It was a conversation under a pagoda on the campus of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in June 2022, that marked the birth of this project, and for that I have to thank language scientist Annika Tjuka. Annika was enrolled in the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School, as was I, and though we weren’t talking about the Indo-European languages specifically, the passion she showed for her subject – in that thoroughly multidisciplinary environment – caused something to crystallise in my mind. So my first thanks go to Annika and to the Santa Fe Institute, which expanded all our minds that summer.
Many people gave generously of their time and knowledge in the making of this book. Most are named in the text, but not all, so I’d like to express my gratitude to others who conveyed their insight, erudition or practical advice when it was needed: Bruno Batllou and Pascale Landi of the Musée de la Romanité in Nîmes; Thomas Bak of the University of Edinburgh; Bruno Barbier, who shared a curious tale about a 2CV; tour guide Branimir Belchev from Varna; Zina Garces, a teacher of Russian literature; Annie Monneraie Goarin, a former cultural attaché in Armenia; archaeologists Bisserka Gaydarska and John Chapman of the University of Durham; molecular anthropologist Wolfgang Haak of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; sociolinguist Raymond Hickey of the University of Duisburg and Essen; former language teacher Laura M. Keith; retired archaeologist Raymond Lanfranchi and his wife Catherine, a retired teacher; Radosław Liwoch of the Kraków Archaeological Museum; linguist Simon Poulsen of the University of Copenhagen; Corinna Salomon of the University of Vienna, an expert on runes; archaeologist Mykhailo Videiko of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University; linguist Thomas Wier of the Free University of Tbilisi; and Mohammad Yahaghi, who teaches Persian literature in Mashhad, Iran. If the book contains any errors, responsibility for them is, of course, exclusively mine.
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation provided me with a grant that made it possible for me to visit Armenia, where I was fortunate enough to have Arpine Avetisyan as my guide. Ruben Badalyan showed me the Bronze Age collection at the State History Museum in Yerevan; Stéphane Deschamps took time out from his excavations at Erebuni to share his thinking on the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu; and Nazénie Garibian and Israël Lévi of the Matenadaran in Yerevan cut through some red tape to provide me with a document I needed.
Bogdan Draganski and Zornitsa Karamihova helped me organise my travels in Bulgaria, and Vladimir Slavchev answered my many questions while I was there, never baulking even when I dragged him down a rabbit hole the shape of a cow’s thigh bone. Volker Heyd, Marianna Bálint and János Dani took a leap of faith when they let me observe their excavations in the Hortobágy National Park in June 2023. And when I was crippled by a migraine in the middle of the puszta, they could not have been kinder. My apologies go to them and to their team’s chief excavator Bianca Preda-Bălănică for the liability that I temporarily became. At Boğazkale in Türkiye I had an excellent guide in Atila Ertugrul, who had assisted in the excavation of Hattusha since he was a child, and seen a few eminent archaeologists come and go. It was all I could do to keep up with him, as he leapt through those vertiginous ruins like a mountain goat.
I wasn’t sure, at the beginning of this project, if I would go to Russia. Plenty of organisations were boycotting it at the time, and I attended several conferences from which Russian academics had been excluded. I understand the reasons for this, and even agree with them. I thought about it deeply before deciding that to write a book about Proto-Indo-European, I had to visit the lands where it was spoken and meet one of the leading experts on its speakers. The appalling fact of the war only made that more obvious: what happened there in the Bronze Age is relevant to what is happening there now.
Needless to say it was not easy for a foreigner to travel in Russia in the summer of 2023, and without the indomitable Natalia Shishlina it would not have been possible. I would like to thank her and her sister Lilia, along with Vera Kuznetsova and her husband Andrey, Idris Idrisov, the rest of Natalia’s team in Remontnoye and the mayor of that village, Anatoly Petrovitch Pustovetov, for making my trip so productive and, frankly, unforgettable. As Vera knows, I discovered my own shibboleth in the southern Russian steppe. Ekaterina Boldyreva and Maria Alexandrenkova kindly showed me around the State History Museum in Moscow. Linguist Alexei Kassian of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow went out of his way to help, though practicalities got in the way of our meeting.
Guus Kroonen of Leiden University, one of the historical linguists and Indo-European experts who was quickest to embrace the ancient DNA revolution, patiently explained things to me on a number of occasions. Jay Jasanoff of Harvard University commented on sections of the book and dissected an extract from George Orwell’s 1984, even though I spelled his name wrong (I haven’t now). Birgit Olsen of the University of Copenhagen commented helpfully on another section, and included me in a memorable dinner she organised in Yerevan. David Anthony and Jim Mallory showed great intellectual generosity, given that they haven’t finished writing on this topic themselves. Alexey Nikitin answered my many questions in a faultlessly even-handed manner at a time of great personal distress, while the Russian regime waged war on the land of his birth.
Thanks go finally to my friends Sophie and Franck Fatalot, who offered me a place to write when my home was a building site, and to the village of Saint-Hippolyte-de-Caton, which offered me another. Thanks to my friends Kate and Ed Douglas for their advice and encouragement, especially to Kate who read a first draft and, with her expert storyteller’s eye, highlighted some retrospectively obvious room for improvement. Thanks to my agent, Will Francis, for being enthused by the idea from the start, though we hadn’t previously worked together, and to my excellent editors – especially Eva Hodgkin at William Collins – who helped turn it into a book, improving it again in the process. Last but by no means least, bottomless thanks to the majordomo, as the poets style him: my very own lionheart, Richard Frackowiak.