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Post by cunjar on May 4, 2005 3:16:31 GMT -5
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Post by Zapiens on May 4, 2005 9:47:47 GMT -5
That's a broad topic.
Linguistically, the Hittites were Indo-European (IE). Their language or languages, known as the Anatolian branch of the IE language family, are considered by many linguists the most archaic branch that has separated from the main IE stem the earliest.
There are two hypotheses of their origins. Renfrew et al believe that IE languages originated in Anatolia and has made it to Europe through the Balkans with the spread of farming in the Neolithic. This would make Hittites the "aboriginal IE" speakers.
Another hypothesis (i.a., Gimbutas, Mallory) places the IE homeland elsewhere - in the Pontic steppes, Central Asia, even Central Europe. This would make Hittites intrusive to Asia Minor, where they would have probably assimilated a native non-IE population ("elite dominance.") Besides the linguistic evidence for this hypothesis, Hittite pantheon is rather strikingly non-IE and may have incorporated some substratum deities and cults, as it has likely happened in Greece (I am sure Dienekes can correct me on this.)
I am not aware of any genetic studies on human DNA associated with the Hittite remains. I would be interested in learning about anthropological studies of these, if such studies were conducted. I am not aware of
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Post by Zapiens on May 12, 2005 11:37:56 GMT -5
That's a broad topic. Linguistically, the Hittites were Indo-European (IE). Their language or languages, known as the Anatolian branch of the IE language family, are considered by many linguists the most archaic branch that has separated from the main IE stem the earliest. There are two hypotheses of their origins. Renfrew et al believe that IE languages originated in Anatolia and has made it to Europe through the Balkans with the spread of farming in the Neolithic. This would make Hittites the "aboriginal IE" speakers. Another hypothesis (i.a., Gimbutas, Mallory) places the IE homeland elsewhere - in the Pontic steppes, Central Asia, even Central Europe. This would make Hittites intrusive to Asia Minor, where they would have probably assimilated a native non-IE population ("elite dominance.") Besides the linguistic evidence for this hypothesis, Hittite pantheon is rather strikingly non-IE and may have incorporated some substratum deities and cults, as it has likely happened in Greece (I am sure Dienekes can correct me on this.) I am not aware of any genetic studies on human DNA associated with the Hittite remains. I would be interested in learning about anthropological studies of these, if such studies were conducted. I am not aware of I read Dienekes' review of studies on the IE origins, and while I cannot determine how complete the review is, they certainly make a strong case for the IE homeland in SE Europe/the Balcans, rather than in the Pontic area. dienekes.angeltowns.net/articles/ieorigins/
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Post by Drooperdoo on May 16, 2005 2:16:54 GMT -5
Zapiens, Anatolia is not un-Indo-European. You're thinking in modern terms of Turks in Anatolia. Even today, though, Turks are overwhelmingly a minority in a land they re-named Turkey. Kurds, Armenians, Greeks--all Indo-Europeans--find their homeland in Anatolia . . . and it was like that since ancient times. So even if Hittites swept into Anatolia, they would have found Indo-European groups . . . and almost exclusively Indo-European groups. Remember when St. Paul went to preach to the "Greeks"? --9/10ths of those Greek cities [like Ephesus, Thesolonaika, etc] were in Anatolia. And the dates for these Greek settlements in Anatolia is older than Hellenic outposts in modern-day Greece. So, no, Anatolia was not Semitic or Turkic then--nor even is it today.
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Post by Zapiens on May 16, 2005 12:52:40 GMT -5
Zapiens, Anatolia is not un-Indo-European. You're thinking in modern terms of Turks in Anatolia. Even today, though, Turks are overwhelmingly a minority in a land they re-named Turkey. Kurds, Armenians, Greeks--all Indo-Europeans--find their homeland in Anatolia . . . and it was like that since ancient times. I believe that Turkish speakers are a significant majority in modern Anatolia. However, my question was, was Anatolia the original homeland of the IE speakers, its centre of expansion? This is one of the IE homeland hypotheses, put forward by Renfrew. So even if Hittites swept into Anatolia, they would have found Indo-European groups . . . and almost exclusively Indo-European groups. That I have to question. I have not looked this up recently, but remember that the Hittites have assimilated the Hurri substratum population, which was not IE. Would be interested in finding out whether this theory still stands. I was referring to the prehistoric times around the spread of IE languages and/or their speakers - estimated anywhere from 10000 BP to 4500 BP, way before the recorded history (for these areas.)
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Post by mike2 on May 16, 2005 12:56:02 GMT -5
Your gut instinct is right, Zapiens. The kingdom of Urartu was not Indo-European. Neither were the Hurrians. If anything the people of Urartu spoke a language akin to the Georgian language of Caucasia.
And there is no forgetting the Etruscans of Lydia. They didn't speak IE either. Anatolia was a host to many different language stratums, some IE, others not.
Whether or not Indo-European has its origins in Anatolia or in the steppes of the Kurgans is still up in the air.
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Post by Zapiens on May 16, 2005 13:48:23 GMT -5
Your gut instinct is right, Zapiens. The kingdom of Urartu was not Indo-European. Neither were the Hurrians. If anything the people of Urartu spoke a language akin to the Georgian language of Caucasia. Well, I usually don't go my "gut instinct", I just could not cite anything asserting the non-IE "status" of Hurrians or Urartians (Urartans?). I was not aware that Etruscans were identified anywhere outside Italy. Or in the Balcans, or elsewhere...
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Post by mike2 on May 16, 2005 14:06:59 GMT -5
I was not aware that Etruscans were identified anywhere outside Italy. Well, they came into Italy from somewhere. The most accepted explanation for Etruscan origins in the historical community is that they came to Italy from Asia Minor as Herodotus related in his histories.
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Post by Drooperdoo on May 17, 2005 9:45:49 GMT -5
Zapiens, Turks are relatively new in Anatolia, and the very name "Turkey" was not applied to the peninsula until the 20th Century. It had never historically been associated with Turks or Turkic peoples--this is entirely new (historically speaking). Even the man who renamed the Ottoman Empire--Mustafa Kemal--was not Turkish. He was from the European side of the Ottoman Empire when it stretched up as far as the Danube. So the famous "Ataturk" wasn't even ethnically Turkish. You say that the overwhelming majority of people in Turkey speak "Turkish," as if that makes them Turkic. They're not. One source on the subject said that actual Turkic peoples in "Turkey" are less than 20% of the population--the other 80% being Indo-European groups under Turkish rule--Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Chechyns, etc. "Turkey" is not a real country in any meaningful sense [if one defines "country" as a coherent group of people with the same language, culture, history, past and common goals]. It's a nation in the modern American and Soviet sense--a conglomeration of bickering ethnic groups . . . which is why the original Ottoman Empire fell. The very term "Balkanization" comes from the Balkan part of the Ottoman Empire and the ethnic squabbles that led to that empire's cancer from within.
P.S.--In propaganda efforts, the Turkish government puts out phony census stats which dishonestly say that if one speaks Turkish one is a Turk, implying that the Turks in Turkey are as high as 80%. In reality, it's more about 20% . . . .with the other 60% having been forced to learn Turkish in schools--much as dictator Francisco Franco in Spain suppressed Basque, Gallego and Catalan, forcing all commerce and administration in Spain to be conducted in Castillian. Read up on the subject. It's fascinating.
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Post by yigal on May 17, 2005 15:51:40 GMT -5
Actually from what i remember learning it is not Indo Euro but from a language that branched out before the indo euro branch,or was that another language im thinking of?
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Post by Zapiens on May 17, 2005 17:48:11 GMT -5
Zapiens, Turks are relatively new in Anatolia, and the very name "Turkey" was not applied to the peninsula until the 20th Century. It had never historically been associated with Turks or Turkic peoples--this is entirely new (historically speaking). Even the man who renamed the Ottoman Empire--Mustafa Kemal--was not Turkish. He was from the European side of the Ottoman Empire when it stretched up as far as the Danube. So the famous "Ataturk" wasn't even ethnically Turkish. You say that the overwhelming majority of people in Turkey speak "Turkish," as if that makes them Turkic. They're not. One source on the subject said that actual Turkic peoples in "Turkey" are less than 20% of the population--the other 80% being Indo-European groups under Turkish rule--Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Chechyns, etc. "Turkey" is not a real country in any meaningful sense [if one defines "country" as a coherent group of people with the same language, culture, history, past and common goals]. It's a nation in the modern American and Soviet sense--a conglomeration of bickering ethnic groups . . . which is why the original Ottoman Empire fell. The very term "Balkanization" comes from the Balkan part of the Ottoman Empire and the ethnic squabbles that led to that empire's cancer from within. Hi Drooperdoo, I never wanted or expected this thread to take any political turn - the OP asked about the Hittites. The argument "what makes one ethnicity XYZ" is a difficult and sometimes meaningless one, but I will try to address some of your points. I am not Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, Serbian or Bulgarian, so I think I can keep a measure of impartiality. True. Used to be Ottoman Empire/Supreme Porta. There was no Romania/Serbia/Greece before the 20th century or so; does this mean these ethnicities did not exist. True in antiquity. Not true in the middle ages - when was Anatolia (Asia Minor) conquered by the Central Asian Turkic-speaking nomads? When did Constantinople fall to them? True, they did not exterminate the substratum population, and the genetic contribution of Central Asians to the modern Turkish population is relatively small (but not negligible.) So who was he if not Turkish? I stand by my assertion that the majority (not overwhelming) of people in Turkey speak Turkish, and that makes them ethnically Turkish, this language belonging to the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. I wanted to use the U.S. as an analogy but then read you do not consider it a country, so I will use France: there, descendants of whatever populations preceded the Kelts, the Kelts, the Romans, the Germanic tribes, Gascons, Normans etc (more recently, Russians, Poles, Jews and to some extent North Africans) speak French, and are therefore ethnically French. Can you name this source? I understand that many governments try to represent their countries as more monolithic than they are in reality, but 80%? I was in Turkey twice, and while Turkish-Kurdish tensions were noticeable, the claim of a 20% ruling elite subjugating the rest of the population (speaking different languages) seems far-fetched. There is no such ethnicity, or living language, as Indo-European. Chechen language does not belong to the IE family. If what I read about the Armenian genocide is true, and I tend to believe it is, there are virtually no Armenians in Turkey today. I am not sure what your problem with Turkey is, it is a country with a rich past, as all or most other countries are. As I wrote above, the tribes that gave it its name and language appear to have made a fairly small genetic impression. So what? The Romans imposed/introduced their languages on half of Europe without significant genetic contributions; so did the Hungarians in Hungary. Unless I am factually wrong, in which case a separate thread seems in order, can we turn to the subject of Hittites? What is known about the populations that they assimilated in Asia Minor? Was Hittite mythology similar to the mythology of other IE-speaking cultures?
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Post by Zapiens on May 17, 2005 17:58:57 GMT -5
Actually from what i remember learning it is not Indo Euro but from a language that branched out before the indo euro branch,or was that another language im thinking of? Somewhere on the Linguistics forum on this site, I remember seeing the tree of IE languages, where, indeed, the Anatolian branch, which includes the Hittite, appears to have branched off first. I did see somebody proposing to rename Indo-European to Indo-Anatolian due to the great antiquity of Anatolian languages, but I don't believe this terminology took. I googled this and found the following page, not sure how authoritative it is: indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article13.htmlIn a language feature comparison table, several rows say, all but Anatolian. To quote from this page here, The first language which fell apart the Proto-community, was obviously Anatolian. Among all the 16 features in the table above, the forms number 1, 5, 9 are present in all Indo-European groups, except Anatolian. Neither Hittite, nor Lydian, Palaic, nor Late Anatolian languages show the feminine stems in long a-, i-, u-, and therefore lack the very feminine gender, having only two genders: active (animate) and inactive (neuter, inanimate). Several noun case endings (including the instrumental plural masculine) and the demonstrative pronoun so, sá, to are as well absent in all Anatolian languages. This all creates some distance between the Anatolian groups and all the rest groups of the family - and this gap is evidently the matter of time. The ancestors of Hittites and Luwians moved apart from the Proto-Indo-Europeans several centuries before the general greakup occurred.
Phonetic data confirms our supposition. Anatolian was the only to preserve many phonetic trends quite archaic for the family: it keeps laryngeals, which cannot be found anywhere else in ancient Indo-European languages (Latin ante, Hittite hant- "forward", Greek arktos, Hittite hartagga "a bear"). The special directive case, which is common for early Hittite and Luwian documents, is unique in the Indo-European family.
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Post by Crimson Guard on May 24, 2005 8:47:57 GMT -5
The Basque's dont Speak an Indo-European tongue,but yet their European DNA wise....I wouldnt look to deep into languages...
Same with the Etruscan's,while its possible they came from Anatola or the so-called Levant region,its still up in the air.
* The Caucasoid Race came outve the South East Europe/asia,from in and around that region,so it matters very little.
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