History of the World Chapter 4:The Indo-Europeans (Patreon)

English, Russian, Bangladeshi, Persian, Punjabi, Armenian, Kurdish, French, Spanish, Marathi, Italian and Tajik cultures and languages are all connected and spring from the same tree. Behind the screen of history, beyond which we can barely see, great invasions took place and ripped the old world apart and created the fabric of the world as we understand it today. India, Europe and the heart of Eurasia were all created in a wave of conquest and blood that spread from the cold rocky shores of the North Atlantic to the jungles of South-East Asia.

The First of the Nomadic Horsemen

Towards the center of Eurasia is a sea of grass stretching from the mountains of the Balkans to China, from the frozen wastes of Siberia to the deserts of the Middle East. This land was too dry for the forest agriculture that occurred in Europe and China, but not dry enough to force the population to cluster around the rivers for irrigation, as they did in the deserts. It never developed farming the way the surrounding regions did. Instead the inhabitants learned to herd animals that could digest the grass of the plains and in turn make calories for humans out of their milk and meat. These peoples were relatively unimportant at the dawn of history, they did not have the numbers or the technology to compete with the civilized peoples. Without the ability to ride horses, they were unable to gain mobility over the enormous region they lived in. There was a group of people who lived in this manner between the rivers now called the Volga and the Danube. We refer to them as the Yama or the Kurgan, named after the burial mounds they left. Little is known about the Yama and the Kurgan due to their illiteracy, but we can gleam a certain amount from the archaeological record. They had a developed hierarchical culture with nobility and centralized monarchies. From their burial mounds we can see that they were clearly a warrior people, with weapons abounding. They gave the horse great reverence, which seems reasonable for a steppe people. They also had a priest class that worshipped a series of gods that were the progenitors of the famous Norse, Greek, Hindu and Celtic pantheons among others. They were skilled metalworkers, making high quality weapons alongside artwork. This culture was able to gain its predominance across such an enormous region due to a single invention, the chariot.

The wheel was likely invented somewhere close to the mouth of the Danube and was after some time, applied to make the cart. The belief that the Sumerians invented the wheel is likely a myth caused by the assumption that only civilizations can initiate technological progress, with the earliest chariots appearing on the steppe. From the cart sprang the idea to use the cart for warfare. Horses at this point had not been bred large enough to carry humans, but could pull a chariot or cart and so allowed a large deal of mobility. The Horse was also likely domesticated on the Western Steppe as well, where exactly we are not certain. This extra mobility allowed the Indo-Europeans to spread across the steppe at breakneck speed. It also bestowed upon them the military advantages that were mentioned in the previous chapter. In battle, their armies were not hampered by long supply trains and large armies of poorly maneuverable pikemen. Thus, they could ride circles around the civilized armies, breaking them time after time. The tough nature of life on the steppe means that there were always another wave of invader to be driven outwards. There simply wasn’t enough land to support all the tribes and those who were driven from their grasslands attacked outwards to gain new and hopefully greener pastures. We will see this pattern again and again in history, as one tribe drives another off the steppe into the civilized world. Also, leaders of tribal confederacies had to maintain their honor and prestige by attacking outwards for loot, much like the Mycenaeans of the prior chapter. This created a continually renewing process of outward conquest. Once the conquest of one region was achieved, a distinct group would break off from that group, making another conquest for a land for their own people and the process would repeat. This would mean that the Indo Europeans diversified as they continued their conquests. This eventually resulted in a world in which English and Bangladeshi culture are wildly different, but both stem from the same Indo-European tree.

The Indo Europeans moved out in four different directions: West, to Europe, South, to the Middle East, East to Western China, and South-East; to Afghanistan, Central Asia, and India. Each of these conquests were fought in in wildly different lands with equally diverse results. Thus, to gain an understanding of the results of the Indo-European conquests we should follow their conquests geographically rather than chronologically.

The Conquest of Europe

To the West of the Eurasian steppe lies the forest covered peninsula of Europe, which is split by a chain of mountains in the middle, with the southern side significantly drier than the north. We know very little about the inhabitants before the Indo European conquest, partially because they were illiterate, but also the Indo European conquest was so complete that very little remains of them. Today, the only fragment of the previous population are the Basque people of the French-Spanish border, a reclusive people who pay little attention to the outside world alongside a few hill villages in mountainous Georgia. We’ve been able to able to glean from archaeology that they were fairly advanced. There was likely a migration from Anatolia across the northern shores the Mediterranean, ending in Spain, resulting in the origins of the Etruscans in Italy and the Basques not the Franco-Spanish border. In the Bronze Age and Neolithic, we find evidence for a united culture spanning the Atlantic coast from Morocco to Scotland. They built amazing megaliths and monuments like Stonehenge, Scara-Brae and Carnac. Due to their illiteracy, we know next to nothing about the creators, but we can make a few guesses. They were likely united by naval travel, due to their geographic range. It seems highly plausible that they were dominated by a priest class, since they are the ones who can muster the support and desire for such monuments. There are thousands of mile long ditches dug in Ukraine and Moldavia built by someone, we just don't know why or by whom.  A combination of stone and Bronze tools dominated the continent, without the former really having giving way to the latter.

The Indo European invasion of Europe is definitely the most decisive and likely one of the most interesting stories that will never be told. Neither side was literate and only one side remains. The Indo Europeans drove up the Danube River, lost most invaders of the European peninsula coming from the steppe, settling in the mini steppe of the Hungarian plain. The Balkans were home to an advanced urban society that the Indo-Europeans seem to have wiped out. After this, they crossed into the Rhine valley and into the North Sea basin. This migration started before the invention of the chariot and the heavily wooded and wet climate of Europe likely impaired the chariot’s usefulness anyway. The hierarchical militaristic organizational structure of the Indo-Europeans alongside their skill in Bronze working likely gave them a large advantage. If this seems slight, remember the enormous advantages the Romans had over their opponents in later ages due to organizational structure and slightly more armor. Priest societies have a terrible military record against warrior societies, whether in Hindu India, Medieval Italy or the Maya. The Pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe were likely no different. Between the priests ability to control the masses and the warriors to conquer and “protect” them, the two learned to work together quite well in most “developed” societies in later history.

Perhaps the myths of the descendants of this conquest are partly demonstrative of the process involved. The Irish refer to four different waves of invasions of mythical peoples before the ancestors of the Irish themselves arrived, the otherworldly Fairies, the underground and heroic Tuatha De Danaan and ogre like Foromian pirates all inhabited Ireland in mythology before the ancestors of the Irish arrived on the isles. This might be demonstrative of the genetic results we have seen that would indicate Ireland faced settlement of the Ice Age inhabitants followed by farmers from the Near East, dairy farmers from Anatolia and finally by the Indo-Europeans. Norse mythology speaks of non human inhabitants, like giants, dwarves nd mermaids who shared the world and humans slowly gained leverage over. The humans fought these peoples in battle, especially the giants and bred with them. Norse mythology even has a chronology of when the giants were driven from certain locations in Scandinavia, likely a chronology of the conquest of the Scandinavia from the pre Indo-European population. In Greek mythology we hear four ages of humanity, each less peaceful than the last, being wiped out by the following more aggressive age. This might be analogous with the four invasions we saw in Ireland.

Once they reached the mouth of the Rhine River, around the modern day Netherlands, the Indo-Europeans became a culture known as the Beakers, known for their elaborate ceremonial beakers found in their graves. Once thought to be different, the beakers were likely the progenitors of the Celts. Beaker culture spread across the Northwest of Europe, into the British Isles, the north of France and Scandinavia. The Celts drove as the vanguard into Europe, spreading across an enormous region of Europe, taking most of Western Europe. Starting in Austria they settled France, Southern Germany, parts of Spain and Italy and the British Isles. The Celts spread across all of Europe a common culture and way of life. They followed a priest class named the druids. The druids scorned writing, thinking it made the mind weak, thus preventing the Celts from using it in anything except foreign trade. The Celts never united, instead they were divided between hundreds of little chiefdoms, who fought endless wars between each other. The Celts were very much a warrior people, with war being a central focus and were run by a warrior aristocracy. As we’ll see later, the Celts made formidable enemies in battle, using their military skill to a great advantage. The Celts never developed urban living and instead lived mainly a rural lifestyle. Among all the Celtic cultures we see a unity of the same styles of art, made with the same very high standards.

The single Indo European branch broke out into many different directions as it spread into Europe, be they Celts, Germans, Italics, Illyrians, Greeks or Slavs. This is origin of the basic ethnic and lingual divisions of Europe, with each group diversifying upon hitting the local conditions. The Germans and Slavs wandered into the swamps and cold forests on the northern fringe of Europe. The Celts and Italics drove West first, sheltering themselves in the valleys of the Alps mountains and the Greeks and Illyrians turning south into the Balkans. The Phrygians, a branch of the Greeks and Illyrian branch wandered across the Dardanelles into Anatolia.

The last chapter dealt with the Mycenaeans and their piratical civilization,  but they were not the final Indo European group to spill out of the north into Greece. After the Mycenaeans had been able to take to the seas, following the Bronze Age Collapse, another group, the Dorians came out of Macedonia into the Greek peninsula. They drove the Mycenaeans from the valleys and center of Greece and into the islands and peninsulas around Greece. The survivors of Mycenaean civilization came to be known as the Ionians. The Ionians sailed across the Aegean and settled the Western coast of what is now Turkey, which came to be known as the Ionian shore. For the next 3,000 years, the Western shores of Turkey were culturally part of Greece. These two peoples, Ionians and Dorians, would come to mix and make the Greek culture of the later Greek Golden Age.

The Dorians were far less advanced than the Ionians, since they didn’t have the model of Minoan civilization to base themselves. With the Minoans wiped out and the Ionians rebuilding themselves, Greece fell into a Dark Age. The skill of writing was lost, cities were completely lost and advanced technology was forgotten for hundreds of years. The mighty kingdom of Annawahiya degenerated into petty tribal chieftains.

The Indo Europeans brought great change to Europe’s religions. One can trace common gods among all the Indo European pantheons, there is a god of the Storm; Thor, Zeus, Indra, Peruna. A god of war; Odin, Shiva, Mars: of art and happiness, Krishna, Baldur, Apollo, Lugh etc… In Europe, these gods gained predominance in the pantheons. The native fertility religions were shoved off to the side. In Norse mythology for example, the fertility gods or Vanir, like Freya, are in their own weaker pantheon to the main gods, the Aesir. In Celtic Mythology, the fertility and nature figures like the Fairies and the Green Man were submerged into the forest as spirits. In Greek mythology, Persephone, the fertility goddess, is physically captured by Hades, likely an Indo-European god of the underworld. The main Greek fertility goddess, Aphrodite, was a later importation from Mesopotamia. The rise of the warlike Into-European gods likely lowered the place of women in the religions of Europe. Indo-European worship also tended to have a strong emphasis upon idols and physical representations of their gods.

We are not sure if the Indo-Europeans replaced the native populations of Europe or not. The genetic interpretations of the subject change every few years. It was used to believe that the Indo-Europeans formed a thin elite while the majority of the population remained the same. Now, the genetics suggests that they completely replaced the population of Northern Europe while in the more populated Southern Europe the descendants of the farmers remained predominant. The genetic and skeletal reconstructions of the Kurgan and Yama seem indistinguishable from modern Northern Europeans. If we consider how lightly populated much of the North of Europe was even during the Roman era and how later migrations like the Slavs seem to have radically shifted the genetic makeup of the conquests, this interpretation seems at least plausible. However, nothing in ancient history is set in stone and we should expect the reality to have been far more convoluted and complex than we could ever imagine today.

Even if the Indo-Europeans just became a ruling clique, they had profound cultural effects on the regions they conquered. They wiped out the native cultural so effectively that practically none of it remains to study today. Even river place names are of Indo-European origin, which isn’t even the case in modern examples of population replacement, such as in North America oe Australia. The rivers are normally the first things to be noted by conquerors and thus are almost always given the native name. There was no racial or cultural division between the conquerers and the conquered, a problem that still plagues India or Latin America hundreds or thousands of years later. The new European nations were culturally homogenous. The complete wipeout of the native cultures gave Europe a blank slate, without the cultural baggage of the previous groups, like a strong priest class or god-kings. The pure warrior nomadic based culture of Europe made it very aggressive, with the new chieftains building high castles in the hills and constantly warring with each other. This may have given European civilization an inherently more aggressive outlook across the many thousands of years of its history.

The Conquest of India

To the south of the Indo-European homeland lay the mountains of the Caucasus. As the Indo-Europeans migrated south, they left some of the more inhospitable mountain valleys of this region in native hands, resulting in some of the few remaining pre-Indo-European societies in Europe. The ancient-ness of these people led German racial theorists in the 19th century to view them as the original Europeans and thus lies the origin of the term “Caucasian” being used for all white skinned peoples. Beyond them lay the Anatolian highlands, who’s climate and terrain actually isn’t that different than the steppe and thus hosted the Indo-European (and later steppe invaders) quite well. Anatolia was one of the first regions the Indo-Europeans migrated to, thus even resulting in the theory that their original homeland was Anatolia. After the collapse of the Hittite monarchy, migrants from the Balkans, called Phrygians and relatives of the modern Greeks, migrated into Anatolia once again.

To the East of the Indo-European homeland lies grasslands much like those the Indo-Europeans came from themselves. They spread far east across the steppes to the Altai mountains where modern day Mongolia, Kazakhstan, China and Russia meet. From there, modern archaeology even suggests they spread deep into Western China. Archaeology of Red Haired, North European looking peoples dressed in plaid and with Celtic designs caused quite a stir when discovered in Western China. They likely spread the chariot as well as wheat into China, changing the balance of power there as it had everywhere else in the world. Wheat alongside barley was the primary crop of Chinese civilization for its first 3,000 years. They founded cities in the oases of Western China that lasted until a little more than a thousand years ago and came to be called the Tocharians.

The Indo Europeans spread across the steppeland of modern day Central Asia with ease, drifting across the grassland from one river basin to the next. They settled between the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers, in the region called Transoxiana, in modern day Uzbekistan, a veritable Central Asian Mesopotamia. There was a pre-existing advanced farming society that the Indo-Europeans likely subdued and mixed with. The Apple was originally from this region and likely spread across Eurasia with the Indo-European invasions. South of Transoxiana lies the mountains of Afghanistan and Persia, which the Indo Europeans populated. The hills of Afghanistan have always been a launching point for the invasion of the fertile fields of India to the south, with the Indo-Europeans being the first of a long lineage of conquerors to do so.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, India had the powerful and advanced Harappan civilization, but we have very little idea of what was going on in the rest of the subcontinent. It was probably primitive Neolithic farming kingdoms, likely in outline not that much different from those that existed in Europe. Primitive and out of the way peoples in India maintained the lifestyle of their primeval ancestors even until a few decades ago, worshipping fertility cults, following a priest class, using primitive tools to farm and living off the seasons and the land. There are even still hunter gatherers in the hidden regions of South India. This is not a great deal of information about an enormous region over a large amount of time, but is perfect preparation for the shoddy records of the rest of the Indian history.

We cannot be exactly sure what resulted in the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization. The arrival of the Indo European, or Aryans, as they called themselves (the Nazi term for the master race derived from this word. The Nazis used this to describe mainly North Europeans, however in the original Sanksrit it merely means noble, likely not a purely racial distinction.) may have caused, expedited, or simply completely not involved with the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization. We only know that they happened at roughly the same time, and considering the destructive tendencies of Indo-Europeans in other regions, a correlation is a pretty good guess. Historians often underestimate the sheer violence of history and nomadic barbarians taking down sedentary civilizations has been the rule of history, not the exception. Later Indian culture owes nothing to the Indus Valley civilization, with the alien Aryan culture contributing the most of anything. This suggests some sort of violent take over, majority peoples almost never forget their own culture without impetus, often violent, from outside. The declining civilization, perhaps struggling with water issues and internal conflict, possibly with population pressures similar to what I have suggested last chapter with the civilizations of the Near East, would have made easy prey for the nomadic invaders. Among the terms in the later Sanskrit societies, the term fort despoiler was used. This was in a society in which the only forts were wooden stockades barely deserving of the titled, suggesting there was some earlier greater war against urban fortified enemies. This process may have taken hundreds of years, in the same way the decline and fall of the Roman Empire took over a thousand years, but it eventually did happen. No matter, the Indus civilization did collapse, the cities along the Indus did fall and India collapsed into a Dark Age.

In this era, much like in Greece, writing, cities, advanced trade and all the other trappings of advanced civilization collapsed. It was replaced by the clannish ways of the conquerors. We know significantly more about this era than in Europe of the same era, which still isn’t much, because out of this age came the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. This is the founding document of Hinduism. It seems to have been originally an epic heroic war poem with ethical parables and moral points added in. The plot follows the epic Bharata wars, supposedly fought in North-Western India over the kingdom of Ayodha, between two clans, with the gods intervening on whichever side is in their interest/more virtuous. The characters go on religious and moral tangents and parables, using them to create a theology. The Western equivalent would be a combination of the Iliad and the Bible, with a length to match. It was quite literally religiously recorded and transcribed, likely with additions over the thousands of years, surviving to the present. The actions involved were historically said to have taken place in 3137 BC, however this is far too early to make any sense historically and 1200 BC is likely a better ball park.

The Mahabharata is definitely in the realm of myth and thus cannot be taken seriously as history, but it gives us invaluable information about the society it reflects and that that wrote it. It was a rural, mainly tribal society that valued cattle and inter-tribal warfare very highly. Oriental Historian John Keay compared them to the Highland tribes of Scotland, and the comparison is very apt. They were clannish, violent, honor obsessed and not very industrious. The original invaders of India were very much the conquerors of Europe, Turkey, or Eastern China, this is because, they were the same. They loved horses, chariots, war, castles and their own sense of honor and freedom. However, the conditions in India were very different from those in Europe and the Near East, thus resulting in a new and very unique civilization developing from any other in Eurasia.

The climate of India was changing even before the Indo-Europeans arrived. In the early days of the Indus-Valley civilization, the Indus Valley was wetter and more fertile than the present. In fact, the same change in rain patterns that brought about Mesopotamian civilization may have also brought about the rise of Harappan civilization. This change in rain currents, namely the monsoon, an annual enormous storm that brings an avalanche of rain to each Indian summer, thus sustaining the region, likely partially resulted in the weakening of Indus Valley civilization to a point at which the Aryans could destroy it. A change of rain brought the monsoon from the Indus Valley to the Gangetic plain in the east. This drying of the pastures in the west resulted in the Indo-Europeans driving east into the Gangetic plain, thus bringing them into the heart of modern India. This overtime would result in the Gangetic plain becoming the dominant and most central region in India, from 1000 BC all the way to the present.

From a mix of legends, archaeology and common sense we can piece together a picture of this movement. Archaeology shows that the horse tribes followed the foothills of the Himalaya mountains first, sticking to a climate that was healthy for them and staying clear of the malarial mangrove swamps and jungles of the river basin. At the same time, a movement struck to the south of the river, the two pincer movements met of at some point deep in Central India. These days, the Gangetic plain is an endless ocean of paddies, feeding a billion peasants and city dwellers. In those days, it was a deep tropical forest, one filled with horrifying predators, both macro, like the Bengal tiger or crocodile and microscopic, like the countless diseases. This was a large move for the Aryans who had only known the harsh deserts and plains of Central Asia and the Indus Valley. The Indian myths refer to Nagas, forest dragon-snake gods that the Aryan heroes had to either conquer or intermarry with the sufficiently friendly ones. Like in European mythology, this is possibly a represtation of the native populations, primitive farming peoples who likely worshipped snake based fertility cults and were native to the forest realm which the Indo-Europeans infringed upon. Like much of this era of history, this time is told about in mythology. The Ramayana, one of the famous epics that has become one of the pillars of Indian culture, describes an epic war for control of a kingdom on the edge of the forest. After being driven out of power, the king Rama flees into the forest and after gaining an alliance with the forces of the forest is able to regain power against his demonic domestic enemies. The Ramayana is a tale of a society on the edge of the frontier with enormous forests and native populations. Ethically, it practically becomes an argument for the divine right, likely a later tool added by kings trying to prove the right to rule their kingdoms.

The India the Aryans dealt with was a very different world than that their cousins had to struggle with in Europe. In Europe, the temperature was more temperate and wet, but in general similar to the steppes they came from. In India, the climate was tropical and humid. Diseases likely cut them down in great number, like it did for all of India’s later northern invaders like the Mongols, Persians, Turks and British. In Europe, the horses the invaders brought thrived, in India they struggled with diseases and a cramped jungle where they had little to eat. The natives of Europe were pale skinned and almost identical to the Indo-Europeans physically, meaning after a couple of generations one could not tell the difference between the two. In India, the natives were dark skinned. Most importantly of all, the warmer climate likely meant that there were far more natives in India than in Europe. All these factors meant that the Indo-Europeans could not enforce their culture the way they did in Europe, completely destroying the prior one. All of these inhibiting factors for the conqueror resulted in the creation of the caste system.

The caste system was likely brought about by many different reasons: fear that the Aryan bloodline and warrior nature might degenerate with native inbreeding, a need to keep natives working the fields and not fleeing into the forest to escape their miserable treatment, trying to keep different populations apart so not to spread disease in an already disease infected subcontinent, sheer bigotry, and fear of the native population slowly gaining dominance on the part of untalented Aryans, all likely combined to create the caste system. The caste system is like the internet, at heart a simple design, but upon closer study truly vast and impossible for an outsider, and even an insider, to understand its full dimensions. In Northern India four main castes developed, the Brahmins, or priests, the Kshatriyas, or warriors and kings, Vaisyas, or farmers and merchants, and Sutras, or untouchables, those who dealt with taboo actions like the killing of cows and cleaning of filth, they were to be scorned and hated by all the others. The higher castes tended to have a higher composition of Aryan blood and the lower ones of native, however 4,000 years have likely created quite a mixing. The taboos about no inter-caste breeding have however likely done as good a job as humanly possible at preventing this, however. Genetics have found clear differences between the different castes, with the higher castes being significantly genetically clover to the lighter skinned nations to the north and west. One born into a caste was expected to leave it upon no conditions. In fact, in later Hinduism, developed to support the caste system, one’s religious duty was to simply do what was expected of one’s caste. Being a good killer was what was religiously expected of a soldier and being a good farmer is what was expected of a farmer. Castes were expected to relate as little as possible with each other, especially breeding. Even having a member of a different caste cook for another caste was considered taboo.

Today, the Brahmins are the dominant caste, however in the early days of India, this role was given to the Kshatriyas. Can one really expect a violent nomad society to not have the warriors in charge? The process by which the Brahmins gained power over India is the entirety of the next few chapters on India in a nutshell. Remember, that this system is infinitely complex, with many subcategories and regional varieties. In non-Aryanized India, for example, there are only the untouchable and Brahmin castes. Often times when a new tribe were to come out of the forests, they would merely be incorporated into the greater local caste system as untouchables. Or on the opposite side of the system, when the British invaded India, they practically made their own caste above the Brahmins, not breeding with the natives for the most part (at least officially as known by their wives). The strength and flexibility of the system is shown in that rail-workers were created as a special caste when the British started to build railroads in India. Like the internet, the caste system was in fact so complex that a certain mobility was allowed inside one’s caste and place in society. Merchants and farmers often became quite wealthy and Brahmins often took on many roles besides merely spiritual.

Like the caste system, religion in India developed in the exact same way, by incorporation into a vast and nearly incomprehensible web. Unlike Europe, where the Indo-European gods gained clear predominance, in India, the ancestor of Hinduism developed with thousands of gods and sub-avatars evolving for those gods. Indian religion lacked a pantheon and was filled with hundreds of myths, gods and regional sub varieties. In this way, Indian religion was capable of maintaining both Indo-European and native religion. Much like the caste system and India itself, these gods have a long history of development and evolution in front of them.

The caste system took India into a very different direction from the rest of the world. It fractionalized Indian society and prevented meritocratic talent from rising in India. It formed the spine upon which the later Indian civilization developed and thus must be treated as a jumping point for the rest of that civilization’s development.

As the Aryans spread East they at the same time became more Indian, creating its own civilization out of the jungles and plains. The chieftains and tribes grew in number, becoming fully fledged kingdoms with cities and trade. The caste system evolved into an existence into itself, changing and making India as we know it today. Indian religion took its own path, one that would shake the rest of the world and control India itself. This would all result in the creation of an Indian civilization, one of a kind in the world. This will all come when our gaze returns to India, however, now we must turn our gaze west across the deserts once more to where this story started, the Near East.