Egyptian rulers after 2000 BCE made their mark here, as did the Greeks and Romans who followed, turning what began as a modest temple into the ancient world’s largest and most impressive complex of religious buildings which, even today, inspires awe.

The first work, begun around 1950 BCE, was followed by five centuries with no known additions. But endless construction, destruction, and renovation over the next millennium and a half has proved challenging to modern-day researchers. Each change at this vast site can illuminate a political, religious, or social aspect of ancient Egypt, a text in stone chronicling the levels of prosperity, nature of beliefs, and the power of central authority. But, until now, the best that scholars could do to visualize the complex as it once existed was to visit the static wooden model of Karnak carved by French archaeologists at their nearby dig house. And conveying the complicated changes to students was even more difficult. “I was completely frustrated with the materials available—I wanted to show all the phases,” says Diane Favro, who teaches architectural history at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Slides and two-dimensional photos left out all the experiential aspects of the place.”

By pulling together a team of computer experts, archaeologists, and architects, Favro helped create a virtual Karnak—an exciting alternative to poring through archaeological reports, tourist guides, and maps to make sense of this fascinating, overwhelming, and confusing site. You can avoid the crowds at what is the most popular attraction in Egypt after the Great Pyramids, have a bird’s-eye view as temples take shape, and follow the path of the annual festival processions that were part of ancient Egyptian life. Digital Karnak offers a fresh way of understanding this vast site.

The task of the UCLA team has been to piece together how Karnak was pieced together. Three-dimensional models, ranging from Stonehenge to Aztec temples, are common now across the web. But quality varies; many are used primarily for entertainment purposes, and there are no accepted standards or guidelines for accuracy. Archaeologists have shied away from such models, since they inevitably involve guesswork.

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It’s a formidable task in one of the whitest states in the nation, and one that is deeply ambivalent about outsiders, suffers from extremes of wealth and poverty and low literacy, and is isolated by the ocean and a long foreign border. Distances pose a challenge. The drive from Portland, where Jorgensen lives, to Madawaska in the far north takes as long as the trip to New York City. The job, which he has had since 2007, is not made easier if you hail from Massachusetts. Maine was long a colony of that state, a fact that native Mainers don’t forget. “I usually say I’m from the part of Maine that is still Massachusetts,” he quips.

But though Jorgensen is “from away” in Maine parlance, he has thrown himself with gusto into exploring and preserving the state’s varied, esoteric, and colorful history. After graduating from Bowdoin College with a degree in art history, he lugged a council-funded exhibit about Maine’s last chicken processing plant— “the photographs were gruesome”—around the state one summer. He eventually landed a job running a local historical society whose properties included the home of Civil War general Joshua Chamberlain, who also served as president of Bowdoin as well as governor. “It was falling apart—you could stick a pencil through the walls,” he says. Riding the wave of interest in the Civil War in the wake of Ken Burns’s series, Jorgensen raised money to stabilize the house and turn it into a popular tourist site before heading to graduate school then joining the council as a program officer a decade ago.

Now, as the overseer of a $2 million annual budget and twelve employees, the lean, energetic forty-four-year-old is focused on a host of innovative programs designed to convey what he calls “the power and pleasure of ideas.” Recently the council organized a daylong symposium on India and Pakistan, which drew fifty teachers from all over the state to learn about an area much in the news. Most hospitals across Maine now have a literature and medicine program that encourages health-care personnel—from receptionists to doctors—to grapple with a host of issues through the lens of literature.

This NEH-funded program, which was the brainchild of Victoria Bonebakker at the council, started in Maine and has spread to twenty-two states, and with the help of a new NEH grant, the program soon will expand to fifteen Veterans Administration hospitals around the country. The council also is spearheading an effort to introduce children’s literature to adults who are barely proficient in reading. That can turn a practical skill into a tool for expanding one’s intellectual horizons, says Jorgensen.

The council also is funding an effort to create civic debate about important issues dear to the hearts of Mainers. A few years ago, it developed and produced a short play about the history of taxation in the state. This year, another history-based play called As Maine Grows will work its way through libraries, meeting halls, and cafes to once again spark debate—this time about development. “This is a good way to involve people on both sides of an issue,” he says. “It breaks people out of their granular communities.” But the tightening purse strings in an economic downturn have put some projects on hold. For example, an effort designed to let parole officers and parolees participate in book groups has been badly crippled by the heavy caseloads of the parole officers, says Jorgensen. But the council’s diversity of funding sources—from individual donors, foundations and the NEH—so far has kept the overall organization on an even keel.

Jorgensen keeps his hand on the tiller, quite literally. He delights in sailing a vintage thirty-foot sloop on Casco Bay, which surrounds Portland, as well as up and down the coast. “It is a great way to get out and see Maine from a different perspective,” he adds. Even then, he keeps a weather eye on history.

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Measuring teeth from dead horses in upstate New York seems an unlikely way to get at the truth behind some of the most controversial questions about the Old World. But David Anthony, a historian and archaeologist at Hartwick College, discovered that by comparing the teeth of modern horses with their Eurasian ancestors, he could determine where and when the ancient ones were ridden. And answering that seemingly arcane question is important if you want to explain why nearly half the world today speaks an Indo-European language.

The origin of Indo-European tongues has roiled scholarship since a British judge in eighteenth-century Calcutta noticed that Sanskrit and English were related. Generations of linguists have labored to reconstruct the mother from which sprang dozens of languages spoken from Wales to China. Their bitter disputes about who used proto-Indo-European, where they lived, and their impact on the budding civilizations of Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Indus River Valley are legion.

That contentious debate, says Anthony, has been “alternately dryly academic, comically absurd, and brutally political.” To advance their own goals, Nazi racists, American skinheads, Russian nationalists, and Hindu fundamentalists have all latched on to the idea of light-skinned and chariot-driving Aryans as bold purveyors of an early Indo-European culture, which came to dominate Eurasia. So the search for an Indo-European homeland is now the third rail of archaeology and linguistics. Anthony compares it to the Lost Dutchman’s mine—“discovered almost everywhere but confirmed nowhere.”

With his grizzled beard and affable manner, the fifty-nine-year-old Anthony is an unlikely candidate to wade into such dangerous territory. His father—an intelligence officer during and after World War II—taught the non-Indo-European tongue of Japanese at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. Young David dreamed about the new-world Inca and Maya, cared little for livestock, and grew up unaware of the fierce arguments about who lived on the vast Eurasian steppes five millennia ago. The closest he got to the Old World was studying Spanish views of Inca history in Seville’s archives. But to convince potential graduate schools he had broad interests, he wrote a paper on Indo-European origins. “That paper,” he recalls, “became the rest of my life.”

The quest has led him to some strange places, from the inside of horses’ mouths to six vodka-drenched banquets hosted by hospitable Kazakhs in a single day. Now Anthony is putting himself in the scholarly crosshairs. His recent book, The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, posits a location for that fabled Indo-European homeland, based on extensive research in linguistics, zoology, and old-world archaeology. Such chutzpah is enough to get attention in today’s academic world. Yet Anthony is also not a linguist or zoologist; his excavations have been mainly at North American prehistoric sites, and he claims not to know how to even ride a horse. But he has pieced together a comprehensive and remarkably vivid picture of the life and times of Bronze-Age riders who live on in the vocabulary of nearly half the world.

To unravel the mystery of Indo-European, he taught himself Russian to closely examine archaeological reports in obscure Soviet-era journals mostly ignored in the West. What he found were not the remains of crude barbarians living on the distant fringes of the civilizations blooming five thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile, Indus, and Tigris and Euphrates. Instead, these peoples of the steppes stretching from Bulgaria to Turkmenistan made quick and efficient use of the newly invented wheel, mined ore to forge metal tools and weapons, and lived in substantial villages and towns. They also participated in a vast network of trade that brought Afghan lapis lazuli to Egypt and Persian Gulf shells to the Central Asian deserts.

But did they ride? Cowboys without steeds can’t cover much territory. Horses would give any population on the grassy stretches of the steppes an enormous advantage in trade, warfare, and plain old pastoral migration. That mobility could be one way to explain the spread of the language which then morphed into a variety of tongues throughout Eurasia. Based on linguistic evidence, Anthony estimates that proto-Indo-European flourished between 4000 BCE and 3000 BCE before dying out by 2500 BCE. Yet clear representations and mentions of horses don’t appear in the Near East until about 2000 BCE. Archaeological evidence until recently has been difficult to obtain, since wild and domesticated horses look alike.

Anthony realized that one creative way to tell the two apart is to look a horse in the mouth. Collaborating with his wife, archaeologist Dorcas Brown, he measured the wear on the teeth of autopsied horses. Then, with a small grant, he bought five unbroken horses and stabled them at the State University of New York at Cobleskill. He and his students fashioned a variety of bits that may have been used five millennia ago, made from hemp rope, horsehair, bone, and leather, rather than the metal favored today. Then the horses had to be broken without using equipment. The trainer put Anthony in an enclosed paddock to show him how to achieve dominance using body motions alone “It was a stunning lesson,” he recalls. After a half hour, the wild horse responded to his movements as it would have to a lead stallion. “Since then, I’ve been up to my elbows inside horses’ mouths at least once a month.”

After training horses to take bits made of leather and rope, likely materials used by the earliest horsemen, David Anthony and Dorcas Brown made casts of the animals’ premolars and compared them with teeth excavated in the Eurasian steppes.
—Courtesy David Anthony

After his students rode each horse for one hundred and fifty hours, they found that even these organic bits like hemp rope wear down teeth, demonstrating that such wear and tear would show up on the molars of ancient domesticated horses as well. Taking advantage of the Iron Curtain’s collapse, Anthony and his wife visited museums across the former Soviet Union, measuring old teeth in dusty collections. He and Dorcas determined that horse teeth from two sites in northern Kazakhstan dating from 3500 BCE to 3000 BCE showed bit wear. Other scholars remain unconvinced, given the small samples. Anthony attributes some of that skepticism to the hothouse world of archaeozoology. “Dory and I are seen as interlopers—neither of us is a trained zoologist—and we have had a hard time getting accepted.”

Anthony contends that his data demonstrate that people on the steppes were using horses during the same time proto-Indo-European was current. Which part of the steppes? The ancient speakers left no written records, but they did leave clues embedded in our own speech—their words relate to our terms for bulls, cows, oxen, lambs, and pigs. They sheared wool, used wheeled vehicles, and had no word for city. And they were not above theft; from Celtic Ireland to the Iranian plateau, the verbs for cattle rustling are related. By examining the range of animal and plant species with proto-Indo-European roots with archaeological data from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, Anthony pinpoints that homeland to the steppes north of the Black Sea and west of the Caucasus region called the Pontic-Caspian steppes. But these were not the marauding barbarians who swept out of the grasslands to terrorize farmers and plunder wealthy cities à la Genghis Khan. Instead, Anthony sees the proto-Indo-Europeans as self-sufficient people migrating in fits and starts, perhaps sometimes peacefully filtering into settled areas or occasionally through warfare.

But those conclusions, though based on an exhaustive analysis of pottery and radiocarbon dates from the region, irk colleagues. “Languages are culturally learned, not biologically inherited,” notes Phil Kohl, an archaeologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who knows and respects Anthony’s work. “Conflating language and culture and race is the cardinal sin of anthropology.” That is because the language a person speaks doesn’t necessarily mean they come from a particular ethnic group—Hispanic Americans may speak English and Siberian herders may speak Russian. But some scientists and nationalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used the search for an Aryan tongue and homeland to attempt to prove racial purity of modern ethnic groups, a concept now rejected by most academics. While praising his thorough and comprehensive study, he says that Anthony uses archaeological data to fit his model. Kohl adds that, like many other scholars, Anthony has fallen prey to the romance surrounding the Bronze-Age riders, noting that the book’s subtitle claims those riders “shaped the modern world.” Kohl adds, “If I didn’t know him better, I’d label him a racist.”

This site in the Samara Valley of southern Russia near Kazakhstan is one of many locations David Anthony has studied to determine the role of early horsemen in spreading proto-Indo-European across the steppes. —Courtesy David Anthony

Anthony dismisses such criticism as itself mired in old thinking about the interaction of language and material culture. “We’ve all been taught for years not to talk about it because of its colonialist and racist baggage,” he says, adding that he doesn’t like being labeled a romantic because he sees himself foremost as a careful scientist. But he does acknowledge that he has come to view archaeology “as a form of ancestor worship.” When he was fifteen, he read a passage from the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle that says: “Consider History, with the beginnings of it stretching dimly into the remote time, emerging darkly out of the mysterious Eternity, the true Epic poem and universal Divine scripture.” That poetic vision has stuck with him through his decades of painstaking research, what he calls “a personal Rosebud.” And that, he adds, “might make me a romantic—or a Buddhist.”

Courtesy of Humanities Magazine website

Volume 29, Number 5

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