The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

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This book appears to be a quintessential “gosh-wow!” science book. By Gosh-wow!, I mean a book that tackles a big unanswered question in a mind-blowing way. The reconstruction of a language that was not written down and which has not been spoken for 4,500 years, and the final answer to the question of where the ancestors of the Indo-European languages came from is such a question.

The first quarter of the book hummed, in my opinion. The author, David W. Anthony, did a fantastic job of describing the work that goes into reconstructing Proto-Indo-European (“PIE”). He also did a fantastic job of making the case for the when and where of PIE language group, namely between 4,500 and 2,500 years ago on the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

The concepts and ideas that emerged in this section were stunning. We got a description of how the proto-languages we know, Latin, Celtic, German, Slavic, Greek, etc., sloughed off the PIE homeland and began making their move westward, southward, and eastward (in the case of Tokharian.) I had always believed that Lithuanian was one of the oldest PIE languages because it bore such a resemblance to Sanskrit, but the truth appears to be that Lithuanian and Sanskrit were the last languages to separate, which explains their similarity. Likewise, I'd always understood that Hittite was an Indo-European language, but Anthony suggests that Hittite may have split off of the PIE stock at a pre-PIE point in time. Another interesting point is the appearance of themes and deities from the Rig Veda in Mittanian culture. Anthony's theory is that the Mitanni were chariot conquerors of Mitanni who adopted local language and culture except for the tradition of Indo-European names.

Fascinating.

Based on language roots, Anthony locates the PIE era in the period after the domestication of sheep and during the development of wheels and wagons. The horse/wheel/wagon technology gave PIE speakers the ability to exploit the steppes and an attractive resource for setting up client relationships with non-PIE tribes, who would eventually be brought around to the PIE language culture.

Anthony's understanding of the PIE expansion does not involve epic migrations and conquests. Rather, based on his model of language acquisition in more contemporary settings, Anthony explains the IE expansion as involving trade and the guest/host relationship.

However, the balance of the book becomes a slog as Anthony canvasses every pot and artifact dug up in the steppes. This is important stuff, and it casts off a periodic nugget of intense interest. Based on archeological data, Anthony identifies the Yamnaya culture as the PIE group:

“The Yamnaya horizon meets the expectations for late Proto-Indo-European in many ways: chronologically (the right time), geographically (the right place), materially (wagons, horses, animal sacrifices, tribal pastoralism), and linguistically (bounded by persistent frontiers); and it generated migrations in the expected directions and in the expected sequence. Early Proto-Indo-European probably developed between 4000 and 3500 BCE in the Don– Volga– Ural region. Late Proto-Indo-European, with o-stems and the full wagon vocabulary, expanded rapidly across the Pontic-Caspian steppes with the appearance of the Yamnaya horizon beginning about 3300 BCE. By 2500 BCE the Yamnaya horizon had fragmented into daughter groups, beginning with the appearance of the Catacomb culture in the Don-Kuban region and the Poltavka culture in the Volga-Ural region about 2800 BCE. Late Proto-Indo-European also was so diversified by 2500 BCE that it probably no longer existed (chapter 3). Again, the linkage with the steppe archaeological evidence is compelling.”

This is fascinating and potentially revolutionary stuff, made possible in the last 15 years by the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, honestly, if you aren't an archeologist, the last two-thirds of the book involve a lot of trudging through cultures, cities and artifacts. I did a lot of skimming at that point.

Clearly, Anthony is not to be faulted for the book he wrote, and the information is first-rate. Nonetheless, most readers might not be expecting this kind of book, particularly after the opening portion of the book, which involved a higher altitude survey, rather than getting into the weeds.