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Starting from Greenland
The word “kayak” came into the
European languages in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, probably
brought from Greenland by Dutch or Danish whalers. Some version of this
word is now used in most European languages for any boat built on the
model of Inuit (Eskimo) skin boats. Long before that, however, boat names cognate with
“kayak” had already been found in most of the Turkish languages, being first attested
by Kashgari in a book written for the caliph in Baghdad during the
eleventh century AD (precluding the idea that Turks learned the word
from the West.) Related words are also found in some of the Mongol and
Tungus languages of Central Asia and Siberia, as well as in Hungarian,
Russian, and several of the other Finno-Ugric or Slavic languages of
Eastern Europe. (The distributions make it almost certain that the word
was originally Turkish, and was borrowed by the other languages). Through
Turkish, in the 1500’s the “caique” finally appeared in Italian as the
name of a boat found on the Adriatic, and the name spread from there to
the other European languages, finally reaching Sweden in the 1700’s. There
the boat names “caique” and “kayak” met – albeit as the names of
boats of entirely different kinds.
The fact that the Turks and the
Inuit both had boat names pronounced something like “kayak” seems at first
to be a pure coincidence of the type that cranks love and linguists dread.
However, a good case can be made that the Inuit and the Turkish words were
etymologically related, and that the word probably originated in Turkish.
First, the Turks first appeared in
history in Mongolia, far from present-day Turkey, and a Turkish people,
the Yakut, still lives in eastern Siberia, about 600 miles north of
China’s northernmost point, and east of almost all of China or Korea.
Second, the kayak apparently originated with the Thule (Inuit) culture on the Bering strait (the
closest point in North America to Asia), and starting about 800 A.D. spread with them from there
via southern Alaska, reaching Greenland by about 1000
AD. From Yakutsk to the Bering strait is about 1900 miles; from the Bering
Strait to the southern tip of Greenland is about 3300 miles. The Inuit
have always been capable of crossing the Bering strait, and in fact the
Yupik still live on both sides of the strait. The upshot of all this is
that, if the Thule culture was able to transmit itself from the Bering
strait more than three thousand miles to Greenland, it easily could have
been in contact with the Yakut (or some other other
Turkish people in that area ca. 800 AD) less than two thousand miles away. While all this does not prove that
the Inuit word “kayak” is derived from the same source as the Turkish words “qayiq” (etc.),
it certainly does show that this is by no means impossible or even
terribly improbable.
I thus conclude the word “kayak” circumnavigated the globe
between 800 nd 1700 AD, reaching Scandinavia from both directions at
the end of that period.
II
The Norse apparently first reached
Greenland not too long after the Thule Inuit did – though the older Dorset
culture had been there long before the Thule arrived. From Greenland, the
Norse established a trade route for walrus and narwhale ivory that
reached as far as Sung dynasty China.
It is possible to reconstruct the
Ivory Road with tolerable exactness. Ships from Greenland went directly
to Bergen without stopping at Iceland. The route to the eastern Baltic was
routine. From near Lake Ladoga it was not far to the upper Volga at
Timerevo near the present Jaroslav; from there it was a simple trip
downstream to Bulghar, where the Rus had already been observed in the
ninth century A.D. by Ibn Fadlan. The trip from Bulghar to Khwarizm (Khiva
or Samarqand), possibly by boat on the Uzboy river / canal, was again
routine, and at Khwarizm the Ivory Road joined the long-established Silk
Road. (There was also a route via the Vistula and Dnieper from the Baltic to the Black
Sea near the Crimea, whence the sea route would be taken to Trebizond
and then to the Caspian sea.)
Given what I’ve said above about
the Bering Strait, it doesn’t seem impossible to me that China also
got New World luxury products from Alaska too, via intermediaries, but I have
no evidence for that.
III
The Norse had already been in
Constantinople (which they reached via the Dnieper -- Black Sea route) for
centuries by the time they reached Greenland. Harald Hardrada, the King of
Norway, had been a leader of the Varangian Guard there, and was
important enough to be named in one of the Byzantine chronicles. In 1066
Hardrada
invaded England, hoping to re-establish the kingdom of Knut (Canute), but
he was defeated and killed at Stamford bridge by the English king, Harold Godwinson. (The
Norse were killed in a surprise attack, and there is reason to suspect that
they were drunk,
just as were Grendel’s victims in Beowulf). At Hastings immediately
afterwards, King Harold fought the invading William of Normandy (later “William the Conqueror”) and was defeated. This ended Anglo-Saxon rule of
England (though, like William and Harald Hardrada, Godwinson was ultimately of Norse
descent anyway).
About this same time, other Norman
raiders established a kingdom in Sicily, and not too long after this
purely-secular conquest, the Crusades began. In 1202 Venetian treachery
diverted the Fourth Crusade from Jerusalem to the Christian Byzantine
Empire, which was conquered and divided into Latin (or Frankish)
kingdoms. But after a century and a half, the Varangian Guard in which
Harald Hardrada served was still in existence, and it still recruited
mostly among Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. Most of the Varangians died
defending the Byzantine Emperor, but the few who survived were recognized
as distant relatives by the Normans and returned to their home, thus, rather
involuntarily, completing their circumnavigation of Europe.
Link
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UPDATE:
I believe that there's
something of general interest that can come out of this. There are
two reasons why the transcontinental diffusion of memes works better in
the Arctic than in the temperate or tropical zone. First, actual
distances are less. Someone going around the world from East to West
following the 65th parallel would cover fewer than 10,000 miles, whereas
at the equator it would be almost 25,000 miles.
But second, there are fewer
stopping points. In thinly-settled areas, traveling long distances is
necessary and normal. This is not only true of the Arctic. The
Polynesians covered enormous distances in their exploration of the
Pacific, but this was simply because their only two alternatives were
long-distance travel, and staying home. By contrast, a traveler
from Rome to China traveling through settled areas would be tempted (or
compelled) to stop (depending on his route) at Beirut, Jerusalem,
Damascus, Alexandria, Cairo, and many places further east, whereas a
traveler taking the northern route would not be tempted to stop
anywhere before Samarkand or thereabouts -- Trebizond, Khazaria, and
Bulgar were all just relays, rather than destinations. And after
Samarkand, there were really no stops until the old capital of China,
Xian, was reached. (In the present-day U.S., in the West long trips are
normal, so that it's quite routine for someone to travel 1000+ miles
from Portland to Reno and back for the weekend. A comparable trip from
Richmond, Virginia to Boston would seem rather odd; a
Cleveland-to-Boston trip might be slightly more likely.)
So the impediments to
long-distance trade and communication are three: first, political and
military opposition by states and bandits protecting monopolies; second,
the temptation to stop at some nice place before the far destination was
reached; and third, the actual physical difficulty of travel. The third
of these, which is often considered the most important, is almost
certainly the least important. Civilization can be an impediment.
.
Addendum
Hodges,
Richard and Whitehouse, David
Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe
Cornell, 1983
Archaeological detail which partially confirms and partially
disconfirms the Pirenne thesis. The isolation of NW Europe was under way
well before the Muslim conquests, which were more the result than the
cause of the weakening of Byzantium and the West. Via the Vikings /
Varangians, the Carolingians traded luxury goods with the Abbasids in
Baghdad, and this trade was critical to the Carolingian Renaissance.
Trade through the Mediterranean was made difficult partly by
Christian-Muslim hostility, but more by the Byzantine Empire's difficult
relationship with both the Carolingians and the Abbasids. The
Carolingians were thus part of a Northern oecumene which included both
the Christian Anglo-Saxons and the pagan Norse, and which also had an
eastward outlook both via the Baltic, and overland to Bohemia, Moravia,
and what would later become Hungary.
NOTES
The kayak in Turkish, Swedish,
etc.:
Sinor, Denis, “On Water-transport
in Central Asia”, in Inner Asia and its Contacts with Medieval Europe,
IV, Variorum, 1977. (pp. 163-168).
PDF:
http://altaica.ru/LIBRARY/Congress1960/sinor.pdf
"The Kayak
in North-Western Europe", David MacRitchie, The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 42,
Jul. - Dec., 1912 (Jul. - Dec., 1912), pp. 493-510.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0307-3114(191207%2F12)42%3C493%3ATKINE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L
"A
Comparison between Eskimo-Aleut and Uralo-Altaic Demonstrative Elements,
Numerals, and Other Related Semantic Problems" by Rene Bonnerjea,
International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Jan.,
1978), pp. 40-55.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0020-7071(197801)44%3A1%3C40%3AACBEAU%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S
Thanks also
to Ruth at GNXP comments, who pointed out that "kayak" in Turkish can
also mean "ski" and is an inflected word from kay- "glide", and
asked whether Inuit/Eskimo kayak / qayaq is also an inflected
word, or instead a borrowing from Turkish.
“Kayak” in English by 1757:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=kayak (though the old-edition
OED seems to say ~1660.)
Henry Yule speculates about the
"kayak" vs. the "caique", claiming that the Mediterranean caique is
similiar to the Eskimo kayak: Hobson-Jobson, Wordsworth Reference
reissue, 1996, p. 143 -- originally published in 1886.
The Thule culture and the
kayak:
“The Thule Tradition in Alaska
(c.700 BC-AD 1800). Includes all prehistoric Eskimo remains in Bering
Strait after c. 700 BC, from northern Alaska coast after c. AD 800, from
southern coasts after c. AD 1000, and from Canada and
Greenland after c. AD 1000. …. Some appear in the
archaeological [record?] for the first time (kayaks, umiaks, dog sleds, efficient
toggling harpoons, harpoon line floats, harpoon mounted ice picks).
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/2596/dorset.html
The Yakut:
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/EthnoAtlas/Hmar/Cult_dir/Culture.7883
Ivory:
The Amber Road
connected the Baltic and the Black Seas long before the birth of Christ.
Laufer, Berthold, “Arabic and
Chinese Trade in Walrus and Narwhale Ivory, T’oung Pao, 2nd
series, #14, 1913, pp. 315—370.
David Christian, A History of
Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia, Vol. I, Blackwell, 1998 (Ivory in
Khwarizm in 985 AD: p. 320. Timerevo: map on p. 337.)
David Nicolle (Medieval Warfare
Source Book, Vol. 2, Arms and Armour, 1996, p. 122) reports that the
Uzboy water route between the Caspian and the Aral was open as late as the
sixteenth century, and also reports that a boat called a “caique” is still
in use on the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Ibn Fadlan: "La relation de la
voyage d'Ibn Fadlan chez les Bulgares de la Volga", tr. Marius Canard, #
XI in Miscellanea Orientalia, Variorum, 1973.
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All original material copyright John J.
Emerson
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