Ep 206. The Ancient Linguistic Order with Laura Spinney

Now I want to move on to the topic that made this a disorder episode for me.

You know, if you're listening, a mega orderer until now, and you're like, this is ancient history.

What does this have to do with what you usually talk about on this podcast? Okay, here we go.

Regular Disorder listeners will have heard me bang on about Halford Mackinder and his view that Ukraine is the geographical pivot of all human history.

This is something that's very close to me.

When I was living in D.C. and there was the first attempted impeachment of President Donald Trump in 2018, I wrote in the Washington Post that Ukraine was the pivot of human history.

And if we didn't stand up for the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, and if we had let Russia annex sovereign Ukrainian territory, it would come to no good, and we would only reinforce this lawlessness.

So I'm reading Proto, and I'm wondering whether Mackinder was not only right, but he just didn't go back far enough.

the Northern Black Sea and Eurasian steppe and where they meet in Ukraine have always been this consequential crossroads.

And maybe part of the reason the Yamnaya were important was they controlled this strategic bit of land.

Am I onto something?

I think you're definitely onto something.

Yeah, control is an interesting idea, isn't it? I mean, obviously they had a different relationship to property and to land than we do or that anyone did forward of the sort of invention of the modern nation state.

But were they adapted to those lands? Did they want to expand through them and claim them for themselves? Yes, it seems so.

And I suppose we come back to this idea of creative tension at boundaries.

You know, half of modern Ukraine is steppe.

So the boundary between forest and steppe goes across Ukraine.

And that boundary has shifted backwards and forwards through prehistory and history.

And forward of the last ice age, you've always had the herders on one side and the farmers of the other after the agricultural revolution.

So there's been that tension there.

In other words, there's a cultural boundary overlaid on the ecological boundary.

And climate change has sort of regularly thrown the dice and shifted that boundary and caused people to have to adapt.

Sometimes that's been violent, sometimes that's not, but it's generally been a place which has generated new cultures.

That's where the Yamnaya emerged and it's where it seems also the Indo-European languages emerged.

So yeah, it's been a crucial factor and that's where the climate comes into.