Richard Kettlewell

The Horse, The Wheel And Language, David W. Anthony, ISBN 978-0-691-05887-0

This is another look at the question of when and where Proto-Indo-European (the inferred common ancestor of many the modern and ancient languages found in areas ranging from Europe to India) was spoken, and why, how and when it spread. What makes it worth a new work on the subject is not just new research, but also the improved availability of archaeological research from eastern Europe (both from the Soviet era and later).

The author spends a couple of chapters discussing the history of the question and arguing that reconstruction of unattested languages is indeed possible before moving onto meatier questions such as timing, settling on 2500BCE as a latest terminal date for PIE, based on the youngest IE branches (which are also among the first to be written). Moreover he argues on the basis of the various elements of related vocabulary, that PIE cannot have started to separate into its daughter language at least until its speakers’ adoption of the wheel, and that the archeology the wheel places this somewhere between 4000 and 3500BCE (with the possible exception that the Anatolian languages separated earlier).

This dating also forms the core of his response to the hypothesis that the IE languages spread with farming: the dispersal date it requires is just too early.

Timing, farming vocabulary and relationships to other reconstructed proto-languages (such as Proto-Uralic) are then used to argue for a homeland on the steppe north of the Black Sea, the familiar territory of the Kurgan Hypothesis. He proceeds to lay out one possible sequence of events, backed by considerable argument. This forms the meat of the book (see below for a summary).

The book is well supplied with maps and diagrams showing archaeological finds. Less diverting are the table of radiocarbon dates associated with various sites, though fortunately for anyone interested in when things are likely to have happened, dates are well represented in the text making these inessential. As well as historical-linguistic and archaeological research the author draws on evidence of past climate change (to offer reasons for some of the archaeologically observed changes) and documents his own extensive research into the the wear patterns made on horses’ teeth by their bits, although unfortunately a shortage of archaeological finds so far makes this less directly relevant to the question of when horses were first ridden.

The relationship of the steppes to the settled societies of the Middle East is also explored. The Indo-European languages didn’t develop in a vacuum, isolated from other developments in the world, but parallel to them and sometimes in (often indirect) interaction with them.

An interesting diversion concerns the current and ancient cognates of the much-abused Aryan. The word that speakers of proto-Indo-Iranian used to describe themselves was probably *arya-, from PIE *h₄erós “tribe”. The best known cognates apart form the modern word itself is probably country name Iran. Interestingly derivatives of the word appear in non-Indo-European languages (whose ancestral languages were presumably therefore spoken in proximity to Indo-Iranian), with Finno-Ugric *orya, Pre-Saami *oarji “southwest” and ārjel “southerner”, Finnish orja “slave” and Estonian ori “slave”.

This book is well worth reading as an answer to the Indo-European homeland question.

Anthony’s Answer

(Errors in this extremely compressed summary are of course mine!)

Farming (of cattle, sheep and grain) the European edge of the steppes, then occupied by foragers, around 5800BCE. Anthony argues, with analogy to modern examples, that the archaeological frontier here is persistent enough that it may have been a linguistic frontier too. Between 5200 and 5000BCE farming was adopted by some of those foragers; the new way of life, and probably the dialects ancestral to PIE, spread over the steppe. Horseback riding probably originated on the steppe around 4200BCE. (But riding horses into battle was much later, so PIE speakers weren’t early analogs of the Huns or Mongols.) The greater range of mounted herders led to expansion and conflict, and a cooling of the climate increased the need for movement. One result was the expansion of (archaic) PIE into southeastern Europe, giving rise to the Anatolian languages (e.g. Hittite, the earliest attested Indo-European language). Around 3500BCE some of the easternmost speakers of PIE migrated thousands of kilometers eastwards, producing the Afanasievo culture and thought to have originated the (now dead) Tocharian languages.

The wheel reached the steppe 3500-3300BCE, producing the the Yamnaya culture, which used wagons to maintain a predominantly mobile herding way of life: these people are identified with the speakers of late PIE. A number of factors are identified for the spread of IE languages westwards into Europe. Firstly IE speakers probably had more and better horses, allowing them to grow rich by trading them, to manage larger herds, and to raid more effectively. Secondly, inferred properties of Yamnaya society are suggested as easing the integration other groups into Yamnaya communities, leading to new speakers adopting the language. Three groups of languages find their genesis here: Italic (e.g. Latin and French), Celtic (e.g. Welsh) and Germanic (e.g. English). While migration may well have been involved in some cases the author emphasises that there was no “Indo-European invasion of Europe”.

From 2100BCE fortified towns of the Sintashta culture appeared east of the Urals. These people had (and perhaps invented) chariots, and their graves show many similarities with the rituals described in the ancient Sanskrit text of the Rig Veda, and they probably spoke the ancestor of the Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Persian, Sanskrit and Hindi).