The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

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		The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
		The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

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In this work, David Anthony seeks to demonstrate that the original homeland of the Indo-European language family was in the Pontic-Caspian Steppes. In the process, he shows how the culture developed. This represents a significant contribution to the field and I would highly recommend it to all interested in the topic.

Anthony argues that persistent material culture frontiers tend to coincide with linguistic frontiers. This suggests that a well-bordered material culture horizon ("horizon" being an identifiable pattern regarding archaeological finds) would be home to one or more languages which would be, for the most part, contained within it (or at least it would be bounded on all sides by other languages). However, since this methodology is not fully accepted yet, and since even if accepted it does not provide a 1:1 correlation of language and culture, this work should be read critically. Furthermore, a number of his conclusions appeared to me sufficiently tentative that they could not be accepted without question. This work thus needs to be read as a groundbreaking (and thus somewhat tentative) work rather than a fully authoritative account.

However, despite the above issues, his proposed mappings of Indo-European language groups to archaeological horizons work surprisingly well. In some cases, the mappings seem to be hard to dispute.

I am going to disagree with a number of other reviewers on the value of minutae in the book. While it is true that the book seems to get repetitive at times regarding goat to sheep ratios, horse to cattle ratios, burrial types, etc. there is a great deal of value in providing this information. Often times, it is helpful to be able to see the patterns the author is referring to, and in order to do so, one must read all of the details.

Despite my recommendation, I will however provide two caveats for those who would order this book. The first is that this is a heavy, scientific read. It is not intended to be useful to the general public, and he assumes a basic scientific knowledge of archaeology and biology. If you are looking for an easier read, start elsewhere.

The second caveat is that the subtitle is slightly misleading. The author does not fill in the effect of the Indo-European language spread on the modern world, and this is probably best left for other works anyway. This is, however, an excellent survey of archaeological candidates for the speakers of languages which are the ancestors of modern languages, however.

All in all, highly recommended for interested readers.

I love reading about archaeology, and this book's main idea is fascinating: The roots of most modern languages came from semi-nomadic, horse-riding tribes around 3500 years ago, not (as expected) from settled farming communities. The evidence for this is both linguistic (the first shared words for horse, bridle, bit, chariot, wagon, etc.) and archaeological (wagons, wheels, bits, tools with horse decoration, bit-wear marks on horse teeth, etc.).
I wish I could say the book's style is as good as its idea. However, once past the first few chapters, the idea bogs down in a welter of sometimes conflicting evidence from several sites whose names and relative dates I couldn't remember. Instead of photographs, archaeological drawings and maps are used, which convey little to the layman. For example, there are many line drawings of pots and tools in cross section, where photos would have communicated much more. The technical lingo is equally daunting: the mouth-breaking phrase "Proto-Indo-European" is about the simplest. Instead of a popular science book, it turns into a doctoral thesis.
What Anthony's idea needs is a popularizer, something akin to Isaac Asimov explaining physics. I look forward eagerly to reading THAT book.

Imagine grasslands as far as the eye can see, a vast open sky, hot, dry summers and bitterly cold winters where the wind won't quit. Imagine South Dakota and you have a good idea of the Steppes of southern Russia. Now, imagine men on horseback tending vast herds of cattle, and sheep being herded by barking dogs. There are no cities and few towns. For the most part, people live in tents and move constantly. This was life on the southern Russian Steppes circa 3500 BCE. And it's still this way today.

In 3500 BCE, however, a revolution was taking place here. These cowboys and shepherds--Indo-Europeans as they are now known--domesticated the horse, utilized bronze age technology fully 1000 years ahead of Western Europe, and perfected the wagon (wheels, axels, harnesses, etc.). If the Mesopotamia Valley was the urban center of the ancient world, the Indo-European home to the north was its transportation center.

Life is good on the southern Russian Steppes in 3500 BCE. The herds keep growing, and the population keeps growing, but the finite agrarian economy will feed only so many people. Every few hundred years or so, a group breaks away to try their luck elsewhere. With horse-drawn wagons, it's easy to pick up and go. What's it like over the next hill, across the next river? Wherever they go, they encounter primitive hunter-gatherers, and become lords and masters. The language they speak and the culture they introduce becomes dominant. One anthropologist has likened the spread of Indo-European as more like a franchising operation than an invasion.

As the centuries pass, the splinter-groups who travel west become the Greeks who built Athens, and the Romans who created the Roman Empire, and the Celtics who populated Gaul and Britain, and the Germans, Slavs, and Russians of north-central and northeastern Europe. Those who head east and southeast become Iranians, Afghans, and the ruling elite of India.

Incredible as it may seem, it's all true. Linguists and archaeologists have been debating the finer points for the past 200 years but are in agreement on all the main issues. The Indo-Europeans were not the white master race that Hitler imagined they were, but they did become the dominant group wherever they settled. The story of their origin is still being unearthed in archaeological digs in the south Russia Steppes. A nice summary of what has been learned to date can be found in "The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by anthropologist David W. Anthony.

The one problem I have with Professor Anthony's book is that it's a bit too scholarly. Reading it, I couldn't help feeling that he was not writing for me, the uninitiated lay reader, but for his fellow anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists; and that he was afraid of offending them with some minor slip-up. As a result, he's hard pressed to draw conclusions, repeats himself a fair amount, and presents pages of data that might as well be written in, well, Sanskrit, because it has little relevance to most of us. Having said that, in writing this book he took on a great deal and succeeded--a feat tantamount to climbing Everest. Bravo.

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