Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25604 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 566 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this study of language, archeology and culture, Hartwick College anthropology professor Anthony hypothesizes that a proto-Indo-European culture emerged in the Ponto-Caspian steppes 4,000 years ago, speaking an ur-language ancestor to the Romance, German and Slavic family of languages, Sanskrit and modern English. Citing discoveries in the Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan made possible only after the fall of the Iron Curtain brought together Soviet and western scientists, Anthony combines evidence from radioactive dating, demographic analysis of migration patterns, linguistic analysis and the study of epics such as the Iliad and the Rig Veda to substantiate his contention. Central to his thesis is the role of the horse, originally domesticated for food and first ridden to manage herds; only later, with the development of the chariot, were they ridden during combat. Anthony provides a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of his subject, complete with a history of relevant research over the past two centuries (including evidence and opinion that counter his own, such as the now-discredited Aryan race hypothesis). A thorough look at the cutting edge of anthropology, Anthony's book is a fascinating look into the origins of modern man.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"... a major new study by David Anthony." -- Times Higher Education

Review
Anthony is not the first scholar to make the case that Proto-Indo-European came from this region [Ukraine/Russia], but given the immense array of evidence he presents, he may be the last one who has to.... 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. [The book] lays out in intricate detail the complicated genealogy of history's most successful language.
(Christine Kenneally The New York Times Book Review )

[A]uthoritative . . .
(John Noble Wilford New York Times )

A thorough look at the cutting edge of anthropology, Anthony's book is a fascinating look into the origins of modern man.
(Publishers Weekly )

In the age of Borat it may come as a surprise to learn that the grasslands between Ukraine and Kazakhstan were once regarded as an early crucible of civilisation. This idea is revisited in a major new study by David Anthony.
(Times Higher Education )

Starting with a history of research on Proto-Indo-Europeans and exploring how this field for obvious reasons assumed an ethno-political dimension early on, leading PIE scholar Anthony moves on to established facts . . . then shifts his focus to the interrelation of the three essential elements of horse, chariot, and language and how the first and second provided the means for the spread of Indo-European languages from India to Ireland. The bulk of the book contains the factual evidence, mainly archaeological, to support this argument. But a strength of the book is its rich historical linguistic approach. The combination of the two provides a remarkable work that should appeal to everyone with an interest not just in Indo-Europeans, but in the history of humanity in general.
(Abdi, Dartmouth College, for "CHOICE )

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 )

David Anthony's book is a masterpiece. A professor of anthropology, Anthony brings together archaeology, linguistics, and rare knowledge of Russian scholarship and the history of climate change to recast our understanding of the formation of early human society.
(Martin Walker Wilson Quarterly )

The Horse, the Wheel and Language maps the early geography of the Russian steppes to re-create the lost world of Indo-European culture that is as fascinating as any mystery novel.
(Arthur Krim Geographical Reviews )

Customer Reviews

The Neolithic and Bronze Ages on the Pontic Steppes
This book is about pastoral cultures that flourished in the Pontic steppe region during the late Neolithic and Bronze ages. The author reviews the succession of cultural complexes that existed in that area during those periods and their interactions with neighboring cultures and eventually with the great civilizations of the ancient Near East. His account is based on archeological evidence that has been extensively developed by Soviet and Russian archeologists, as well as by the author himself.

The author identifies the Pontic steppes as the area where the horse was domesticated, based on his own research into evidence of bit-wear on horse teeth found in the archeological record. He shows how the horse and later the wheel and wagon transformed the patterns of pastoralism that characterized the region in the fourth millenium BCE and how metallurgy became established there. It is fascinating reading for anyone interested in European and Eurasian pre-history, and the author's detailed account is persuasive on these topics.

A principal focus of the book is the theory, which the author endorses, that the Pontic steppe area was the homeland of peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the language that linguists posit as ancestral to most of the languages of Europe, including English, Latin, Greek and Russian, as well as of present-day Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, northern India and elsewhere. These languages are attested in writing and many of them are spoken today. The theory that they are derived from a common parent language, which is not attested in writing, is well established. It is based on correspondences among the sound systems (and, to a lesser extent, the grammars) of the various daughter languages that are too uniform and regular to be attributable to chance. The theory that the PIE homeland lay in the Pontic steppes, however, although shared by many, is more controversial than the author makes it out to be, especially among linguists.

The author claims that the question of the PIE homeland has been resolved conclusively in the past ten years by archeological advances, but the evidence the author adduces for the Pontic steppe region as the PIE homeland is not new: it is based on "linguistic archeology," a method that was first brought to bear on the question in the mid-19th century. This method consists of identifying words in the PIE daughter languages that might be associated with a specific geographic area--trees, plants, animals, physical features, etc.--and that can be traced to a PIE origin (words that show up in more than one PIE sub-group), and then trying to associate those words with a specific geographical range.

Many if not most linguists are uncomfortable with this method. Among other objections, words can change their meaning over time and it isn't necessarily clear that the meaning of an original PIE word was the same as the meaning of cognate words in the daughter languages. All we can be reasonably sure of is that at some period a word (or an element of a word)--one that is not preserved in any written form, however--must been ancestral to words in languages spoken at a substantially later date, for which we have a written record. The author of this book relies in particular on reconstructions of the PIE words for "salmon" and "beech," but these are old arguments that have been drawn into question, and there is no consensus. Another difficulty is that PIE could have had an extensive vocabulary that simply didn't survive into two or more of the daughter languages and the words that did survive could represent only a very limited sample. (A recent book that discusses these questions authoritatively is Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).)

In short, Indo-European linguists are generally wary of attempts to tie the PIE-speakers to a particular region by the method of linguistic archeology or any other method. Moreover, other scholars have proposed different regions for the PIE homeland--currently in serious competition with the Pontic steppes are Anatolia, the south Caucasus and other locations further east.

There are also difficulties with the author's speculative suggestions about how the Indo-European languages spread from their assumed homeland in the Pontic steppes to the regions where they are found in historical times. He suggests that IE languages spread into Europe up the valleys of the Danube and other rivers flowing into the Black Sea by a process that he describes as "franchising": a group of IE-speakers would establish a stronghold in an area where speakers of other languages were settled and would offer the settled inhabitants protection and rights to participate in the IE-speaking community, and this would lead to the IE language becoming the dominant and prestigious language in the area and co-opting speakers of other languages. This seems plausible but entirely speculative; the author doesn't seem to offer concrete evidence that might support this model.

He further suggests that IE-speakers might have migrated into Anatolia by boat, a suggestion also unsupported (and probably unverifiable) by archeological evidence and one that strains the limits of plausibility--but if you are trying to pin down the PIE homeland somewhere other than Anatolia, it is essential to get IE languages into Anatolia by some means or other, since we have extensive written evidence that they were widely spoken there by the first half of the second millenium BCE, when the the Hittite empire was at its zenith. (Moving the PIE homeland either to Anatolia itself or further east would allow more plausible theories about how this occurred, but there's no lingusitic evidence for any of these alternatives, either.)

And there is apparently a lively (and politically charged) debate about how IE languages wound up in India and about whether there is any evidence in the archeological record for their assumed movement into the subcontinent (although IE-speakers obviously were there in ancient times, probably by no later than around 1500 BCE; how they got there is a different story). (This question is exhaustively but inconclusively aired in The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate.)

In the end, the archeological record can tell us a lot about a material culture in a specific region at a particular moment in time, but, in the absence of writing, doesn't tell us anything about the languages spoken by human beings who participated in the material culture. A particular style of pottery doesn't tell us anything about the language spoken by the people who used it. How languages become dominant in an area and spread to other areas are topics that are not well understood, and it is probably true that each case has to be considered on its own facts. This would mean that much information about prehistoric languages, their distribution and diffusion is simply irrecoverable.

In fairness, it should be noted that the author is aware of many of the difficulties with his linguistic theories and is at pains to address those difficulties. And I suspect he would be the last person to insist that his is the final word on the subject.

In summary, this is a very thought-provoking book. Anyone passionately interested in PIE (and who isn't?) will want to read it. But it should be read critically.

Update 1/12/2009: There has been a very interesting discussion by Don Ringe, a prominent Indo-European linguist, of some linguistic issues that are relevant to this book on the Language Log website. At the risk of putting words in his mouth, Dr. Ringe gives David Anthony's views a cautious and tentative acceptance. If you read this book and find it as interesting as I did, you should read the Language Log discussion, which goes into greater depth on the linguistic issues relating to the reconstructed Indo-European horse/wheel/wagon terminology.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1013

Filling in the blanks on the Indo-Europeans
I am neither a linguist nor a historian, just someone who for ten years now has been fascinated by the whole subject of Indo-European -- the lost language of 6 - 7000 years ago, parent to dozens of languages now spoken by billions of people. Indo-European gave rise to Latin, Greek, most modern European languages, and also Persian, Kurdish, and modern languages of India like Hindi and Urdu -- Sanskrit, too, was an Indo-European language.

From time to time I pick up books on Indo-European, books to which I always bring questions: Who exactly were the speakers of Indo-European? Where did they live, and how did they live? What caused them to migrate in every direction, and what made their language so influential?

Unfortunately, the books I've found are usually written by academics ensconced within the confines of their chosen fields (e.g., linguistics), and with such authors my own questions, which are of a general nature, go for the most part unanswered.

Now along comes "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language," the first book I've come across that not only answers my questions but does so in depth, and in plain English -- though "plain English" doesn't quite do justice to David W. Anthony's work here: some of the writing, especially in the early chapters, is lovely. But what also makes this book so satisfying is the way Anthony is well-versed in a number of relevant fields -- including archaeology, historical linguistics, animal behavior and animal husbandry, and the relevant terrain, the steppes of Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

I'll write more when I've completed the book. For now, three points:
1) It's a physically beautiful book, handsomely designed.
2) It's well illustrated, with maps, charts, and drawings of everything from grave sites to artifacts.
3) In addition to answering my questions about Indo-European, Anthony delivers quite an education about the many difficulties associated with resurrecting a long-dead way of life and language. The book functions as a kind of report from archaeology's front lines, with notes on the latest methods, theories, and disputes.

A fascinating read.

A Devil's Advocacy Review
I'll play the Bad Guy here, offering a more critical review than the others. Not that I disagree with the favorable reviews -- but I think that readers should realize that the book is not quite as advertised.

It starts off great with Part I, which is an excellent explanation of the linguistic questions associated with Proto-Indo-European. Anthony offers the latest results clearly and thoroughly. Unfortunately, Part I is only 120 pages long. Part II, 340 pages long, is the real meat of the book. And while Part II has lots of merit, it's not at all what the title or the subtitle suggest. Part II is best summarized as "A thorough summation of the archaeological results from the areas thought to be the homeland of the Proto Indo-European peoples". Here the author departs substantially from the subject matter as suggested by the title, subtitle, and Part I. We are subjected to endless detailed descriptions of archaeological digs all over southern Russia and Siberia. We are told (many times) what the percentage of sheep/goat bones, cattle bones, and horse bones were at every site. We are told the direction in which the bodies were placed in burial, how many flint tools of each type were found, and other details that are surely appropriate for a compendium of archaeological results, but not for the larger synthesis promised by the title and subtitle.

I will concede that the author does thread a larger narrative through the endless site reports. There's a section, for example, on "The Economic and Military Effects of Horseback Riding", which explains the impressive idea that the real impact of horseback riding was that it made it possible for nomads to travel further from the river valleys while grazing their animals. Another example: "The First Cities and Their Connection to the Steppes", which describes the trading patterns that arose once cities appeared in Mesopotamia.

But these delightful sections are lost in the numbing freshet of details. Here's a quote, from page 293:

"The bronze tools and weapons in other Novosvobodnaya-phase graves included cast flat axes, sleeved axes, hammer-axes, heavy tanged daggers with multiple midribs, chisels, and spearheads. The chisels and spearheads were mounted to their handles the same way, with round shafts hammered into four-sided contracting bases that fit into a V-shaped rectangular hole on the handle or spear. Ceremonial objects included bronze cauldrons, long-handled bronze dippers, and two-pronged bidents (perhaps forks for retrieving cooked meats from the cauldrons). Ornaments included beads of carnelian from western Pakistan, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, gold, rock crystal, and even a bead from Klady made from a human molar sheathed in gold (the first gold cap!)"

The author simply couldn't make up his mind what kind of book he wanted to write. Let me speculate on how this chimera of a book could have been written: the author, having spent years with Russian archaeologists accumulating a huge store of information about their work, approaches the publisher with a great idea for a book. "These Russians have been digging up all sorts of wonderful things", he says, "but here in the West we don't know much about their work. I'd like to write a book putting all their results together into a coherent story."

To which the publisher replies, "Sounds great, but what's the hook? We can't call this book 'A Summary of Results of Russian Archaeological Field Work Over the Period 1980 - 2000'. We need something sexier."

Anthony: "Well, their research certainly sheds a lot of light upon the beginnings of the Indo-European peoples."

Publisher: "Perfect! Let's make the book about how the Indo-European languages got started! That's always a good topic!"

So Anthony writes some extra chapters to slap up front, and we get two books for the price of one:

1. "Beginnings of the Indo-European Languages"
and
2. "A Summary of Results of Russian Archaeological Field Work Over the Period 1980 - 2000".

Now, there's nothing wrong with this. However, buyers should be aware of the fact that three quarters of the book consists of site reports and only one-quarter deals with Indo-European languages.