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For the most part, Gimbutas' assertions seem to be correct, but they assume a gradual outward migration that I consider unrealistic for a horse culture.
My pet theory is that the first part of the Kurgan Hypothesis is correct. The "Kurgans" originated in the vicinity of the upper-Volga somewhere between 5000BC & 6000BC as pre-historic nomads who adopted horse riding, and then migrated southward onto the Caucasian steppes. For some reason however, both Gimbutas and mainstream archeology seems to think that they just climbed off their horses and spent the next thousand or so years only growing slowly...something that I consider to be completely unrealistic.
I think that sufficient evidence does exist to assume that the circum-Caspian migration posited in the Turkish-origins theory did happen, but not the way that theory speculates. I believe that the Kurgans did NOT stop at the Caucasian steppes but instead continued southward (at least in part) through the Trans-Caucasus into modern northern Turkey. At that point they collided with the early pre-Hurrian peoples of eastern Turkey and were introduced to "modern" agriculture. This new fusion of cultures...a horse-based warrior society with a solid agricultural underpinning, then circled the Caspian...spawning the Hurrian/proto-Sumerian, Indo-Iranian, and Indus cultures as it went...until it ended up back on the Caucasian Steppes.
This new "super-Kurgan" culture, armed with horses, good weapons, a warrior culture, and full stomachs made possible by their agricultural base, then swept northward and outward, easily displacing the poorly-defended, underfed, and disorganized prehistoric "Goddess/Mother Culture" societies with their own paternally driven warrior culture. In an age where women and fertility were revered, and "wars" were limited to a few dozen people on foot from competing villages beating each other with clubs and shooting arrows at their opponents, the appearance of the Kurgans, with possibly hundreds of warriors charging on horseback, with bows and bronze axes, would have been an irresistible shockwave across Europe. The old way of living, with origins predating the ice age, died out in a relatively short period of time as the Kurgans defeated the Goddess/Mother Culture tribes, or the unconquered tribes "Kurganized" themselves in order to mount a reasonable defense.
Defense over the long term, however, simply wasn't possible. With wave after wave of Kurgan invaders pouring into central and northern Europe out of the Russian Steppes, and a second smaller wave of invaders sweeping across the Aegean out of Turkey into Greece and the Balkans, the Europe was transformed in just several hundred years.
As the Indo-Europeans swept outward, they took their religion, their astronomy, and their stone circle building practices with them. As the conquests ended and the Indo-Europeans fragmented into the pre-European cultures we recognize...the Greeks, the Celts and preceding Beaker peoples, etc...they took those practices and evolved them in very different, but still recognizeably related, ways. In Northern Europe the stone circles got bigger and more prevalent, but remained architecturally simple outside of the occasional lintel stone. In Southern Europe the stone pillars became columns, the lintels evolved into roofs, and the classical Greco-Roman temple was the result.
By the way, this is just a hobby for me so be kind if my conglomeration of theories has any holes (none of it is mine, but it is a collection of several other theories). This has always been an interest of mine as I have always been fascinated at just how closely related we all really are and what a fluke modern society is. History as we know it encompassing every great society and empire from Europe, across the middle east, and into Asia, got its start because a few hundred nomads in central Russia figured out how to ride horses and decided to take a trip south. Everything after that, quite literally, is history.
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