Second paragraph of third chapter:

Hrozný had just broken the code of the first Indo-European language ever to be written down: Hittite. Though he didn’t know it at the time, the document that had given him the key was the last will and testament of an early Hittite king, Hattushili I, who had ruled in north-central Anatolia in the seventeenth century BCE. Hattushili was a master of spin, especially when it came to himself: ‘his frame is new, his breast is new, his penis is new, his head is of tin, his teeth are those of a lion, his eyes are those of an eagle, and he sees like an eagle’. But he was also an accomplished warrior who had laid the foundations of one of the great empires of the preclassical world. As he lay dying he dictated his plan for his succession, but in the ancient equivalent of the microphone being left on after the interview has concluded, an over-enthusiastic scribe kept scribbling and captured his last words.’ As death rushed up to meet him, Hattushili the Lion was seized by terror: “Wash my corpse well! Hold me to your bosom! Keep me from the earth! Three thousand years after its ancestor was first spoken on the shores of the Black Sea, the first Indo-European cry to reach us is heartrending in its humanity.

I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics, especially the evolution of languages over the millennia, and a friend very rightly recommended this book to me for Christmas. It looks at the history of the Indo-European languages, cross-referencing the evidence from the languages themselves with the latest archaeological findings and, crucially, DNA evidence about the people who lived and died in various places and times.

I just love the concept of Proto-Indo-European, from which six of the top seven languages in the world are descended (not Chinese, obviously, but Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali and Russian), spoken 5,000 years ago, and some of whose words are eerily similar to ours and some startlingly different.

Spinney goes with the standard theory which has been around for decades, that the speakers of PIE were the Yamnaya culture, a subset of the Kurgan culture, north of the Black Sea, and named after their burial practice of funeral pits (яма, yama) with tumuli on top (курган, kurgan). The latest DNA research strongly supports this, though she gives time to other explanations as well (notably the Anatolian and ‘Out Of India’ theories), and gives personal glimpses of Gimbutas and Renfrew in their debates, also citing David Anthony whose book I enjoyed a few years back.

The movements of population and language were initially driven by climate change as Eurasia recovered from the Ice Age, and then by technology as the horse was domesticated, the wheel was developed and agriculture began to be adopted. (NB that in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain is the bad guy and the farmer, Abel is the good guy and the herder.)

She follows up with individual chapters, each prefaced by a helpful map, on the extinct Anatolian and Tocharian languages, on the western Celtic/Germanic/Italic branch, on the eastern Indo-Iranian languages, on the northern Baltic and Slavic groups, and on the isolated Albanian, Armenian and Greek, the last of which has the longest continuous literary tradition. I love little snippets like the extinct Venetic language, known from a few hundred inscriptions, most of which are dedications to Reitia, the goddess of writing.

There’s interesting stuff in the DNA too. Apparently when the Beaker People arrived in Britain in 2450 BC, the result was that they took over 90% of the British gene pool and 100% of British Y-chromosomes, and the same when they reached Ireland 200 years later. Did they speak Celtic? It’s a little too early from the linguistic change point of view, but otherwise it’s not clear how Celtic language came to Ireland. I actually bought J.P. Mallory’s book to find out more.

This is a great book, filled with history, science and literature. Spinney has gone light on the technicalities of linguistics, so as not to deter the faint-hearted, though I would have been happy with more detailed reconstructions; still, these are easy enough to find. Lots to learn. You can get Proto here.

This was the last book that I finished in 2025, so it’s good to end on a high note. Thanks to Aoife White for the recommendation.