1 GENESIS Lingua obscura
The justly named Golden Sands resort, north of Varna on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, boasts warm, shallow waters where children can paddle while their parents look on tranquilly from the beach. The continental shelf is wide here, protruding around fifty kilometres (thirty miles). It is submerged today, but there have been times when the sea level was lower and the shelf was exposed. For most of the past two million years, in fact, the Black Sea was not a sea but a lake, a large fresh or brackish pond cut off from the Sea of Marmara, the Mediterranean and oceans beyond. Periodic warming caused the Mediterranean to rise and spill over the rocky sill of the Bosporus, injecting a mass of salty water into the lake and reconnecting it to the world ocean.
The lake was most recently cut off during the last ice age, when much of the world’s water was locked up in glaciers. The glaciers melted, the oceans rose, and the moment when the Bosporus plug could no longer hold back the Mediterranean came, in one telling, between nine and ten thousand years ago. Water roared over that giant weir with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls, triggering a tsunami that surged through estuaries and lagoons and flooded an area the size of Ireland.
The manner of the reconnection, if not the fact of it, is debated. Some say that it happened gradually, as the Black Sea overflowed into the Caspian Sea, the Caspian Sea regurgitated the excess and the oscillation between them eventually subsided. Others say that the water level in the Black Sea rose ten metres as opposed to sixty. If it ‘only’ rose ten metres, the area of land flooded would have been smaller, the size of Luxembourg rather than Ireland. Still others suggest that, because that prodigious wall of water had to pass through the slender bottleneck of the Bosporus, it would have taken time for the sea levels to equalise. The Bosporus Valley might have roared at full spate for decades rather than months, a wondrous sight and sound in itself.
The two American geoscientists who proposed the deluge theory in 1997, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, speculated that the tales told by traumatised eyewitnesses might have been passed down orally over generations, until eventually they inspired the flood myths of the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh. ‘He who saw the deep’ are the first words of Gilgamesh’s poem, written four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, while Noah witnessed ‘all the fountains of the great deep broken up’. There’s no way of testing Ryan and Pitman’s theory, as compelling as it is (and flood myths are not unusual). But perhaps the more profound impact of those events on humanity was that the Black Sea, always a valuable resource in itself, now became a conduit for other resources, including genes, technology and language.
By the time it was reconnected, it was roughly the shape and size that it is today. The Greek geographer Hecataeus of Miletus likened it to a Scythian bow, with the southern coast representing the string and the northern one the curved staff. The Greeks called it the ‘inhospitable sea’ (Pontus Axeinus), until they colonised its bountiful shores in the first millennium BCE and renamed it the ‘hospitable sea’ (Pontus Euxinus). It teemed with fish that had been pursued through the Bosporus Valley, now Strait, by dolphins, seals and minke whales. It was probably Turkish mariners who, pursuing the fish, encountered its treacherous squalls and dubbed it ‘black’.
To the north of the sea lay the steppe, known there as the Pontic steppe in a nod to the Greeks.1 To the east lay the rugged peaks of the Caucasus, to the south the mountains and high plateaus of the Turkish peninsula or Anatolia, to the west the wooded hills of the Balkans and the Danube flood plain. Each was a world unto itself, but they met at the Black Sea, and whatever was exchanged between them could be ferried back deep into the interior via the great rivers that empty into it: not least the Don, Dnieper, Dniester and Danube. (Hold on to that recurring D, a linguistic tale to which we’ll return.)
Ten thousand years ago, the Balkans were inhabited by the hunter-gatherers who had seen out the ice age in Europe. Another group of hunter-gatherers had moved west from the Caspian Sea as the world warmed, settling around the marshes and lagoons of the northern Black Sea coast and the rivers that feed them. At that time, a stretch of river south of modern Kyiv consisted of a series of rocky cataracts and lakes known as the Dnieper Rapids.2 Archaeozoologists, people who study animal bones including those retrieved from old rubbish dumps, say there were catfish in those rapids the size of baby whales. The Eastern hunter-gatherers squatted the riverbanks, spears poised over the brooding megafish.
(The catfish of the Dnieper were up to two and a half metres or over eight feet in length, and three hundred kilogrammes – over six hundred pounds – in weight. Catfish approaching that size still swim in European rivers. They terrorise archaeologists diving for Roman relics in the murky River Rhône, whom they have been known to catch by the flippers, only letting go when they realise that archaeologists are too big to swallow. They are wels catfish, where wels, the common name of the species in German, shares a root with English ‘whale’.)
To the south of the Black Sea, in the Fertile Crescent, the farming revolution was underway. ‘Revolution’ is a somewhat misleading term, in fact, since the set of practices that we call farming came together over a long period of time, in different places, through trial and error. The hunter-gatherers living at the western edge of the Iranian Plateau, in the Zagros Mountains, were probably the first to domesticate the goat (only the second animal to be domesticated after the dog, whose wolfish origins lie deep in the ice age). They likely grew wheat and barley too. To the west of them, in Anatolia and the Levant – modern Lebanon, Israel and Jordan – other hunter-gatherers began penning sheep and cultivating chickpeas, peas and lentils. In time the aurochs, a wild ox with long, curved horns, joined the domestic herd. The first farmers would have needed new words to describe these plants and animals, and the tools they invented to harness them. They would have acquired a vocabulary of agriculture.
Farming became a true revolution when its practitioners started expanding out of the Fertile Crescent. Throughout the twentieth century, archaeologists argued over whether the farmers themselves had migrated, or it was just their inventions that had travelled – whether other populations had simply embraced their ideas. Genetics showed that the farmers had moved, and on a massive scale. But theirs was in no way a conscious empire-building project; with each passing generation they simply needed more land to feed the growing number of mouths. It was colonisation by leapfrog: an advance guard travelling on foot identified a promising new site up to several hundred kilometres ahead, and others gradually settled the land in between. They took their languages with them.
Farmers from Anatolia entered Europe via two routes. One stream crossed the Bosporus, reaching the eastern Balkans by 6500 BCE and then following the Danube inland. Within a thousand years they were building villages in the Carpathian Basin – the depression, centred on modern Hungary, that is bound by the Carpathian Mountains and the Alps. A second stream island-hopped across the Aegean and along the northern Mediterranean seaboard by raft or boat (rowing, not sailing), then headed north from France’s azure coast. The two streams met in the Paris Basin, the lowlands before the Atlantic, and there they mingled before fanning out again. By 4500 BCE, descendants of the Anatolian farmers were all over Europe, as far west as Ireland and as far east as Ukraine. These movements took place over many, many generations, but the distances covered are still extraordinary when you think that, apart from the sea crossings, they happened on foot. There was as yet no donkey or other docile pack animal, no horse that wasn’t wild, no wheel and hence no wagon.
As the farmers advanced, the indigenous hunter-gatherers retreated. They were so few, and their footprint in the landscape so light, by comparison, that the immigrants might have had the impression that they were encroaching on virgin territory, at least to begin with. Some of the displaced hunter-gatherers headed for the Baltic Sea; others may have joined those skewering catfish on the Dnieper (who would certainly have spoken a language that was foreign to them). Still others stayed in their ancestral lands but sought refuge in the hills, or in the densest parts of forests: places that didn’t lend themselves to cultivation, meaning the farmers passed on by.
Occasionally, in a forest clearing, a farmer and a hunter-gatherer must have come face to face. The encounter would have been a shock for both. Roughly forty thousand years had passed since their ancestors had parted ways during the exodus from Africa, enough time for them not only to behave and sound different but to look different too. The farmers were smaller, with dark hair and eyes and, probably, lighter skin. The hunter-gatherers had that now rare combination of dark hair and skin and blue eyes. They had no language in common, and they likely had different ideas on just about everything, from child-rearing to death to the spirit lives of animals. From what archaeologists can tell, such encounters did not typically end in violence. Sometimes the parties exchanged knowledge and objects. Sometimes they interbred. In time, many hunter-gatherers converted to the new economy, ensuring that some of their genes, perhaps even some of their beliefs and words, were passed on. But in general they couldn’t compete. Their way of life and their languages were on a fast track to extinction.
From the Zagros Mountains, the Iranian farmers expanded east across the Iranian Plateau, in the direction of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and north towards the Caucasus. Not even the formidable Greater Caucasus range, with its ‘gloomy, mysterious chasms, into which the mists crept down, billowing and writhing like serpents’ deterred them, though they may have hugged the Caspian coast where the mountains tumble to the plain.3 Soon farming settlements dotted the foothills of the North Caucasus. North of those hills lay the band of wetlands called the Kuma-Manych Depression.4 This might have held the revolution up for a while, but before long it had penetrated the flatlands we call the steppe. And since you couldn’t grow crops in the steppe – at least not in that part of it, where conditions were often too dry – the steppe-dwellers selected the one component of the farming package that worked for them: herding. The idea might have percolated in from the west as well, from the direction of the Carpathians. At first the steppe tribes kept only small herds, for the purposes of ritual sacrifice, and they continued to live off hunting and fishing. In time the herds became a source of food and textiles for them too. And as the herds grew, those people were forced to make occasional forays out of their valleys in search of fresh pasture. They strayed into the open steppe, but never far, and they always returned.
By 4500 BCE, the physical and genetic barriers that had divided Eurasian populations for tens of thousands of years had begun to come down, but a new divide had opened up. This one was cultural. It separated herders from farmers, those whose wealth was mobile from those whose wealth was immobile. The two economic models bred two different mindsets: one that prized self-sufficiency and lived for the present, the other that valued collective decision-making and planned for the future. Both the Bible and the Qur’an recount how this clash of worldviews led to the first murder, that of the shepherd Abel by his farmer brother Cain, but the clash is much older than the Abrahamic scriptures.5 In the Black Sea region it started more than six thousand years ago, when farmers and herders found themselves cheek by jowl at two steppe boundaries: one in eastern Europe, the other in the North Caucasus. That encounter marked the beginning of a dance of death that, for millennia to come, would bind the two in mutual hostility and dependence. Each grew and attained new heights of sophistication thanks to the other, but any malaise that affected one affected the other too, and climate change periodically rolled the dice. It was against this backdrop that the Indo-European languages were born.
Vladimir Slavchev noses his car between the nondescript buildings of an industrial estate and parks by a rusting gate. Beyond the gate a stretch of wasteland slopes down towards Varna Lake to the south. It’s late November 2022. The trees are bare, but they still screen the city of Varna beneath us, to the left, and the Black Sea beyond it. Glancing over my left shoulder, I can just make out the bluffs running north-east along the Bulgarian coast, up towards Golden Sands and beyond.
Security cameras train their lenses on Slavchev as he unlocks the padlock on the gate. Never was such an unprepossessing parcel of earth under such heavy if discreet protection, but that’s because it was here, exactly fifty years ago, that a man named Raycho Marinov was digging a ditch for a high-voltage electricity cable when he noticed that he had disturbed some metal and flint objects. He turned his finds over to the local archaeological museum and subsequent investigations revealed the remains of one of the most advanced societies ever to grace prehistoric Europe.
Here on the hill, within sight of their settlement on the shore of Lake Varna, a wealthy community of artisans and traders had buried their dead amid sumptuous grave goods. Besides exquisitely honed copper weapons and tools of flint and antler, they had interred thousands of gold objects including diadems, sceptres, bull-shaped figurines and astragals (sheep knuckle bones used as dice in the ancient world, though these ones were cast in gold). The cemetery at Varna was in use for just a couple of hundred years either side of 4500 BCE, but the gold extracted from it far exceeded that found at all other fifth-millennium sites in the world combined, including those in Mesopotamia and Egypt. And this at a time when vanishingly few human beings anywhere had set eyes on a metal object. Varna upended thinking about global prehistory. It forced the carving out of a new age from the late Neolithic: the Copper Age. It was an archaeological sensation.
Slavchev, who is an archaeologist, shows me the eastern sector where his team dug the previous summer. Pointing to a patch of darker soil in the wall of a trench, he tells me that it indicates an as yet unexcavated burial. He still doesn’t know exactly how far the cemetery extends. His predecessor, Ivan Ivanov, excavated intensively for two decades, with labour provided by seventeen long-haul prisoners under the supervision of their guards (the best workers he’d ever had, he told Slavchev). But in 1991 Ivanov decided to put the project on hold, until such time as the newly democratic republic of Bulgaria had more resources to allocate to it and his successors could apply cutting-edge tools. The significance of the cemetery was already beyond doubt, and had been since his discovery in 1974 of the spectacular Grave 43. The sheer quantity of gold in this grave, including bracelets, rings, a sceptre, a penis sheath, even a gold-spangled hat, indicated that the man buried there had been a chief or priest. He had been around fifty at the time of his death. A reconstruction of his face, modelled on his skull, revealed a high-foreheaded, patrician-looking figure with an aquiline nose.
Ivanov died in 2001, and the site lay dormant for twenty years. Slavchev waited in turn for Bulgaria to get richer, only reviving the project in 2021. A stocky man with an easy smile and a wiry brown ponytail shot through with grey, he has the unflappable air of one who operates on millennial timescales. ‘These people have lain in the ground for thousands of years,’ he says. ‘Who cares if it’s me or someone else who digs them up?’ The one resource he does have plenty of is labour (no longer Soviet-era lifers, but paid excavators), and he makes use of it as long as the weather permits. Having completed the season’s dig at Varna, he had redeployed his team to another site about forty kilometres (twenty-five miles) inland, up in the hills. There, on a grassy, west-facing terrace above which rose stands of oak in all the splendid shades of autumn, they were unearthing the remains of a pottery workshop where people of the Hamangia culture had once decorated pots with bright-orange pointillist swirls.6
Around seven and a half thousand years ago, long before Varna had distinguished itself, the Hamangia had been among the first farmers to settle these parts. They brought with them material reminders of their Anatolian roots, in the form of the white or pink-orange Spondylus shells that their relatives had collected from the islands and coast of the Aegean (Spondylus, a scallop, doesn’t grow in the Black Sea, preferring the warmer, saltier waters of the Mediterranean). These they turned into bracelets, belts and pendants, or beads which they sewed into cloth, before they exchanged them for other prestige goods. Their exchange networks stretched north across the Dobruja Plain to the Danube and its delta on the Black Sea.
In many respects the Hamangia were typical of European farming communities at that time. They lived in small settlements of wattle-and-daub houses with thatched roofs, whose walls they may also have decorated with colourful swirls, and they kept cows, goats, sheep and pigs. But there were a few ways in which they set themselves apart, Slavchev explains. They had sufficient understanding of chemical and physical processes to be able to produce sophisticated artistic effects with their ceramics. By regulating the oxygen supply to their kilns, they could obtain a black surface with a metallic lustre or an intense red or orange, to order. A Hamangia potter, possibly a woman since potters often were, left behind the first known depiction of thought in the history of art. Twelve centimetres (nearly five inches) tall, made of dark, burnished clay, the sculpture depicts a man sitting on a stool with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. The Romanian archaeologists who found it dubbed it ‘The Thinker’ (it has a pair, ‘The Sitting Woman’). It is seven thousand years older than Rodin’s statue of the same name.
Slavchev and I are standing by a trench-in-progress. My eye falls on a sack of bones at its edge, and, following my gaze, a cheerful, ruddy-faced man in the trench puts down his spade and plunges his hand in. Pulling out a specimen about twenty-five centimetres (ten inches) long, he lays it across my palm. Slavchev identifies it as a cow’s thigh bone. ‘They used them as ice skates,’ he says, beaming. The climate in Copper Age Bulgaria was slightly warmer and wetter than it is now, but a body of water might still freeze over in winter, especially in these uplands. Slavchev says that prehistoric people strapped on cow bones at the slightest provocation; a frozen puddle would do.7 I picture a woman skating beneath a leaden sky, wrists folded behind her back, dreaming of the statuette she’ll sculpt that day.
The Hamangia culture lasted for a thousand years. Towards the end of its existence, its bearers experimented with placing copper ore in their kilns instead of fashioned clay. They may not have been the first to extract copper from its ore, by the process we call smelting, but they were probably the ones who bequeathed that valuable skill to the people of Varna. There are sites in Bulgaria, notably one called Durankulak on the coast, where layers of earth containing Hamangia artefacts lie beneath layers of earth containing Varna artefacts. This is how archaeologists know that the splendours of the latter grew out of the humbler foundations of the former. A thread connected the two, a continuity of ideas and traditions. Varna people continued to value the precious Spondylus shells of their distant ancestors.
By 4600 BCE, the inventiveness that budded with Hamangia had bloomed at Varna. The population had grown, in the region to the west of the Black Sea, and copper production had been scaled up accordingly. The ore was brought from half a dozen mines across the Balkans in the form of azurite and malachite. These minerals were powdered and mixed with ground charcoal before being roasted in kilns fanned by bellows. At eight hundred degrees Celsius (nearly fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit), the copper bled out in glistening beads that could be tapped and moulded into implements and ornaments.
An aura of magic must have hovered around the early smiths, who drew this gleaming marvel from blue-green rock. (It is even possible, as we’ll see, that they were early models for Faust, the doomed man who prefers human to divine knowledge.) But in the Bulgarian heartland of the copper industry they formed just one element of a skilled community that included metallurgists, casters, miners and charcoal-burners – a level of specialisation, and of organisation, that Europe had never seen before. Around Varna Lake alone, eight settlements accommodated this community along with its support industries and dependants. Each one had up to eight hundred inhabitants, twice as many as a typical Hamangia village, and they lived in large, often two-storeyed timber houses that were laid out along streets according to a preconceived plan. Beyond the settlements, which were protected by wooden fences, lay cultivated fields, grazing herds and the dead. The Varna cemetery excavated by Ivanov turned out to be just one of several, albeit the richest discovered to date.
In time, the smiths added gold to their repertoire. It was panned out of the rivers that rose in the nearby Balkan Mountains, probably using fleeces, and brought to Varna as grains or nuggets. Ground up and suspended in an emulsion, it was painted on ceramics (the same technique was used with powdered graphite to produce stunning geometric designs in black and gold). Smelted to remove impurities, it was cast into jewellery and sceptres or other symbols of power. And besides gold and copper, there was a third commodity that was vitally important to Varna: salt. Farming communities used this mainly for conserving food, and some have argued that demand for it was so dependably high that it was salt rather than metals that made Varna rich. Up the River Provadia, which flowed into Lake Varna, a productive salt spring attracted its own walled settlement complete with shrine and cemetery. Here, in an industrial-scale operation, ceramic bowls were filled with brine and placed in giant ovens to accelerate the water’s evaporation.
By 4500 BCE, the Copper Age societies of south-eastern Europe had reached the zenith of their wealth and influence. Their mastery of pyrotechnology, for which they must have developed a vocabulary, had put them in a league of their own. And what they produced, others wanted. Grave goods resembling those at Varna and Durankulak, including gold jewellery with some of the same motifs, have been unearthed from contemporary cemeteries on Georgia’s coast and at Trabzon in north-eastern Türkiye. More astounding still, in a world before wheels, the Balkan miracle found its way deep into the steppe. Copper traced to one of the principal mines supplying Varna was adorning the bodies of the dead at Khvalynsk, an important ritual centre two thousand kilometres (twelve hundred miles) to the north-east, on the banks of the Volga. The copper ornaments in the Khvalynsk cemetery were more crudely made than those at Varna, suggesting that the copper was smelted in the Balkans, then transported in the form of small rods or ingots to its destination. There it was reheated (at this point lower temperatures sufficed), flattened into sheets using hammers of stone and antler, and turned into ornaments using chisels – beaver incisors set into bone handles.
How those rods or ingots were transported over such large distances is not clear. There were no wagons yet, but couriers could have carried small packages overland (the journey from Varna to Khvalynsk could have been completed in about a month on foot). Larger ones might have been loaded into dugout canoes. Though no remains of canoes have been definitively identified on the Black Sea’s west coast, from this period, miniature models of them have, and archaeologists assume that some kind of vessel must have been in use there, for transport and fishing, since the bones of dolphins, seals and even whales have been found at Durankulak.
A large canoe six metres (twenty feet) in length could have carried up to four people and the equivalent of two men’s weight in cargo. The copper could have travelled from the Black Sea to the Volga via the waterways of the Kuma-Manych Depression and then inland to Khvalynsk. Oxen, by now beasts of burden, could have dragged the heavy canoes upstream on the return journey. On the capricious Black Sea, however, seaborne trade would have been restricted to a short summer season, and even then such a vessel would not have strayed beyond shallow coastal waters. (Fisherfolk out of the Turkish port of Sinop have a saying: ‘The Black Sea has only three safe harbours: July, August and Sinop.’)
Who were the couriers – and what language did they speak? Who were those mysterious people who travelled so far, risking ambush by hostile tribes, not to mention the wild animals that skittered or lumbered into their path? Woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses had vanished with the last of the ice, but they still had bears, lynx, wild boar, aurochs and lions to contend with. Lion’s teeth, pierced so that they could be worn as pendants, have been found in burials from this period around the Black Sea. The American archaeologist David Anthony, whom we met in the Prologue, has long argued that steppe societies dispatched their chiefly elite on this perilous mission.
Anthony figures among the most ardent and imaginative sleuths of the Indo-European languages of the last half-century, and the first to appreciate that ancient DNA would rewrite their story. But it’s through the archaeological record that he detects the rise of this elite, and in particular through the steppe tribes’ changing death rites. The hunter-fishers of the Dnieper Rapids had buried their dead in communal pits with not much more than a few deer or fish teeth to embellish their corpses. Once herding had infiltrated the steppe, burials remained communal, but certain individuals began to stand out in the mass graves by virtue of their eye-catching regalia, including caps and breastplates made of flattened boar’s tusks, and belts of mother-of-pearl. Copper beads of Balkan provenance appeared, signifying status. Later on, steppe cemeteries shrank and the dead began to be buried singly, sometimes under small earthen mounds known as kurgans.8
By 4400 BCE similar kurgans had appeared in the Lower Danube Valley, very close to the northernmost copper-working settlements. They contained a great deal of copper, but also curious polished stone objects carved in the shape of horses’ heads. These strange objects also crop up in settlements from the Balkans to Khvalynsk. Anthony interprets them as the heads of maces or clubs, the type of weapon that a chief might wield. Others see them as tools for polishing metal and infer that the steppe envoys were artisans. Whoever they were, it probably wasn’t only men moving around the Black Sea at that time. Mitochondrial DNA, the kind that passes from mother to child, has been found in burials at Khvalynsk that originated in Balkan populations. And there are hints that women and children were moving in the other direction too.
One of the most intriguing such cases is that of a five-year-old girl who was buried with lavish grave goods in the Varna cemetery itself. Geneticists later retracted their conclusion that she was related to the steppe tribes, on the grounds that her DNA may have become contaminated. But despite the enduring question mark over her ancestry she remains the subject of intense speculation because of her unusual diet. In the farming societies of the Balkans, meat typically formed a smaller proportion of people’s diet than it did on the steppe, and women ate less of it than men. Yet more than half the girl’s diet consisted of meat, a higher proportion than characterised most of the men around her, including the chief in Grave 43. Could she have been the child of high-status immigrants, the daughter of a chieftain hailing from the steppe?
The individuals buried under the kurgans north of the Danube appear to have been pretty diverse genetically. Some carried ancestry from the steppe, some carried local farming or hunter-gatherer ancestry, others carried mixtures of all three. One way of interpreting this diversity is to posit that the first steppe emissaries found local imitators who acted as middlemen in the copper trade, or local wives with whom they had children who, once grown, took up that role. The coveted metal may have passed through a chain of intermediaries, each of whom travelled a relatively short distance to convey it. Whatever was given in exchange has not survived, but it may have been perishable. Among the commodities that have been proposed are animal skins, cured meats and steppe plants with medicinal or hallucinogenic properties. (It’s possible that nothing was given, in which case ‘exchange’ becomes ‘theft’, but scholars think this unlikely because of the durability of the trade network through time, and the genetic and cultural mixing that accompanied it.)
The more tantalising question, from the point of view of this story, is what language the couriers and their suppliers negotiated in (and what language the little girl’s death rites were pronounced in). The languages spoken around the Black Sea at the end of the last ice age are, sadly, beyond the reach of linguists’ reconstructions. We can nevertheless be close to certain that, before they entered into their long-distance exchange activities, the steppe dandies with their mother-of-pearl belts and the gilded incumbent of Grave 43 had no language in common. It is also clear that the customers from the steppe must have lacked a lexicon of metalwork and smelting, at least to begin with, since they also lacked the technology.
In all of recorded history, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single example of human beings trading in high-value goods without an effective means of communication. Usually what has happened, in situations where the parties initially lack a common tongue, is that they have developed a lingua franca or shared language of commerce. The eponymous Lingua Franca, the supposed ‘Language of the Franks’, was spoken in Mediterranean ports from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century.9 (It was probably spoken earlier, before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, just not written down for a long time.) It developed out of Latin, but not the classical Latin of Livy or Tacitus, the ‘vulgar’ form spoken by ordinary, mostly illiterate people – the soldiers, sailors, colonists and enslaved people who frequented those ports. It was endlessly disparaged by the urban elite, precisely because it was a language of faraway places, of souks and brothels and cockfights. It was a chameleon, taking on the colours of Italian, Catalan, Occitan or any of the other emerging Romance languages, depending on where it was spoken and by whom. In the hundreds of Roman colonies of North Africa, it was strongly influenced by Arabic (‘sugar’, ‘artichoke’ and ‘zero’ are three of many Arabic words that entered English via the Lingua Franca).
It is likely that a lingua franca was also in use in the Black Sea region five thousand years earlier. We can only speculate as to what it sounded like, but some scholars have proposed that an ancestor of all the Indo-European languages was that lingua franca – that this ancestor gained an early foothold as a language of trade, eventually being adopted by many of the populations involved in that trade. Linguists are mostly unenthused by this idea. They point out that lingua francas are tightly tethered to the activity for which they were forged, tending to exist alongside their speakers’ mother tongues without replacing them. Becoming a lingua franca is not, in itself, a recipe for world domination.
Nevertheless, many linguists do agree that an Indo-European ancestor was probably the mother tongue of one of the partners in that Copper Age trade network – the language of the couriers from Trabzon or Colchis on the Georgian coast, perhaps, or of those who hailed from the steppe via the Rivers Volga and Don. They think this mainly because, in order to have produced the degree of divergence that they see between all known branches of the Indo-European family, the common ancestor must already have been spoken by then. And since we know that the Black Sea network operated for hundreds of years, that women moved through it and that children were born of mixed parentage, there would have been time for generations to grow up who spoke more than one of the languages involved in the copper trade, in addition to the lingua franca. These bi- or plurilinguals, who as natural mediators might have become wealthy and powerful in their own right, would also have acted as conduits for the influence of one language on another. Through them, the Indo-European ancestor might have absorbed words, sounds, meanings and grammatical constructions from the other languages in the network (while donating its own to them). If that is what happened, then the Indo-European languages that we speak today contain echoes of the Pontic seaboard as it accosted traders’ ears over six thousand years ago.
Around 4400 BCE, signs of strain began to appear among the farming societies of south-east Europe. A site called Tell Karanovo, two hundred and fifty kilometres (one hundred and fifty miles) south-west of Varna, was abandoned.10 Starting with the first farmers to settle the Balkans more than two thousand years earlier, people had built and rebuilt on that site almost without interruption, until finally, in the late Copper Age, they vanished. Slavchev says that he never feels the past weigh on him so heavily as at Karanovo. You can stand in a trench there today and let your eye wander up twelve metres (forty feet) of compacted human debris: the trash of a civilisation that lasted longer than Christianity so far.
Hundreds of settlements followed Karanovo into oblivion, many of them apparently burned by their inhabitants before they left. Within two centuries Varna had stopped producing its glittering marvels and its cemetery had fallen into disuse. Europe wouldn’t regain its social and technical heights for over a thousand years. The Spondylus shells that the farmers had treasured when they were still in the Near East, and exchanged like charms ever since, were now the opaque shibboleths of a vanished world. At about the same time, Balkan copper more or less disappeared from steppe graves, and its couriers disappeared from the Balkans. It is possible that the steppe tribes had become dependent on the metal, that its distribution in the form of rewards and tributes had become a vital means of keeping the peace among them, and when it dried up peace broke down. At any rate, there were no more sacrifices at Khvalynsk, and no more feasts. The shamans fell silent.
The balance of power was shifting in the Black Sea region, and the linguistic landscape with it. The Indo-European ancestor evolved and fragmented as its speakers’ circumstances changed. And as it expired, its daughters entered the scene.
Alexey Nikitin hails from the village of Pochuyky, where steppe shades into forest-steppe south-west of modern Kyiv. His wife grew up across the street from him. Both played as children in the shadow of a vast earthen mound, the tomb of a Scythian warrior who died in the first millennium BCE. These days the mound is unimpressive; farmers have ploughed it nearly flat. But when Nikitin was five years old, he says, ‘You could see it for miles.’
Pochuyky existed long before the Scythians arrived. One of the oldest continuously settled places in Ukraine, it lies in a corridor through which farmers from the west and herders from the east advanced and retreated over thousands of years. Nikitin, a palaeogeneticist, considers that his blood contains traces of all of them. He’s the latest in a long line of migrants, and is used to moving on when things get tough. These days he works in the United States, at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University, but the burial mound at Pochuyky still looms large in his imagination. He thinks deeply about the boundary that it marks, and how its meaning has changed over time.
Forest-steppe describes the band of sparse woodland that separates the forests of northern and western Eurasia from the treeless steppe, and it traverses modern Ukraine. When Varna was thriving, that ecological boundary coincided with a cultural one – the boundary between farmers and herders. The cultural divide was in turn reinforced by anatomical differences, with the gracile farmers and the taller, more robust herders still able to distinguish each other at fifty paces, and we can be fairly sure that different languages were spoken either side of it. Around 4200 BCE, however, the climate began to change, and the ecological boundary to slide.
Conditions grew cooler and drier around the Black Sea. Grassy steppe encroached on forest, expanding grazing opportunities for herders and making it easier for them to move around because rivers were fordable for longer. Life became tougher for farmers, on the other hand, since without rain their crops failed. One year of drought is survivable for the average farming community that sagely keeps grain in reserve. Two or three in a row can spell hardship, and they were now experiencing sustained periods of drought. It seems likely that, to add to their woes, their salt springs dried up. Control of this lucrative industry shifted to the populations living around the estuaries and lagoons further north. In the Dniester Delta, south of modern Odesa, the salt simply dries out on the flats; all you have to do is pick it up.
People began to leave Varna and the other Balkan settlements and move north, following the salt. In the lands beyond the Danube they would have encountered tribes living a more mobile lifestyle. To feed their families, some farmers may have converted to that lifestyle. (The evidence for this is that, in the Balkan uplands, no settlements were built for five hundred years following the collapse of the farming communities.) But they would have been novices at it: they didn’t know how to manage large herds, or where the best pastures lay, or when those pastures were at their most succulent. They would have had to draw closer to the ancestral foe to survive. They might have started speaking a steppe language, no hardship for those who were already bilingual. But the power dynamic had switched: now they were the underdogs, the ones asking.
At some Copper Age Balkan sites, though not at Karanovo or Varna, there is evidence of extreme violence just before they were abandoned: massacres that spared no man, woman or child. This violence wasn’t restricted to the Balkans. The archaeological record attests to growing tensions across Neolithic Europe at this time – manifesting, for example, in ever more robust fortifications around settlements – and these only intensified over the next few centuries. Knowing this changes the complexion of the strife in the Balkans. It could have been farmer-on-farmer, as climate change exacerbated social tensions within and between their communities, leading to scapegoating and feuds. David Anthony suspects that the steppe envoys may have delivered a final coup de grâce. Those peripatetic chieftains with their horse-head maces might have spied an opportunity to seize the means of production. It wouldn’t have taken much. If they harried the farmers in their fields until the latter no longer dared leave their stockades, hunger would eventually have forced them to flee. Those who took their place would have spoken different languages.
A strange thing now happened. People who had previously inhabited small villages in the forests of Romania and western Ukraine began to move across the forest-steppe boundary, into the then sparsely populated area between modern Kyiv and Odesa.11 Migrating east as far as the right or western bank of the Dnieper, they built settlements that were up to twenty times the size of their old ones. These astonishing megasites, some of which may have been home to ten thousand people, have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. Some say they were simply farming villages that swelled as the population grew, others that they were refugee camps built to accommodate the farmers fleeing the calamity further south. Still others consider them a radical social experiment, proto-cities built along egalitarian lines.
Whatever they were, within a couple of centuries they were quite permeable to steppe influence. The farmers’ ceramics were much finer than those of the herders, yet now the farmers started to import inferior pots from their neighbours in the flatlands. Archaeologists have been at a loss to explain why, but Nikitin thinks a possible answer is that they were exchanging, not pottery, but potters. By 4000 BCE, ancient DNA reveals that steppe women were moving into farming settlements, farming women were moving into steppe settlements, and these were no longer rare or sporadic events.
It’s impossible to know if those women moved willingly or not, but whether they were wives or captives, they would have had to learn a new language – the dominant language in the new place – while probably speaking to their children in their mother tongue (over the course of history, we know, captive women did just this). They may have passed on other skills, too, including knowledge related to food production. By the time the climate grew warmer again, around 3800 BCE, steppe herders in the contact zone were dabbling in crop cultivation. What had been a clear cultural and linguistic demarcation was becoming a continuum. And the boundary was softening further east as well, thanks to dramatic developments far to the south.
A few centuries after the appearance of the first megasites in Ukraine, Mesopotamian villages by the names of Uruk and Tell Brak also began to swell. These would become the first cities that prehistorians would recognise as such, because they were organised much like our modern cities – albeit extreme versions of them. They were dizzyingly hierarchical, with god-like rulers at the top, festooned in the trappings of power, and slaves at the unenviable bottom. As these southern cities grew, so did their appetite for raw materials. The kings of Uruk established a network of trading colonies, a mercantile dragnet to suck those materials in, and the Caucasus, so rich in timber, pasture and metal ores, marked its northern extremity. (As in the Balkans, people used fleeces to pan for gold in those mountain streams. It was in Georgia, in the ancient kingdom of Colchis, that the Greek mythological hero Jason found the golden fleece: ‘… he lifted the great fleece in his hands, and over his fair cheeks and forehead the sparkle of the wool threw a blush like flame’.12)
By 3700 BCE, this other experiment in urbanism was making itself felt where the Caucasus meets the steppe. Farmers of Iranian ancestry had inhabited those foothills for hundreds of years, trading and interbreeding with the steppe-dwellers to the north. Now tombs on a truly monumental scale erupted from their midst. One kurgan was nearly as high as a four-storey house and the length of a football pitch in diameter. Beneath it lay a man, two women who had been sacrificed to accompany him to the afterlife, and a magnificent trove of treasure. Besides figurines in the form of a lion and a bull – Mesopotamian power symbols – the deceased took with him quantities of gold, silver, turquoise, lapis lazuli and carnelian, exotic luxuries from faraway lands. Under another kurgan, a man had been draped in an ankle-length coat made from the skins of two dozen sousliks, or ground squirrels.
These fur-coated princelings, or oligarchs, were the beneficiaries of that prehistoric gold rush.13 Archaeologists disagree as to whether they were emissaries from Uruk itself, or local entrepreneurs, but having amassed fabulous wealth, they patrolled the limits of the Mesopotamian world oozing glamour and ruthlessness. They even took to their graves the cauldrons and meat hooks that had served them at banquets, and the gold straws through which they had sucked ceremonial beer. If they were colonisers, the piedmont seems to have been where their covetousness ran out. Their inner gaze was directed firmly south. Nevertheless, the new technologies that they flaunted at the steppe’s edge attracted attention. They included the first bronzes, copper-arsenic alloys whose greater strength and flexibility translated into superior weapons, and possibly, the wagon.
Sometime between 4000 and 3500 BCE, the first wheeled vehicle trundled into the steppe, pulled by oxen. It’s a measure of how transformative this technology was that evidence for it appears simultaneously east, west and south of the Black Sea, and archaeologists can’t say exactly where it was invented. The steppe herders, by now seasoned middlemen in an international trade network, immediately saw what it could do for them. Couriers could transport heavier payloads: salt from estuary to megasite, ore from mine to forest-steppe (where the timber grew to fuel the smelting furnaces). Exactly how useful it was to begin with is disputed: the first wagons lacked a steerable front axis, meaning they could only move straight ahead. But roads weren’t long in coming; archaeologists have traced a network of them connecting the crossing-places of rivers. And the hauliers, too, may have operated in bone-rattling relay.
Goods were certainly being traded in larger quantities from this time on, and they were travelling further too. Caucasian-style bronze daggers found their way, along with Baltic amber and Aegean coral, into settlements at the mouth of the Dniester. Fine pottery with the stamp of the Ukrainian megasites began moving across the Pontic steppe in bulk, as did silver. Mesopotamian cylinder seals, used for signing or sealing documents, have been found at sites on the north-east coast of that sea, that might have travelled up by boat from Trabzon.
By now the middlemen may have had access to longboats, powered by many oars, but on land the wagon-driver was king. East of Stavropol in the North Caucasus, a man was buried sitting up in one (his skeleton bore several healed fractures, an occupational hazard).14 Along with the goods travelled knowledge and beliefs. The Caucasian oligarchs’ monumental death mounds were soon being imitated, not only in the steppe adjacent to them but in the Dniester Valley far to the west. In some settlements along that river, kurgans abutted the flat cemeteries favoured by the more egalitarian farmers. Languages surely spread and mixed too. It’s possible that the wagon-drivers spoke an Indo-European dialect, a daughter of the common ancestor, which they ferried back and forth across the steppe.
Around 3500 BCE, the megasites in turn were abandoned. Since their occupants left no trace of themselves, not a single bone or tooth (they may have cremated their dead, or left them out for the birds), the demise of those sites is as mysterious as their rise. Some suspect that they were casualties of the next iteration of the dance of death, rendered uninhabitable by the incessant threat of raids from the steppe. Others think that after seven hundred years, the experiment in decentralised city-dwelling was shelved, perhaps for reasons of internal politics. The survivors scattered, moving closer to steppe settlements or retreating back behind the forest-steppe boundary.
What followed was a period of broken borders, of fluidity and fusion across the western steppe. And out of that vortex of genes and ideas arose a revolutionary new culture. Permanent settlements vanished. Kurgan cemeteries stretched in long lines across the interior grasslands. The people who built them were the first herders to detach themselves from the river valleys and to adopt a fully nomadic lifestyle: the Yamnaya. They expanded rapidly, sweeping before them the intricate tapestry of cultures that had preceded and given rise to them, until they came up against the old enemy again – the farmers in their settled villages. In the west they overran the boundary that had once passed through Pochuyky. In the east they crossed the Volga. And then they kept on going, taking the mother of all living Indo-European languages with them.
