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

Between 1950 and 1952 Swadesh published a hundred-word and a two-hundred-word basic core vocabulary, a standardized list of resistant terms. All languages, he suggested, tend to retain their own words for certain kinds of meanings, including body parts (blood, foot); lower numerals (one, two, three); some kinship terms (mother, father); basic needs

Five factors probably were important in enhancing their status: 1. Pontic–Caspian steppe societies were more familiar with horse breeding and riding than anyone outside the steppes. They had many more horses than anywhere else, and measurements show that their steppe horses were larger than the native marsh and mountain ponies of central and wester

The first people to think seriously about the benefits of keeping, feeding, and raising tame horses must have been familiar with wild horses. They must have lived in a place where humans spent a lot of time hunting wild horses and learning their behavior. The part of the world where this was possible contracted significantly about ten thousand to f

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

In prayers recited by the later Hittites, the sun god of heaven, Sius (cognate with Greek Zeus), was described as rising from the sea. This has always been taken as a fossilized ritual phrase retained from some earlier pre-Hittite homeland located west of a large sea.61 The graves of Suvorovo were located west of the Black Sea. Did the Suvorovo peo

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.

Surprisingly few children were buried at Mariupol (11 of 124 individuals), suggesting that a selection was made—not all children who died were buried here. But one was among the richest of all the graves: he or she (sex is indeterminate in immature skeletons) wore forty-one boar’s-tusk plaques, as well as a cap armored with eleven whole boar’s tusk

The meaning of wheel is given additional support by the fact that it has an Indo-European etymology, like the root for *k’tom. It was a word created from another Indo-European root. That root was *kwel-, a verb that meant “to turn.” So *kwékwlos is not just a random string of phonemes reconstructed from the cognates for wheel; it meant “the thing t

Wagons and horseback riding made possible a new, more mobile form of pastoralism. With a wagon full of tents and supplies, herders could take their herds out of the river valleys and live for weeks or months out in the open steppes between the major rivers—the great majority of the Eurasian steppes. Land that had been open and wild became pasture t

Participation in long-distance trade, gift exchange, and a new set of cults requiring public sacrifices and feasting became the foundation for a new kind of social power. Stockbreeding is by nature a volatile economy. Herders who lose animals always borrow from those who still have them. The social obligations associated with these loans are instit