The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

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

File:The Horse, the Wheel and Language.jpg Cover of the first edition
Author	David W. Anthony
Language	English
Subject	Indo-European migrations
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Publication date	2007
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	568
ISBN	978-0-691-14818-2

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World is a 2007 book by the anthropologist David W. Anthony, in which the author describes his "revised Kurgan theory." He explores the origins and spread of the Indo-European languages from the Pontic–Caspian steppe throughout Western Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. He shows how the domesticated horse and the invention of the wheel mobilized the steppe herding societies in the Eurasian Steppe, and combined with the introduction of bronze technology and new social structures of patron-client relationships gave an advantage to the Indo-European societies. The book won the Society for American Archaeology's 2010 Book Award.

Synopsis

Anthony gives a broad overview of the linguistic and archaeological evidence for the early origins and spread of the Indo-European languages, describing a revised version of Marija Gimbutas's Kurgan hypothesis. Anthony describes the development of local cultures at the northern Black Sea coast, from hunter-gatherers to herders, under the influence of the Balkan cultures, which introduced cattle, horses and bronze technology.

When the climate changed between 3500 and 3000 BCE, with the steppes becoming drier and cooler, those inventions led to a new way of life in which mobile herders moved into the steppes, developing a new kind of social organisation with patron-client and host-guest relationships. That new social organisation, with its related Indo-European languages, spread throughout Europe, Central Asia and South Asia because of its possibilities to include new members within its social structures.

Part One covers theoretical considerations on language and archaeology. It gives an introductory overview of Indo-European linguistics (ch. 1); investigates the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (ch. 2); the dating of Proto-Indo-European (ch. 3); the specific vocabulary for wool and wheels (ch. 4); the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland (ch. 5); and the correlation of these linguistic discoveries with archaeological evidence and the role of elite recruitment in language shift (ch. 6).

Part Two covers the development of the Steppe cultures and the subsequent migrations out of the Pontic-Caspian region into Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. The splitting of the major branches of Indo-European (except perhaps Greek) can be correlated with archaeological cultures, showing steppe influences in a way that makes sense chronologically and geographically in light of linguistic reconstructions. Anthony gives an introduction to Part Two (ch. 7); describes the interaction between Balkan farmers and herders and steppe foragers at the Dniestr River (in western Ukraine) and the introduction of cattle (ch. 8); the spread of cattle-herding during the Copper Age and the accompanying social division between high and low status (ch. 9); the domestication of the horse (ch. 10); the end of the Balkan cultures and the early migrations of Steppe people into the Danube Valley (ch. 11); the development of the steppe cultures during the Eneolithic, including the interaction with the Mesopotamian world after the collapse of the Balkan cultures and the role of Proto-Indo-European as a regional language (ch. 12); the Yamna culture as the culmination of these developments at the Pontic-Caspian steppes (ch. 13); the migration of Yamna people into the Danube Valley and the origins of the western Indo-European languages at the Danube Valley (Celtic, Italic), the Dniestr (Germanic) and the Dnieper (Baltic, Slavic) (ch. 14); migrations eastward which gave rise to the Sintashta culture and Proto-Indo-Iranian (ch. 15); migrations of the Indo-Aryans southward through the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological complex into Anatolia and India (ch. 16); and concluding thoughts (ch. 17).

Reception

Anthony's work received generally positive reviews. The New York Times, noting the longstanding debate among scholars over the origins of the Indo-European language group, stated, "Anthony is not the first scholar to make the case that Proto-Indo-European came from [the steppes of southern Ukraine and Russia], but given the immense array of evidence he presents, he may be the last one who has to."

Geographer Arthur Krim discussed the work in Geographical Review. According to Krim, Anthony's "debate is with the archaeologist Colin Renfrew" and his Anatolian hypothesis, which proposed that early Proto-Indo-European developed by around 6500 BCE, originating in the famous Neolithic site at Çatalhöyük in Turkey. According to Krim,

Anthony offers convincing logic that the rate of linguistic change, as preserved in the first inscribed-tablet evidence of Indo-European branches as Hittite and the Vedic texts in India, rests on the invention of the wagon wheel and domesticated wool sheep between 4000 and 3500 B.C.E. These linguistic roots, not the older Anatolian-Near Eastern origins that Renfrew proposed, mark PIE after 4000 B.C.E.... David Anthony has produced convincingly detailed evidence that plants the origins of Indo-European culture firmly on the Russian-Ukrainian steppes by 3500 B.C.E. and demonstrates the spread of its horseback-riding innovations westward up the Danube River in Central Europe and eastward over the Iranian plateau into the Indus Valley.

The Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association's Rocky Mountain Review called the work "an archaeological feat" that "bridges the stubborn gap between linguists and archaeologists." The review noted with approval Anthony's drawing upon Soviet and Eastern European studies that had previously been unknown to western researchers.

The most critical review was Philip Kohl's "Perils of Carts before Horses: Linguistic Models and the Underdetermined Archaeological Record" in American Anthropologist. Kohl argues that Anthony's linguistic model is overly simple on the development of the Indo-European languages as products of divergence originating from one single source, though he admits that Anthony pays some attention to loanwords and the influence of neighboring cultures. Kohl is critical that Anthony's linguistic model guides "the archaeological interpretation rather than the reverse." According to Kohl, "such a procedure almost necessarily means that the archaeological record is consistently manipulated to fit the linguistic model that it is meant to confirm; the reasoning is circular." Kohl further notes that Anthony's reconstruction is bold and imaginative but is also "necessarily selective" and sometimes misleading when it relies on a rather limited number of items. According to Kohl,

the central problem with this book is its assumption that Indo-Europeans exclusively or nearly exclusively practiced certain cultural features, including technologies and even religious rituals. Was such exclusivity characteristic of the late prehistoric world or, rather, were peoples who spoke different languages continuously interacting with each other, adopting and transforming other peoples' practices and beliefs?

Kohl cautions about Anthony's proposal that horseback riding developed very early in the Chalcolithic in the Proto-Indo-European homeland. According to Kohl, horseback riding was almost invisible in the Ancient Near Eastern pictorial record until practically the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. Finally, Kohl notes that past fantasies about superior Aryans are dismissed by Anthony but that his descriptions of the influence of the Indo-European cultures on the Eurasian world may nevertheless feed into "fantasies about peculiarly gifted and creative Indo-Europeans–Aryans."

Nonetheless, Kohl also called the book a "magisterial synthesis of steppe archaeology" and stated that

the book's enduring value will be its rich and vivid synthesis of an extremely complex corpus of archaeological data from Neolithic times through the Bronze Age, stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia. Anthony writes extremely well and masterfully describes material culture remains, teasing out incredible amounts of information on the nature and scale of subsistence activities, social structure, and even ritual practices.

Kohl's critique was challenged by others, who noted that Anthony's extensive review of archaeological evidence suggested that he was using the linguistic model not to "'confirm' the 'archaeological record'" but "to interact with and help to explain [the archaeological record]."

Awards

• The Society for American Archaeology's 2010 Book Award.

Sources

Printed sources

• Anthony, David W. (2007), The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-14818-2
• Anthony, David W. (2010), The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-1400831104
• Kohl, Philip L. (March 2009). "Perils of Carts before Horses: Linguistic Models and the Underdetermined Archaeological Record". American Anthropologist. 111 (1): 109–111. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01086.x.
• Krim, Arthur (1 January 2008). "Review of The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World". Geographical Review. 98 (4): 571–573. JSTOR 40377356.
• Ringe, Donald A. (2006). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Linguistic history of English, v. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-955229-0.

External links

• Complete text at archive.org
• Sample chapter
• New York Times review
• Dreamflesh Review
• Entry at Google Books
• Entry at AbeBooks
• 'Horseback Riding and Bronze Age Pastoralism in the Eurasian Steppes', David W. Anthony, University of Pennsylvania Museum, YouTube (video)