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

The korios raiders wore a belt and little else (like the warrior figures in some later Germanic and Celtic art, e.g., the Anglo–Saxon Finglesham belt buckle).

Persistent raiding and warfare would have made fixed settlements a strategic liability. Raids by Slavic tribes caused the abandonment of all the Greek-Byzantine cities in this same region over the course of less than a hundred years in the sixth century CE. Crop failures exacerbated by warfare would have encouraged a shift to a more mobile economy.

Italian and French have distinct, unrelated words for 23% of the terms in the two-hundred-word list, and Spanish and Portuguese show a difference of 15%. As a general rule, if more than 10% of the core vocabulary is different between two dialects, they are either mutually unintelligible or approaching that state, that is, they are distinct language

For example, the Greek god Ouranos and the Indic deity Varuna had strikingly similar mythological attributes, and their names sound somewhat alike. Could Ouranos and Varuna be reflexes of the name of some earlier Proto-Indo-European god? Possibly—but the two names cannot be derived from a common parent by the rules of sound change known to have ope

More cattle and sheep could be owned and controlled by riders than by pedestrian herders, which permitted a greater accumulation of animal wealth. Larger herds, of course, required larger pastures, and the desire for larger pastures would have caused a general renegotiation of tribal frontiers, a series of boundary conflicts. Victory in tribal warf

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

Proto–Indo–European contained a vocabulary related to gift giving and gift taking that is interpreted as referring to potlatch–like feasts meant to build prestige and display wealth. The public performance of praise poetry, animal sacrifices, and the distribution of meat and mead were central elements of the show. Calvert Watkins found a special ki

This book argues that it is now possible to solve the central puzzle surrounding Proto-Indo-European, namely, who spoke it, where was it spoken, and when.

idealized Indo-European social world of the linguists. We might not be able to retrieve the names or the personal accomplishments of the Yamnaya chiefs who migrated into the Danube valley around 3000 BCE, but, with the help of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language and mythology, we can say something about their values, religious beliefs, initi