Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 508  George van Driem   The reasoning of [Bellwood and Renfrew 2002] is therefore flawed, and the Centripetal Migration model was proposed as an alternative to their cen- trifugal Farming Language Dispersal theory [van Driem 2007]. Bellwood and Renfrew argue that the surplus generated by an agricultural economy and the stratified social and command structure enabled by a Neolithic lifestyle drove demographic spread into many areas. They claim that the incremental spread of the Neolithic led to ‘the foundation dispersals’ of language families with the ancient spread of linguistic phyla unfolding in the same direction as the demographic spread driven by Neolithic agriculture. The very opposite may be what actually happened in many cases. Across the Fertile Crescent, agricul- ture was adopted by ethnolinguistically unrelated populations, and agriculture spread effortlessly across ethnolinguistic boundaries without disrupting them in any significant way. The phylogeography of barley DNA suggests that the spread of the Neolithic across Europe may have involved a complex history of interaction between foragers and farmers [Jones et al . 2012]. Sumerian pictographic script, developed ca. 3200 BC, appeared millennia after the invention of agriculture. Sumerian, Elamite, Akkadian, 1 Hurrian, Hattic and other contemporaneous agricultural civilisations were in all likeli- hood not the first cultivators of the region. Yet even these antique agricultural language communities have left no surviving linguistic descendants. The ear- liest recorded and reconstructible history of the Near East bears witness to the permeability of linguistic boundaries for the dissemination of agriculture and crops. The Bronze Age of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia is characterised by a long period of incursive population movements into, rather than out of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent, lured by the relative affluence of urban centres supported by agricultural surplus. Gutæans, Amorites, Kassites and other peoples were drawn in by the promise of the good life. Most linguis- tic reconstructions presume that Indo-European groups such as the Hittites and Mitanni likewise came to settle in Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent from elsewhere. Toponymical evidence and details about the cults of certain deities have been used to argue that even the Sumerians originally migrated from an earlier northern homeland to lower Mesopotamia. Were the motivations of migrating peoples in agricultural and pre-agri- cultural societies genuinely different at the Neolithic horizon than at later times? Tidings of technologically advanced urban societies may in the course of prehistory have provided ample motivation for migration, with enticing prospects of plunder and material advancement. We must consider such al- 1 Today Afroasiatic languages are spoken throughout this area, but none are descended directly from the extinct branch of the family represented by Akkadian.