If this sounds like a puzzling picture, well, you are right. Europe and the Mediterranean was then, as it is now, a hodge-podge of many tongues, including some unrelated to each other linguistically but which were spoken by neighboring peoples. This was the result of numerous mass migrations which took place following the end of the Ice Age. As the glaciers receded northward, various groups wandered into reclaimed lands, following the herds of animals on which they lived. As they moved, some overlapped each other, some groups welded themselves together while others split up, and so on. One could literally call the millenia following the Ice Age and leading up to classical times, a period of "social shuffling." Anthropologists and historical linguists are only just now beginning to puzzle out the travels of various groups — and even then there is much uncertainty and mystery.
Civilization as we know it sprang up in the Near East, in fertile lands well suited to agriculture (the Nile valley, and the "Fertile Crescent," running from Palestine into what is now eastern Syria, and all the way down the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Other areas remained the homes of nomadic peoples.
Agriculture actually first developed — at least, according to the latest findings — at the "apex" or northern bend of the Fertile Crescent, in what is now eastern Turkey, Armenia, or Azerbaijan. It soon drifted down both ends of the Crescent, reaching eastward down to the Persian Gulf, and down westward to the Nile valley.
While agriculture began at the apex of the Fertile Crescent, urban societies sprang up at its ends. Settlements in the midst of the Crescent were generally small — but in Sumer and in Egypt, they grew immensely, into true cities.
It was these markings which grew in complexity, and as they did so, the need for the tokens disappeared. Eventually, the markings indicated more than just numbers of things being exchanged — names were included, which required that the markings somehow reflect sounds and words. With that innovation, true "writing" — a physical representation of a language — came about. Sumerian writing is known as cuneiform, from the Latin word for "wedge;" for Sumerian writing was composed of wedge-shaped impressions made in clay by reed styli.
Somewhat later, Egyptian writing developed. It began originally as a means to label objects, rather than for recording commercial transactions. However, once the marking of things began, it followed the same pattern of development — the Egyptians needed to put names on things, and this required that the markings reflect sounds and words. Soon, though, drawing with a brush and ink on papyrus became the preferred means of writing in Egypt — while the Sumerians, and the Babylonians and Assyrians who followed them kept working in clay.
Both cultures eventually employed writing on monuments, generally telling who built them & why, or invoking the blessings of the gods, or — sometimes — both! So, in both places, writings carved in stone began to appear.
The development of writing is critical to the understanding of the history of language. The recording of these languages, as they were spoken at that time, tells us a good deal about how languages changed later on.
The only misfortune is that we do not have as good a record of other languages spoken in the days of early writing. Each writing system was developed to record that particular language, and could only poorly represent others. Still, the recording of foreign names and places by Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes does tell us a little about some of the other languages of that time.
Writing proved to be a useful tool, and within a couple of millenia, it was being used by a great many different peoples, to represent their languages. Even so, writing itself was considered an art too complex for most, and the only people who could read or write were those trained — usually from a young age — to do so. This was especially true in Egypt and Mesopotamia, which had complex writing systems requiring the mastery of hundreds of different symbols, or "glyphs."
As writing expanded to other languages, innovations were introduced. Most significant was the creation of a true alphabet, or set of letters representing specific sounds, or "phonemes," as linguists call them. Egyptian and Mesopotamian writings had been ideographic & syllabic scripts. That is, each glyph could represent either one idea, or word, or else a spoken syllable. These two different types of glyphs could be mingled together — which made this sort of writing complex enough that it was relegated to a virtual "caste" of scribes. This is why there were hundreds of different sorts of glyphs in each of these writing systems.
In a true alphabet, however, each glyph does not represent a whole word or a syllable, but one specific phoneme. Words are composed of a string of glyphs which represent the sequence of phonemes in that word. Thus, an alphabet needs only to be made up of a number of glyphs equal to the number of different phonemes found in the language — anywhere from, say, a dozen, to about 40 or so. The need for hundreds of different glyphs, which could stand for various sorts of things, vanished, and writing was greatly simplified.
The earliest alphabet that we know of appeared on the Arabian shores and was based upon Egyptian hieroglyphs, whose initial phoneme that each letter stood for. So the symbol for "water," which in Egyptian is "mu" and whose hieroglyph was a wavy line, stood for the sound "m." The other letters of this early alphabet were derived in much the same way, from other Egyptian hieroglyphs.
This early alphabet reached the Phoenicians, who adapted it to their own language, and changed it to suit their needs. Another, different alphabet, derived from cuneiform but based on the same principle, developed in Syria, and since it was found in the city of Ugarit along the coast, it's known as the Ugaritic script.
A notable feature of these scripts is that they generally made no attempt to represent vowel sounds — they only included consonants. While, to us, this seems rather odd and less than useful, introducing the possibility of ambiguity, it appears that the ancients managed quite well, this way. Vowels were yet another innovation, sort of an "afterthought," if you will.
It was the Phoenician script, however, which caught on most. Perhaps it was because the Phoenicians were such avid travelers and merchants, who reached the most ports and conducted a great deal of business (and therefore brought a lot of writing) to many different places. The Phoenician script was picked up by the early Greeks. They did not need all of the letters of the Phoenician script — as their language used slightly fewer phonemes — so some of the "extra" letters, the Greeks used to represent vowels. They also devised letters for sounds which appeared in their language but not in Phoenician.
Meanwhile, at about the same time, the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations had developed writing on their own, syllabic scripts which appear to have been used to represent a proto-Greek language. These are called "Linear A" & "Linear B," and seem to have been outmoded by the Phoenician-inspired alphabet.
The Etruscans — like the Phoenicians a strongly commercial culture — soon appropriated the Greek alphabet for their language. Note, the language of the Etruscans is not Indo-European, but they had little difficulty in adapting the Greek letters to their use. The Etruscans passed their alphabet, in turn, to the other peoples of Italy — most significantly, to the Latins, whose primary city of Rome went on to conquer most of the known world.
Alexander's conquest of the Near East brought Greek to those regions, and it became the chief language of commerce. Of course, Aramaic — which had its own alphabet, inspired either by the Phoenician or the earlier Arabic one — was spoken and used, as well. Aramaic was descended from Assyrian, and was related to Hebrew, which had, by then, disappeared — except among the Judaic priesthood. But by the time of the Roman conquests of these areas, Aramaic was used less; Greek, and later, Latin, eclipsed it.
The Germanic peoples themselves remained numerous only in the north and in central Europe. This is why the Romance languages are found only in territories which had been integrated into the Roman Empire, while the Germanic languages are found only outside the sphere of Rome's conquest.
Greek remained important in the east, however, and in Egypt, the Coptic language descended from ancient Egyptian, remained in use. Even so, Latin became a common tongue across Europe and the Mediterranean, and even long after the fall of the western Roman Empire, Latin remained the most important language in the world.
The expansion of Rome, and in the wake of its fall, the growth of the Church as an institution, fuelled the continued importance of Latin. It provided a common ground for discourse even among the folk of different realms, whose own languages had drifted apart. Latin was the glue which held the Church together and in turn, kept medieval culture together as well.
For a thousand years after the fall of Rome in the west, Latin remained the language of scholarship and meaningful discourse. In many places it was the language of state business, and even commerce. It also remained the language of administration in the Byzantine Empire, the remnant of the original Roman Empire, until it had shrunk down in size to include only Constantinople and some Greek territory, following the debacle of the Fourth Crusade. It was only at this point that the Byzantines started using vernacular Greek as their official language.
Latin actually has several "flavors." Even in classical and Imperial times, there was a slight difference between the Latin spoken by the upper classes, and for literary purposes, and what was spoken by the general population. The language of the common folk was called "vulgar" Latin. All the present Romance languages descend from vulgar Latin. A variety of changes occurred in various regions, resulting in the differences we see in those languages, now.
Luckily, although the Romans themselves frowned upon putting vulgar Latin into written form, St. Jerome translated the Bible into vulgar Latin, late in the Imperial period. This version of the Bible is, thus, known as the "Vulgate," and provides us a good picture of how vulgar and literary Latin differed, at least in Jerome's day.
The Latin of the Church, however, descended from literary or classical Latin, although it too changed, but far less. To this day, Latin is still the "official" language of the Church (although services & other public ceremonies & announcements are made in the vernacular). This flavor of Latin, ecclesiastical Latin, has distinctive features which make it slightly different from classical literary or vulgar Latin.
We have the fortune of having a Bible translated into early Slavic, now called Old Church Slavonic, so we have a good idea of the original Slavic language as it was spoken by the Slavs before they were broken up. It is known as Old "Church" Slavonic, since the Church in those areas used it for some official purposes (although they also used Latin as needed). They adapted the Greek alphabet to their language, rather than the Roman — being geographically closer to Greek influences — and this precedent continued among many Slavic peoples. The Russian alphabet, for example, was derived similarly from the Greek. It is known as "Cyrillic," since it was devised by followers of St. Cyril, the famous missionary who converted many Slavic nations to Christianity, based upon one he had invented himself. Cyrillic is still used by many Slavic peoples today, in addition to the Russians. It has even been adapted for some of the Altaic and other Asian languages spoken within central Asian lands which the Russians conquered in modern times.
Also, the Baltic-speaking people were forced northward into what is now Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and their languages grew apart somewhat.
At the western end of the Balkan pensinsula, a people speaking an Illyrian language have remained. These are the Albanians, recently re-emerging from the isolation imposed by a collapsed Communist regime.
So far I've mentioned only the Indo-European languages of Europe. Others are found there, however, and deserve some note.
The last of the Altaic nations to invade Europe, the Magyars (or Hungarians) retained their language, rather than taking on the languages of the peoples they conquered (as their predecessors the Avars had done). The same occurred with another Altaic people, the Suomi (or Finns) who settled to the east of Scandinavia and to the north of the Baltic-speaking people.
Altaic Turks invaded the Near East in the last half of the first millenium, bringing their language with them. There they converted to Islam, and in many places took on the Arabic language, which was the language of the Koran, Islam's body of scripture, but in Anatolia, at least, they generally kept their own language, and we find that there today.
The language of the Picts, the aboriginal people of Britain prior to the arrival of the Celts, is not known well enough to be sure where it stands. We only have a few place-names in northern Britain as remnants of their language, to go on. Their language was not recorded when it was still used. St. Columba, however, an Irish missionary who converted the Picts to Christianity, knew it, and from remarks made by his contemporaries, it was not easy to learn. This would suggest that it was not a Celtic language — but this is by no means certain.
Some inscriptions have been found in Spain which are not of Romance origin, and in fact, are in no known language. As they are short, they have yet to be deciphered, but may have been in a pre-Roman Iberian language.
Finally, we arrive at the enigma of Basque. Spoken in northern Spain, Basque (or Euskara, in their own language) is not Indo-European, nor does it appear to be connected with any other known language. Efforts to link it with Etruscan, & hence to the Caucasian languages, haven't met with much success — although such a connection cannot yet be ruled out.
For example, this was at the heart of the conflict in Kosovo, in which NATO interceded a couple of years ago. It is a district settled mostly by Albanians, speaking Albanian, with a sizeable minority of Serbs, speaking Serbo-Croat. While they have many grievances against each other, one of those grievances was language. Being a part of Yugoslavia, the "official" language was Serbo-Croat, yet the majority of people in the district were Albanian. They resented having to use a language not their own, in their own land.
Doubtless, as political and social changes continue, especially in the Balkans, such linguistic grievances will keep coming up.