The Horse, the Wheel, and Language
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.
Stats for nerds
17recommend
23mentions
22people
2013–2026years
78% recommend17% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- In a similar vein: "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by David W. Anthony
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691148182/th...
- "Proto" - Laura Spinney. Proto-Indoeuropean. https://www.powells.com/book/proto-how-one-ancient-language-...
before that
"The Horse the Wheel & Language". David Anthony. Proto-Indoeuropeans. https://www.powells.com/book/horse-the-wheel-language-how-br...
- Also David Anthony's book _The Horse, the Wheel, and Language_ (2007), which just missed the ancient DNA revolution but essentially anticipated its findings on Yamnaya migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppe into Europe.
- If you like this kind of language archeology, check out David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language — for how the people that spoke the Proto Indo-European language were located in time and space.
- An excellent book I strongly recommend about PIE is The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.
- For PIE, the most accessible recent book in English is probably The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (Anthony 2007), and I would highly recommend it. (It pulls double duty as a laymen's and as an academic publication, so if you do read it, know that it's OK to skip the minutiae of pottery shards.)
A slightly older but enduringly popular work is In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (Mallory 1989). I'm told How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Watkins 1995) is very good too, but I have not read it myself.
Chapter 2 of Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (Fortson 2004) is a very good summary of PIE culture. The book is excellent in general - probably the best English language introduction to PIE linguistics at the moment - but outside the first two chapters it is not generally accessible to laymen.
If you read other European languages it's worth checking out other books that may be available to you. The field by definition requires the ability to read a decent number of languages, so the literature is spread out across English, German, French, Russian, etc.
Related
Politics and the English language
112 recommend · 263
The Language Instinct
44 recommend · 108
The Wheel of Time
57 recommend · 242
Empires of the Word
5 recommend · 10
Historical linguistics
1 recommend · 2
The English and their history
3 recommend · 4
The Languages of Pao
recommend · 5
