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imscrem's review against another edition
4.0
This was a fantastically argued and informative work. I particularly enjoyed learning about the early taming of the horse (horses were originally important for meat!). The introduction and the conclusion I also found to be beautifully written.
When it got deep into archeological facts, it often lost me: I have little background in the area, and the myriad cultures Anthony described largely ended up going over my head.
I believe I’ll end up rereading this book more closely in the future.
When it got deep into archeological facts, it often lost me: I have little background in the area, and the myriad cultures Anthony described largely ended up going over my head.
I believe I’ll end up rereading this book more closely in the future.
theciz's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
An interesting book making the case for prehistoric people from a shared area around modern-day Ukraine and Russia being the progenitors of Proto Indo-European, based on the domestication of horses, the development of chariots and the linguistic markers that make them important. I don’t have the academic knowledge to interrogate the information critically, but I will say as a casual reader that the initial section about language was the most interesting and layman friendly.
The rest of the book summarises archaeological findings related to prehistoric and Bronze Age people around Russia/Ukraine and the Eurasian steppes generally. I struggled with this section as it goes chronologically and for a long time is just summaries of pots, bones and graves, but it does eventually become clear what the relevance is. The ending is a little abrupt, but the argument is generally understood. I think you could get away with just reading the bit about language if you have no specialist knowledge.
The rest of the book summarises archaeological findings related to prehistoric and Bronze Age people around Russia/Ukraine and the Eurasian steppes generally. I struggled with this section as it goes chronologically and for a long time is just summaries of pots, bones and graves, but it does eventually become clear what the relevance is. The ending is a little abrupt, but the argument is generally understood. I think you could get away with just reading the bit about language if you have no specialist knowledge.
corinna_naso's review against another edition
This book manages to be a non-racist look at the Indo-European cultures that eventually had a massive influence over a good portion of the world. I personally found the linguistic information in the first half a bit more interesting than the archaeology in the second half, but I found the anecdotes of performing experimental archaeology to determine when horses began to be used for draft animals especially fascinating. This book also included a passage on the moral implications of adopting new technologies, including agriculture technologies, that completely blew my mind.
christopherc's review against another edition
4.0
Most of the languages of Europe and western Asia can be traced back to a common ancestor spoken several thousand years ago termed Proto-Indo-European. The exact population who spoke this language has long been cause for speculation. While scholars have turned away from the racist fantasies of past centuries -- a tribe of blond, blue-eyed "Aryans" pouring out of the north and subduing lesser peoples -- they nonetheless could only suggest that the homeland of Proto-Indo-European was probably somewhere in the steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia. David W. Anthony's THE HORSE, THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE is a powerful work of synthesis that offers a very convincing thesis of where PIE was spoken and how exactly it spread.
The opening part of the book sketches the history of Indo-European studies and presents the basics of historical linguistics and the comparative method. Anthony lists the problems of Colin Renfrew's alternative theory, that the Indo-European languages spread much earlier when farming came to Europe from Anatolia, namely that the languages are too similar for such an ancient common ancestor and that they share a common terminology for the later technology of horses and wagons.
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.
The new findings that led Anthony to create the book are twofold. On one hand, there are Soviet archaeological reports on Ukraine and the Russian steppe that only now are drawing attention internationally. The other new work is Anthony's own: along with colleague Dorcas Brown, he discovered that bits left distinctive wear on the teeth of horses, which helps determine the date that horses were first ridden and how horsemanship spread. Examining cultural changes in Eurasia, he shows the probable split of the Tocharian, Germanic, Italo-Celtic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian branches. This spread of Indo-European languages happened less through deliberate and brutal invasion (as the old fantasy of the Nazis and other racist romantics held) than through gradual new societal configurations where IE speakers allied themselves with speakers of other languages, who then adopted IE dialects along with other innovations they found desirable. Also, he overturns Gimbutas' rosy claim (popular with some feminists) that Old Europe was a perfectly peaceful matriarchy before those bad horse-riding patriarchal barbarians did them in -- the archaeological record shows that Old Europe was caught up in warfare before the arrival of horsemanship.
(Only Greek is a hard nut to crack; the first Mycenaean remains show clear similarities to steppe cultures, but there's no apparent migration from the steppe to the Aegean.)
Indo-European studies are often resisted by Hindu fundamentalists who wish to regard India as the cradle of world civilization, and Sanskrit as a divine language emanating from the gods (which the other IE languages are only a corrupted form of) instead of one just offshot of Proto-Indo-European among others. Anyone attempting to do secular science risks being attacked as a racist and an agent of colonial oppression. Anthony avoids the polemics of how the Indo-European languages spread into India, but he makes a strong case that the Indic proto-language and the mythology of the Rig Veda were formed already in what is now Tajikistan. This explains its continuing relationship with early Iranian and the origin of the Mitanni.
I was very impressed by THE HORSE, THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE. My complaint are mainly limited to presentation. There are quite a few typos. Anthony also uses reconstructions of roots from the whole span of PIE studies, from Brugmann's early system to the latest laryngeal-filled forms. Still, these mistakes and inconsistencies do not affect his main thesis, are mere annoyances. The other infelicity is that he seems to accept Dumezil's theory of societal organization (among other PIE world and myth reconstructions) uncritically and does not even explain exactly what these ideas are to a general audience.
Still, this is a major achievement, and things can only get better in a second edition. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Indo-European linguistics or ancient history.
The opening part of the book sketches the history of Indo-European studies and presents the basics of historical linguistics and the comparative method. Anthony lists the problems of Colin Renfrew's alternative theory, that the Indo-European languages spread much earlier when farming came to Europe from Anatolia, namely that the languages are too similar for such an ancient common ancestor and that they share a common terminology for the later technology of horses and wagons.
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.
The new findings that led Anthony to create the book are twofold. On one hand, there are Soviet archaeological reports on Ukraine and the Russian steppe that only now are drawing attention internationally. The other new work is Anthony's own: along with colleague Dorcas Brown, he discovered that bits left distinctive wear on the teeth of horses, which helps determine the date that horses were first ridden and how horsemanship spread. Examining cultural changes in Eurasia, he shows the probable split of the Tocharian, Germanic, Italo-Celtic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian branches. This spread of Indo-European languages happened less through deliberate and brutal invasion (as the old fantasy of the Nazis and other racist romantics held) than through gradual new societal configurations where IE speakers allied themselves with speakers of other languages, who then adopted IE dialects along with other innovations they found desirable. Also, he overturns Gimbutas' rosy claim (popular with some feminists) that Old Europe was a perfectly peaceful matriarchy before those bad horse-riding patriarchal barbarians did them in -- the archaeological record shows that Old Europe was caught up in warfare before the arrival of horsemanship.
(Only Greek is a hard nut to crack; the first Mycenaean remains show clear similarities to steppe cultures, but there's no apparent migration from the steppe to the Aegean.)
Indo-European studies are often resisted by Hindu fundamentalists who wish to regard India as the cradle of world civilization, and Sanskrit as a divine language emanating from the gods (which the other IE languages are only a corrupted form of) instead of one just offshot of Proto-Indo-European among others. Anyone attempting to do secular science risks being attacked as a racist and an agent of colonial oppression. Anthony avoids the polemics of how the Indo-European languages spread into India, but he makes a strong case that the Indic proto-language and the mythology of the Rig Veda were formed already in what is now Tajikistan. This explains its continuing relationship with early Iranian and the origin of the Mitanni.
I was very impressed by THE HORSE, THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE. My complaint are mainly limited to presentation. There are quite a few typos. Anthony also uses reconstructions of roots from the whole span of PIE studies, from Brugmann's early system to the latest laryngeal-filled forms. Still, these mistakes and inconsistencies do not affect his main thesis, are mere annoyances. The other infelicity is that he seems to accept Dumezil's theory of societal organization (among other PIE world and myth reconstructions) uncritically and does not even explain exactly what these ideas are to a general audience.
Still, this is a major achievement, and things can only get better in a second edition. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Indo-European linguistics or ancient history.
bioniclib's review against another edition
2.0
It started off right in my, a-hem, wheelhouse. Then it got to chapter 6.
After Chapter 6 the focus shifted to archeology and anthropology. I’m interested in both, well, perhaps not the former, it’s too pottery-shard focused, but I was looking for philology and etymology, so I put it down
But the first 5 chapters had some really fascinating stuff. My notes are below:
Because England made a colony of India, it needed laws. Those laws needed to take into account both English law and Hindy law. I know, how magnanimous of the colonizers, right? Sir William Jones, one of three Justices, was picked to learn the native language to better understand points of conflict between the two legal systems. Since the laws were written in English owed much to Latin and the those of Hindu much to Sanskrit, there were four languages more languages he could compare; adding to Persian, Welsh, and Gothic that he already knew for various reasons. When he started to see similarities among them, he postulated a common ancestor. Thus, the Proto-Indo-European was “discovered” because the British needed to settle legal disputes in a country they were occupying for financial gain. (7)
The original Aryans “lived in Iran and eastward into the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India.” It achieved its racist superiority from Madison Grant’s book The Passing of a Great Race (1916), wherein he warned that the “superior American ‘Aryan’ blood” was being tainted by such “races” as “Poles, Czechs, and Italians as well as Jews…” (9)
It’s amazing linguists were able to discover Proto-Indo-European because its native speakers were illiterate and never wrote any of it down. (14)
The Hopi language requires you to use indicate, with a grammatical marker, whether you witnessed what you’re talking about or not. I think this would go a long way to combat Fake News. Also, I hate that the despicable man has forever altered the English Language. (19)
One guess puts 3000 BCE as the first splitting of PIE, based on the resistance to change of core vocabulary; think body parts, basic needs (eat, sleep, etc), kinship, stuff like that. Also using this resistance, the lifespan of the language is estimated at 2000 years. Given that Vulgar Latin begat the Romance Languages in but 1000, that estimate is probably too long. (42)
Wheel and wool vocabulary help put the estimated start of PEI at sometime after 4000-3500 BCE (59)
“Sheep with long wooly coats are genetic mutants bred for just that trait.” (59)
The shorter coats could be the source of the wool vocab, so using such words as the early date isn’t as sure a thing as using wheel words. That means the start date goes back to 4000 BCE because before that there aren’t any mentions (on pottery and such) of wheeled words. (63)
Just as the English dictionary is not, really, the English language, PIE reconstructed words are not PIE. So to say that there is no PIE people’s homelands is correct but besides the point. (85)
Native American tribes and/or tribal confederations may have only been formed after the Europeans gave them something to unite against. (102)
The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages came about because Denmark wanted to create the first Museum of Antiquities in Europe. Christian Thomsen sorted through artifacts and arranged them by those that were only stone, those that had bronze in them, and those with iron. (123)
After Chapter 6 the focus shifted to archeology and anthropology. I’m interested in both, well, perhaps not the former, it’s too pottery-shard focused, but I was looking for philology and etymology, so I put it down
But the first 5 chapters had some really fascinating stuff. My notes are below:
Because England made a colony of India, it needed laws. Those laws needed to take into account both English law and Hindy law. I know, how magnanimous of the colonizers, right? Sir William Jones, one of three Justices, was picked to learn the native language to better understand points of conflict between the two legal systems. Since the laws were written in English owed much to Latin and the those of Hindu much to Sanskrit, there were four languages more languages he could compare; adding to Persian, Welsh, and Gothic that he already knew for various reasons. When he started to see similarities among them, he postulated a common ancestor. Thus, the Proto-Indo-European was “discovered” because the British needed to settle legal disputes in a country they were occupying for financial gain. (7)
The original Aryans “lived in Iran and eastward into the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India.” It achieved its racist superiority from Madison Grant’s book The Passing of a Great Race (1916), wherein he warned that the “superior American ‘Aryan’ blood” was being tainted by such “races” as “Poles, Czechs, and Italians as well as Jews…” (9)
It’s amazing linguists were able to discover Proto-Indo-European because its native speakers were illiterate and never wrote any of it down. (14)
The Hopi language requires you to use indicate, with a grammatical marker, whether you witnessed what you’re talking about or not. I think this would go a long way to combat Fake News. Also, I hate that the despicable man has forever altered the English Language. (19)
One guess puts 3000 BCE as the first splitting of PIE, based on the resistance to change of core vocabulary; think body parts, basic needs (eat, sleep, etc), kinship, stuff like that. Also using this resistance, the lifespan of the language is estimated at 2000 years. Given that Vulgar Latin begat the Romance Languages in but 1000, that estimate is probably too long. (42)
Wheel and wool vocabulary help put the estimated start of PEI at sometime after 4000-3500 BCE (59)
“Sheep with long wooly coats are genetic mutants bred for just that trait.” (59)
The shorter coats could be the source of the wool vocab, so using such words as the early date isn’t as sure a thing as using wheel words. That means the start date goes back to 4000 BCE because before that there aren’t any mentions (on pottery and such) of wheeled words. (63)
Just as the English dictionary is not, really, the English language, PIE reconstructed words are not PIE. So to say that there is no PIE people’s homelands is correct but besides the point. (85)
Native American tribes and/or tribal confederations may have only been formed after the Europeans gave them something to unite against. (102)
The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages came about because Denmark wanted to create the first Museum of Antiquities in Europe. Christian Thomsen sorted through artifacts and arranged them by those that were only stone, those that had bronze in them, and those with iron. (123)
noel_rene_cisneros's review against another edition
4.0
David W. Anthony se propone contestar, a través de las evidencias lingüísticas y arqueológicas con que se cuentan en los últimos años del siglo XX y principios de éste ¿cuales fueron los factores que permitieron la expansión de la familia lingüística indo-europea? Así, plantea que no fue una invasión e imposición militar por parte de los hablantes del PIE, sino que se debió a un factor tecnológico decisivo, la domesticación del caballo y las tecnologías que se desarrollaron al rededor de éste (la rueda, el carro y el movimiento por extensiones territoriales amplias). Así, plantea Anthony, el caballo fue decisivo para el desarrollo de redes comerciales y culturales en toda Eurasia a partir del mediados del cuarto milenio antes de la era común, que sería el momento en el que, él calcula, se comenzó a hablar el PIE II.