Further investigation, however, did not confirm this ideally happy form of primitive civilization. Many of Pictet’s etymologies were erroneous, many of his deductions based on very uncertain evidence. No recent writer adopts Pictet’s views of the Indo-European family. But his list of domesticated animals is approximately correct, if domestication is used loosely simply of animals that might be kept by the Indo-European man about his homestead. Even at the present day domestication means different things in the case of different animals. A pig is not domesticated as a dog is; in areas like the Hebrides or western Ireland, where cattle and human beings share the two ends of the same building, domestication means something very different from the treatment of large herds on a farm extending to many hundreds of acres. In other respects the height of the civilization was vastly exaggerated. That the Indo-European people were agricultural as well as pastoral seems highly probable. But as Heraclides says of the Athamanes (Fragmenta hist. Graec. ii. 219), the women were the agriculturists, while the men were shepherds. Agriculture begins on a very small scale with the dibbling by means of a pointed stick of a few seeds of some plant which the women recognize as useful either for food or medicine, and is possible only when the people have ceased to be absolutely nomad and have fixed settlements for continuous periods of some length. The pastoral habit is broken down in men only by starvation, if the pasture-lands become too cramped through an excessive increase of population or are seized by a conqueror. As has been well said, “of all the ordinary means of gaining a livelihood—with the exception perhaps of mining—agriculture is the most laborious, and is never voluntarily adopted by men who have not been accustomed to it from their childhood” (Mackenzie Wallace, Russia, new ed. i. p. 266, in relating the conversion of the Bashkir Tatars to agriculture). Even the plough, in the primitive form of a tree stump with two branches, one forming the handle, the other the pole, was developed, and to this period may belong the representations in rock carvings in Sweden and the Alps of a pair of oxen in the plough (S. Müller, Nordische Altertumskunde, i. 205; Dechelette, Manuel d’archéologie, ii. pp. 492 ff.). The Indo-European civilization in its beginnings apparently belongs to the chalcolithic period (sometimes described by the barbarous term of Italian origin eneolithic) when copper, if not bronze had come in, but the use of stone for many purposes had not yet gone out. While primitive Indo-European man apparently knew, as has been said, the horse, ox, sheep, goat, pig and dog, it is to be observed that in their wild state at least these animals do not all affect the same kind of area. The horse is an animal of the open plain; the foal always accompanies the mother, for at first its neck is too short to allow it to graze, and the mare, unlike the cow, has no large udder in which to carry a great supply of milk. The cow, on the other hand, hides her calf in a brake when she goes to graze, and is more a woodland animal. The pig’s natural habitat is the forest where beech mast, acorns, or chestnuts are plentiful. The goat is a climber and affects the heights, while the sheep also prefers short grass to the richer pastures suited to kine. To collect and tame all those animals implies control of an extensive and varied area.
What of the trees known to primitive Indo-European man? On this the greater part of the arguments regarding the original home have turned. The name for the beech extends through a considerable number of Indo-European languages, and it has generally been assumed that the beech must have been known from the first and therefore must have been a tree which flourished in the original home. Now the habitat of the beech is to the west of a line drawn from Königsberg to the Crimea. The argument assumes that its distribution was always the same. But nothing is more certain than that in different ages different trees succeed one another on the same soil. In the peat mosses of north-east Scotland are found the trunks of vast oaks which have no parallel among the trees which grow in the same district now, where the oak has a hard struggle to live at all, and where experience teaches the planter that coniferous trees will be more successful. On the coast of Denmark in the same way the conifer has replaced the beech since the days of the “kitchen middens,” from which so much information as to the primitive inhabitants of that area has been obtained. But with regard to the names of trees there are two serious pitfalls which it is difficult to avoid. (a) It is common to give a tree the name of another which in habit it resembles. In England the oriental plane does not grow freely north of the Trent; accordingly, farther north the sycamore, which has a leaf that a casual observer might think similar, has usurped the name of the plane. (b) In the case of the beech (Lat. fagus), the corresponding Greek word φηγός does not mean beech but oak, or possibly, if one may judge from the magnificent trees of north-west Greece, the chestnut. It has been suggested that the word is connected with the verb φαγεῖν to eat, so that it was originally the tree with edible fruit and could thus be specialized in different senses in different areas. If, however, Bartholomae’s connexion of the Kurd būz, “elm” (Idg. Forschungen, ix. 271) be correct, there can be no relation between φαγεῖν and φηγός, but the latter comes from a root *bhāuḡ, in which the g would become z among the satem languages. The birch is a more widely spread tree than the beech, growing as luxuriantly in the Himalayas as in western Europe, but notwithstanding, the Latin fraxinus, which is almost certainly of the same origin, means not birch but ash, while the word akin to ash (Gr. ὀξύη) appears in Latin without the k suffix as os- in Latin ornus, “mountain ash,” for an earlier *osinos, cp. Old Bulgarian jasenŭ (the j has no etymological value), Welsh and Cornish onnen, from an original Celtic *onna from *os-nā. One of the most widely spread tree names is the word tree itself, which appears in a variety of forms, Gr. δρῦς, Goth triu; Skt. dāru, δόρυ, &c., which is sometimes as in Greek specially limited to the oak, while the Indian deodar (deva-dāru) is a conifer. O. Schrader, who in his remarkable book, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte (1883, 3rd ed., 1906-1907), locates the original home in southern Russia, would allow the original community (ii. p. 178) to be partly within, partly without the beech line. The only other tree the name of which is widely spread is the willow: the English with, withy, Lat. vitex, Gr. ἰτέα for ϝιτέα, Lithuanian wýtis, Zend vaệti. Otherwise the words for trees are limited to a small number of languages, and the meaning in different languages is widely different, as Gr. ἐλάτη, “pine,” Old High German linta, “linden,” with which go the Latin linter, “boat,” and Lithuanian lentà, “board.” The lime tree and the birch do not exist in Greece, and the Latin betula is a borrowing from Gaulish (Irish bethe), the native word fraxinus, as we have seen, being used for the ash. The equation of the Latin taxus, “yew,” with Gr. τόξον, “bow,” is no doubt correct; Schrader’s equation of Skt. dhanvan, “bow,” with the German tanne, “fir,” must, if correct, show at least a change of material, for no wood is less well adapted for a bow than fir. The only conclusion that can be drawn with apparent certainty from the names of trees is that the original settlements were not in the southern peninsulas of Europe.
Some of the names for cultivated plants are widely spread, but like the names of trees do not always indicate the same thing. This is not surprising if we consider that the word corn, within the Teutonic languages alone, means wheat in England, oats in Scotland, rye in Germany, barley in Sweden, maize in the United States of America. Thus the Skt. yáva means corn or barley, in Zend corn (modern Persian jav, barley, but in the language of the Ossetes yeu, yau is millet), the Gk. ζεά is spelt, the Lithuanian jawaḯ corn, the Irish éorna barley (Schrader, Sprachvergleichung3 ii. p. 188). The word bere or barley itself is widely spread in Europe—Latin far, spelt, Goth, barizeins, “of barley,” Old Norse barr, Old Slav, bŭrŭ, a kind of millet (ibid.). But the original habitat of the cultivated grain plants has not yet been clearly established, and circumstances of many kinds may occasion a change in the kind of grain cultivated, provided another can be found suitable to the climate. In early England it is clear that the prevalent crop was barley, for barn is the bere-ern or barley-house.
The earliest tree-fruits found in Europe are apparently those discovered by Edouard Piette as Mas d’Azil in a stratum which he places between palaeolithic and neolithic. They included nuts, plums, birdcherry, sloe, &c., and along with them was a little heap of grains of wheat. If Piette’s observations are correct, this find must go back to a date long preceding the fruits found by Heer in the pile-dwellings of Switzerland. Here also cherry-stones were found, though the modern cherry is said to have been imported first by Lucullus in the first century B.C. from Cerasus in Pontus, whence its name. In the pile-dwellings a considerable number of apples were found. They were generally cut up into two or three pieces, apparently to be dried for winter use. In all probability they were wild apples of the variety Pirus silvatica, which is found across the whole of Central Europe from north to south (Buschan, Vorgeschichtliche Botanik, p. 166). The original habitat of the apple is uncertain, but it is supposed to be indigenous at any rate south of the Black Sea (Schrader, Reallexikon, s.v. Apfelbaum). The history of the name is obscure; it is often connected with the Campanian town Abella, which Virgil (Aeneid, vii. 740) calls malifera, “apple-bearing.” Here also the material for fixing the site of the original habitat is untrustworthy.
The attempt has been made to limit the possible area by a consideration of three animals which are said not to occur in certain parts of it—(a) the eel, which is said not to be found in the Black Sea; (b) the honey bee, which is not found in that part of Central Asia drained by the Oxus and Jaxartes; (c) the tortoise, which is not found in northern areas. From evidence collected by Schrader from a specialist at Bucharest (Sprachvergleichung,3 ii. p. 147) eels are found in the Black Sea. The argument, therefore, for excluding the area which drains into the Black Sea from the possible habitat of the primitive Indo-European community falls to the ground. Honey was certainly familiar at an early age, as is shown by the occurrence of the word *medhu, Skt. mádhu, Gr. μέθυ (here the meaning has shifted from mead to wine), Irish mid, English mead, Old Slav, medŭ, Lithuanian medùs honey, midùs mead. Schrader, who is the first to utilize the name of the tortoise in this argument, points out (op. cit. p. 148) that forms from the same root occur in both a centum and a satem language—Gr. χελύς, χελώνη, Old Slav. žĭly, želŭvĭ—but that while it reaches far north in eastern Europe, it does not pass the 46th parallel of latitude in western Europe. This argument would make not only the German site for the original home which is supported by Kossinna and Hirt impossible, but also that of Scandinavia contended for by Penka.
From the foregoing it will be seen that the arguments for any given area are not conclusive. In the great plain which extends across Europe north of the Alps and Carpathians and across Asia north of the Hindu Kush there are few geographical obstacles to prevent the rapid spread of peoples from any part of its area to any other, and, as we have seen, the Celts and the Hungarians, &c., have, in the historical period, demonstrated the rapidity with which such migrations could be made. Such migration may possibly account for the appearance of a people using a centum language so far east as Turkestan. But our information as to Tocharish is still too fragmentary to decide the question. It is impossible here to discuss at any length the relations between the separate Indo-European languages, a subject which has formed, from somewhat different points of view, the subject of Kretschmer’s Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache and Meillet’s Les Dialectes indo-européennes.
Bibliography.—Besides the articles on the separate languages in this Encyclopaedia the following works are the most important for consultation: K. Brugmann (phonology and morphology) and B. Delbrück (syntax), Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (1886-1900), ed. 2, vol. i. (1897); of vol. ii. two large parts, including the stem formation and inflexion of the noun, the pronoun and the numerals, have been published in 1906 and 1909. A shorter work by Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, dealing mainly with Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic and Slavonic, appeared in three parts in 1902-1903. A good but less elaborate work is A. Meillet, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes (1903, 2nd ed. 1908). For the ethnological argument: W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (1900); G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race (English edition, 1901). Other works, now largely superseded, which deal with this argument are K. Penka, Origines Ariacae (1883), and Die Herkunft der Arier (1886), and I. Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, N.D. (1890). The ethnologists are no more in agreement than the philologists. For the arguments mainly from the linguistic side see especially O. Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte (3rd ed., 2 vols., 1906-1907)—the second edition was translated into English by Dr F. B. Jevons under the title Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples (1890); Reallexikon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde (1901); M. Much, Die Heimat der Indogermanen (1902, 2nd ed. 1904); E. de Michelis, L’Origine degli Indo-europei (1903); H. Hirt, Die Indogermanen (2 vols., 1905-1907); S. Feist, Europa im Lichte der Vorgeschichte und die Ergebnisse der vergleichenden indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft, 1910, in W. Sieglin’s Quellen und Forschungen zur alten Geschichte und Geographie. Important for special sections of this question are S. Müller, Nordische Altertumskunde (2 vols., 1897-1898), and Urgeschichte Europas (1905); V. Hehn, Kulturpflanzen und Haustiere (1870), 7th ed. edited by O. Schrader, with contributions on botany by A. Engler (1902); J. Hoops, Waldbäume und Kulturpflanzen im germanischen Altertum (1905). Delbrück has devoted a special monograph to the I.-E. names of relationships, from which he shows that the I.-E. family was patriarchal, not matriarchal (Die idg. Verwandtschaftsnamen, 1889). E. Meyer, from Tocharish being a centum language, has revived with reserve the hypothesis of the Asiatic origin (Geschichte des Altertums,2 I. 2, p. 801).
(P. Gi.)
[1] E. Meyer, Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie (1908, pp. 14 ff.), and more fully in Kuhn’s Zeitschrift (xlii. pp. 17 ff.); also Geschichte des Altertums (i. 2, 2nd ed. pp. 807 ff.).