SANSKRIT AND INDO-EUROPEAN II territorial limits within which the cradle of the Indo-European languages is to be sought. It is known with reasonable cer- tainty that the Italian and Greek peninsulas were colonised from the North. The occupation of France and the British Isles by Celts from Central Europe occurred at a comparatively late date (c. 500 b.c.). The Iberian peninsula remained predomin- antly non-Indo-European till Roman times, and in modern Basque there still exists a survival of pre-Indo-European speech. The Eastern limit is indicated by the fact that before the two Asiatic migrations (Tocharian and Indo-Iranian) Indo- European must have been bounded to the East by an early form of Finno-Ugrian, and there is some evidence of contact be- tween these two families in the primitive period. There is reason to believe that the original centre of Finno-Ugrian expan- sion lay between the Volga and the Urals and this forms the extreme limit beyond which Indo-European was not to be found in the early stages of its history. This leaves the central portion of Europe extending from the Rhine to Central and Southern Russia, and it is probable that by the time of the Indo-Iranian migrations the larger part of this area had long been occupied by various Indo-European dialects. It is not possible to define the original Indo-European home- land in terms any narrower than these, nor is it desirable to try, since those who have attempted to do so have usually suffered from misconceptions about the nature of ‘ Primitive Indo- European ' and about the time when the earliest divisions began. The evolution of the Indo-European should not be re- garded as being on a par with that of the Romance languages from Latin. In the latter case the various languages are derived from a single unitary language, the language to begin with of one city. But in the case of Indo-European it is certain that there was no such unitary language which can be reached by means of comparison. It would be easy to produce, more or less ad infinitum a list of forms like Skt. nabhi Gk. 6 fjuf>a Aos* ' navel ', which although inherited directly from the primitive IE period, and radically related are irreducible to a single original. In fact detailed comparison makes it clear that the Indo-European that we can reach by this means was already deeply split up into a series of varying dialects. It is from this point of view that the question of the r split- ting ' of Indo-European should be regarded. It has not been
