In 1765 BC:
autumn;
chill streams;
hoarfrost;
dark fir;
yellowing ash;
oak turning brown;
huge outbound flocks of swans, geese etc;
stags;
Caucasus snowpeaks.
The Bakhri, breaking camp to move to winter lowlands:
strike tents;
load wagons;
hitch oxen to wagons and horses to chariots;
round up herds.
Seasonal change and human activity: the Time Patrol series is not only time travel paradoxes and historical summaries but also realization of the world in past periods.
See also:
One thing that has changed is that the IE migrations are now dated earlier.
ReplyDeleteWe have to accept that not only futures but also pasts differ in sf.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteThe IE migrations/invasions are better dated around 2500 BC?
Ad astra! Sean
Depends on which. They started between 3500 and 3000 BCE, first into Europe and a branch of the Yamnaya moving all the way to the Altai, who formed the Tocharians later.
ReplyDeleteSo Indo-Europeans arrived in, say, Denmark around 2800 BCE or a bit earlier. In the British Isles, it started around 2500 BCE.
OTOH, the Aryan migrations into India took place after 2000 BCE.
The original Aryans were an offshoot of the Corded Ware culture, which expanded east and west starting aboug 2900 BCE from what's now Poland and eastern Germany; it took them about five or six hundred years to reach the Urals, where they formed the Sintashta culture. Who invented the war-chariot, btw.
That begat the Andronovo culture, which was the source of the Indo-Aryan migration into India. They probably arrived in India itself around 1600-1500 BCE. In the late Harappan period, but nobody's absolutely sure.
I had some idea that the Aryans came from Siberia.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks! It's obviously hard to date when and where we should place the Indo-Aryans. I recall you stating, I think, that Lithuanian is the language most closely related to the oldest forms of written Sanskrit.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: that -is- Siberia, tho' the extreme western end of it, since it's over the Urals.
ReplyDeleteIE-speaking nomads eventually ended up in what's now Dzungaria, western Mongolia, and far-eastern China proper -- Gansu.(*)
Then they got driven west by the Chinese and further north by Asian nomads.
(*) The Tocharians in the Tarim basin were the product of an earlier IE migration, one of the first ones, and predated the satemization of the eastern IE dialects and their evolution into Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan.
It caused a good deal of bewilderment back in the earlier 20th century when their documents were decoded, since Tocharian preserved the initial "k" sound, unlike the other eastern dialects. In fact, it was one of the ways it was proved that the initial "k" sound was the Proto-Indo-European source, and that its transition to "s" in the eastern dialects was a later development.
You can still see the Tocharian genetic influence on the Uyghurs, though they're Turkic-speaking. The Tocharians looked like northern Europeans.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, a lot of early German students of Proto-Indo-European thought that the IE migrations started in eastern Germany and western Poland.
ReplyDeleteThis is wrong -- but it's understandable.
Since the Corded Ware culture formed there, was Proto-Indo-European speaking, and -did- expand explosively east and west, and was responsible for the Indo-Europeanization of much of Europe and Central Asia (and India).
The Iranian-speaking steppe nomads were descendants of the Corded Ware, for example, and they supplanted the original Yamnaya-descended ones.