The Slavs (Ancient Peoples and Places, Vol. 74) by Marija Gimbutas

Linguistic bootstrap analysis of Indo-European languages (Gray & Atkinson 2003) places the earliest divergence of PIE at about with 6500 BC (+/- a few hundred years). The question is, what language did the farmers speak? Indeed the patriarchal pastoral society reconstructed by comparative Indo-European mythology fits well with those events, and the archaeology also matches.

They had a patriarchal society, and worshipped the sun rather than the mother goddess. These invaders established an elite ruling class that lived in fortified enclosures and dominated the local conquered farmer populations. The evidence does not discriminate between the two positions.ģ) Gimbutas (and most others) equate the Indo-Europeans with the Kurgan-building Indo-Iranian expansion from the steppe north of the Black Sea who invaded on horseback into Europe after about 4500 BC. While the Minoans themselves did not speak Indo-European, their written records may well have been recorded in a more ancient Indo-European script, like church Latin. When you boil this argument down though, it has holes.ġ) The language spoken by the first farmers is not attested linguistically, so we don't know whether they spoke Indo-European.Ģ) There are written texts, such as the Old European Dispillio Tablet from northern Greece, which shares certain characters with Early Minoan written texts: the undeciphered Linear A script. Gimbutas, and much of established opinion after her, argue that the first farmers were non-Indo-European speakers because they were matriarchal mother worshippers, and because Indo-European comparative mythology paints a portrait of a male dominated (patriarchal) society for the society of people who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE). I do have a different opinion on just who these people were though.

On the whole I thoroughly enjoyed this book. This is essentially a technical academic summary of archaeological finds, overglossed with Gimbutas' interpretations about the mother-worshipping nature of the society involved, and its eventual demise at the hand of horse-riding nomadic Indo-European (IE) invaders who originated from the steppe. If you are, then it should be a must read. I enjoyed this book, but if you are not even mildly interested in the first farming societies that moved into Europe via Greece from about 6500 BC, along with their package of Neolithic technologies, then this is not for you.

The Slavs (Ancient Peoples and Places, Vol. 74) by Marija Gimbutas