So apparently the Kingdom of Macedon was founded by Doric-Speaking dynasty from Argos, the Argives, which includes Phillip II and his son Alexander the Great. So that begs the question, who were the inhabitants of the region prior to the Argead migration?
- Did the migrating dynasty bring their people with them or simply ruled over the natives similar to Indo-Europeans ruling Non-Indo-Europeans like the Mittani Kingdom?
- Were these natives Indo-Europeans?
- If so, what language family did the language they speak belong to? Were they related to the Proto-Greeks migrating to the area from up north? Were they Thracians, Illyrians, Phrygians, or perhaps Paionians?
The reason I'm asking this question is because of the inconsistencies in what I've read. On the page about Ancient Macedonia in Wikipedia, the earliest event in the history of Macedonia was the founding of the Kingdom of Macedonia by Doric-Speaking Greeks from Argos, and in another page on Wikipedia it mentions that the Ancient Macedonian language was either a sister language with Greek or completely different dialect from Doric.
Did the Ancient Macedonian language exist prior to the Argead migration, or did it simply evolve out of the language the Argives spoke over the course of 500 years?
I know this is a broad topic and I'm sure it varies by country, but on a different thread here somebody posted this paper:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5048219/
It seems to suggest that modern Europeans have ancestry from a wide variety of groups with the oldest hunter gatherer populations being most common in the Baltic area, the steppe ancestry being most common the far north, and early neolithic agriculturalists being most common in the southern Mediterranean.
So far so good, but then I found this more recent Guardian article that says that, in Britain specifically, the incoming peoples from the steppe who brought Indo-European languages resulted in 90% of the current ancestry for the historical population of the British Isles. This makes it sound like the previous inhabitants of Britain had such a marginal impact on the current genetic makeup of the island they might as well not exist.
I'm a bit confused by all of this and I might be reading the data wrong, but I'd appreciate if I could get some clarification, did Indo-Europeans just come in the last few thousand years and expel the previous inhabitants to such an extent that they made next to no impact on the genes of currently existing Europeans? Or was there more integration than this implies? One of the reasons I ask is because I've noticed some people use this to suggest that about 5000 years ago White people conquered Europe to exterminate and replace its native population. I hate to use such modern racialized language for something where I know that makes little but I'm just relaying the arguments I've heard other people make with this data.
Aside from the Etruscans (or Proto-Villanovians, considering the period), and the Nuragics in Sardinia, what do we know about those who inhabited mainland Italy (more specifically Central and Southern Italy) when the Italic tribes arrived and settled in the peninsula?
For example, I am aware of the Remedello, Rinaldone and Gaudo cultures, mostly found in present-day Lombardy, Tuscany, Latium and Campania, but from what I’ve read these cultures ended around the late 3rd millennium BC; the Proto-Italics entered Italy only in the 2nd millennium BC, possibly even as late as around 1300 BC. Were the descendants of these Neolithic cultures still inhabiting the regions when the Proto-Italics arrived?
Genetically, the 3 previously mentioned cultures seem to descend from the Anatolian Neolithic farmers and from other Neolithic farmer populations of Europe. For example, the remains of a male from the Rinaldone and Gaudo cultures have shown that his DNA was a mixture of Early European Farmer ancestry (85%) and West Hunter Gatherer ancestry (15%).
Do we know if the Proto-Italics mixed with these Neolithic populations (or their descendants), and if they did, do we know in approximately what percentage?
While the pre-Greek substrate is well established, and the Italic descended language Spanish evolved alongside Basque, are there other notable examples in Germanic, Celtic, Slavic etc.
I'm thinking about languages like the Pre-Greek substrate, sometimes called "Pelasgian" or "Aegean", or generally about any language spoken by the inhabitants of "Old Europe" before the Indo-European migrations.
To make a more specific example, let's assume that a non-Indo-European language was spoken across some islands of the Aegean, like the Cyclades and Rhodes; would it be realistic to think that the language might have survived after the Mycenean (and therefore Indo-European) colonization/conquest of the islands around 1450 BC, and perhaps continued to be spoken by farmers and other illiterate parts of the population during the Mycenean rule and during the Greek Dark Ages (so up to the 8th century BC)?
Herodotus, for example, wrote (56-58) about the Pelasgians and reported that the inhabitants of Placia and Scylace (in Ancient Mysia, so present-day Sea of Marmara) and of the 'city of Creston' (it is unclear if Creston referred to Kreston in Ancient Macedonia or to the Etruscan city of Cortona/Curtun) still spoke a non-Greek language, perhaps being or having originated from Pelasgian, during his times.
>For the people of Creston and Placia have a language of their own in common, which is not the language of their neighbours; and it is plain that they still preserve the fashion of speech which they brought with them in their migration into the places where they dwell.
Thanks in advance for any answers.
The Helots of Sparta were by all accounts treated miserably by the Spartans who are considered or believed be a group of Indo Europeans who migrated to the Greece mainland.
The treatment of Helots sound an awful like how Indo-Europeans in India treated thier subjugated people. In fact it even sounds like a caste system. Assigning them to lower castes and just generally treating them miserably. We often hear about how the Indo Europeans were a small group of invader who ruled larger local populations. Well this sounds exactly like that.
So were the Helots people in a similar situation?
Many Indo European cultures feature conflict between two races of gods. The Aesir and Vanir, Asuras and Davas, the Titans and the Olympians for example. Is likely these represent older deities from pre Indo European cultures being incorporated into their mythologies?
We have (at least some) attestations of pre-IE languages around the Mediterranean, but do we know anything at all about any pre-IE languages north of the Alps, directly or indirectly?
We today believe that some people, notably Basques, maintained stronger "connection" to the pre-Indoeuropean population, aka they have a more genetic connection to what is believed to be "Old Europeans". I also heard some stories about the population of Western Balkan (allegedly genetic studies showed specific haplogroup for this area). My question is do we know of any other major genetic anomaly in some areas that can be connected to a strong "connection" to the pre-Indoeuropean population? Do we know, or have at least some good guesses, what happened to the pre-Indoeuropean population in Europe after the arrival of Indo-Europeans?
Hi! I am a big fan of history and ethnography and i love to study the genetics and origins of the people’s of the world. I have always heard of the Indo-Europeans and the Pre-Indo-Europeans but it has only been up until recently when i have begun to research them. When reading about these two groups i hear the words “hunter gatherer” and “agriculture” a lot and i have gotten confused as to wether Indo-Europeans are hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists as i have heard many things about them both. I would also like to know what we’re the Pre-Indo-Europeans, were they agriculturists or hunter-gatherer tribes?
P.S. I have read that the Indo-Europeans practiced animal husbandry so would this make them hunter-gatherers?
Second P.S. If anyone has any resources or any reading material relating to the Indo-Europeans and/or Pre-Indo-Europeans please send it as i love to learn.
Any help is appreciated, thank you!
Edit: I noticed i made a spelling mistake in the title.
Before Baltic languages have reached the region, I always wondered what languages they spoke before the Bronze age collapse. I tried finding info but failed. Can anyone give me an answer?
As a disclaimer, I know very little about linguistics but I'm very interested in ancient history. I've recently learned about the Kurgan hypothesis and the spread from the Indo-European Urheimat, thought to be the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.
Genetically, my understanding is that Europeans of today have varying levels of ancestry from the native European population (Western Hunter Gatherers & Early European Farmers) and the later Western Steppe Herders (WSH). I also understand that the WSH are theorized to have expanded into Europe from the Urheimat, resulting in the dispersal of Indo-European languages some ~5000 years ago, supplanting the preexisting cultures and languages of the WHG and EEF.
It's also been theorized (and debated) that the massive expansion of WSH culture and language over the preexisting Europeans is due to both the domestication of the horse and a patriarchal warrior society that dominated a native European egalitarian society.
Although the WSH expansion significantly changed the European landscape, possibly through violent military incursions, genetics shows they didn't kill all the native inhabitants in a massive genocide. My question is: do modern languages show this admixture between native European languages and later Indo-European expansion?
I know there is at least one extant non-Indo-European language (Basque), and that recently extinct languages such as Etruscan are thought to be non-Indo-European, but do Italic/Germanic/Celtic languages have many words that come from the pre-existing non-Indo-European languages? Is that possible to know without more information about the earlier languages?
I am sure I got a lot of this wrong. I haven't studied it in any academic context, but have just picked up bits and pieces here and there out of pure interest, so go easy on me if I'm making mistakes. :)
TL;DR: To what extent do we see words from native pre-existing European languages in modern Indo-European languages? Was there much admixture or borrowing from a linguistic standpoint?
Also what's the consensus (either based on evidence or speculation) on whether there were different families spoken or only closely related dialects?
I know we know very little about the pre-Celtic Britain and Ireland, but I wanna know if there is anything we can say about their language(s), or just culture overall. Anything we can reconstruct from toponyms with uncertain origin, or random words in Celtic languages that we have no idea where the come from (I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Celtic languages have a lot of those).
I'm really curious if any linguists or anthropologists have tried to stitch together anything substantial from the little we know about those languages and people. I'm also curious about commonly accepted (and also less so) theories proposed about them
I was wondering if the script and language were of that of a dying Pre indo european language (i.e. Basque) . The script could seems awfully similar to something derived from Phoenician too although i cant draw much parallel between each character.
Perhaps it was one of those Native European Languages which were overshadowed by the Indo European ones.
Maybe a small group of people still spoke this langauge between the time of the writing of the manuscript.
Apparently, the syllabic consonants mostly derive from syncope, and there is a proposal that the voiced aspirates derive from a stop + h2. What else is known?
I know there is some information reconstructed about it, but I'm having trouble tracking it down. Given that PIE is the best understood protolanguage, and its often possible to do internal reconstruction to a limited extent, I'm sure we must have some rough hazy idea of what the phonology of the stage before PIE could have been
Is there serious evidence that Uralic and Indo-European cultures had contact with each other in the early periods of their migrations? Be it, genetic, linguistic or archaeological? Are there roots that we know are borrowings from one language to the other?
Most of the articles and papers that I found ended up being about Indo-Uralic or other "fringe" theories.
