The expansion of the Hittites from being a two city state petty kingdom to ruling almost all of Anatolia and the Northern Fertile Crescent to the fall of the empire is pretty well documented historically at every step, so we know on a pretty much province by province basis what parts of Anatolia were Hattic and then conquered by the Hittites. There are a few non-Hittite Anatolian communities that become client states, but these are a decided minority an appear only in pockets of the ultimate Hittite empire.

Much of the surviving record consists of correspondence between different senior political leaders across Anatolia and in Egypt, and bragging accounts of their conquests and battles. The Hittites won their empire one little chunk at a time, not in one fell sweep. This is much richer material than the trade and welfare accounting records left behind by the Minoans, and is more similar in character to the contemporaneous Egyptian historical legacy.

Moreover, the accuracy of the Hittite accounts are corroborated by parallel Akkadian and Egyptian accounts and have some archaeological corroboration as well. In the 13th millenium BCE, there was a border boundary that Egypt and the Hitties shared and the these kingdoms engaged in at least a couple of instances of royal bride exchange. The pre-Hittite non-Indo-European sequence of languages in Northern Mesopotamia (in a nutshell, Sumerian, Akkadian, Kassite-Hurrian, a Mittani superstate for a while) is documented quite far back. Similar, there is quite solid evidence of the non-Indo-European substrate in the Aegean.

Moreover, while we do not know from whence the Hittites or other Anatolian communities came to Anatolia with any real certainty (eastern, western and maritime routes are all plausible), we do know that Indo-European Greek arrived in the Aegean first in mainland Greece from the North and then worked its way South, which would be a rather improbable trajectory for a language that had recently diverged from an Anatolian source.

The survival of Hattic as a liturgical language long after the Hittite language had replaced Hattic in commerce and politcs and daily use is also instructive. This very strongly parallels the sequence of events in which Sumerian was superceded by Akkadian in Mesopotamia. Other examples, like the survival of otherwise extinct languages like Latin, Coptic, Sanskrit and Hebrew as liturgical languages also support this sequence.

The pattern of Indo-European Anatolian language attestation in Anatolia looks much more like the pattern in which the Greeks and the linguistically diverse early Italic speakers established colonies in Southern Europe and the adjacent islands. Anatolian languages that predate Hittite (and most of the Anatolian languages arise after the demise of the Hittite empire in a process more like the diversification of the Romance languages from Latin or the diversification of the Indo-Aryan languages from Sanskrit), appear in little patches here and there that discontinous in Anatolia. Also, both the earliest Hittite metal working evidence, discovered archaeologically, and the earliest Indo-Aryan metal working evidence, discovered archaeologically, is contemparaneous, and in both cases shows antecedents in the Caucusas – suggestive again of intrusive colonies of recent migrants rather than a widespread continuguous indigenous linguistic community.

Thus, even if the Anatolian languages are indeed a very basal branch of Indo-European suggesting a great time depth of a common ancestor of these langauges and other IE languages, putting their point of origin in Anatolia, rather than, for example, a source point for colonists in Anatolia somewhat in the Caucasus in a model, may be misleading in terms of identifying a probably location of origin for these languages.

A similar point comes up with Armenian. One of the quite plausible possibilities suggested by some of the isoglosses between Armenian and Greek is that Armenian was a divergent and now lost Greek dialect of a people who migrated across Anatolia from the Aegean in the wake of the collapse of the Hittite empire and then experienced areal influences arising from language contact in the intervening centuries that made it mutually unintelligible with Greek. There is historical evidence that such a migration happened, but we don’t know how big it was, whether the migrants were successful when they arrived, and whether these migrants can be identified with the Armenians. Armenian itself is not attested in the historical record until much, much later – it was spoken in a place that was not on the “stage” that writers in literate languages were aware of for a very long time. Of course, if Armenian is indeed a basal branching from a most recent common ancestor of Indo-European languages, a source in or near the Caucasus is at least as plausible as one in Anatolia from a geographic perspective.

Another key point is in regard to what in particular is distinctive about the Anatolian languages, or the Greek languages, for example, relative to other IE languages. In both cases, the evidence for the deviations being causally attributable to substrate influences is not insubstantial. We do not see in either of these languages a pattern of random differentiation by isolation; instead we see a pattern of significant lexical borrowing and notable phonetic and grammatical influence from the substrates.

The story this evidence tells is that rather than the Indo-European contribution to Anatolian or Greek being particularly ancient or basal, it is telling us something about how very much different the substrated in the Balkans and Anatolia were from the substrates in other places to which the Indo-European languages expanded.

If we want evidence of what the basal Indo-European languages were like, Tocharian, which involved a community in which there was no substrate and was settled basically as virgin territory (and in which there is also almost no evidence of admixture until very late) is a signal with a lot less noise in it. By analogy, Icelandic which is also an isolated language fringe with no substrate is also very conservative, experiencing just 3% lexical change over a time period when English saw a 32% lexical change. Language contact, substrate influence and intentional language differentiation by a community to separate their dialect from another community aren’t just side stories when talking about the rate of language change – they appear to be the dominant source of language change with random drift playing a comparatively insignificant role.

We have no good evidence of what impact, if any, in Indo-European languages can be attributed to, for example, an LBK Neolithic or Harappan substrate linguistic influence on Indo-European languages. One plausible story of Indo-European ethnogenesis would be that it arose from the fusion of an LBK Neolithic and Uralic community involving a relatively equitable creolization in the vicinity of its purported urheimat. Another is that Indo-European ethnogenesis may have involved substantial borrowing from the populations at the fringes of the Harappan trade network at places like BMAC, perhaps magnified by the impact of the Harappan diaspora created when its empire collapsed and its people relocated in the wake of the drying up of the Saravasti River (notably, the Indo-Aryans, unlike many Indo-European populations, do not have an origin myth that involves a migration from somewhere else). An ethnogenesis born from the interactions of one or more languages of the Caucasus with Uralic would be another possibility. Tracing your way back to a time and place in which the most recent common ancestral language of all Indo-European languages doesn’t tell you anything about the origins of PIE itself.

Your analogy is broken when we take into account the fact that the Seljuq Anatolia hosted for an appreciable period two very different and often clashing forms of Islam (the Islam of the establishment, and the Turkic Islam; they continued to clash as late as the mid-13th century, see the Babai revolt) and the fact that the Islam of the establishment was already the fully formed orthodox Hanafi Sunni Islam from the very beginning of the Seljuq rule in Anatolia, as it was imported from Persia via the Persian Hanafi Sunni religious elite that was brought to Anatolia by the Seljuq elite, who supported them from the beginning, so the Islam of the establishment had no influence from the Islam of the Turkic invaders. So, in Anatolia we do not see a transition from a Tengriist form of Islam to an orthodox form of Islam, rather, we see the concurrent and hostile (to the level of massacres) existence of the two from the very beginning and the ultimate victory of the orthodox Islam.

by analogy, one could speak of distinctive nordic christianity during the early years when the new religion had to accommodate with the old. but this was just a transient. in sharp contrast for various historical reasons irish christianity did develop its own distinctive cultural form which was NOT a transient, and the overturning of irish christianity for roman christianity was not an evolution toward orthodoxy, but a cultural rupture and rejection.

It was basically Tengriism with a Muslim clothing. It was neither Sunni nor Shiite Islam but a very different religion.

tell me about this islam in concrete terms. what made it distinctive from hanafi sunni islam.

You accused me of literalism before, but you are now making the same literalism. If you just focus on my expression “even that is debatable” and take it out of the context, it may sound like bullshit to you. But the rest of the sentence quite clearly shows what I mean by “debatable”: “as the Turkic language that spread in Anatolia is not directly the continuation of the Turkic language of the Turkic invaders, but a form of Turkic that is greatly impacted by the Persian and Arabic of the Muslim ruling class of Anatolia and, especially at the folk level, by the local languages such as Greek and Armenian”. So it is clear from my word “directly” that the Turkic language that spread in Anatolia is some sort of a continuation of the Turkic language of the invaders but not so much due to the great impact from the non-Turkic languages that I mention (from top to down for Persian and Arabic and from bottom to top for Greek and Armenian). I hope I have now made myself clear.

what is turkic islam that you speak of? be precise and specific in your response so i can evaluate it. don’t evade or expend excessive verbiage.

The Turkic Islam I speak of is the kind of Islam that was prevalent among the Turkic invaders of Anatolia. It was quite different in many ways from the Islam of the Muslim establishment in Anatolia, which was established in Anatolia by the Hanafi Sunni Iranian religious elite that came with the Seljuqs. It is the Islam of the establishment that won the day in Anatolia.

this sounds like bullshit to me. of course the substrate has an effect. but anyone who hears turkish sure as hell knows it sounds like a totally bizarre language. but that’s only because you are used to hearing semitic or indo-european languages (the same is true of finnish and hungarian; both shaped by the indo-european neighbors, but notably distinct even to the casual ear).

Even the kind of Islam that spread in much of Anatolia is not the Turkic Islam but the Islam of the Hanafi Sunni Iranian religious elite that came to Anatolia with the Seljuq elite. Only in some small marginal areas of Anatolia (

what is turkic islam that you speak of? be precise and specific in your response so i can evaluate it. don’t evade or expend excessive verbiage.

Actually the Turkic invaders did not leave much of a cultural impact in Anatolia other than language (even that is debatable, as the Turkic language that spread in Anatolia is not directly the continuation of the Turkic language of the Turkic invaders, but a form of Turkic that is greatly impacted by the Persian and Arabic of the Muslim ruling class of Anatolia and, especially at the folk level, by the local languages such as Greek and Armenian) and some products such as yoghurt, which spread not only in Anatolia but all through West Asia during the same time. Even the kind of Islam that spread in much of Anatolia is not the Turkic Islam but the Islam of the Hanafi Sunni Iranian religious elite that came to Anatolia with the Seljuq elite. Only in some small marginal areas of Anatolia (e.g., the relatively depopulated Byzantine-Seljuq border region) did the Turkic invaders leave a relatively strong cultural impact.

ancestor of indo-european), and it can population much of the rest of the world due to cultural advantages. but it may not have those advantages in the anatolian homeland.

As unlikely as this seems, IIRC, this is exactly what happened with Austronesian, as it only closely resembles one of the 5 language groups in Taiwan (aka Formosa) – the most southerly one – but seems to have spread from there to the Philippines and peninsular SE Asia and beyond… so I guess there is at least one instance of this rare event happening…

@39 Fair point.

@37 “You’re presupposing that Hattic preceded Hittite in Anatolia, you aren’t mentioning why. If you want to argue that, you need to provide us with the relevant information if you have it.”

I tend to look at things as a process of elimination which is the wrong way round, however…

If farming started in Eastern Anatolia and then spread in the directions that were viable for farming at the time then either

1) The original farmer population expanded into adjacent suitable regions

or

2) The idea of farming was transferred to adjacent populations in suitable regions

*If* it was the first case then you’d expect peoples like the Sumerians to the south or other early farming groups to the west of Eastern Anatolia to show some cultural and/or genetic connection to the first farmers and from my understanding they don’t show any sign of being IE or PIE. So unless i’ve missed something i think that implies either it’s case (2) or the first farmers weren’t PIE.

Case (1) seems more plausible to me on path of least resistance grounds so that would leave the first farmers not being PIE.

However where the expansion of early farming out of eastern Anatolia was blocked in some way either by physical geography (mountains, marshes, deserts) or climate (too hot, too wet, too cold, too dry) and that blockage lasted for a long time then i think part of the farmer population would develop a purely pastoralist model along the edges of the blockage and that model might spread to the indigenous hunter-gatherers through their hiring as stockmen (if the blockage lasted long enough).

http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2011/06/15/1226075/553655-180611-raparapa.jpg

So the most plausible model to me is original farmers expanding where suitable from Eastern Anatolia – mostly to the west and south – sparking in their wake the creation of pastoralist societies all around the edges of the farming terriotory e.g. the Semitic tribes in the south and maybe the PIE tribes in the vicinity of the transcaucasus. If so, once pastoralized, that position would be very convenient for expanding around the black sea coast, to the steppe or to the Tarim basin – or over-running the non PIE farmers in Anatolia (while the Semitic pastoralist tribes did the same thing in the south).

I think that works as a model – at least to my current level of knowledge.

(I’m not saying it’s true just that it’s a plausible fit.)

I don’t see how these assumptions could work with languages, which can and do borrow freely. For example in the Romani case, the material it has borrowed would make it relatively dissimilar to the other Indo-Aryan languages, and the algorithms would thus position it as an outgroup to those languages. With enough such borrowing, it could even shift position in the tree as a whole, and group with(say) the Italic languages.

take a look at where the arabs spread their language: only in the afro-asiatic domains. in areas like the fertile crescent there were already a fair number of arabs, and the other languages were related.

It only seems to you so because of the usual salience of the periods of war compared to the periods of peace when looking at history. In reality, there were periods of peace in Anatolia during much of the period you mention.

-It’s happened with other languages, this is not a good generic objection.

“If PIE arose in Anatolia then how do the Anatolian hypothesis proponents explain the presense of Hattic, a non IE language ,in the Hittite substratum?”

-You’re presupposing that Hattic preceded Hittite in Anatolia, you aren’t mentioning why. If you want to argue that, you need to provide us with the relevant information if you have it.

“The Mitanni empire covered parts of Anatolia yet the language of the empire was Hurrian, a non IE language even while the elites were significantly composed of Indo-Aryans.”

-The eastern edges but what’s your point here?

“account of Turkic displacing IE in some parts of Eurasia and coming to dominate Anatolia ; that is my point, that we know of IE preceding Turkic in the region. Yet in Anatolia we don’t have record of Hittie or another IE preceding Hattic.”

-Are there records of Hattic that precede Hittite?

“Sri Lanka and Iceland show up as dark blue in the authors’ IE timeline spread; dark blue corresponding to 500 years bp. Indo-Aryan speakers reached Sri Lanka around 2500 bp.”

-You should read the note accompanying the map.

Perhaps you don’t like this particular scenario for good reasons but the arguments you’ve presented aren’t particularly good – at least with no background information for some of them that desperately need it.

I think another possible example comes from the Arab conquests. If a relatively small elite-based expansion has an associated religion and their language is associated with that religion then that may increase the chances of the language taking over although that could only apply if the indo-european expansion had an associated religion.

@30
“If PIE arose in Anatolia then why didn’t IE come to dominate the region , even as it came to dominate areas as far apart as the Western fringe of Europe and most of South Asia?”

Although i personally think PIE is more likely to be in the mountainous regions north and east of Anatolia than Anatolia proper, in the period between the Hittites and the Turks, Anatolia was a crossroads and fought over almost incessantly so it could just be a question of who got to be the ultimate (or most recent) winner.

i don’t personally believe in this model, but it’s not crazy.

http://language.cs.auckland.ac.nz/

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4142

Re. account of Turkic displacing IE in some parts of Eurasia and coming to dominate Anatolia ; that is my point, that we know of IE preceding Turkic in the region. Yet in Anatolia we don’t have record of Hittie or another IE preceding Hattic.

this is a very stupid point. can we get off it? we know “why.” the turks. the objection re: hatti and hurrians seems valid, but let’s think before we type. imagine you’d ask yourself: “if celtic languages came from the continent, why is the only celtic language on the european continent derived from a british variant?” again, we know why.