Where is Europe; how does it divide

There is no particular place where one can draw a border between Europe and Asia. Europeans, meanwhile, are preoccupied by differences and local rivalries, and Europe would never appear in intuitive maps. We could consider Christendom as a unit. Christendom would include the Armenians, the Georgians, several million Christian Arabs, the Copts, the Assyrians, etc., all over the border into Asia. For most of the period we are discussing, the key division was between capitalism and communism. We could use democracy as a criterion, accepting civilised values and jettisoning a geographical concept of 'Europe'. Or, the Latin alphabet (= the domain of Roman Church as it was in the Dark Ages). Or, we could see Europe as the home of centum languages, using the classical dividing line of Indo-European languages into centum and satem, depending on their treatment of the mother-language's palatalised s sound. The k:s line sweeps up almost all Western Europeans on one side of it, while leaving the Slavs and Albanians with the Iranian and the Indian peoples (speakers of Prakrits) on the other side. Thus, we would have defined the Czechs and the Poles as being non-European, while inadvertently defining almost the whole population of South, Central, and North America, centum speakers, as being Europeans. This will not do.

There was an outlying centum language spoken in Central Asia, Tokharian. Supposedly this is similar to European centum languages, but I can’t see any resemblance to Latin, German, or Welsh. Does this help us to determine where the edge of Europe is? bearing in mind that the region where these languages (Tocharian A and B) were spoken is now within the People's Republic of China. It suggests to me that the edge of Europe doesn’t exist – the geography of the steppe does not support frontiers and abiding edges.

V I Abaev, in his work Skifskiye-evropeyskie izoglossy, draws our attention to the geographical position of the Ossetic language, Iranian in affiliation but situated on the edge of Europe. The edge of Europe could well be the edge of the centum languages: where k becomes s. But, there are reasons for giving Slavonic a position intermediate between the European languages and the Asiatic ones: which would place the furthest Iranian language (precisely, Ossete) in the position at the border. Slavic agrees with western languages in having l instead of r in certain words (such as slukh, the word for hearing) and with eastern languages in having s for k in words like the one for hundred (Slavic sot, Latin centum). No-one doubts that Iranian languages were once spoken much further north and west, in lands which now form the Ukraine and eastern Europe. Abaev suggests that the l:r opposition, where l matches r, includes Ossete within the European group: compare Alan (ethnic name) with Aryan, where the Alans were of Iranian speech. The Ossetes also have this word, so that their name for themselves is Iron, and, as Harmatta points out, their use of the -r- in this position allocates them to the Asian group of languages. He remarks that the Ossetes may not be descendants of the Scythians, but immigrants from much further east, their language related to Sogdian instead. Abaev's argument is, however, valid for an Iranian ethnic group which did once live in the Ukraine: the Alans (whose name embodies the r/l alternation in its version of the lexeme Aryan). This curious resemblance conjures up an ancient state of distribution where the Indo-European languages were still in contact, and when there were intermediate dialects between Iranian and Slavic - and, perhaps, between Slavic and Germanic. This offers us the possibility of saying that the edge of Europe is wherever, on the rolling steppes, l is exchanged for r. Where a group of riders sweep north - the frontier shifts. When they ride east - the frontier shifts again. This seems a suitable definition when the eastern edge of Europe is clearly not there, and has to be drawn arbitrarily.

Does a language represent a mentality? or could several mentalities exist in different regions which share, however, the same language? Finding the edge of a language was quite easy for the data collectors - but who has ever tried to find the edge of a mentality? In Britain, it's clear that groups which speak the same language, English and its dialects, have quite different political traditions - as Irish, Scots, or Welsh. Could we, further, describe the speakers of a language group as possessing a shared mentality? I fear not. The absence of evidence is deafening. Some fragments of evidence may in fact exist, but they do not constitute a body of knowledge which anyone could rely on.

Another dividing line is, the line of de-feudalisation in the 18th and 19th centuries. The liberation of the serfs is a good line to trace modernisation in Europe. My concept of Europe is not based on some criteria which include everyone within some territorial line, and could be used then to exclude other people; it has more to do with wished-for social contacts. I am oriented towards a fluent shared space, an inside, and the fact that Europe has edges is embarrassing or insignificant: I don’t have a cultural policy which excludes the Turks, Lebanese, or Algerians (and I don’t count-out the Turks, Algerians, or Lebanese already in Europe).

Maybe we could throw away the image of lines of division, and look instead where the prized qualities reach their peaks. Although territorial borders are vague entities in culture, we can see it as a set of poles, drawing energies towards themselves and radiating them back. We would map waves of intensity rather than edges. These maps are easier to dream about than to find in the shops.

We can define an Iranian cultural space as distinct from the Near East, and its influence on Europe is quite different from the flow of ideas from the cities of the Near East, the basis of Christianity. Franz Altheim, a philologer of remarkable abilities and remarkable flaws, talks (in Weltgeschichte Asiens im Griechischen Zeitalter), about coats of mail dug up on the Baltic island of Gotland (relics of a battle?), which are under Persian influence. This would have been mediated across the Russian steppes, which at that time were inhabited by largely Iranian-speaking nomads. The derivation of the concept of the Knight from Persian or North Iranian models is now a commonplace among historians; I think Altheim may have been the first to point it out. European historians are very receptive to hypotheses about ideas coming across the Mediterranean, relatively blind to similar flows of ideas from the east, across the Ukraine-Polish steppe area, so wide and easy to cross. There is a privileged layer of European culture flow, and a dumb layer, split into many regional networks. Anybody can spot classical influences on a poet (or, more recently, French influences), but it is harder to do conscious discussion of other influences. It has been suggested that the European romance or ballad has eastern links, and certainly there are remarkable resemblances to Iranian narrative poems, chivalrous and romantic. But this could simply be due to parallel developments, with the combination of small courts, castles, minstrels, and wandering knights being typical for Central Asia at a certain stage of its development.

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