The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

Weaving together linguistics, archaeology, and other social sciences, Anthony gives you the state of play in our current understanding of the Indo-European efflorescence that came out of the transition between the tail-end of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age proper. While it's still largely a matter of steppe-dwelling pastoral nomads who first effectively tamed the horse, think less in terms of something that looks like the horde of Attila or Genghis Khan and more a group of peoples who turned the steppe from a barrier to a road and who were better able to exploit a landscape entering into something of a little ice age, and to organize other cultures traumatized by climatic change. That we have this new understanding, which puts a final end to the curdled romanticism about the "Aryans," is largely a testament to East-West scientific cooperation in the wake of the end of the Cold War. If I have one particular gripe it's that this book could have used some more basic editing; I read a library copy that was liberally proof-marked by a previous reader.

The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, by David Anthony, is an outstanding work of history, archaeology, linguistics and overall scholarship. Anthony argues that it was indeed Indo-European Bronze Age chariot riders from the steppes who “invaded” (actually he suggests a gradual, transitional displacement, amalgamation) and absorbed the territories of the Danubian agriculturalists of Old Europe such as the Cucuteni-Trypillian people, as well as introduced new technologies (i.e. the chariot) to the Near East and (through the Tocharian Mummy segment) to China. Anthony’s fascinating study begins with the study of bit wear on horses, a scientific examination that he seems to have inaugurated some years back. His studies have provided evidence that clearly demonstrates the demarcation line between those who utilized horses for food like other mega-fauna and those who rode them, thereby establishing that the latter occurred far earlier than previously noted.Unfortunately, Anthony’s book is heavily bogged down with the minutiae of archaeological evidence – hundreds of pages of it – that would have found better provenance in an appendix. The organization of the book is such that his well-written narrative becomes pregnant with details of each site and culture to the degree that even scholars in the field would grow weary of it. It took me months of perseverance – while reading other books, of course – to make to the end of this volume, which is in fact well worth the read. Anthony should re-edit the book, however, and re-issue a version that is more accessible to, if not a popular audience, at least for readers who are not schooled in professional archaeology. Still, I highly recommend the book as the best and certainly the most comprehensive study of the early Indo-European peoples.

I came for the language. I stayed for the horse teeth.

Very detailed and interesting description of prehistoric people in Europe and Asia going back to the dawn of recorded / literate civilization.
I liked it as much as Guns germs and steel. It comes to a similar subject from a different angle and I learned a lot, worthwhile listen/ read even if it is quite technical in linguistics and archeology ( but I am not an archeologist / linguist and I did not have any problems following). Also if unfamiliar with the main geographical features of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Google maps or an old fashion school atlas is your friend.

In short, this is the prequel to Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (to which the author refers in the text and in the title trifecta). Maybe this book is a bit more technical in its archeological descriptions, and less forceful in formulating a central thesis, but I found it just as fascinating.Why did the Indo-Europeans come to dominate the larger part of the Eurasian land mass (thereby extinguishing at least three pre-existing language groups, of which no trace remains, except in river names and a few other language fossils)? How and where did they originate, and how did they split up to form the various main language groups, from Celtic, Germanic and Italic over Greek, Armenian, Iranian to Sanskrit and faraway Tocharian?The descriptions of what was found exactly in which tomb are a bit tedious, but they are compensated for by the author's research into language evolution and horse domestication as proofs alongside the physical evidence. And there you have it: Troy and the Iliad don't suddenly appear out of nowhere, as our classical education had us believe until recently, but fit firmly in this narrative, as do the Assyrians and their urban civilisations. Suddenly our earliest history gains a new sense by the identification of this Indo-European tribe in their steppes above the Black and Caspian seas, linking old civilisations in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Iran to the earliest Chinese states, and finally dominating many of them with their horses, their chariots and indeed their languages.

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 other bits and pieces we have of ancient history in the region (including Indian and Chinese history). Author David Anthony reminds us that the oldest images in Near Eastern art of spoked wheels (which identifies chariots used in warfare from carts used for other more domestic purposes) appear about 1900 BCE, which leads us to the realization that chariots were developed first in the steppes, and "introduced to the Near East through Central Asia". The appearance of chariot-riding warriors can explain the sudden appearance (and disappearance) of armed settlements, large-scale migrations, technologies that focus on instruments of war, the replacement of the heroic warrior with the strategizing general of armies, etc. Even if you're not interested in language, this detail-rich volume has many threads for historians to follow; it is a monumental work for anyone.