The Horse The Wheel And Language Pdf Rating: 8,9/10 228 votes
The first and most intimate affiliations we have are the genetic ties we share with our family and the language we speak. In the first case, the links are pretty straightforward. Without exception, everyone is created by two parents, who each had two parents, who themselves had two parents, and on and on, so that behind every reader of this review, thousands of mothers and fathers fan out and multiply in a completely predictable way.
Linguistic inheritance, by contrast, is a story of irreducible patterns and historical contingencies. In “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language,” David W. Anthony argues that we speak English not just because our parents taught it to us but because wild horses used to roam the steppes of central Eurasia, because steppe-dwellers invented the spoked wheel and because poetry once had real power.
Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped. Anthony(D.W.)The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes shaped the Modern World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.
English belongs to the very large Indo-European language family. All of the Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic, Latin, Hellenic, Iranian and Sanskrit languages (among other families) are Indo-European, which means that Lithuanian, Polish, English, Welsh, French, Greek, Kurdish and Punjabi, to name just a few, descend from the same ancient tongue. It is known as Proto-Indo-European, and it was spoken around 3500 B.C. Thanks to a careful comparison of the daughter languages (as linguists call them), thousands of Proto-Indo-European words have been reconstructed, including those for otter, wolf, lynx, bee, honey, cattle, sheep and horse. The way some words group together in Proto-Indo-European shows that its speakers believed in a male sky god, respected chiefs and appointed official warriors. One word for wheel sounded something like “roteh.” The word for axle? “Aks.”
Where Proto-Indo-European came from and who originally spoke it has been a mystery ever since Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar in India, posited its existence in the late 18th century. As a result, Anthony writes, the question of its origins was “politicized almost from the beginning.” Numerous groups, ranging from the Nazis to adherents of the “goddess movement” (who saw the Indo-Europeans as bellicose invaders who upended a feminine utopia), have made self-interested claims about the Indo-European past. Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College who has extensive field experience, makes the persuasive case that it originated in the steppes of what is now southern Ukraine and Russia, a landscape consisting mainly of endless grasslands and “huge, dramatic” sky. Anthony is not the first scholar to make the case that Proto-Indo-European came from this region, but given the immense array of evidence he presents, he may be the last one who has to.
Anthony lays out crucial events that built up the economic and, later, military power of Proto-Indo-European speakers, increasing the reach and prestige of the language. It’s a linguistic version of the rich getting richer, with the result that more than three billion people around the world today speak a descendant of this mother tongue.
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Perhaps the most important moment came with the domestication of horses, first accomplished around 4,800 years ago, at least 2,000 years after cattle, sheep, pigs and goats had been domesticated in other parts of the world. Initially, horses were most likely tamed to serve as an easy source of meat, particularly in winter; it wasn’t until centuries later that they were ridden, and then eventually used to pull carts with solid wheels, turning the Proto-
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Indo-European speakers into mobile herders and the steppes into a conduit for themselves and their language. Later, they became skilled warriors whose spoked-wheel chariots sped them to battle and spread their language even farther.
The impact of horses on the reach of language is particularly important to Anthony, and he conveys his excitement at working out whether ancient horses wore bits (and were therefore ridden by Proto-Indo-Europeans) by comparing their teeth to those of modern domesticated and wild horses. He muses on the “deep-rooted, intransigent traditions of opposition” that existed along the Ural River frontier, slowing the spread of herding and the cultural innovations that went with it. He also cites remarkable genetic analyses suggesting that although all the domesticated horses in the world may have come from many different wild mothers, they might all share a single father.
Anthony also describes a world in which spoken poetry was the only medium, one that helped spread Proto-Indo-European through what he calls “elite recruitment.” It wasn’t enough for the newcomers to assume a dominant position: in order for their language to be picked up, they also had to offer the local population attractive opportunities to participate in their language culture — a process that continues today, incidentally, with the spread of English as a prestige language.
“The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” brings together the work of historical linguists and archaeologists, researchers who have traditionally been suspicious of one another’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.
THE HORSE, THE WHEEL, AND LANGUAGE
How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.
By David W. Anthony.
Illustrated. 553 pp. Princeton University Press. $35.
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Preview — The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony
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 Arya..more
Published December 9th 2007 by Princeton University Press (first published November 19th 2007)
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Rating details
Mar 04, 2019
Best Eggs rated it
it was amazing Shelves: 2019-100-reviews, misc-reference, history, travel-adventure-countries, sex, 2019-read
The initial chapters of this book are fascinating. They explain the rules of language sound - phonology - how one sound changes to another over time. Since these 'rules' are consistent within a language, it is possible to work backwards from a present sound to one that might have existed. If many languages have similar words meaning the same thing, then it should be possible using these phonological rules to reconstruct the original word in Proto-Indo-European although that language was in the p..more
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 and 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). Why should cultures at such dist..more
Jun 13, 2008
Terence rated it
really liked it Shelves: history-general, science-archeology, science-general, science-language-linguistics
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Admittedly it does get bogged down describing archeological sites but you can skim through those sections without missing anything.
Anthony combines linguistics and archeology to localize the origins of the Indo-European language family and plot its spread across Eurasia, similar to Spencer Wells' efforts to combine genetics and archeology to trace the spread of humans from Africa.
The author marshalls the evidence to argue that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) eme..more
Dec 16, 2013kaśyap rated it really liked it
Indo-European languages are now some of the most widely spoken languages in the world. The Indo-European languages and the cultures and traditions associated with them which have influenced most of the world have come from a shared source known as proto-Indo-European language.
The main purpose of the book is to trace the proto-Indo-European and its evolution through a study of philological and archaeological sources. The author here makes the case for the Pontic-Caspian steppes as the homeland of..more
Sep 23, 2015
Laurie rated it
really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: history-prehistory, science, anthropology, human-migration, indo-european-studies, central-asia, archaeology, cultural-exploration-history
David W. Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (HWL), is a worthy addition to Indo-European scholarship. Using a synthesis of linguistics and many recent additions to the archaeological record from Russia and other Central Asian countries, Anthony attempts to answer the lingering questions of the Proto-Indo-European languages: 'namely, who spoke it, where was it spoken and when.'
The focus here is on science and reaso..more
Jun 29, 2019Terry rated it liked it
3.5 stars
_The Horse, the Wheel, and Language_ investigates the possible origins of the Proto-Indo-European language, the reconstructed language posited by philologists and historical linguists to be the mother tongue from which a host of modern languages were derived, including English, French, German, Italian, Punjabi, Spanish, Russian and Persian to mention only a few. The mere reality of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is contested by some, who insist that a purely hypothetical language, produced..more
Apr 12, 2014
Brian rated it
liked it Shelves: middle-east, asia, society-and-culture, history, linguistics
I feel a little bad rating The Horse, the Wheel, and Language at all, because it's primarily advancing an argument that I simply do not have the qualifications to evaluate. I have no background in archeology at all, and my background in linguistics is a single survey-level course in university and an amateur interest thereafter, so the hundreds of pages of descriptions of grave-sites and red ochre placement and pottery sherds made my eyes glaze over and are part of why it took me so long to fini..more
Jan 20, 2009
Patricia rated it
really liked itRecommends it for: linguists, Asian steppe and art historians, archaeologists
Shelves: chinese-history-iconography-arch, steppe-history
Educated in an era when the Tigris-Euphrates 'Fertile Crescent') region was credited with the invention of the chariot, this work's most fascinating contribution to our understanding of world history to me was the identification of the Pontic-Caspian steppes as the origin of horse-riding about 4200-4000 BCE, and the invention of wheeled vehicles around 3300 BCE. Chariots used in warfare utterly changed world history, so dating their appearance is important because it helps us understand so many..more
Oct 31, 2018
Peter Mcloughlin rated it
really liked it Shelves: language-and-reading, 00000good-things, european-history, 1990-to-2019, asian-history, politics, 10000-bce-to-500-ce, general-history, nonfiction
Makes the case for the Indo-Europeans coming out of the region just north of the Black Sea. I don't know if I buy it or not. The author marshalls a lot of linguistic and archeological evidence to make his case but with a people who left no writing and some metal trinkets behind there is room for tons of interpretation. There does seem to be something about the wide swath of linguistic root words from India to Ireland that suggest a common origin but a tribe of people from the Black Sea being the..more
Jun 30, 2018David rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Anthony writes in his conclusion, 'I have used a lot of archaeological detail in this account' and he sure did! This book is a very dense look at who the Proto-Indo-Europeans might have been (or probably were, in my opinion), looking at both the historical linguistics and the archeology.
I have an amateur interest in historical linguistics, so the first part of this book worked quite well for me (Proto-Indo-European is a 'reconstructed' language based on all its descendants, likely to have existe..more
Oct 08, 2010Barnaby Thieme rated it it was amazing
This rather technical overview of recent archaeological and linguistic scholarship sheds important light on the mysterious Proto-Indo-European-speaking Bronze Age cultures and offers a tentative picture of their development and spread across the Steppes until they impacted an area stretching between Western China and Atlantic Ocean. The author pays special attention to evidence for the domestication of the horse around 4000 BCE and draws attention to his original work analyzing bit wear patterns..more
Dec 22, 2011Bryn Hammond rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
I haven't felt equipped to review this -- at least until I get to that 2nd reading. A shame not to say that I thought it fantastic, though. A couple of notes:
I am a non-linguist (severely, I think) and can find language discussion in Indo-European books scary. Here I didn't, and besides there isn't over-much of it.
Its section on frontiers -- frontier theory and how frontiers work -- was enlightening for me, even outside the scope of this book. I think I met Frontier Studies here.
If I was bored..more
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 somew..more
Aug 12, 2008
Elaine rated it
it was amazingRecommends it for: intelligent people with good thinking skills
This is a fascinating study. He ties up what we know about the original Indo-European language with actual archaeological studies in the Steppes of Russia, probably their ancestral home. The Indo-European language family is the largest in the world, and its daughter languages include most of the European languages, many Indian languages, Iranian and languages in Afghanistan.
I will admit I am a linguist and know how to reconstruct dead languages. In order to do so, you have to understand the sci..more
Jan 06, 2009Maya rated it it was amazing
I'd like to start my review of the book with part of the last sentence of the last chapter of the book:'..in the invisible and fleeting sound of our speech we preserve for a future generation of linguists many details of our present world.' (p.466)
The main ideas of this book are a reconstruction of a dead language and how that is possible (in this case Proto-Indo-European) and dating it. The reconstruction of the lives and migrations of the Proto-Indo-Europeans including their possible homeland..more
May 14, 2008
Susanna - Censored by GoodReads rated it
liked it Shelves: ancient-world, history, science, archaeology, linguistics, russia
The first several chapters, and the last several chapters are both excellent. The middle bogs down a bit. I'm interested in archaeology, but my eyes were crossing while trying to read some of the middle portion. Very interesting, however.
Dec 02, 2010Michael rated it really liked it
Anthony has rendered a great service in making available information on the archaeology of the Bronze Age cultures of the Pontic-Caspian and Eurasian steppes contained in Russian language publications. The book features excellent notes and bibliography and extensive maps and illustrations. Many of the illustrations, however, are adapted from other publications and lack sufficient accompanying information to be useful for anything other than giving a general impression of the artifacts included i..more
Jun 30, 2019Ginger Griffin rated it really liked it
Proto-Indo-European speakers: Invading hordes or back-slapping cultural salesmen? Anthony goes with the salesman option (even likening PIE expansion to a franchise operation at one point). That theory looked a lot more plausible in 2007, when this book was published. Now, not so much. Genetic evidence developed since then shows that PIE speakers (known to archaeologists as the Yamnaya) expanded rapidly out of the Eurasian steppe and quickly replaced most of the people then living in western Euro..more
This was MUCH more than I bargained for. Extremely thorough on the archaeology (the number of cultures and 'horizons' is off the chart) with detailed explanations of horse tooth wear patterns, more pots than you can shake a stick at, pages of radiocarbon dating, words like caprine, onager, and einkorn, unknown minerals and gems, references to Siberian rivers.. it is a miracle I made it through.
While a monument of scholarship, I can't see it helping my cursory intro to linguistics lectures on P...more
Sep 30, 2016Peter Bradley added it · review of another edition
Please give my review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1P0HDS..
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,..more
Jan 23, 2014
Alison rated it
really liked it Shelves: science, history, non-fiction, evolution
A much more compelling story than the history of our 'genes', this books traces the evolution of the common cultural and linguistic roots of societies as diverse as the Lithuanians and the Iranians, the Indian sub-continent and the British Isles. Anthony details a breathtaking range of scholarship, from the early linguistic chapters (which too tantalisingly brief) through frontier and migration theorists, to his own archaeology, to pull together his argued position for the development of a cohes..more
As a graduate student in linguistics, I was initially quite enthused to read a book that bridges the gaping divide between linguistics and archaeology. The first half of this book does a decent job of describing the basics of historical reconstruction of language and understanding linguistic change within cultural landscapes (with a few sociolinguistic over-generalizations and gaffes).
However, Anthony's narrative of Proto-Indo-European's heritage and vast expansion is rather sparse on the lingu..more
David Anthony Archaeologist
Jun 14, 2010Matt rated it really liked it · review of another edition
David Anthony Kohls
I got pointed towards this book due to its being cited a few times by Karen Armstrong in the The Great Transformation - particularly around Zoroaster being much earlier than I had previously heard and how parts of the Rig Veda are remnants of proto-Indo-European culture. While there was a little of that in the book, the vast majority was on the archaeological evidence that there WAS a proto-Indo-European culture, along with the linguistic evidence. The linguistic evidence I found fascinating, al..more
I was really excited to read this book to understand the origins of the Indo-European languages and especially the shared culture and mythology of ancient Greeks, Romans, Vikings and modern Hindus. However, this book is first and foremost a book of archaeology. I think it's probably a pretty good book of archaeology, but I found myself less than completely interested in analyses of grave sites, ratios of different animal bones and the wear on horse teeth caused by bits. There is a lot of parsing..more
Jul 03, 2013Sharon Miller rated it really liked it
This was a fascinating book. I think if you were to memorize it that alone might qualify for a graduate degree. I have always been interested in the topic and this is the most balanced and comprehensive account I have come across. I appreciate the author's herculean efforts to peg theory and conjecture on fact and evidence as much as possible. While that led to a book very dense in archeological minutiae for the general audience, I truly enjoyed it and appreciate the work. It certainly is as clo..more
Feb 23, 2019Sarah Schanze rated it really liked it · review of another edition
After many months I have FINALLY finished this book. Despite the length of time it took to get through, it has some fascinating information about the origins of language and, well, society as we know it. The writing is thick as bricks, though, and chock full of almost too much information, but it's all to serve as evidence to get the writer's arguments across. This is not a casual read but it's still super interesting and thought-provoking and makes me want to learn more about the areas and cult..more
Feb 12, 2019David Putzolu rated it really liked it
A fairly heavy read with a ton of detail. The author seemed to be targeting both a lay audience as well as professional archaeologists and this shows through in the writing. Even with this in mind, I think some level of detail could have been placed in footnotes and made for an easier read. The concluding chapter was too short and would have benefited from doing a better summary of the main points of the book.
May 24, 2018Aha rated it it was amazing
This book is the best summary of the world our (European) ancestors lived in during the Bronze Age and of the proto-language development through ages.
Jun 09, 2015Yi Lun rated it liked it
3 stars
I studied languages and linguistics at university and the subdiscipline of linguistics I love the most is historical linguistics. Despite this, I do not know much about Proto-Indo European (PIE) and have been wanting to know more about it ever since graduating. After finding this book in the history section of Waterstones, I decided to go for it.
The first part of the book was fantastic. It starts with the discovery by Sir William Jones during his time in India that Sanskrit bore incred..more
Feb 04, 2017Nicholas Whyte rated it really liked it
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2776093.html
It is a very detailed presentation of evidence supporting a theory that I have known about for a long time: that Proto-Indo-European, the long-lost language from which most European languages, most Indian languages and others (notably Farsi) are descended, was originally spoken by tribes living on the steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, around 3500 BC. There's a well-known set of arguments for this which starts from the vocabulary which can..more
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David W. Anthony is an American Professor of Anthropology, specializing in Indo-European history and languages.
“It is oddly ironic that capitalist archaeologists made the mode of production central to their definition of the Neolithic, and Marxist archaeologists ignored it.” — 2 likes
“Both linguists and archaeologists have made communication across the disciplines almost impossible by speaking in dense jargons that are virtually impenetrable to anyone but themselves.” — 1 likes
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