METAL NAMES AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN HOMELAND
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14795/jaha.13.2.2026.1452Keywords:
Indo-European homeland, copper, tin , lead, gold, silver, Kura-Araxes cultureAbstract
Indo-European studies established that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were familiar with copper. However, at a very early stage, they were also familiar with other metals: tin, lead, gold, and silver. Therefore, their homeland can only be located in a region where all these metals were produced in antiquity. This immediately eliminates the Eastern European steppes from the list of possible candidates. The analysis of distribution of metal names across different language groups, as well as their relations with the names in languages of the Caucasus and the Near East, allows two main dialectal areas to be identified: 1) Balto-Slavic in Transcaucasia. Adjacent to the latter was the Indo-Iranian area in the region of Lakes Van, Sevan, and Urmia. 2) Germanic-Celtic-Italic + Tocharian in the upper Euphrates region. The area of formations of Albanian and Armenian lay between area (2) and Indo-Iranian one, while Greek developed in northeastern Anatolia. These areas correspond to different ceramic styles of the Kura-Araxes culture. To the west, center, and west of Asia Minor lay the Anatolian language area. Migration of speakers of northwestern Indo-European languages to Europe occurred through Siberia and Eastern Europe, but some of them penetrated far east, as evidenced by borrowings of metal names into the Finno-Ugric and Chinese languages.
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