Parnassus the Horse, the Wheel and Language

If you’d like to tackle a book that will keep your head spinning, The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David Anthony is the one to go for.

Initially I thought it would be a nice, easy kind of read with lots of pleasant illustrations of dug up things; but in fact it is a large, complex tome full of facts and figures that describe various completely mind-boggling studies by a host of different archeologists in search of dates for the advent of the Wheel, the domestication of the Horse, the first use of the Cart, and so on.

Maybe you’re old enough to remember the famous Highlander movies series where Connor Macleod (aka Christopher Lambert) tries to keep his head while reluctantly removing the heads of others ? It came complete with a Freddy Mercury theme song called Princes of the Universe and a tag line of There can be only one.

In first and classic screenplay, Connor’s scary adversary is known as “The Kurgan” (played by one Clancy Brown), a kind of conanesque bronze age swordsman with a very bad attitude toward most things, including Connor himself.

Enter Anthony’s book, where you’ll discover that “The Kurgan” is a real, academically concocted name for the Aryan uber-culture, the original speakers of indo-European. Between these mythical speakers and modern times lies a bewildering host of other cultures, mainly in and around the Black Sea, that have been rigorously documented and catalogued as part of the effort to stump up the dates of the title.

During the course of your journey you’ll also run across some quite unnerving facts. Stallions can only be definitively identified because they have canine teeth?

That maybe suggests why Diomedes flesh-eating horses, the ones that Herakles was forced to deal with, might actually have come to be?

Also, high-caste female burials give ample evidence of the practice of human sacrifice: perhaps not a comfortable thought in our day and age with its very active Women’s Rights movements. Ever heard of “SCUM”? (Society for the Cutting Up of Men).

Anyway, despite its difficulty (I doubt the book would pass the Flesch test for easy readability – but that seems a positive virtue to me), The Horse, the Wheel and Language, is worth its price. Certainly it’s better than being subjected to a bolt of lightning while binge-watching Highlander – or at least, that’s my opinion for the present.