If they had the largest, strongest, and most manageable horses, and they had more than anyone else, steppe societies could have grown rich by trading horses. In the sixteenth century the Bukhara khanate in Central Asia, drawing on horse–breeding grounds in the Ferghana valley, exported one hundred thousand horses annually just to one group of

From this time forward the people of the Eurasian steppes remained directly connected with the civilizations of Central Asia, South Asia, and Iran, and, through intermediaries, with China. The arid lands that occupied the center of the Eurasian continent began to play a role in transcontinental economies and politics.

between about 1900 and 1800 BCE, for the first time in history a chain of broadly similar cultures extended from the edges of China to the frontiers of Europe. Innovations and raw materials began to move across the continent. The steppe world was not just a conduit, it also became an innovating center, particularly in bronze metallurgy and chariot

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

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

Balkan smiths, about 4800–4600 BCE, learned to fashion molds that withstood the heat of molten copper, and began to make cast copper tools and weapons, a complicated process requiring a temperature of 1,083°C to liquefy copper metal. Molten copper must be stirred, skimmed, and poured correctly or it cools into a brittle object full of

Warfare, a powerful stimulus to social and political change, also shaped the Sintashta culture, for a heightened threat of conflict dissolves the old social order and creates new opportunities for the acquisition of power. Nicola DiCosmo has recently argued that complex political structures arose among steppe nomads in the Iron Age largely because

If we can combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of archaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usual limitations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge of these particular ancestors.

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