Reddit reviews The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
We found 20 Reddit comments about The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Princeton University Press
A great source for this is [The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David Anthony.](http://www.amazon.com/The-Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age/dp/069114818X)
The book deal with historical, linguistic and archaeological evidence of horseback riding, the author made a major contribution as the principal investigator in the first studies of bit wear on ancient horse teeth.
When sierra1bravo mentions the horse domestication before riding, these cultures had domesticated cattle and sheep, and hunted wild horses, then began keeping horses over winter with their legs fettered. Horses don't need supplemental feed in the brutal steppe winters, as cattle and sheep do. Anthony cites a lack of diversity in the horse Y chromosome to suggest that the discovery of an unusually docile stallion may have been essential to true domestication, all horses may be descended from one stallion.
The wheel, and oxcart, were probably invented in Mesopotamia, there is evidence of trade with that culture shortly after the first signs of horse riding. Then, the steppe people learned to pack their tents and belongings into wagons and became mobile in a way no humans ever had before.
After the Ice is a great resource. Interesting narrative style as well.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language is also a great (although fairly technical) book about the origin and spread of the Indo-European language which had a large effect on the bronze age cultures in the area.
I'm almost done reading "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" and learned a lot about the Steppe theory. It's really interesting stuff.
On that note you might be interested in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language - it’s great.
No problem! Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Europe and western Asia is fascinating as hell! I recently read a book called The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World and it is an amazing read, packed with a metric shit-ton of archeological info.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony
Historical linguistics was too deep for me too until I listened to a podcast on the subject, and after the first 20 episodes I was so fascinated I went back and listened to them again. Now this week I'm nearing the end of those for the second time, but as of today there are over 70 episodes total. Anyway, to your questions:
> If humans have been in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, how could so many languages over the continent be connected to a single language spoken so recently?
Language is spread from cultures that dominate or influence other cultures for whatever reason: winning wars, economic power, being a key trading partner, religious influence, technological influence, etc. Or it could just be the speakers of the language moving from one place to a previously unoccupied place. In the case of PIE the reasons kept changing over the years, but in the beginning it spread because of Economic and military power. The PIE people had (a) domesticated horses, which other peoples did not, (b) a genetic mutation for lactose tolerance which allowed them to produce and consume much more calories per acre, (c) wool/weaving technology since their latitude caused their domesticated sheep to grow longer wool. They therefore also had (d) the luxury of being isolated from other cultures due to their ability to live on the Eurasian steppes where others could not, so they had a long time to expand their power and population without interference. All of this turned into military might and economic advantages that were unsurpassed in the region and allowed them to invade and dominate a successively wider area. In later years some of the other language-spreading factors also came into play.
> When we theorize about PIE, do we also theorize about neighboring dialects?
Yes. But in this case the PIE culture tended to wipe out their neighbors without much blending of the conquered languages, because that was their style and they could pull it off. Remember all those advantages they had. After the establishment of the language families (Hellenic, Italic, Germanic, Celtic, Indic, Balto-Slavic, etc) you see some blending with other languages because there was cultural mixing instead of just complete domination.
> A lot people think it was spoken by a people in the Caucuses, right?
More likely North of the Caucasus mountains. Here's a map.
> So do they think that this one language was basically a superstrate language, dominating everywhere from England to Iran (with help from people like the Romans)...?
Yes, that is exactly what they think. It was a superstrate language beginning in the Eurasion steppes that spread into a huge multi-continental region. What's interesting about English in particular is that it is composed of several different offspring of the original PIE: Germanic, Italic, Hellenic and Celtic. So English represents a re-merging of the original proto-language to a great extent.
> ...or was *PIE a part of a contemporary language family that already covered a great deal of land? If that's true, successful theorizing about PIE would land us at one really random lect of a language spoken ~three thousand years ago. Right?
There is a tremendous amount of evidence; linguistic, archeological and historic, that refutes this possibility.
By the way I just bought this book which I plan to read over the Christmas break. It was recommended in the podcast I mentioned earlier.
Edit: Spelling (photo → proto) and a little grammatical clarity
Indo-European archaeology - The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David Anthony
https://www.amazon.com/Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age-Eurasian/dp/069114818X
Archaeology of Europe - Any books by Barry Cunliffe, but especially Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000
https://www.amazon.com/Europe-Between-Oceans-9000-BC-AD/dp/0300170866
J.P. Mallory (The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, In Search of the Indo-Europeans) and M.L. West (Indo-European Poetry and Myth) have written several books on PIE society and culture.
That's really the crux of it - Ireland ended up speaking a Celtic language but the dispute is whether this was a result of wholesale population replacement (i.e. invasion, extermination of indigenous non-indoeuropean speaking peoples as in, say, Europeans in North America) or as a result of a relatively small number of high-status settlers becoming culturally or technologically dominant to the point that the non-indoeuropean population adopted their way of life and language more or less voluntarily (more like how English displaced Irish in Ireland or local languages in India by becoming the high-status language of business, education, politics etc.).
This new genetic evidence seems to give us an idea that steppe people (who would have spoken a PIE dialect, the very ancient ancestor of Gaelic) had reached Ireland by about 2,000 BCE which is the at the early end of what has been postulated.
THIS is great book about this era if you're interested.
There is a theory about Proto-Indo-Europeans (who were the 'origins' for Germanic, Celtic, Latin, Greek, Indian, Russian and western Chinese races) that they 'grew up' on the steppes to the west of the Caucasus mountains (and, importantly, over them shortly after. It's where we see the first horse-drawn chariots too).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age-Eurasian/dp/069114818X
Finished this book last fall... The Horse, the Wheel, and Language...and is a fascinating account of PIE, yamnaya, etc. It borrows quite a bit from Mallory's "In Search of the Indo-Europeans" which is a good read too.
I can't give an expert answer in this but it's been 13 hours and no one else has answered you, so I will just point you to this book. Basically, the cultures around the Caspian Sea, like the Sredny Stog cultures and later peoples in the same area, from around 2500-5000 BC are considered to be the earliest, judging from wear-marks on teeth or other signs in burials.
Oh, yeah, I love reading. I use Abebooks.com quite a bit. Here's a wonderful crackpot book that's simply fascinating: Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Extremely intriguing.
And a non-crackpot book I highly recommend is by David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Eye-opening and fascinating.
Honestly a lot of my knowledge just comes from reading online. The Norse aspect of what I wrote comes from this site. A few books I've read that are relevant are Heather O'Donoghue's From Asgard to Valhalla which is about the development of Norse myths and their influence through time. Religions of the Ancient World I haven't read but I read a similar book by the same author (which I can't find) for a class and it was a good overview of ancient religions. Here are some books on Indo-European culture that seem reputable but I haven't read them. 1 and 2
the horse, the wheel, and language
I read in the book The Horse, the Wheel and Language that the author explains that sometimes nomadic groups in Africa would defeat other groups of people and then establish their language as the one "with prestige". Could it be possible that it happened there?
The End of the Bronze Age Princeton University Press https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691025916/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdo_t1_.XcJBbE2K75XH
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World https://www.amazon.com/dp/069114818X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_C1cJBbZV1V1W6
The Horse, The Wheel, and Language might be up your alley. It's focused quite a bit earlier than Genghis Khan, and is pretty heavy on some fairly dry archaeology, but there's a lot of really interesting insight on the development and reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language and how its speakers affected the cultural development of India, Iran, and Europe.
My personal favorite chapter takes you through the development of a methodology used to determine when the Steppe peoples first mastered horse-riding, which involves looking at the wear patterns on horse teeth from thousands of years BCE and comparing them to wear patterns on modern horse teeth after they've been trained using various materials for bits.
Like davemidrock said, most of your ancestors are Indo European and a lot of experts and scholars have put together a few well researched reconstructions/hypothesis's of what that original culture would be like and their gods. Here's a few books to start with:
https://www.amazon.com/Search-Indo-Europeans-J-P-Mallory/dp/0500276161
https://www.amazon.com/Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age-Eurasian/dp/069114818X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=4FZR86TV92PSQ8B7PSG9
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Ancestors-Practicing-Religion-Proto-Indo-Europeans-ebook/dp/B00JF6RKXK/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Deep+Ancestors%3A+Practicing+the+Religion+of+the+Proto-Indo-Europeans&qid=1568890408&s=books&sr=1-1*** I have not read this one but I have heard good things about it. It really get's into the whole deity and myth thing.
With Indo-European beliefs you generally get the twin creation myths, an earth goddess, sky god and of course sun/moon deities. It seems with the earth goddesses, it not really an earth goddess that embodies the whole world (although it can be) but more of a local or regional goddess of the land. The problem with that is that most of the land deity's names have been lost to time, unless otherwise recorded (like Arduinna for the Ardiennes area). I'm nowhere near where Arduinna was first honored but she is what I lean toward as far as a goddess. However, I'm actually working through outdoor meditation on perhaps learning what my local land goddesses name is. My first instinct was to find the local indigenous name for the land spirit/goddess, but again, that's been swallowed by the mists of time. So even I have my struggles lol. I think you can figure this out with mindfulness, meditation, patience and reflection. Good luck!
The Horse, the Wheel and Language is a really excellent book about the origins of the Indo-european peoples. Did you ever wonder why so many of our ancient gods were sky and/or thunder gods? Why Iranian, English and Norse are all one big language family?
I also love After the Ice. That's another approachable archaeology/prehistory book. The author does an amazing job of imagining what life was like as the great sheets of ice retreated and humans began to settle in villages. Just imagine the changes in how people saw their world as they gave up tens of thousands of years of wandering to settle in one place and learn how to coax a living out of the land.