The Connection Between Horses and Language
Most historians think of war when they begin to list the changes caused by horseback riding and the earliest wheeled vehicles. But horses were first domesticated by people who thought of them as food. They were a cheap source of winter meat; they could feed themselves through the steppe winter, when cattle and sheep needed to be supplied with water
... See moreDavid W. Anthony • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were farmers and stockbreeders: we can reconstruct words for bull, cow, ox, ram, ewe, lamb, pig, and piglet. They had many terms for milk and dairy foods, including sour milk, whey, and curds. When they led their cattle and sheep out to the field they walked with a faithful dog. They knew how to shear wool, which
... See moreDavid W. Anthony • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
Language replacement always is accompanied by revised self–perceptions, a restructuring of the cultural classifications within which the self is defined and reproduced. Negative evaluations associated with the dying language lead to a descending series of reclassifications by succeeding generations, until no one wants to speak like Grandpa any more
... See moreDavid W. Anthony • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
The other side of understanding language shift is to ask why the identities associated with Indo–European languages were emulated and admired. It cannot have been because of some essential quality or inner potential in Indo–European languages or people. Usually language shift flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. Paramount status
... See moreDavid W. Anthony • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
The Indo-European problem can be solved today because archaeological discoveries and advances in linguistics have eaten away at problems that remained insoluble as recently as fifteen years ago. The lifting of the Iron Curtain after 1991 made the results of steppe research more easily available to Western scholars and created new cooperative archae
... See moreDavid W. Anthony • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
The domestication of the horse ushered in a third age of globalization, the Equestrian Age, which I date from 3000 BCE to 1000 BCE. This period is typically labeled the Copper and Bronze ages, though I prefer to emphasize the role of the horse over that of the minerals. With the domesticated horse, rapid, long-distance overland transport and commun
... See more