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

Product Information

The most fascinating and mind-blowing thing I learned in this book is that grammar actually shapes our perceptions of our world. I always thought all languages were basically the same, in that they conjugate into past, present, and future tenses and indicate singular and plural actors. This is the way most most modern languages work, and it is an inheritance from the Indo-European root language. However, this is not universal and it was not always common. For example, Hopi speakers are "forced by Hopi grammar to habitually frame all descriptions of reality in terms of the source and reliability of their information." WHAT?!?!?!? The Usatovo culture developed in southeastern Central Europe at around 3300–3200 BCE at the Dniestr. [71] Although closely related to the Tripolye culture, it is contemporary with the Yamna culture and resembles it in significant ways. [72] According to Anthony, it may have originated with "steppe clans related to the Yamnaya horizon who were able to impose a patron-client relationship on Tripolye farming villages." [73] According to Anthony, the Pre-Germanic dialects may have developed in the culture between the Dniestr (western Ukraine) and the Vistula (Poland) in c. 3100–2800 BCE, and spread with the Corded Ware culture. [74] Approximate extent of the Corded Ware horizon with the adjacent 3rd-millennium cultures ( Baden culture and Globular Amphora culture, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture) One of the things I did in grad school was to become a Proto-Indo-European otaku, a long, lonely voyage into the dark and uncharted seas of PIE myth via a marriage of philological and structural takes on mythology. I did this because I was amused by facts such as the following: (a) the English word "sweat" and its Sanskrit cognate, " svet" are practically homophonic; (b) Erin, the ancient name for Ireland, is a cognate of the Persian word Iran and of the Vedic Sanskrit word Aryan (the 'race' that inspired Hitler); (c) blonde, blue-eyed Lithuanians speak a language closer to India's primordial tongue, Sanskrit, than is any other European language. To wit: The obvious success of PIE-speaking cultures made their dialects prestigious and worth knowing, dominating and eventually driving non-PIE languages to extinction in most areas Indo-Europeans reached. In addition, PIE cultures appear to have been very inclusive, basing identification on language and ritual rather than race and ethnicity, which also helped facilitate their spread. This tradition was long lived: Rome's success two thousand years later owed much to her ability to accomodate foreign elites and co-opt them into the ruling hierarchy. I have had this book at home for several years and did not finish reading it because it is hard to find the time to sit and read. Audiobooks provide a wonderful alternative and I was able to listen/read this excellent book in just a few days.

Two key questions arise: when was PIE spoken (what are its birth and death dates), and where did this occur (what is the ‘homeland’ of the PIE peoples)? A combination of linguistic and archaeological evidence is used to discover this. Anthony begins his investigation of the first question by examining key vocabulary in PIE and its daughter languages centring on the concept of wheels/chariots/wagons, as well as words and concepts related to wool and corelating this with the archaeological record for evidence of such objects that have been found. This then leads to the question of what is the PIE homeland? The debate has raged since the question was first asked, making it everywhere and nowhere, often pushed by nationalistic and racial/racist ideologies. Once again using some PIE vocabulary (such as the words for “bees” and “honey”, which let us know something about the physical and natural characteristics of the landscape, and words for “horse”, “sheep”, “wool”, “milk”, “pig”, “grain”, and “chaff”) Anthony contends that we can ascertain that these peoples were farmers and herders, not hunter-gatherers, who lived in an area whose climate was conducive to bees and the kind of plants that allowed the creation of honey, all of which helps to narrow down the possible locations. Anthony admits that many Archaeologists argue the validity of using a hypothetical reconstructed language as the basis for any hypothesis, though he makes, I believe, a strong case for its validity.

The bulk of the book then seeks to connect PIE and intermediary proto-languages to cultures attested in the archaeological record. It's worth mentioning that THE HORSE, THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE is a serious work of archaeology: details of bone findings, pottery traditions and tomb burials are listed exhaustively. Even non-archaeologists can make it through the book (I'm a linguist, for example), but it requires dedication. This thesis makes sense certainly, although I am in no position to make judgements on such a specialist area. The sense of how technology interweave with our lives gels well with how I see our society developing. Anthony's explanation of cultural spread, ideas of dominant cultures replacing those of less dominant, tribute and labour becoming mechanisms by which language and custom shift, makes a lot more sense than "these people moved here, beat everyone else up, and kept being exactly who they were". There are a lot of interesting points made about historical linguistics. For example, what does it mean to reconstruct a language which was spoken over millennia? Surely the language must have changed quite a bit over that time, right? This is true, and it's important to remember that a reconstructed language is a bit like the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains hundreds or thousands of words which haven't been in common use for decades, and some that haven't been used for centuries. Despite that, it's still possible to learn a lot about Proto-Indo-European speakers just from the words we've been able to reconstruct. They were familiar with honeybees and drank fermented honey (PIE *médʰu, descended through the millennia to us as "mead"), which means they must have come from an area with honeybees. They had words for horse and cow and sheep, as well as for wool, which required a mutation among sheep for longer hair before it could be woven. They had a word for the wheel. They had words for sky gods and the sacrifices necessary to propitiate them. They had words for plowing, milking, grinding meal, and other agricultural and herding practices.

This parallels the argument Karen Armstrong makes that the great moral traditions of the Western religions arose between 2500 and 1500 BC as a response to the incredible violence inherent in the cultures that arose with the horse-riding steppe herders. Other parts of the book were literally mind-blowing, and actually changed my life. Seriously, I would never in a million years have guessed how much grammar shapes our world view and our perspectives on life. It was riveting to read about how this Indo-European culture has been fixed in time by using clues from the language. Anthony analyzes the rate of change in vocabulary and dates words for "horse", "wheel", and textiles, and then examines the archaeological evidence for when those things entered the region or were invented: There is extensive analysis of when horses were first domesticated and used for food, riding, and pulling wagons and chariots; of the archaeological origins of wheeled vehicles; and of the origin of weaving and other textile crafts. The other mind-blowing thing I learned from this book is that the East Slavic term for a burial mound is a kurgan...am I the only one delighted by the fact that if you google "Kurgan", the Highlander character comes up as one of the first results??? Ever since a British linguist in colonial India discovered connections between Sanskrit and European languages, explanations have been put forth for these connections by the inquiring minds of the world. Some of these explanations were built around the existence of a prehistoric super-race who dominated the world from the Rhine to the Ganges, spreading their language everywhere they went. It speaks to the resilience of these ideas that David Anthony feels (probably correctly) that he must thoroughly expound upon his work as a matter of linguistics and archaeology, and that ethnicity is not a major concern of either discipline.

the book's enduring value will be its rich and vivid synthesis of an extremely complex corpus of archaeological data from Neolithic times through the Bronze Age, stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia. Anthony writes extremely well and masterfully describes material culture remains, teasing out incredible amounts of information on the nature and scale of subsistence activities, social structure, and even ritual practices. My first impression about this book was that it was going to be way over my head, filled as it was with excavation grid drawings, radiocarbon date tables, and words in a language that was never written down and no longer exists. Overall, it was. Happily, though, I often enough found The Horse, the Wheel, and Language to be engaging and intelligent, sometimes poignant, and sometimes so thrilling that I couldn't bear to put it down. This contrasted sharply with other moments, when I could hardly even comprehend the words that were written down because the ideas and methodologies were so complex and convoluted. This made for a really interesting reading experience---I was simultaneously SO glad I was reading it and SO glad to finally be done with it! Around 4200–4100 BCE, a climate change occurred, causing colder winters. [35] Between 4200 and 3900 BCE, many tell settlements in the lower Danube Valley were burned and abandoned, [35] and the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture showed an increase in fortifications [36] and moved eastwards, towards the Dniepr. [37]

There's a bit at the beginning about how language can spread due to prestige rather than through conquest. If neighboring cultures perceive that speakers of another language have higher status, they'll encourage their children to be bilingual, and eventually the original language will be lost. This might be part of how Proto-Indo-European spread, coupled with gaining tribe members from agricultural societies, because a mobile herd is easier to defend than stationary agricultural land. A thorough look at the cutting edge of anthropology, Anthony's book is a fascinating look into the origins of modern man."— Publishers Weekly

Review

Yes, the book does get long-winded and it takes a lot of patience to get at the wheat from the chaff. The author really made one other big mistake in his telling. He should have clearly stated what he was going to tell you, then tell you, and then tell you what he just told you and did that for each chapter. He doesn’t. He makes a lot of digressions in to how we know what we know and doing that I would lose the meaning of facts he was presenting and miss the just so story he was telling. Readers who are primarily familiar with the characterization of Proto-Indo-Europeans drawn by Dumézil and Gimbutas (like myself) will find out to their surprise and delight that breakthroughs in archaeology in recent decades have forced us to substantially revise their theories. For example, Gimbutas's concept of peaceful matriarchal cultures being militarily overrun receives a strong challenge, as does her excessively reductive view of a homogenous Kurgan culture. But the basic pattern Gimbutas suggested remains intact. Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches: [5]

Almost two-thirds of the bookshelves into the archaeological history/cultures from Southern Europe to just east of the Ural mountains of Eurasia; particularly the Pontic-Caspian steppe region. This thorough (almost too thorough) examination of midden, grave goods, and building structures turns some major theories of Proto-Indo-European language speakers on their heads. For example, most authorities credit the invention of the chariot to Near Eastern societies around 1900 to 1800 BCE. Through an analysis of horse teeth found in steppe graves to determine whether or not horses were bitted and an examination of very early spoked wheels and cheekpieces also found in those same graves, Anthony posits that chariots were actually first developed by people of the steppe regions around 2000 BCE. The Catacomb, Poltavka and Potapovka cultures were succeeded by the Srubna culture, and the Sintashta and Petrovka cultures were succeeded by the Andronovo culture. [91] Reception [ edit ] In its integration of language and archaeology, this book represents an outstanding synthesis of what today can be known with some certainty about the origin and early history of the Indo-European languages. In my view, it supersedes all previous attempts on the subject."—Kristian Kristiansen, Antiquity Steppe cultures between 2200 and 1800 BCE are the Multi-cordoned ware culture (2200–1800 BCE)(Dniepr-Don-Volga), Filatovka culture, and Potapovka. In the forest zone are the Late Middle Dniepr and the Late Abashevo cultures. East of the Urals are the Sintashta and the Petrovka cultures. East of the Caspian Sea is the non-Indo-European Late Kelteminar culture. [90] Most people who think of the discovery of the Horse, and wheel will automatically think of war, but the author gives us a history of both and how they effected the lives of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and the last thing that it effected was war.However, after four of five chapters of detailing this archeological evidence and presumptions on what the people must have been like, their social structure, how they travelled (horse, wheel), how they traded and the development of settlements to cities and how they explored the world, it becomes mind-glazingly boring. Kenneally, Christine (2 March 2008). "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language – David W. Anthony – Book Review". The New York Times . Retrieved 16 January 2017. The Yamna horizon is reflected in the disappearance of long-term settlements between the Don and the Ural and the brief periods of usage of kurgan cemeteries, which begin to appear deep into the steppes between the major river valleys. [66] 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. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language brings together the work of historical linguists and archaeologists, researchers who have traditionally been suspicious of each other's methods. Though parts of the book will be penetrable only by scholars, it lays out in intricate detail the complicated genealogy of history's most successful language."—Christine Kenneally, International Herald Tribune