Indo-European origins and prehistory
In 1786 Sir William Jones told the Asiatic Society in Calcutta that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin shared so much in their roots and grammar that they must have come from a common source, one that perhaps no longer existed. He was right. The languages of nearly all of Europe, of Iran, and of northern India descend from a single ancestor, spoken by a people who left no writing and no name for themselves. Where they lived, when they moved, and what they carried with them are questions scholars have argued over for two centuries.
Three kinds of evidence bear on the answer. Linguists reconstruct the lost language from its descendants. Archaeologists search the ground for the culture that fits the words. And in the last decade geneticists, reading DNA from ancient bones, have shown that a large movement of people out of the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas reshaped Europe in the third millennium BC. The three lines now largely converge on the steppe, though not without dissent, and the dissent is worth reading.
This is the first shelf of the library described in Why Build a Library. The books are grouped by the question each one answers.
The Shape of the Problem
In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth, J. P. Mallory
If a reader buys one book on this subject, it should be this one. Mallory works through the linguistic, archaeological, and mythological evidence in turn, weighs the candidate homelands, and makes the case for the steppe with unusual fairness to the alternatives. It was written before the genetic evidence arrived, and that evidence has largely borne out where it pointed.
The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, Colin McEvedy
A slim atlas that maps the ancient world at intervals, from prehistory to the late Roman Empire. Its prehistoric maps predate ancient DNA and should be read as the older consensus, but for fixing where Hittites, Mycenaeans, and Scythians stood in relation to one another, nothing so inexpensive does the job so well.
What the Ground Shows
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony
The fullest archaeological argument for the steppe homeland. Anthony traces the domestication of the horse, the coming of wheeled wagons, and the rise of the herding Yamnaya culture, and he argues that the language spread through the institutions that bound outsiders to its speakers: patronage, oath, feasting, and the obligations of host and guest. It is the book on which the title of this shelf most directly rests.
Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Colin Renfrew
The strongest rival case. Renfrew argued that Indo-European spread not with herders from the steppe but with the first farmers out of Anatolia, thousands of years earlier, carried slowly across Europe by the advance of agriculture. The genetic evidence has since told against him for most of Europe, but the book shaped a generation of debate, and no one can judge the steppe hypothesis without knowing its best opponent.
The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics, Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin W. Lewis
A defense of the traditional methods of historical linguistics against a widely publicized 2012 computational study that revived the Anatolian homeland. It is as much a book about how evidence ought to be weighed as about where the homeland lay, and it shows why reconstructing a language takes more than running its words through software.
What the Bones Show
Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich
The ancient-DNA revolution told from inside the laboratory that led much of it. Reich shows that every living European population is a mixture of three ancient sources: the hunter-gatherers who were there first, the farmers who arrived from Anatolia, and the herders who came off the steppe. It is the clearest account of how the migration moved from argument to evidence.
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, Nicholas Wade
A science journalist’s survey of human origins as genetics understood them in 2006, from the first modern humans to the rise of settled life. It was written just before ancient genomes could be read, which is both its limitation and its use: set beside Reich, it shows how far the picture changed once the dead could be sequenced.
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
An argument that human evolution did not stop in the Stone Age but quickened once agriculture changed how people lived. Its explanation for the Indo-European expansion, that the steppe herders spread because they could digest milk as adults, has not survived later ancient DNA, which found the trait rare among them. It belongs on the shelf as a bold thesis put to the test.
What the Language Preserves
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams
The standard guide to what the reconstructed language reveals about the people who spoke it. Organized by subject, it recovers their words for kin, livestock, house and field, law, and the gods, and from vocabulary alone it builds a picture of a vanished world. It is demanding in places but never written only for specialists.
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, eds.
The reference companion to the Oxford Introduction, arranged alphabetically, with entries on reconstructed words and on the archaeological cultures proposed as their speakers. It is a book to consult rather than read through, and the first place to turn once a reader’s questions become specific.
How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, Calvert Watkins
Watkins shows that the Indo-Europeans handed down not only words but fixed poetic formulas, and that one of them, the hero who slays the serpent, can be followed from Vedic hymn to Greek myth to Hittite ritual. It is the most rigorous book on this shelf and asks a reader to follow citations in several ancient languages. The reward is proof that a poem can outlast every memory of where it began.
Indo-European Poetry and Myth, M. L. West
A vast comparison of the poetry, gods, and cosmology of the Indo-European traditions, from the Vedas and Homer to the Eddas and Irish saga. Where Watkins follows a single formula to its root, West gathers the whole inheritance: the sky father, the shape of the world, the hope of undying fame. It makes the case for a shared poetic tradition by sheer weight of evidence.
What Became of the Gods
Comparative Mythology, Jaan Puhvel
The most readable introduction to Indo-European myth. Puhvel moves tradition by tradition, Indian, Iranian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and others, before drawing out what they hold in common, and he writes as a scholar who knows the texts in their original languages.
Gods of the Ancient Northmen, Georges Dumézil
The Norse gods read through Dumézil’s great idea: that Indo-European peoples ordered the divine world, and their own societies, according to three functions of sovereignty, force, and fertility. Here Odin and Tyr govern, Thor fights, and the Vanir bring abundance. No one has studied these gods since without reckoning with it.
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Marija Gimbutas
Gimbutas first proposed the steppe homeland in the 1950s, and this book describes the world she believed the steppe herders overran: the Neolithic villages of southeastern Europe and the thousands of figurines they left behind. Her catalog of that material remains valuable. Her reading of it, as a peaceful goddess-centered civilization undone by warlike newcomers, is interpretation, and it is best read after the scholarship above.
The Inheritance
The migration was real, and the evidence for it is now difficult to set aside. What came out of the steppe and lasted was a language, and with the language a way of naming the gods, swearing an oath, praising a hero, and ordering a household. Those things passed to peoples who did not descend from the men who first spoke them, and they are the inheritance the rest of this library follows. The next shelf turns to Greece, where that inheritance became a literature Europe still reads.