The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World available in Paperback, eBook
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
- ISBN-10:
- 069114818X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691148182
- Pub. Date:
- 08/15/2010
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 069114818X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691148182
- Pub. Date:
- 08/15/2010
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
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Overview
A book that solves the mystery of the people who spread the ancient mother tongue that gave us English and the other languages spoken by half of humanity today
"Authoritative."—New York Times • "A masterpiece."—Wilson Quarterly
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
| ISBN-13: | 9780691148182 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2010 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 568 |
| Sales rank: | 108,856 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE HORSE THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE
HOW BRONZE-AGE RIDERS FROM THE EURASIAN STEPPES SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD
By DAVID W. ANTHONY
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05887-0
Chapter One
The Promise and Politics of the Mother Tongue
Ancestors
When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.
It is disconcerting to realize how few of our ancestors most of us can recognize or even name. You have four great- grandmothers, women sufficiently close to you genetically that you see elements of their faces, and skin, and hair each time you see your reflection. Each had a maiden name she heard spoken thousands of times, and yet you probably cannot recall any one of their maiden names. If we are lucky, we may find their birth names in genealogies or documents, although war, migration, and destroyed records have made that impossible for many Americans. Our four great-grandmothers had full lives, families, and bequeathed to us many of our most personal qualities, but we have lost our ancestors so completely that we cannot even name them. How many of us, just three generations from now, can imagine being so utterly forgotten by our own descendents that they remember nothing of us-not even our names.
In traditional societies, where life is still structured around family, extended kin, and the village, people often are more conscious of the debts they owe their ancestors, even of the power of their ghosts and spirits. Zafimaniry women in rural Madagascar weave complicated patterns on their hats, which they learned from their mothers and aunts. The patterns differ significantly between villages. The women in one village told the anthropologist Maurice Bloch that the designs were "pearls from the ancestors." Even ordinary Zafimaniry houses are seen as temples to the spirits of the people who made them. This constant ac knowledgment of the power of those who lived before is not part of the thinking of most modern, consumer cultures. We live in a world that depends for its economic survival on the constant adoption and consumption of new things. Archaeology, history, genealogy, and prayer are the overflowing drawers into which we throw our thoughts of earlier generations.
Archaeology is one way to acknowledge the humanity and importance of the people who lived before us and, obliquely, of ourselves. It is the only discipline that investigates the daily texture of past lives not described in writing, indeed the great majority of the lives humans have lived. Archaeologists have wrested surprisingly intimate details out of the silent remains of the preliterate past, but there are limits to what we can know about people who have left no written accounts of their opinions, their conversations, or their names.
Is there a way to overcome those limits and recover the values and beliefs that were central to how prehistoric people really lived their lives? Did they leave clues in some other medium? Many linguists believe they did, and that the medium is the very language we use every day. Our language contains a great many fossils that are the remnants of surprisingly ancient speakers. Our teachers tell us that these linguistic fossils are "irregular" forms, and we just learn them without thinking. We all know that a past tense is usually constructed by adding -t or -ed to the verb (kick-kicked, miss-missed) and that some verbs require a change in the vowel in the middle of the stem (run-ran, sing-sang). We are generally not told, however, that this vowel change was the older, original way of making a past tense. In fact, changing a vowel in the verb stem was the usual way to form a past tense probably about five thousand years ago. Still, this does not tell us much about what people were thinking then.
Are the words we use today actually fossils of people's vocabulary of about five thousand years ago? A vocabulary list would shine a bright light on many obscure parts of the past. As the linguist Edward Sapir observed, "The complete vocabulary of a language may indeed be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests, and occupations that take up the attention of the community." In fact, a substantial vocabulary list has been reconstructed for one of the languages spoken about five thousand years ago. That language is the ancestor of modern English as well as many other modern and ancient languages. All the languages that are descended from this same mother tongue belong to one family, that of the Indo-European languages. Today Indo-European languages are spoken by about three billion people-more than speak the languages of any other language family. The vocabulary of the mother tongue, called "Proto-Indo-European", has been studied for about two hundred years, and in those two centuries fierce disagreements have continued about almost every aspect of Indo-European studies.
But disagreement produces light as well as heat. This book argues that it is now possible to solve the central puzzle surrounding Proto-Indo-European, namely, who spoke it, where was it spoken, and when. Generations of archaeologists and linguists have argued bitterly about the "homeland" question. Many doubt the wisdom of even pursuing it. In the past, nationalists and dictators have insisted that the homeland was in their country and belonged to their own superior "race." But today Indo-European linguists are improving their methods and making new discoveries. They have reconstructed the basic forms and meanings of thousands of words from the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary-itself an astonishing feat. Those words can be analyzed to describe the thoughts, values, concerns, family relations, and religious beliefs of the people who spoke them. But first we have to figure out where and when they lived. If we can combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of archaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usual limitations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge of these particular ancestors.
I believe with many others that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is today southern Ukraine and Russia. The case for a steppe homeland is stronger today than in the past partly because of dramatic new archaeological discoveries in the steppes. To understand the significance of an Indo-European homeland in the steppes requires a leap into the complicated and fascinating world of steppe archaeology. Steppe means "wasteland" in the language of the Russian agricultural state. The steppes resembled the prairies of North America-a monotonous sea of grass framed under a huge, dramatic sky. A continuous belt of steppes extends from eastern Europe on the west (the belt ends between Odessa and Bucharest) to the Great Wall of China on the east, an arid corridor running seven thousand kilometers across the center of the Eurasian continent. This enormous grassland was an effective barrier to the transmission of ideas and technologies for thousands of years. Like the North American prairie, it was an unfriendly environment for people traveling on foot. And just as in North America, the key that opened the grasslands was the horse, combined in the Eurasian steppes with domesticated grazing animals-sheep and cattle-to process the grass and turn it into useful products for humans. Eventually people who rode horses and herded cattle and sheep acquired the wheel, and were then able to follow their herds almost anywhere, using heavy wagons to carry their tents and supplies. The isolated prehistoric societies of China and Europe became dimly aware of the possibility of one another's existence only after the horse was domesticated and the covered wagon invented. Together, these two innovations in transportation made life predictable and productive for the people of the Eurasian steppes. The opening of the steppe-its transformation from a hostile ecological barrier to a corridor of transcontinental communication-forever changed the dynamics of Eurasian historical development, and, this author contends, played an important role in the first expansion of the Indo-European languages.
Linguists and Chauvinists
The Indo-European problem was formulated in one famous sentence by Sir William Jones, a British judge in India, in 1786. Jones was already widely known before he made his discovery. Fifteen years earlier, in 1771, his Grammar of the Persian Language was the first English guide to the language of the Persian kings, and it earned him, at the age of twenty-five, the reputation as one of the most respected linguists in Europe. His translations of medieval Persian poems inspired Byron, Shelley, and the Europe an Romantic movement. He rose from a respected barrister in Wales to a correspondent, tutor, and friend of some of the leading men of the kingdom. At age thirty- seven he was appointed one of the three justices of the first Supreme Court of Bengal. His arrival in Calcutta, a mythically alien place for an Englishman of his age, was the opening move in the imposition of royal government over a vital yet irresponsible merchant's colony. Jones was to regulate both the excesses of the English merchants and the rights and duties of the Indians. But although the English merchants at least recognized his legal authority, the Indians obeyed an already functioning and ancient system of Hindu law, which was regularly cited in court by Hindu legal scholars, or pandits (the source of our term pundit). English judges could not determine if the laws the pandits cited really existed. Sanskrit was the ancient language of the Hindu legal texts, like Latin was for English law. If the two legal systems were to be integrated, one of the new Supreme Court justices had to learn Sanskrit. That was Jones.
He went to the ancient Hindu university at Nadiya, bought a vacation cottage, found a respected and willing pandit (Ramalocana) on the faculty, and immersed himself in Hindu texts. Among these were the Vedas, the ancient religious compositions that lay at the root of Hindu religion. The Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedic texts, had been composed long before the Buddha's lifetime and was more than two thousand years old, but no one knew its age exactly. As Jones pored over Sanskrit texts his mind made comparisons not just with Persian and English but also with Latin and Greek, the mainstays of an eighteenth-century university education; with Gothic, the oldest literary form of German, which he had also learned; and with Welsh, a Celtic tongue and his boyhood language which he had not forgotten. In 1786, three years after his arrival in Calcutta, Jones came to a startling conclusion, announced in his third annual discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he had founded when he first arrived. The key sentence is now quoted in every introductory textbook of historical linguistics (punctuation mine):
The Sanskrit language, what ever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. Jones had concluded that the Sanskrit language originated from the same source as Greek and Latin, the classical languages of European civilization. He added that Persian, Celtic, and German probably belonged to the same family. European scholars were astounded. The occupants of India, long regarded as the epitome of Asian exotics, turned out to be long-lost cousins. If Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were relatives, descended from the same ancient parent language, what was that language? Where had it been it spoken? And by whom? By what historical circumstances did it generate daughter tongues that became the dominant languages spoken from Scotland to India?
These questions resonated particularly deeply in Germany, where popular interest in the history of the German language and the roots of German traditions were growing into the Romantic movement. The Romantics wanted to discard the cold, artificial logic of the Enlightenment to return to the roots of a simple and authentic life based in direct experience and community. Thomas Mann once said of a Romantic philosopher (Schlegel) that his thought was contaminated too much by reason, and that he was therefore a poor Romantic. It was ironic that William Jones helped to inspire this movement, because his own philosophy was quite different: "The race of man ... cannot long be happy without virtue, nor actively virtuous without freedom, nor securely free without rational knowledge." But Jones had energized the study of ancient languages, and ancient language played a central role in Romantic theories of authentic experience. In the 1780s J. G. Herder proposed a theory later developed by von Humboldt and elaborated in the twentieth century by Wittgenstein, that language creates the categories and distinctions through which humans give meaning to the world. Each particular language, therefore, generates and is enmeshed in a closed social community, or "folk," that is at its core meaningless to an outsider. Language was seen by Herder and von Humboldt as a vessel that molded community and national identities. The brothers Grimm went out to collect "authentic" German folk tales while at the same time studying the German language, pursuing the Romantic conviction that language and folk culture were deeply related. In this setting the mysterious mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European, was regarded not just as a language but as a crucible in which Western civilization had its earliest beginnings.
After the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, the Romantic conviction that language was a defining factor in national identity was combined with new ideas about evolution and biology. Natural selection provided a scientific theory that was hijacked by nationalists and used to rationalize why some races or "folks" ruled others-some were more "fit" than others. Darwin himself never applied his theories of fitness and natural selection to such vague entities as races or languages, but this did not prevent unscientific opportunists from suggesting that the less "fit" races could be seen as a source of genetic weakness, a reservoir of barbarism that might contaminate and dilute the superior qualities of the races that were more "fit." This toxic mixture of pseudo-science and Romanticism soon produced its own new ideologies. Language, culture, and a Darwinian interpretation of race were bundled together to explain the superior biological-spiritual-linguistic essence of the northern Europeans who conducted these self- congratulatory studies. Their writings and lectures encouraged people to think of themselves as members of long-established, biological-linguistic nations, and thus were promoted widely in the new national school systems and national newspapers of the emerging nation-states of Europe. The policies that forced the Welsh (including Sir William Jones) to speak English, and the Bretons to speak French, were rooted in politicians' need for an ancient and "pure" national heritage for each new state. The ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European soon were molded into the distant progenitors of such racial-linguistic-national stereotypes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE HORSE THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE by DAVID W. ANTHONY Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments....................xi
PART ONE Language and Archaeology....................1
Chapter One The Promise and Politics of the Mother Tongue....................3
Ancestors....................3
Linguists and Chauvinists....................6
The Lure of the Mother Tongue....................11
A New Solution for an Old Problem....................15
Language Extinction and Thought....................19
Chapter Two How to Reconstruct a Dead Language....................21
Language Change and Time....................22
Phonology: How to Reconstruct a Dead Sound....................24
The Lexicon: How to Reconstruct Dead Meanings....................32
Syntax and Morphology: The Shape of a Dead Language....................36
Conclusion: Raising a Language from the Dead....................38
Chapter Three Language and Time 1: The Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European....................39
The Size of the Chronological Window: How Long Do Languages Last?....................39
The Terminal Date for Proto-Indo-Europe an: The Mother Becomes Her Daughters....................42
The Oldest and Strangest Daughter (or Cousin?): Anatolian....................43
The Next Oldest Inscriptions: Greek and Old Indic....................48
Counting the Relatives: How Many in 1500 BCE?....................50
Chapter Four Language and Time 2: Wool, Wheels, and Proto-Indo-European....................59
The Wool Vocabulary....................59
The Wheel Vocabulary....................63
When was the Wheel Invented....................65
The Significance of theWheel....................72
Wagons and the Anatolian Homeland Hypothesis....................75
The Birth and Death of Proto-Indo-European....................81
Chapter Five Language and Place: The Location of the Proto-Indo-Europe an Homeland....................83
Problems with The concept of "The Homeland"....................83
Finding the Homeland: Ecology and Environment....................89
Finding the Homeland: The Economic and Social Setting....................91
Finding the Homeland: Uralic and Caucasian Connections....................93
The Location of the Proto-Indo-Europe an Homeland....................98
Chapter Six The Archaeology of Language....................102
Per sis tent Frontiers....................104
Migration as a Cause of Per sis tent Material-Culture Frontiers....................108
Ecological Frontiers: Different Ways of Making a Living....................114
Small-scale Migrations, Elite Recruitment, and Language Shift....................117
PART TWO The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes....................121
Chapter Seven How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture....................123
The Three Ages in the Pontic-Caspian Steppes....................125
Dating and the Radiocarbon Revolution....................126
What Did They Eat?....................128
Archaeological Cultures and Living Cultures....................130
The Big Questions Ahead....................132
Chapter Eight First Farmers and Herders: The Pontic-Caspian Neolithic....................134
Domesticated Animals and Pontic-Caspian Ecology....................135
The First Farmer- Forager Frontier in the Pontic-Caspian Region....................138
Farmer Meets Forager: The Bug-Dniester Culture....................147
Beyond the Frontier: Pontic-Caspian Foragers before Cattle Arrived....................154
The Gods Give Cattle....................158
Chapter Nine Cows, Copper, and Chiefs....................160
The Early Copper Age in Old Europe....................162
The Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture....................164
The Dnieper-Donets II Culture....................174
The Khvalynsk Culture on the Volga....................182
Nalchik and North Caucasian Cultures....................186
The Lower Don and North Caspian Steppes....................188
The Forest Frontier: The Samara Culture....................189
Cows, Social Power, and the Emergence of Tribes....................190
Chapter Ten The Domestication of the Horse and the Origins of Riding: The Tale of the Teeth....................193
Where Were Horses First Domesticated?....................196
Why Were Horses Domesticated?....................200
What Is a Domesticated Horse?....................201
Bit Wear and Horse back Riding....................206
Indo-Europe an Migrations and Bit Wear at Dereivka....................213
Botai and Eneolithic Horse back Riding....................216
The Origin of Horse back Riding....................221
The Economic and Military Effects of Horse back Riding....................222
Chapter Eleven The End of Old Europe and the Rise of the Steppe....................225
Warfare and Alliance: The Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture and the Steppes....................230
The Sredni Stog Culture: Horses and Rituals from the East....................239
Migrations into the Danube Valley: The Suvorovo-Novodanilovka Complex....................249
Warfare, Climate Change, and Language Shift in the Lower Danube Valley....................258
After the Collapse....................260
Chapter Twelve Seeds of Change on the Steppe Borders: Maikop Chiefs and Tripolye Towns....................263
The Five Cultures of the Final Eneolithic in the Steppes....................265
Crisis and Change on the Tripolye Frontier: Towns Bigger Than Cities....................277
The First Cities and Their Connection to the Steppes....................282
The North Caucasus Piedmont: Eneolithic Farmers before Maikop....................285
The Maikop Culture....................287
Maikop-Novosvobodnaya in the Steppes: Contacts with the North....................295
Proto-Indo-Europe an as a Regional Language in a Changing World....................299
Chapter Thirteen Wagon Dwellers of the Steppe: The Speakers of Proto-Indo-Europe an....................300
Why Not a Kurgan Culture?....................306
Beyond the Eastern Frontier: The Afanasievo Migration to the Altai....................307
Wagon Graves in the Steppes....................311
Where Did the Yamnaya Horizon Begin?....................317
When Did the Yamnaya Horizon Begin?....................321
Were the Yamnaya People Nomads?....................321
Yamnaya Social Organization....................328
The Stone Stelae of the North Pontic Steppes....................336
Chapter Fourteen The Western Indo-Europe an Languages....................340
The End of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture and the Roots of the Western Branches....................343
Steppe Overlords and Tripolye Clients: The Usatovo Culture....................349
The Yamnaya Migration up the Danube Valley....................361
Yamnaya Contacts with the Corded Ware Horizon....................367
The Origins of Greek....................368
Conclusion: The Early Western Indo-European Languages Disperse....................369
Chapter Fifteen Chariot Warriors of the Northern Steppes....................371
The End of the Forest Frontier: Corded Ware Herders in the Forest....................375
Pre-Sintashta Cultures of the Eastern Steppes....................385
The Origin of the Sintashta Culture....................389
Warfare in the Sintashta Culture: Fortifications and Weapons....................393
Tournaments of Value....................404
Sintashta and the Origins of the Aryans....................408
Chapter Sixteen The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes....................412
Bronze Age Empires and the Horse Trade....................412
The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex....................421
The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes....................435
The Srubnaya Culture: Herding and Gathering in the Western Steppes....................437
East of the Urals, Phase I: The Petrovka Culture....................441
The Seima-Turbino Horizon in the Forest-Steppe Zone....................443
East of the Urals, Phase II: The Andronovo Horizon....................448
Proto- Vedic Cultures in the Central Asian Contact Zone....................452
The Steppes Become a Bridge across Eurasia....................456
Chapter Seventeen Words and Deeds....................458
The Horse and the Wheel....................459
Archaeology and Language....................463
Appendix: Author's Note on Radiocarbon Dates....................467
Notes....................000
References....................000
Index....................000
What People are Saying About This
A very significant contribution to the field. This book attempts to resolve the longstanding problem of Indo-European origins by providing an examination of the most relevant linguistic issues and a thorough review of the archaeological evidence. I know of no study of the Indo-European homeland that competes with it.
— J. P. Mallory, Queen's University, Belfast
If you want to learn about the early origins of English and related languages, and of many of our familiar customs such as feasting on holidays and exchanging gifts, this book provides a lively and richly informed introduction. Along the way you will learn when and why horses were domesticated, when people first rode horseback, and when and why swift chariots changed the nature of warfare.
— Peter S. Wells, author of "The Battle that Stopped Rome"
"If you want to learn about the early origins of English and related languages, and of many of our familiar customs such as feasting on holidays and exchanging gifts, this book provides a lively and richly informed introduction. Along the way you will learn when and why horses were domesticated, when people first rode horseback, and when and why swift chariots changed the nature of warfare."—Peter S. Wells, author of The Battle that Stopped Rome
"A very significant contribution to the field. This book attempts to resolve the longstanding problem of Indo-European origins by providing an examination of the most relevant linguistic issues and a thorough review of the archaeological evidence. I know of no study of the Indo-European homeland that competes with it."—J. P. Mallory, Queen's University, Belfast
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