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A review by christopherc
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony
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.