Robert Drews (1) (1936–)

This book is essentially a follow-up to Drews' 1988 work The Coming of the Greeks where he argued (tolerably convincingly to my mind) that the Greek language (or its immediate ancestor) was brought to Greece circa 1600 BC by charioteering conquerors from Caucasia.

Apart from updating that argument to take into account new discoveries made in the interrim, he's adding two additional arguments here: First, that the ancestors of the Germanic, Celtic, and Italic languages were approximately show more simultaneously brought into Central Europe by similar conquerors from the western steppes. Second, that what enabled these conquests was "militarism", by which he understands not merely an ideology exalting the warrior, but also the practice of pitched battles; earlier warfare had, according to Drews's new idea, consisted solely of raids, ambushes, and, where fortifications existed, sieges.

I find the linguistic argument easier to accept than the military one. We can't know much about what warfare was like in early 2nd millennium BC Europe, but I'm not convinced about pitched battle being unknown in the Early and Middle Bronze Age Near East. It's AFAIK true that we have, as Drews notes, no battle-accounts until after the rise of chariotry, but this is hardly a case where absense of evidence is evidence of absense, given the nature of the historical record. And I'm not convinced by Drews' attempts to explain away the infantry apparently fighting in shieldwall on the Vulture Stele (middle 3rd millennium) - where would you fight in such formation but in pitched battle?

One might of course suggest that the Near East may have known pitched battle (if not militarism in the ideological sense) before the Chariot Age but Greece and Central Europe did not. However, while we may speculate about Europe, charioteering elites unquestionably did set up new kingdoms in the Near East in the middle of the 2nd millennium, so in such a scenario a lack of militarism can't be a prerequisite for conquest by charioteers. show less

One of the mysteries of early human history is the near-complete collapse of Bronze Age civilisation in the West around 1200BC. The Mycenaean and Hittite Empires collapsed, the Canaanite and Syrian cities were plundered, Egypt was severely threatened by hordes from the Libyan West and only Assyria survived intact.

This would be like some upheaval destroying civilisation in Europe and Russia and forcing all world trade centres out of business, leaving only China standing and a weakened US. show more What caused this has been a puzzle for generations of archaeologists.

Robert Drews, writing a quarter of a century ago, came up with a very plausible solution in this book, taking account of one simple problem - we cannot know very much about this era. In the end, his solutions seems the most plausible largely because all other solutions are less so.

He takes us through all those formerly plausible scenarios that do not quite stand up to scrutiny - tectonic shifts causing devastating earthquakes, mass migrations of peoples (caused perhaps by, say, over-population), the arrival of ironworking, climatic change and general systems collapse.

His solution is more brutally simple - changes in basic military technology which triggered a change in the relative power of 'primitives' in the hinterland, used to doing imperial dirty work or hungry for the goodies that the empires and cities held, to 'civilisation'.

There is no point on over-simplifying his argument. The slim evidential base is nevertheless handled with skill to place a great deal of emphasis on the arrival of the slashing sword invented to the North and which gave tribes throughout the region a new edge against chariot warfare.

His argument provides a plausible narrative in which mercenaries are hired and then become factors (as in Rome many centuries later) in disturbing the balance of power on which empires depend. Unlike the later barbarians, these 'primitives' were happy just to plunder and not to learn.

Drew calls these events the Catastrophe but points out that it was these plundering tribes who eventually learned to cohere in the Iron Age into 'nations' that were the founding twin poles of later Western civilisation, Greece and Israel.

There is much to ponder here (if one is so minded) on what may cause the collapse of civilisations. Eco-causes are fashionable on the left and migration pressures on the right but it may be that both are allowing ideology and prejudice to get in the way.

Even new technology, the current favourite for renewed torment amongst the terminal pessimists, may not be the probable cause that we are told. Perhaps it is just going to be about the transfer of very specific tools to the 'damned of the earth', a simple shift in power relations.

In 1200BC, the slashing sword and a few other highly specific innovations and new motivations in the hands of masses of men seem to have overcome the capital-intensive military technologies of the day - the chariot army and its logistics - surprisingly quickly and brutally.

The masses of men were outsiders who had been brought into the system to act as mercenaries and seem to have learned of the weaknesses of their employers and enemies. Drews give some emphasis to the role of an attempted mass assault on Egypt by the Libyans as central to the learning process.

I cannot quite see a modern analogy but we might be interested in looking for it. Who are the masses of persons today who are allowed to taste the system but not to own it? What tools are to hand that would give them the edge over the finely honed 'educated' and wealthier 'owners'?

Perhaps then it was a struggle over brute force - the ability to thrust aside the other and plunder. Perhaps today civilisation is vulnerable not to such thuggery but to a simple withdrawal of an acceptance of elite legitimacy enabled by some new and forthcoming single techno-innovation.

The pessimists always think that the collapse of civilisation is due at any time. They are usually wrong. However, Chinese and Western history have shown periodic periods of collapse and restoration. It is probably worth thinking about what could cause the next collapse if it ever came. show less

This is one of three books in my library dating from the period 1987 to 1989, each offering entirely different views of the thorny problem on the origins of the Indo-Europeans (whether considered as a set of languages or a set of peoples). These questions remain unresolved to this day.

This problem is one of those gifts to academics that never ceases to give. The general reader has to make some kind of existential commitment to a position on the data he or she is offered and then stick with show more that until someone argues the case better.

The answer they give, even if wrong, is vitally important because beliefs about origins can dictate our contemporary political and ideological positions. For example, the idea of superior Aryans had its place in building the politics of the first half of the twentieth century.

The reaction against the view that superior Aryans (white skinned and blue eyed) arose in the forests of Europe led to a post war instinct to position them far away on the steppes and turn them into less civilised barbarians.

The racial issues have gone away if only because no one seriously thinks language and genetics are co-terminous but it may now be politically inconvenient to broadcast that European populations have been surprisingly genetically coherent for thousands of years.

It is equally awkward to deal with the probability that much of what we admired in the past (such as the Roman Empire) were machines for brutal exploitation and that ideals of multiculturalism and 'universalism' were dependant for their success on that exploitation.

As to my own understanding of the origin of the Indo-Europeans, I have only these three books to go on, combined with my awareness of the rapidly developing science of historical genetics and some common sense notions of how power is wielded and of the human condition.

From this perspective, I find Drews most persuasive though not exclusively so. If he is right, he revives the importance of military technology and predation in history and the probability of genetic continuities being culturally determined by brute power.

I have to admit I read Mallory's 'In Search of the Indo-Europeans' (1989) and Renfrew's 'Archaeology and Language' (1987) thirty years ago so memory is hazy. I am not a specialist but a quick refresher did not change my view of Drews very much.

Mallory takes the traditional, perhaps still dominant, and I think romantic, view that the Proto-Indo-Europeans emerged on the steppelands of southern Eurasia, He concentrates on the Western Pontic region and puts his case well if you did not know any different.

Renfrew was one of the first to connect with the then-recent scientific exploration of historical demographics and he put forward a highly plausible model of Indo-Europeanism that had little to do with horse cultures and a lot to do with the population effects of farming in the neolithic.

He positioned Indo-Europeanism as arising out of Central Anatolia, spreading outwards with farming technique and diversifying with geography over time. He placed considerable emphasis on language and language change and rapid increases in farming populations.

The reason I find Drews more plausible is because his model of warrior 'takeover' seems to be more pragmatically linked to what we know of human predatory behaviour. His case is well and systematically argued on detailed assessments of the invention and use of chariot warfare.

This emphasis on warfare and the technology of military advantage sits well with another book of his (already reviewed by us) 'The End of the Bronze Age' (1993) where he proposes a change in power relations that were to allow new tactics and resources to destroy chariot power.

Renfrew and Drews are not entirely incompatible. Both would have a PIE population in Anatolia but Renfrew seems to assume that language remains stronger than elite power at all times whereas Drews creates the possibility that incoming minorities can impose their language and culture.

I do not know the answer to this. It is possible that the Pelasgians, prior to the Greeks, actually spoke a variant of Indo-European and so Renfrew's hypothesis stands but Drews gives us an alternative model where predatory chariot warriors used the sea lanes to conquer territory.

Once conquered, populations would lose their language in two or three generations leaving the barest trace of a previous language except in perhaps dialect words (eventually lost) and place names. What little we know of the Pelasgians suggests they were not Indo-European.

Instead of postulating huge mass migrations of people fully displacing natives along the late British and American imperial model (which may have influenced perceptions in the past), earlier exploitative conquerors, whether Celt, Roman or Anglo-Saxon would take the spoils and the labour.

A significant percentage of the population might be classed as part of the ruling community but genetically they would rely on native women or relatively small settler communities, pushing out non-dominant elites and expropriating the local labour.

The survival of English after the Norman conquest might prove the case wrong except that the Normans were much smaller in numbers relatively than earlier cross-Channel and North Sea invaders (who did bring more dependents) so that the final result became a hybrid language.

These situations remain highly complex and subject to endless speculation but Drews argues in a detailed and plausible way that horses may have been a steppe phenomenon but the construction of chariots and the use of horses emerged on the margins of the Near Eastern empires.

He argues that chariot warriors were skilled elites within a multicultural and multilinguistic community that did not recognise ethnicity and only recognised 'lands' over which was the divinely sanctioned (by might) of rulers. The gods favoured the most successful predator.

As chariot warfare developed into a must-have for these rulers, the charioteer corps became an elites within ruling networks, accidentally (by dint of geography) making post-PIE ascendancy dominant and some of this warrior elite then set about raiding to acquire land and labour.

Where these elites entered into already developed societies they retained their multicultural nature so Semites, Hassites, Hurrians or Indo-Europeans might well become petty chariot lords of the Levant or become the Hyksos of Egypt. The chariots were partially equivalent to Viking longships.

Where these elites found their way to virgin territory without even the prospect of a matching military technology, they seized power as a 'superior' warrior and trading aristocracy and so we find ourselves with the Myceneans and, when they collapsed, a little later by the Dorians.

Drews argues for Thessaly as the secondary organising centre for at least the Greek side of the story and it cannot be an accident that the plains of Thessaly were the main horse-breeding country of Greece: horses not being necessary for trade (that would need ships aand asses) but for war.

The Greeks only appear three quarters of the way through the book. The bulk of the book lays the ground work for a theory of Greek origins and it has plausible things to say not only about the course of Near Eastern history but the later Indo-Iranian invasions to the East.

The book is invaluable on two other grounds. In order to lay out his argument, Drews spends a great deal of time on the historiography of the issues about which he is to make his propositions and he does this in a fair and honourable way without polemic. This is worth reading.

The other ground is his engagement with and extension of Piggott's ground-breaking work on wheeled transport in the ancient world, demonstrating broadly to my satisfaction the complex relationship between horse geography, chariot manufacture and chariot use.

This is not to say that there are not problems. The Indo-Iranian side of the question is dealt with cursorily and his thesis is not demonstrated here as it is in the Near East and Aegean. And we are still left with the problem of the extent of Indo-European across Europe.

Somehow it does not seem entirely plausible that Indo-European would extend so far to the West on the back of a chariot so a compromise position might be that PIE did follow the farmers westwards but by-passed Greece which was later Indo-Europeanised by raiding and war.

Another model might be that of neolithic farmers pastoralising and moving on to the steppes without having anything to do with chariot warfare in the Near East. The mysterious Tocharians might merely be returning mercenaries who passed Near Eastern technology to the Chinese.

Chariot warfare as agent of Indo-Europeanisation might be limited therefore to Greece and Thrace in the East and then be a technology passed on to inland pre-existing Indo-Europeans who then adopt the same approach themselves (as the incoming Greeks) in moving south into Italy.

And so on and so forth - a thousand possibilities that mean that Drews strikes me as wholly reliable in describing an Aegean and Near Eastern phenomenon but that Renfrew may still be right about the language group as a whole. And Mallory may be completely off-beam (bar the Tocharians).

Then there is the problem of genetics. Greeks do not seem to have many blonde and blue-eyed people in their heartland and neither do the North Indians so something (a technology) must have brought the language to new communities where intermarriage changed characteristics.

The relationship between technology, power and language on populations that have remained (at least until the last quarter of the twentieth century) stubbornly genetically coherent is at the heart of this mystery and the mystery of all other major language 'conquests'.

Renfrew takes one technology (farming) and Drews takes another (military technology). Substrate populations may remain the same while elites transform the 'means of production' and structures of power. Who decides the culture and language is a live issue for study even today. show less

In the ancient Near East, horseback riding is first heard of around 2000 BC, but doesn't become important (militarily or otherwise) until more than a thousand years later, despite the horse as such being of prime military importance during much of the interval - ca 1600-1200 BC is the golden age of the horse-drawn war chariot. This might be thought odd - Drews seeks the explanation in, among other things, the relatively late invention of effective bits - but that it happened is generally show more agreed.

What's not generally agreed is whether the same line of development applies for all of Eurasia. Where there are any historical evidence from the Bronze Age - primarily Greece and China - the Near Eastern pattern does seem hold, indeed horseback cavalry becomes important even later in these places, but what about the rest of the continent, where we have to rely solely on archaeology? In particular, what about the Eurasiatic steppe, where the horse was an important food animal way back in the stone age, and probably domesticated long before it turns up in the Near East?

One school of thought - whose best presentation is perhaps David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language - holds that the ridden horse was of great importance on the steppe well before 2000 BC, not to speak of 1000 BC. Drews takes the opposite view, arguing that significant riding on the steppe (for military or pastoral purposes) predated Near Eastern by little if any. Absent written records (and pictorial depictions of riders - which in itself suggests that if riding occured, it wasn't considered worthy of depiction), the debate centers on the distribution in time and space of various pieces of horse-gear (bits in particular) and on the necessity or otherwise of horseback riding for Bronze Age steppe economies ("classical" nomad pastoralism starts early last millennium BC - Drews thinks it coincides with the widespread introduction of mounted warfare and good riding techniques in general). For what it's worth, I tend to find Drews's side the more persuasive here.

The book concludes with sections about the importance of cavalry in the rise of the Median and Persian empires, and about the subsequent failure of Iranian horsemen to defeat Greek hoplites. This part is I felt weaker than the preceding chapters; Drews is more at home discussing archaeological distributions than in infering battlefield dynamics. Or maybe it's just that he's a demolisher not a synthetizer - in his earlier books too I've tended to be more convinced by his demolitions of others' hypotheses than by his syntheses. show less