An Essay on Substrate Studies and the Origin of Saami

Questions of migration, ethnicity, and identity in the Steppe are examined from the perspectives of genetics (Patrick J. Geary), archaeology (Ursula B. Brosseder) and historiography (Michael Kulikowski and Walter Pohl). Trade and exchange on the "Silk and Steppe Routes" (70) are discussed by Richard Lim, Rong Xinjiang, Peter Brown, and Scott Fitzgerald Johnson; Lim addresses routes and connectivity, while Xinjiang, Brown, and Johnson are more concerned with cultural exchange. The four remaining chapters are concerned with aspects of Eurasian political culture: Matthew P. Canepa on Rome and Iran's imperial cosmologies, Max Deeg on the spread of Buddhism in China, Frantz Grenet on astrology in central, southern and western Eurasia, and Joel Walker on pearls in Iran and her neighbors. Together, the chapters evoke a vision of the interconnected aspects of culture and politics in the lands between Rome and China in the middle of the first millennium. The importance of the Rouran (c. 400-552), Hephthalite (c. 450-c. 560), and Turk empires (552-630 and 682-742) comes across strongly; these were Steppe political formations with a new character and scale that impacted Rome, Iran, and China and were impacted by them. Of course, elsewhere other pastoralist peoples were also forming larger-scale political organizations; developments among the "Berbers" of the Sahara and the "Arabs" of the Arabian Peninsula are-understandably, given the geographical focus-not addressed in the volume. But "the cutoff point" (5), does not quite coincide "with the Islamic expansion." Islamic conquest had already ended Sasanian rule in Iran in 651 and had reached the Caucasus, Sogdia, and the Indus Valley in the decades before 750. Indeed, the volume's large-scale perspective invites Africa and Arabia's future integration into the picture, together with the Indian Ocean that linked them with India and China. Had the compilation been made a couple of years later, it is also likely that plague would have featured on more than one page (83, in Lim's chapter). Despite the evidential difficulties, climate (particularly the cooling after 536), demography, and economics also invite further attention, as opposed to the volume's emphasis on politics and culture. With a Eurasian scope, "Late Antiquity" becomes a problematic category, as Cameron in particular acknowledges (424). Ultimately, it is a Eurocentric one. But institutional structures at least mean "Late Antiquity" will probably last for some time yet. What is perhaps more important than the chronological label are the editors' and contributors' claimswhich resonate with contemporary concerns about scale and connectivity-that there are inter-related processes taking place across Eurasia in the same time period and that these interconnections are worthy of historians' attention.

Substantia, 2024

This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record.

Ritva Liisa Pitkänen & Janne Saarikivi (eds.). Borrowing of Place Names in the Uralian Languages, 2007

Genetic evidence for the Saami as the earliest inhabitants of Fennoscandia.

KONOSO, the Journal of Aegean Bronze Age Studies, 2019

Minoan Linear A tablets appear to be classed in two primary areas of interest (a) agriculture, and more specifically, crops and grains and (b) religious and sacerdotal. It is to the former that we turn our attention in this study. Focusing on certain Linear A tablets which deal primarily or almost exclusively with grains, we find that these three tablets yield the most promising results, Haghia Triada tablets HT 86 & 95 and Zakros tablet ZA 20. While HT 86 and HT 95 are intact, ZA 20 is not. Other Linear A tablets from Haghia Triada also contribute to our findings. Is it possible to envision an intact version of the original ZA 20 tablet from Zakros? We believe so, and with that firmly in mind we have attempted the first ever restoration of the top of ZA 20, resulting in what amounts to a plausible intact version, however hypothetical, of the original.

The Dump of Burgio: the Kiln Wastes of the First Pottery Workshops (16th-17th Centuries A.D.

Society for Archaeological Sciences Bulletin, 2011

Dixneuf, Delphine (edited by), LRCW5 Late Roman Coarse Wares, Cooking Wares and Amphorae in the Mediterranean. Archaeology and archaeometry, Études Alexandrines 43,, 2017

These two volumes present the results of a group of researchers working on Late Roman coarse wares, cooking wares and amphorae in the Mediterranean: archaeology and archaeometry (LRCW) that gathered in Alexandria in 2014 within the Centre d'Études Alexandrines. After initial encounters at Barcelona, Aix-en-Provence and Pisa, which highlighted productions of the western Mediterranean, the meeting in Thessaloniki launched an oriental approach that was continued in the Alexandrian gathering. The first volume is dedicated to discoveries and research in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Tunisia, Libya and Croatia, while the second looks more particularly at the contexts of the Black Sea, Greece, and especially Egypt, which is the subject of 14 contributions.

2016

In 2009, Mario Liverani celebrated his 70th birthday and retired from teaching at the Sapienza in Rome, although his book Antico Oriente: Storia, società, economia remains in wide use and is still foundational for anyone studying the ancient Near East. The Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Archeologiche e Antropologiche dell’Antichità, where Mario Liverani was a leading specialist since the department’s inception, celebrated Liverani’s milestone birthday and retirement with a conference held in his honor, and this book publishes the papers that were read at the conference on April 20–21, 2009. The title chosen for the conference was “Not Only History/Non solo storia,” which alludes to Liverani’s multiple interests and forays into the field of the ancient Near East and Egypt. A select group of scholars and colleagues was chosen to represent Prof. Liverani’s fields of interests, because it was impossible to include all of the Italian and international colleagues who could have been invited. Even so, the list of eminent contributors in the fields of ancient Near Eastern history, art, linguistics, and archaeology is more than adequate to recommend acquisition of this fine collection: John Baines (Oxford), Dominique Charpin (Collège de France), Joaquín María Córdoba (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Jerrold Cooper (Johns Hopkins), Jean-Marie Durand (Collège de France), Peter Machinist (Harvard), David Mattingly (University of Leicester), Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), Nadav Na'aman (Tel Aviv University), Nicholas Postgate (Cambridge), Johannes Renger (Free University of Berlin), Marc Van de Mieroop (Columbia University), Irene Winters (Harvard), and Norman Yoffee (University of Michigan).

This is a second draft version of my paper on saima-stems. Suggested etymologies: 1. Fi. hydronym Saimaa ?< *sajma 'black' from Early Iranian syāma-'black' (IE *k´iéh1-mó 'dark grey') 2. Fi. sama-, same- in samea 'troubled, thick (porridge)' ?< Iranian sāma 'black' (same IE stem) 3. Proto-Uralic *śäχmä 'black' (represented in Mari and Mansi) < PIE *k´iéh1-mó 'dark grey' 4.. Fi. hämä-rä 'dark, obscure' < Baltic, Lith. šė́mas 'light grey, dark grey, bluish grey' (same IE stem); _not_ < Germanic *sǣma- 'dark' which occurs isolated in Scandinavian, e.g. Old Norse sámr 'dunkelgrau', which in turn might be < Fi. sama-, same- above. 5. Fi. saimasiika 'Coregonus' ?? < *sajma 'black', e.g. musta siika 'black Coregonus', or ?< saima 'net'. 6. Fi. saima 'net' _not_ < Scandinavian, Old Norse seimr 'gold, golden thread'; ?? < North Saami sáibma 'net' from Fi. saimi, derived from saa- 'catch, acquire' (~ Fi. saama 'net'). 7. Proto-Saami *ćōjmē 'pole, quant-pole' < Indo-Iranian, Sanskrit śámya- 'stick, staff (IE *k´em-ieh2-, *k´-om-ieh2-) 8. Fi. saima, soima 'boat' ?< Saami, PS *ćōjmē 'pole, quant-pole' or ???< Indo-Iranian *sav- 'make move, allot', assuming this stem survives in F i. soi-ttaa 'travel, move quickly'.