Concept
Indo-European migrations
Overview
The Indo-European migrations are hypothesized migrations of peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the derived Indo-European languages, which took place from around 4000 to 1000 BCE, explaining how these related languages came to be spoken across a large area of Eurasia, spanning from the Indian subcontinent and Iranian plateau to Atlantic Europe.
While these early languages and their speakers are prehistoric (lacking documentary evidence), a synthesis of linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and genetics has established the existence of Proto-Indo-European and the spread of its daughter dialects through migrations of large populations of its speakers, as well as the recruitment of new speakers through emulation of conquering elites. Comparative linguistics describes the similarities between various languages governed by laws of systematic change, which allow the reconstruction of ancestral speech (see Indo-European studies). Archaeology traces the spread of artifacts, habitations, and burial sites presumed to be created by speakers of Proto-Indo-European in several stages, from their hypothesized Proto-Indo-European homeland to their diaspora throughout Western Europe, Central Asian, and South Asia, with incursions into East Asia. Recent genetic research, including paleogenetics, has increasingly delineated the kinship groups involved in this movement.
According to the widely held Kurgan hypothesis, or renewed Steppe hypothesis, the oldest Indo-European migration split from the earliest proto-Indo-European speech community (archaic PIE) inhabiting the Volga basin, and produced the Anatolian languages (Hittite and Luwian). The second-oldest branch, Tocharian, was spoken in the Tarim Basin (now western China), after splitting from early PIE spoken on the eastern Pontic steppe. The late PIE culture, within the Yamnaya horizon on the Pontic–Caspian steppe around 3000 BCE, then branched to produce the bulk of the Indo-European languages through migrations to the west and southeast.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
But in the primitive state of the country, its mountains were high hills covered with soil, and the plains, as they are termed by us, of Phelleus were full of rich earth, and there was abundance of wood in the mountains. Of this last the traces still remain, for although some of the mountains now only afford sustenance to bees, not so very long ago there were still to be seen roofs of timber cut from trees growing…
Plato, Critias
States what Indo-European migrations is; the author is tied to Indo-European migrations in the knowledge graph.
Great inundations or earthquakes surrounded inhabited districts with water or precipices, portions of the continent were by revolutions of the globe torn off and split into islands. It is obvious that among men thus collected, and forced to live together, a common idiom must have started up much sooner, than among those who freely wandered through the forests of the main land. Thus it is very possible that the…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind
Close in meaning to Indo-European migrations; the term itself is not named.
As touching your citizens of 9000 years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the first place, there is the caste of priests…
Plato, Timaeus
The author is tied to Indo-European migrations in the knowledge graph.
Related ideas
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- The Independent
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- French language
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- Persian language
- Germany
- Greek language
- Greece
- Genetics
- Hungary
- Hinduism
- Herodotus
- Harappa
- Italy
- Iran
- Silk Road transmission of Buddhism
- Ireland
- Ancient Greek
- Indo-European languages
- Iberian Peninsula
- Indus River
- Northern Europe
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Language.