Feeding My History Bug

MY latest great find in a charity shop is David Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, And Language - How Bronze-Age Riders From The Eurasian Steppes Shaped The Modern World.

In it he investigates how roughly half of the Earth came to speak Indo-European (formerly called Aryan) languages.

Or, rather, he investigates the origins of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, ie the language that eventually gave birth to German, Latin, Hindi, etc.

If that sounds somewhat dense or highbrow, you are not wrong 

There is no doubt, in my view, that Anthony, an anthropology professor, was writing for an academic audience, as the following sentence, literally taken at random, suggests.

During Tripolye B2, around 4000-3700 BCE, there was a significant migration out of the Prut-Seret forest-steppe uplands, the most densely settled part of the Tripolye B1 landscape, eastward into the South Bug and Dneiper Valleys.

There are many sentences that are more jargon-filled, and could seem even more opaque, but the book, published by Princeton University Press in 2007, won a 2010 award from the Society for American Archaeology.

And you really do not need to be an archaeologist - I certainly am not - to get a lot of enjoyment from it, and to learn a lot, even if you already know a fair bit more about ancient history than the average person in the street.

How many of the following points about chariots, all taken from a singe section of the book, do you know?

1. War chariots were probably developed and first used in the southern Urals, rather, than, Mesopotamia, Egypt or China.

2. Javelins thrown by charioteers had a significantly greater range than javelins thrown from horseback.

3. Chariot drivers often steered with the reins looped round their hips, to leave hands free for using bows.

4. Some war chariots had single-man crews.

5. Chariots were "incredibly difficult to build, a marvel of carpentry and bent-wood joinery," requiring "a specially trained team of fast, strong horses," and for men to learn to successfully use them took "a lot of time and resources, as well as courage and balance."

The book has given me much to think about, especially in connection with my biblical wargaming rules.

A label on the back shows it cost £15.95, when sold by Blackwell. I found it in a charity shop (I cannot recall where, but it might have been Oxfam in East London's Bethnal Green Road), marked down from a secondhand price of £10 to £5 - what a bargain!

Inevitably in a book this big (500+ pages) and complex, I found something to disagree with, or, perhaps, something I am unable to get my head around.

In this case it concerns the claim that language generally follows a rule known as elite dominance, which argues that people tend, over time, to adopt the language spoken by their rulers, even if the latter are in a small minority.

But examples of the opposite happening spring readily to mind, eg the Franks, a Germanic tribe, after whom Gaul was renamed France, ended up speaking French, the Romance language of the majority of its inhabitants.

Similarly, the Normans had elite dominance in England for centuries, but they gradually abandoned their French tongue for English, the Germanic language of the majority of the land's inhabitants.

Ah well, perhaps I am not meant to understand everything, but at least the book has supplied me with plenty of food for thought.