david anthony the horse the wheel and language

To unravel the mystery of Indo-European, he taught himself Russian to closely examine archaeological reports in obscure Soviet-era journals mostly ignored in the West. But he has pieced together a comprehensive and remarkably vivid picture of the life and times of Bronze-Age riders who live on in the vocabulary of nearly half the world. Yet Anthony is also not a linguist or zoologist his excavations have been mainly at North American prehistoric sites, and he claims not to know how to even ride a horse. Such chutzpah is enough to get attention in today’s academic world. His recent book, The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, posits a location for that fabled Indo-European homeland, based on extensive research in linguistics, zoology, and old-world archaeology. Now Anthony is putting himself in the scholarly crosshairs. The quest has led him to some strange places, from the inside of horses’ mouths to six vodka-drenched banquets hosted by hospitable Kazakhs in a single day.

“That paper,” he recalls, “became the rest of my life.” But to convince potential graduate schools he had broad interests, he wrote a paper on Indo-European origins. The closest he got to the Old World was studying Spanish views of Inca history in Seville’s archives. Young David dreamed about the new-world Inca and Maya, cared little for livestock, and grew up unaware of the fierce arguments about who lived on the vast Eurasian steppes five millennia ago. His father-an intelligence officer during and after World War II-taught the non-Indo-European tongue of Japanese at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. With his grizzled beard and affable manner, the fifty-nine-year-old Anthony is an unlikely candidate to wade into such dangerous territory. Anthony compares it to the Lost Dutchman’s mine-“discovered almost everywhere but confirmed nowhere.” So the search for an Indo-European homeland is now the third rail of archaeology and linguistics. That contentious debate, says Anthony, has been “alternately dryly academic, comically absurd, and brutally political.” To advance their own goals, Nazi racists, American skinheads, Russian nationalists, and Hindu fundamentalists have all latched on to the idea of light-skinned and chariot-driving Aryans as bold purveyors of an early Indo-European culture, which came to dominate Eurasia. Their bitter disputes about who used proto-Indo-European, where they lived, and their impact on the budding civilizations of Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Indus River Valley are legion. Generations of linguists have labored to reconstruct the mother from which sprang dozens of languages spoken from Wales to China. The origin of Indo-European tongues has roiled scholarship since a British judge in eighteenth-century Calcutta noticed that Sanskrit and English were related.

David anthony the horse the wheel and language