That might even help explain the surprising linguistic homogeneity of Berber – the mountains suddenly got so much more useful to folks living on the plains that whatever small populations were already there ended up shifting to the pastoralists' language(s). But when did the iron axe reach the Atlas Mountains anyway? And did it get there by land or by sea?<br /><br />And yes, it would be nice to have a better explanation for Siwa's new importance than "oh, they got an Oracle". Can't think of one offhand, though, unless it's somehow linked to the embryonic trans-Saharan trade.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-14123650903941679382014-05-19T11:05:11.278-07:002014-05-19T11:05:11.278-07:00Herodotus has a bit of a weird on about natural sp...Herodotus has a bit of a weird on about natural springs --like all those old Greeks. Something weird is going on at Siwa, or it wouldn't just appear in history when it does... but I'm not arguing with geology, and the "appearance" doesn't have to have anything to do with technology.<br /><br />Google took some coaxing to come up with a "Green Mountain" in Egypt, but when it did, I got this <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=y8eJikg3alMC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=jebel+akhdar+egypt&source=bl&ots=_ye3HvP7hr&sig=lIp97OJUlAD-XAXFpIlzLE5AaIs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dkN6U8b8Bo7Io" rel="nofollow">little gem</a>:<br />"Northern Egypt must then have resembled the Negeb of Southern Palestine, where chalky hills covered with dwarf oak and srub rise from borad plains of alluvium, rich with grass after the winter rain, but in summer, dry dusty and subject to aerial erosion."<br /><br />Murray puts these events in the Paleolithic past, where, except for bizarre tangential strokes in the direction of ancient Sphinxes, they have stayed. The question is: what happens at elevation? For the Nibbi thesis to be correct, the unimpressive elevations available on the flanks of the Delta must have been sufficient to sustain relict forests. If they were forested, the crest of the Green Mountains behind Cyrenaica, up to almost 900m elevation, are an even more plausible "burned land" for pastoral axe-and-fire cultivation.<br /><br />"The total area of the natural forests in the GM was about 500,000 ha of which more than 35% is converted to cropping agreas. About 85% of the country's mean production oif wood is used in charcoal production where the mountainous landscape is intercepted by heavily forested wadis."<br /><br />http://www.pakbs.org/pjbot/PDFs/43(4)/PJB43(4)1885.pdf<br /><br />The charcoal production angle makes this look like we might have a winner . At the very least, it is a place for cheap iron production, hardly a given in the Egyptian imperial landscape. And given the paucity of ports along the coast, it is even "on the way" to the Aegean, at least if you choose to skip past Mersa Matruh for Tobruk. <br /> Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-18191342798995177732014-05-17T14:19:58.786-07:002014-05-17T14:19:58.786-07:00Come to think of it, if you're considering iro...Come to think of it, if you're considering iron tools changing pastoral economies, the Jabal Akhdar might be worth a look – not that I have any sense for how densely forested that would have been in 1100 BC.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-80218430796847413022014-05-17T06:25:19.781-07:002014-05-17T06:25:19.781-07:00Interesting idea... Not sure Siwa will do as a hom...Interesting idea... Not sure Siwa will do as a home for the foggara system – it's so far below sea level that all the water of the area finds its way there anyway, and today open-air channels and natural springs seem to be more than enough for them. (Herodotus mentions the latter.) Maybe Awjila?Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com