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Talking Neolithic: the Case for Hatto-Minoan and Its Relationship to Sumerian

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Talking Neolithic: the Case for Hatto-Minoan and Its Relationship to Sumerian Talking Neolithic: The Case for Hatto-Minoan and its Relationship to Sumerian Peter Schrijver University of Utrecht It is argued that the Minoan language of second-millennium BC Crete stands a good chance of being descended from the language that was imported into Crete by the earliest farmers that colonized the Island in the 7th millennium BC. Evidence is presented that links Minoan to the Hattic language of second- millennium BC northern Anatolia. An analysis of the Hattic verbal system supports the hypothesis that in turn Hattic is related to Sumerian. The existence of a Hatto-Sumero-Minoan language family is posited, which predates the expansions of Semitic and Indo-European in the Near East and which is implicated in the spread of migrant farmers into Europe. A word for ’pig’ is reconstructed for that language family. 1. Language, genes and culture The expansion of a language across a geographical area takes place as a result of two mechanisms: the language is taken along by people who migrate into new territory, or the language is adopted by local populations beside or instead of their original language. Before the times of widespread formal education, mass media and the internet, language spread by acculturation always went hand in hand with spread by migration: only the presence of migrant native speakers in a new territory is capable of exposing the natives to the new language and of creating social pressure to adopt that language. Exposure and social pressure are what it takes for a population to trade its native language for a different one. Yet the ratio according to which migration and acculturation contribute to language shift in individual cases may vary strongly. In the modern period, acculturation has played a more important part than migration in the expansion of English in Ireland, Wales and Highland Scotland at the expense of native Gaelic and Welsh, and in the spread of French at the expense of Breton. So Talking Neolithic: The Case for Hatto-Minoan 337 it was with the spread of Latin throughout the Roman Empire in the early centuries AD. In North America, intercontinental migration led to replacement rather than acculturation of Native American populations, and the spread of English in North America owes more to migration and segregation than to acculturation of Native Americans. On the other hand, the fact that English rather than the other immigrant languages managed to impose itself as a standard language mainly was the result of acculturation among the immigrant groups. The ratio according to which migration versus acculturation played their parts in effectuating language shift is of relevance to our ability to align linguistic history with data from archaeology and evolutionary genetics. The more a language shift was accompanied by the migration of speakers into a new territory, the larger the impact of those migrants on the local gene pool and the local material and non-material culture, and the larger the chances that modern scholars may recover that language expansion went hand in hand with the expansion of material culture and genes. Conversely, if a language expanded largely as a result of acculturation, the accompanying signal in the gene pool and the material culture is weak and hence difficult or impossible to recover by modern scholars working on remote time periods. It is unquestionably the case that the adoption of agriculture in Europe during the early Neolithic period (ca. 9000-7000 BP) constituted a major cultural and demographic break with hunter-gatherer life that existed previously and, depending on the area involved, continued alongside it for a longer or shorter period. It was a cultural break in the sense that resources, the calendar of activities throughout the year and the mindset required to be a successful agriculturalist were of a completely different nature, and a demographic break in the sense that successful agriculture allowed a manifold increase of the population.1 1A recent study that underlines the marked population increase that went hand in hand with the arrival of Linear Pottery Culture in Central Europe and the extremely low levels of Mesolithic population prior to this arrival is Shennan - Edinborough (2007). 338 Peter Schrijver The theme of this article is identifying the potential linguistic impact of the early Neolithic in Europe. It is a long- standing and widespread opinion among archaeologists that the early expansion of the Neolithic in a northwestern direction, from Anatolia into Greece, across the Balkans and following the river courses into Central Europe (Linear Pottery Culture), owed more to migration (demic diffusion) than to acculturation (the record for the western expansion, across the Mediterranean, into Spain and then northwards through France, is less clear but seems to have involved more acculturation).2 In accordance with this opinion, the Neolithic expansion that stretched from Anatolia to the Linear Pottery Culture in Central Europe was largely the product of migrant farmers who from generation to generation expanded the area of cultivated land.3 These are circumstances predicting that the expansion of Neolithic culture was accompanied by the spread of language and genes from Anatolia. And indeed potential genetic signals have been identified that attest to this expansion.4 Ever since Renfrew (1987), the idea that the Neolithic expansion into Europe between ca. 8500-7000 BP can be identified with the expansion of the Indo-European language family has been popular among many - but by no means all (notably Mallory 1989; Anthony 2007) - archaeologists. This idea received support from research by people who applied to language history phylogenetic methods developed for dating evolutionary change in biology (Gray - Atkinson 2003), while others working in that field dissented on methodological grounds that affect the possibility of dating branches on genealogical language trees (Evans et al. 2006). Pereltsvaig and 2Günther et al. (2015) is an important genetic study that strengthens the case for immigration over acculturation, however. 3A recent survey of calibrated 14C datings of Neolithic sites showed that the Neolithic expansion progressed by leaps rather than uniformly (Bocquet- Appel et al. 2009). 4Haak et al. (2010) investigated ancient DNA from Linear Pottery Culture burials and identified links with the Near East and Anatolia. Fernández et al. (2014) studied ancient DNA from Near Eastern Pre-Pottery Neolithic burials and confirmed genetic expansion from this area across Anatolia and into Europe. Balaresque et al. (2010) studied Y-chromosome microsatellite variation of haplotype R1b1b2, which they linked to the Near East (but see Busby et al. (2012) for a critique). Talking Neolithic: The Case for Hatto-Minoan 339 Lewis (2015) is an important recent study that is highly critical of applying Bayesian phylogenetic methodology to language history. Most linguists as well as archeologists who are aware of historical linguistics reject the idea that Indo-European spread so early, mainly and most persuasively because of the fact that ancestral Proto-Indo-European had words for items that do not appear in the archaeological record until approximately 6000 years BP at the earliest, so that the spread of Indo-European and the accompanying disintegration of Proto-Indo-European must be dated later than that (Darden 2001; Anthony 2007: 59-82). 2. About this article The theme of this article is to identify the language or languages involved in the early Neolithic expansion into Central Europe. Its starting points are two relatively conservative assumptions. First of all that the spread of the Neolithic from Anatolia into Central Europe following a northwesterly route was accompanied by the expansion of one or more languages that originated in Anatolia or thereabouts. My second assumption is that chronological problems attached to the idea that that language(s) was/were Indo-European are such that we should keep an open mind to any alternative. The article progresses by what I shall argue to be a series of reasonable assumptions (rather than compelling evidence). Confirmation of those assumptions will be strengthened by the fact that many of them are independent of one another yet they conspire to form a coherent picture of the past. The justification of this approach lies in its end result rather than in each individual step. This is an accepted methodology in the decipherment of scripts and languages: each individual step in the decipherment of the Linear B script, for instance, was no more than a reasonable assumption, whose validity was only then demonstrated when all assumptions were compounded in the idea that Linear B encoded second-millennium BC Greek and when that idea was applied to the texts. I can claim no such spectacular results, only the demonstration that the methodology is potentially fruitful. The argument proceeds by a number of individual strands, which at the same time structure the article: demonstrating the 340 Peter Schrijver significance to the question at hand of the Minoan language of the Linear A texts from Crete (section 3); identifying linguistic similarities between Minoan and the Hattic language of North- Central Anatolia (section 4); identifying linguistic similarities between Hattic and Sumerian (section 5-6); determining the relevance of those data to the language(s) of the early Neolithic farming communities in the Near East (section 7) and in Europe (section 8); and finally a case study about a word for ‘pig’ (section 9). 3. Neolithic and Bronze-Age Crete On a quest to identify the language of the first Neolithic farmers who spread from Anatolia into Europe, one can do worse than start by investigating the prehistory of Crete. A relatively remote island that required considerable seafaring skills to reach, it was part of the first ‘wave of advance’ of Neolithic farmers into Europe, who colonized the island between 7000 and 6500 BC in full possession of the early Neolithic package of cereals, legumes and domesticated animals (Broodbank & Strasser 1991).
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