This book is about pastoral cultures that flourished in the Pontic steppe region during the late Neolithic and Bronze ages. The author reviews the succession of cultural complexes that existed in that area during those periods and their interactions with neighboring cultures and eventually with the great civilizations of the ancient Near East.His account is based on archeological evidence that has been extensively developed by Soviet and Russian archeologists, as well as by the author himself. The author identifies the Pontic steppes as the area where the horse was domesticated, based on his own research into evidence of bit-wear on horse teeth found in the archeological record. He shows how the horse and later the wheel and wagon transformed the patterns of pastoralism that characterized the region in the fourth millenium BCE and how metallurgy became established there. It is fascinating reading for anyone interested in European and Eurasian pre-history, and the author's detailed account is persuasive on these topics.
A principal focus of the book is the theory, which the author endorses, that the Pontic steppe area was the homeland of peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the language that linguists posit as ancestral to most of the languages of Europe, including English, Latin, Greek and Russian, as well as of present-day Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, northern India and elsewhere. These languages are attested in writing and many of them are spoken today.The theory that they are derived from a common parent language, which is not attested in writing, is well established.It is based on correspondences among the sound systems (and, to a lesser extent, the grammars) of the various daughter languages that are too uniform and regular to be attributable to chance.The theory that the PIE homeland lay in the Pontic steppes, however, although shared by many, is more controversial than the author makes it out to be, especially among linguists.
The author claims that the question of the PIE homeland has been resolved conclusively in the past ten years by archeological advances, but the evidence the author adduces for the Pontic steppe region as the PIE homeland is not new: it is based on "linguistic archeology," a method that was first brought to bear on the question in the mid-19th century. This method consists of identifying words in the PIE daughter languages that might be associated with a specific geographic area--trees, plants, animals, physical features, etc.--and that can be traced to a PIE origin (words that show up in more than one PIE sub-group), and then trying to associate those words with a specific geographical range.
Many if not most linguists are uncomfortable with this method.Among other objections, words can change their meaning over time and it isn't necessarily clear that the meaning of an original PIE word was the same as the meaning of cognate words in the daughter languages.All we can be reasonably sure of is that at some period a word (or an element of a word)--one that is not preserved in any written form, however--must been ancestral to words in languages spoken at a substantially later date, for which we have a written record.The author of this book relies in particular on reconstructions of the PIE words for "salmon" and "beech," but these are old arguments that have been drawn into question, and there is no consensus.Another difficulty is that PIE could have had an extensive vocabulary that simply didn't survive into two or more of the daughter languages and the words that did survive could represent only a very limited sample.(A recent book that discusses these questions authoritatively is Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics).)
In short, Indo-European linguists are generally wary of attempts to tie the PIE-speakers to a particular region by the method of linguistic archeology or any other method. Moreover, other scholars have proposed different regions for the PIE homeland--currently in serious competition with the Pontic steppes are Anatolia, the south Caucasus and other locations further east.
There are also difficulties with the author's speculative suggestions about how the Indo-European languages spread from their assumed homeland in the Pontic steppes to the regions where they are found in historical times. He suggests that IE languages spread into Europe up the valleys of the Danube and other rivers flowing into the Black Sea by a process that he describes as "franchising": a group of IE-speakers would establish a stronghold in an area where speakers of other languages were settled and would offer the settled inhabitants protection and rights to participate in the IE-speaking community, and this would lead to the IE language becoming the dominant and prestigious language in the area and co-opting speakers of other languages. This seems plausible but entirely speculative; the author doesn't seem to offer concrete evidence that might support this model.
He further suggests that IE-speakers might have migrated into Anatolia by boat, a suggestion also unsupported (and probably unverifiable) by archeological evidence and one that strains the limits of plausibility--but if you are trying to pin down the PIE homeland somewhere other than Anatolia, it is essential to get IE languages into Anatolia by some means or other, since we have extensive written evidence that they were widely spoken there by the first half of the second millenium BCE, when the the Hittite empire was at its zenith.(Moving the PIE homeland either to Anatolia itself or further east would allow more plausible theories about how this occurred, but there's no lingusitic evidence for any of these alternatives, either.)
And there is apparently a lively (and politically charged) debate about how IE languages wound up in India and about whether there is any evidence in the archeological record for their assumed movement into the subcontinent (although IE-speakers obviously were there in ancient times, probably by no later than around 1500 BCE; how they got there is a different story).(This question is exhaustively but inconclusively aired in The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate.)
In the end, the archeological record can tell us a lot about a material culture in a specific region at a particular moment in time, but, in the absence of writing, doesn't tell us anything about the languages spoken by human beings who participated in the material culture. A particular style of pottery doesn't tell us anything about the language spoken by the people who used it.How languages become dominant in an area and spread to other areas are topics that are not well understood, and it is probably true that each case has to be considered on its own facts.This would mean that much information about prehistoric languages, their distribution and diffusion is simply irrecoverable.
In fairness, it should be noted that the author is aware of many of the difficulties with his linguistic theories and is at pains to address those difficulties.And I suspect he would be the last person to insist that his is the final word on the subject.
In summary, this is a very thought-provoking book. Anyone passionately interested in PIE (and who isn't?) will want to read it. But it should be read critically.
Update 1/12/2009:There has been a very interesting discussion by Don Ringe, a prominent Indo-European linguist, of some linguistic issues that are relevant to this book on the Language Log website.At the risk of putting words in his mouth, Dr. Ringe gives David Anthony's views a cautious and tentative acceptance.If you read this book and find it as interesting as I did, you should read the Language Log discussion, which goes into greater depth on the linguistic issues relating to the reconstructed Indo-European horse/wheel/wagon terminology.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1013
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Hardcover)
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