The Home of the Indo-Europeans: An Investigation Based on Language and History

Written by a professor of Indo-Germanic Philology in Princeton University, this masterpiece of detective work pieces together evidence from the study of language, geography, history and skeletal archaeology to establish the original homeland of the Indo-European people.

Professor Bender points out that while linguistic relationship is not itself sufficient proof of racial relationship, when combined with archaeological, historical and skeletal evidence, it can provide valuable indicators of common cultural ancestry. His conclusion, after clinically researching the evidence for Asia and Europe, is that the original home of the Indo-Europeans of the "great plain of central and south-eastern Europe, which embraces, roughly, the present Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Russia south and west of the Volga."

From the introduction: "It was early evident that the speakers of these languages of Europe and Asia were the heirs of a common culture and that their several dialects were the descendants of a prehistoric tongue, the so-called Indo-European, which was not identical with that of the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, or other ancient peoples.

"The Indo-Europeans emerge from the obscurity of antiquity as independent nations, scatted from the arctic circle to the equator and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Bay of Bengal . . . The Celts were not always in Britain, nor the Hellenes in Greece, nor the Hindus in India. They must all have been descended in some way from some localized prehistoric group of people who were united by a common speech and a common civilization."

New edition, completely reset, with special introduction and index.