Old Indic, the language of the Rig Veda, was recorded in inscriptions not long after 1500 BCE but in a puzzling place. Most Vedic specialists agree that the 1,028 hymns of the Rig Veda were compiled into what became the sacred form in the Punjab, in northwestern India and Pakistan, probably between about 1500 and 1300 BCE. But the deities, moral co

Feast-hosting behavior is the most common and consistently used avenue to prestige and power in tribal societies.

The Maikop chieftan was buried wearing Mesopotamian symbols of power—the lion paired with the bull—although he probably never saw a lion. Lion bones are not found in the North Caucasus. His tunic had sixty-eight golden lions and nineteen golden bulls applied to its surface. Lion and bull figures were prominent in the iconography of Uruk Mesopotamia

Forager languages were more apt to decline in the face of agricultural immigration. Farmers had a higher birth rate; their settlements were larger, and were occupied permanently. They produced food surpluses that were easier to store over the winter.

THE HORSE AND THE WHEEL Innovations in transportation technology are among the most powerful causes of change in human social and political life. The introduction of the private automobile created suburbs, malls, and superhighways; transformed heavy industry; generated a vast market for oil; polluted the atmosphere; scattered families across the ma

A chariot is a two-wheeled vehicle with spoked wheels and a standing driver, pulled by bitted horses, and usually driven at a gallop. A two-wheeler with solid wheels or a seated driver is a cart, not a chariot. Carts, like wagons, were work vehicles. Chariots were the first wheeled vehicles designed for speed, an innovation that changed land transp

The Mitanni were famous as charioteers, and, in the oldest surviving horse-training manual in the world, a Mitanni horse trainer named Kikkuli (a Hurrian name) used many Old Indic terms for technical details, including horse colors and numbers of laps.

Technological styles are often better indicators of ethnic origin than decorative styles.

Many experts have suggested that horses were not ridden in warfare until after about 1500–1000 BCE, but they failed to differentiate between mounted raiding, which probably is very old, and cavalry, which was invented in the Iron Age after about 1000 BCE.38 Eneolithic tribal herders probably rode horses in inter-clan raids before 4000 BCE, but they