In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth

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While superseded to some degree by David W. Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel and Language, J.P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans is fine reading for those interested in the people who spoke the ancestor of most tongues of Europe and western Asia. While scholars have carefully reconstructed a proto-language, the identity of its speakers and their geographical origin remain a mystery, and J.P. Mallory shows what is currently thought in the field

Mallory begins by tracing the historical development of European comparative linguistics, and then examines the various branches of the Indo-European language family first in Asia, then in Europe. However, the most useful portion of the book begins when Mallory attempts to reconstruct as well as one can the actual cultural and social traits of the Indo-Europeans based on the proto-language they spoke. He shows how horses must have been very important within such a culture, asserts that the people must have lived within certain geographical boundaries based on their common vocabulary, and even postulates Proto-Indo-European religious rituals. Unlike Watkins's How to Kill a Dragon or M.L. West's Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Mallory does not give much space to concepts of comparative Indo-European poetics.

The last third of Mallory's work is concerned with the Indo-European homeland problem, the eternal conundrum for those who would apply comparative linguistics to actual archaeology. Mallory favours the Russian steppes or Ukraine, as do most scholars, and argues quite well against the usual alternative theory of an Anatolian origin. I felt, however, that his placement of the Indo-Europeans could have been more substantial than it was if he had worked in more evidence of contact with speakers of the Uralic languages.

A downside of the book is that, while Mallory's entire topic is based on linguistic reconstruction, there is no passion for linguistics in this book. I was unhappy to see, for example, that while Mallory is well aware of laryngeal discoveries, he has chosen to give the older reconstructions of PIE roots in the interest of pronouncability. I don't think the benefits outweight the appearance of datedness and quaintness.

While introductions to comparative Indo-European linguistics abound, there are few volumes like In Search of the Indo-Europeans which apply reconstruction to substantial archeological exploration. Mallory's work should certainly be read by anyone interested in larger applications of Indo-European philology. I should note that this book should not be approached by the layman unfamiliar with comparative linguistics, and that a work like Lehmann's Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics is a necessary perquisite

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