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shirlee2024's review
3.0
I love historical linguistics and thought I liked archeology a lot too, but I did get a bit tired of reading about pots and cemeteries. Still, the book is quite interesting and fairly readable for a scholarly work.
kathrun006's review
This book is far more acedemic than I am interested in. It is too advanced for my understanding. It is for linguists and I am not a languist nor am I interested in going as in depth as this book goes.
gwenhwyfar's review
5.0
I finally finished listening to the audiobook of this! Very rewarding read, I learned a lot and will continue to casually research this topic. I picked this up on the basis of what's covered in part 1 (the linguistic evidence of the Proto-Indo-European language) but getting into the archaeological evidence in parts 2 and 3, while admittedly dry at times, was also quite fascinating. Read this on recommendation of the History of English podcast.
kurtadb's review
The first part of this book -- connecting historical linguistics and cultural anthropology -- was stupendously awesome. But then all of the linguistics gets stripped away and it's basically just anthro. Which isn't my cup of tea. So I put it down, but in a good way, I think.
Throughout, the writing is exceptionally clear and good at breaking down pretty involved concepts without dumbing them down.
Throughout, the writing is exceptionally clear and good at breaking down pretty involved concepts without dumbing them down.
americanroyal's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
2.0
author tended to go off on tangents, was informative but would recommend the physical copy (I ended up listening to it on 1.5x and it still took me a week)
prahlad's review
4.0
This book uses archaeological evidence to build a case for the existence of a Proto-Indo-European language, the precursor to all Indo-European languages that exist today. This family of languages includes English, Persian, Hindi and many many others. It is spoken by close to 50% of the planet, and that means that we should pay attention to this book. Indeed, modern methods such as Ancient DNA (which was in its infancy at the time this book was written) have only confirmed the hypothesis described in this book.
The book begins around 6200BCE when farming spread from Greece into the Balkans. Horses were domesticated around 4500BCE, and the wheel was invented around 3500BCE. This led to the flourishing of the Yamnaya people of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (the steppe from the Black Sea to the north of the Caspian Sea). They took up wagons and led a very successful nomadic life of herding, fishing and foraging. These were putative speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and it is this culture that the book seeks to describe in detail. The book ends with the Andronovo Culture, and the arrival of Indo-European speakers in modern Pakistan.
I personally learned a lot from this book. Before reading it, I only had a vague notion of the Kurgan hypothesis, but no clear idea about how these cultures spread across all of Eurasia. This book has helped me understand this a lot better, and I strongly recommend it for that reason.
That said, it is not for the faint hearted. It is dense, and there is far too much detail at times about pots and graves. It was a bit overwhelming for me, so I skipped past these bits without so much as a backward glance.
A good follow-up to this book, in my opinion, is David Reich's "Who We Are and How We Got Here". It uses Ancient DNA to update and refine the arguments given by David Anthony.
The book begins around 6200BCE when farming spread from Greece into the Balkans. Horses were domesticated around 4500BCE, and the wheel was invented around 3500BCE. This led to the flourishing of the Yamnaya people of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (the steppe from the Black Sea to the north of the Caspian Sea). They took up wagons and led a very successful nomadic life of herding, fishing and foraging. These were putative speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and it is this culture that the book seeks to describe in detail. The book ends with the Andronovo Culture, and the arrival of Indo-European speakers in modern Pakistan.
I personally learned a lot from this book. Before reading it, I only had a vague notion of the Kurgan hypothesis, but no clear idea about how these cultures spread across all of Eurasia. This book has helped me understand this a lot better, and I strongly recommend it for that reason.
That said, it is not for the faint hearted. It is dense, and there is far too much detail at times about pots and graves. It was a bit overwhelming for me, so I skipped past these bits without so much as a backward glance.
A good follow-up to this book, in my opinion, is David Reich's "Who We Are and How We Got Here". It uses Ancient DNA to update and refine the arguments given by David Anthony.