The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
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The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
As a contiguous land area that has been home to most of humanity, Eurasia has long enjoyed the benefits of scale, long-distance trade, and the innovation and diffusion of technologies. For at least five thousand years, the horse has played a key, even decisive, role in Eurasia’s development, offering unequalled transport services, horse power for
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
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
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
Eurasia’s long east-west axis facilitated the dissemination of technologies within ecological zones.6 Wheat, which emerged originally in the Fertile Crescent (in today’s Turkey, Iraq, and eastern Mediterranean), diffused west into Europe and east into Asia. Horse domestication, which emerged first in the Pontic-Caspian region (spanning the Black
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
Perhaps the first major horse-based society in Eurasia was the Yamnaya people, hypothesized to have emerged as an admixture of hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. Their territory was the northern Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe).