THE PROBLEM OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS For several thousand years before the third millennium b.c. the new way of life based on agriculture, which had developed in the Near East and perhaps also in certain adjacent areas, spread out of these regions into lands which lay around them. There is no doubt that it was disseminated mainly by peoples or smaller groups who migrated out of its original centres. Then the trend was largely reversed. In the third millennium ‘barbarians’ moved into Mesopotamia. Semites from poorer lands to the west settled in the south in such numbers that their language superseded that of the Sumerians, although they adopted Sumerian civilization. Gutian invaders from the highlands to the east ruled southern Iraq during the twenty-second century, but they proved less assimilable and were eventually expelled. After c . 2000 b.c. similar intrusions had more important results. The infiltration of Semitic tribes, ‘Amorites’, from Syria into Mesopotamia continued, but the migrations which caused the greatest changes appear to have come from further north. In many cases the names of the incoming peoples have not been preserved in the records of older civilized states or in documents in their own languages. The earliest of them spoke languages of various types and affiliations. But most of those who came from the north and who are identified for the first time after c . 2000 b.c. spoke languages which belong to the ‘Indo-European’ family.
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