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The Hungarians’ table looked as if someone had dropped a five-course meal onto it from ceiling height. The floor around it was crunchy with broken glass and smashed crockery, the carpet sticky with sauces and bits of trodden-in food. “You cook?” said one in appalling Polish as Rudi approached. “Yes,” said Rudi, balancing his weight on the balls of

THE INDEPENDENT SILESIAN State of Hindenberg – formerly the Polish cities of Opole and Wrocław (formerly the German cities of Opeln and Breslau – formerly the Prussian towns of… etc, etc) and the areas around them – existed as a kind of Teuton island in a Slavic sea. Poland, having been forced by the EU, UN and NATO to accede to an ethnic Silesian

Rudi hated steak tartare. The customer did all the preparation themselves, and they took up table space while they did it. Poles in particular seemed to regard it as a social occasion. They took forever about it, tasting over and over again and minutely adjusting the seasoning. When he had his own restaurant, steak tartare would not be on the menu.

The other side of understanding language shift is to ask why the identities associated with Indo–European languages were emulated and admired. It cannot have been because of some essential quality or inner potential in Indo–European languages or people. Usually language shift flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. Paramount status

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

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 custo

The eastern (Volga–Ural–North Caucasian steppe) Yamnaya pastoral economy was more mobile than the western one (South Bug–lower Don). This contrast corresponds in an intriguing way to economic and cultural differences between eastern and western Indo–European language branches. For example, impressions of cultivated grain have been found in western

Western Indo-European religious and ritual practices were female-inclusive, and western Yamnaya people shared a border with the female-figurine–making Tripolye culture: eastern Indo-European rituals and gods, however, were more male-centered, and eastern Yamnaya people shared borders with northern and eastern foragers who did not make female figuri

There was a very short book before the last book in the Bible with a verse that felt already in me before I got to it there in Florida, before I even knew what a sea was. Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame, wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.

The Yamnaya horizon meets the expectations for late Proto-Indo-European in many ways: chronologically (the right time), geographically (the right place), materially (wagons, horses, animal sacrifices, tribal pastoralism), and linguistically (bounded by persistent frontiers); and it generated migrations in the expected directions and in the expected