Maps on European History

After the cultivation methods had been applied to European conditions within the Balkan ancient cultures (the so-called "OId Europe",) the new way of livelihood spread rapidly by the route of Danube - Rhine - North Sea coast, the way the Savolax forest-scorching expansion took place. On the map the "ribbon ceramic culture" represents this phase. The so-called cultured manner of constructing large houses which could accomodate livestock at the other end of the building affected also e. g. the Finnish house model of the Bronze Age, the Danish "Viking house," and similar solutions were applied in Karelia as late as this century.

Indo-European languages began to supplant the Finno-Ugrian and Franco-Cantabrian (Basque) languages originally spoken in Europe no later than at the time of the migrations that arrived in Europe from the "Kurgan culture" area shown on the map. In the blue and yellow area the language of the newcomers replaced the older languages but changed under their influence into the Proto-Germanic, Slavonic, and Baltic languages. It has been claimed that the Kurgan (pit grave) culture may have been the original home of the Indo-European languages, but at this point views differ. On the next map we shall study closer the European language shift.

The figures on the map refer to centuries or millenniums before or after the common era. The dash connecting the years means the withdrawal to the North of the Finno-Ugrian language zone as a result of language shift and immigration. For clarity's sake, the possessions of the Hungarians and the conquering of modern Hungary in the ninth century have been left out. This example shows the assumptions and attitudes now serving as a basis for scientific discussion on the origins of the Finno-Ugrian languages. The view presented here has still its opponents, but all in all, it is better corroborated than many others which have been taught in schools for decades.

There have been differing positions on the origin of the Indo-European languages, but the above map shows the basic way of thinking held by most researchers until recently. Genetic chartings and the freshly actualized linguistic view on e. g. Germanic languages as a result of an admixture of proto-Indo-European dialects and a "proto-European" Finno-Ugrian language changes the picture: as the Indo-European group was diffused, it cannot have produced "finalized" daughter languages which was the former simplistic view. E. g. Celtic languages have recently shown traces of the Franco-Cantabrian group, now only represented by Basque. And the Basques are the other European people that is outside the general European genetic family, now ascertained by genetic chartings. The other "outsiders" are the Lapps.

There have been chartings and statistics on genetic differences in which the variances between different populations have been calculated as "distances." The results show all present Europeans to be practically of one and same genetic family, including the Finnish peoples - also counting the udmurts. Three groups, the Lapps, the "Europeans," and the Basques, can be explained by comparing them to the present-day hunter peoples of sparsely populated Arctic areas; Europe _was_ Arctic about 20 000 - 10 000 years ago. Under these conditions the genetic heritage common to various populations is relatively distant to other groups when measured in the above manner. The differences could originate in such an ancient period. The Lapps managed to preserve their special qualities by migrating to their Northern areas before the final melting of the glacier, which prevented them from mixing with the rest of us Europeans. We and Western Europeans are genetically related which can be explained by the fact that the latter are Finno-Ugrians who have changed their language.

So the differences of Celtic languages as compared to the other Indo-European tongues spoken in Europe can be traced into "Basque" influence - basically like the Finno-Ugrian language changed the pronunciation of the of the Indo-European spoken in Northern and Central Europe. One of the words possibly remaining from the Western European proto-Finnish could be e. g. 'minä.' The English still say "It's mine" /its main/ while the book of a German is "mein Buch" /main bux/ and the Russian exclaims, "Eta moya!" /eta maia/ when someone tries to grab his vodka bottle. The fact that the Finnish are proto-Europeans must be happy news to our Swedish neighbors who are carrying our genes according to mitochondrio-genetic studies - how's that, _mina vaenner?_

This has been the key to the origins of the present Germanic, Slavonic, and Baltic languages. When Europe was invaded by steppe dwellers speaking Indo-European languages around 3000 BCE, they changed the idiom of the original population - but were changed themselves as well. It is natural to think that the immigrants first sought support at places meaningful to inter-people and inter-tribe contacts in the Europe of the late Stone Age, i. e. those involving commerce and traffic. Here was developed a practical new "world language," a _lingua franca._ The core of the common language came to be the Indo-European language of the more mobile nomad population, but the majority of its speakers had a Finno-Ugrian language as their mother tongue. This is why the common language using Indo-European grammar lost certain features, especially in its pronunciation. In Finland this view is embraced among others by Kalevi Wiik, the creator of the above map. Wiik believes the main reason for the language shift was the "higher authority" of the new Indo-European language of the population which already had adopted agriculture. For this conclusion, the linguist Wiik must have had at his disposal the opinion of the Gordon Childe archaeological school claiming that the invention of agriculture is a kind of a "neolithic revolution" enhancing people's material and cultural level. Differing opinions have equally been voiced. After all, perhaps agriculture was _not_ yielded by new knowledge arriving to the area and people adopting more productive methods of livelihood in lieu of their former hunting-gathering. There are reasons to suppose that the more toilsome agriculture was adopted in a disaster situation when population growth or a change in natural conditions made former ways of life impossible. This theory is corroborated by certain well-known cases where a hunter people has lived for centuries as neighbors of farmers without adopting their means of support. The hunters must have known what farmers do, i. e. their conservatism was not lack of knowledge. Besides, under normal conditions, agriculture is more laborious than hunting-gathering.

The hypothesis of agriculture as the decisive factor in language shifting does not explain the fact that the agricultural vocabulary of the European I-E languages is not of Indo-European origin but something else. We also know that in large parts of Europe agriculture was initiated independently of Indo-European migrations. Present knowledge may not find solutions to these problems, but we may conclude one matter rather reliably. The population groups which changed their habitation according to seasons, having retained their livelihood of hunting-gathering, did not adopt the new form of language. They remained Finno-Ugrian at the time and partially also later, having adopted agriculture... or I wouldn't be writing this in Finnish. To facilitate the matter now under scientific discussion for the layman, we now present the following sweeping generalization as a working hypothesis. The Middle and North Europe of the late Stone Age was abandoning hunting in favor of agriculture during the period 4000 - 2500 BCE. By a route to the North of the Black Sea, the area was invaded by nomads speaking an Indo-European language who settled in the territories of communities which already were basically agricultural. Consequently, several villages had population belonging to two language groups, and communication between families necessitated the above mentioned common language. Under such conditions, the growing generation usually speaks an unmixed language at home, just like today in certain Stockholm suburbs, and in other communication they use the common language. When this generation has families of its own, language shift is a fact which occurs within about one generation. This may have been the way the Finno-Ugrian language disappeared from the area extending from England to Poland within just a couple of millenniums, as shown on map 4. Simultaneously, the peoples that remained hunters retained their language because they did not generally have permanent villages in which people speaking a different language could have settled. There is a word remaining from the contacts of the hunting Finns and Indo-Europeans; it was formed from the tribal name of the nomads, the Aryans (arya, ariya => Iran.) The word now refers to an alien living among indigenous people and his social status and appears in modern Finnish as _orja_ (slave.)

The map has been copied here as it appears in most reference works. The Scythian territory mentioned in the article is here still occupied by their predecessors, the Cimmerians, but the situation is basically the same. The commerce route from the coves of the Adriatic Sea to the amber-rich shores of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea is shown where it still was located during the Roman period. The most common view is that the Celts did not cross the English Channel until 700 BCE, so the coloring of the map is ahead of its time as far as Britain is concerned

In Finland, "Western Bronze Culture" means the similarity of the archaeological material met with in South-Western Finland and its coastline to the Scandinavian and Danish objects which show strong Celtic influence. In inner and Northern Finland, where metal utensils were manufactured locally unlike the coastline, the adoption of bronze and also iron occurred because of the Finno-Ugrian bronze culture of Middle Russia.

The oldest known location where iron was manufactured in Finland lies within the influence of Eastern culture at Rovaniemi, and the first metal objects have also been found in the North. If the Western influence of the era involved immigration, as certain dialectal phenomena imply, this could mean a movement directed from the southern end of the Baltic Sea to the shores of Scandinavia and Finland, as marked on the map. Should this be the case, the Western bronze objects discovered in Finland had the same uses and meaning as in e. g. the better known bronze culture of today's Denmark. Later the animal ornaments, practically a hallmark of Scandinavian objects, may have first been adopted in Denmark under the aforementioned Celtic influence.

Ancient historians describe a Cimbric tribe that attacked Rome, and its name and surviving personal names sound very Celtic (cf. Cymric,) although the Romans did regard the Cimbrics as Germanics. With great efforts, the Romans managed to ward off the Cimbrics who returned to their homeland Denmark. The famous Gundestrupp kettle, a relic so dear to the Danish, was obtained during this very campaign (from the Balkans.) Thus we may suppose that the Western Germanics, at least in Denmark, were ruled at the time by a Celtic upper class who have indirectly influenced also the above mentioned Finnish bronze culture.

The religious phenomena of the Bronze Age in Finland include among others the large "hiidenkiuas" structures which were never built here before or after that period. A notable feature in early hiidenkiuas'es is their location. They were built at conspicuous sites by waterways - not in connexion with villages and the like. Thus their function must have had something to do with "representing" the community or village to outsiders, neighbors, and international seafarers. Only when the Bronze culture was waning did the rearranging of stone ruins into grave monuments move close to habitation where such a status symbol could support the authority of a mighty family etc. through a famed forefather immortalized by a stone construction. So we may conclude that the descendants of the leaders buried so magnificently had no special position in a Bronze Age community. If we may also suppose that the bronze culture of the Finnish Western coast was directly reinforced by a corresponding Scandinavian phenomenon, we can conclude that the Bronze Age chieftains were religious leaders, Rois de Soleil of a kind, whose power was not based upon an "upper class" often imagin ed by various popular books, but upon religious and moral authority. Towards the end of the era, these communities seem to have been polarized, and the construction tradition of hiidenkiuas'es changed. In the process, the power of the monarchs that had ruled the tribe or community was probably annulled.

The religion of the hiidenkiuas construction period in Scandinavia and the Western-oriented shore of Finland may well have followed the general trends of the period in Southern regions where various pharaohs etc. declared themselves as religious prophets or sons of the Sun. The Finnish version of the Scandinavian bronze culture is well represented by this brooch found at the Karelian isthmus, featuring maze-like ornamentation.