185 Elena E. Kuz’mina, he Origin of the Indo-Iranians, edited by J. P. Mallory (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 3) Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007; xviii + 766 pages, appendices, 19 tables, 18 maps, 114 igures, bib- liography, index, $217, €146, hb. , ISBN 978-90-04-16054-5 E. E. Kuzmina, he Prehistory of the Silk Road, edited by Vic- tor H. Mair (Encounters with Asia Series) Philadelphia: Uni- versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2008; xii + 264 pages, appendix, 15 maps, 57 igures, notes, bibliogra- phy, index, $65, £42.50, hb., ISBN 978-0-8122-4041-2 Academician Elena Efimova Kuz’mina, currently Chief Research Oicer, Russian Institute for Cultural Researches, Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Russian Academy of Sciences, exempliies the very best in Russian scholarship as applied to Central Asian archaeology. To this grounding, she outpaces her peers and forebears by also bring- ing to bear an impressive range and rigour in ethnology, his- tory, historical geography, linguistics, mythology, and physical anthropology. All of us in English-speaking scholarship are now indebted to Elena Eimova for these two publications and to her edi- tors—an archaeologist and a Sinologist, respectively—who, long familiar with her scholarship, have rendered yeoman’s service in publishing these volumes. Indeed these works are indispensable additions to their own novel collaboration in recent years on Indo-Iranology and Xinjiang studies. 1 Kuz’mina’s he Prehistory of the Silk Road, a comprehensive introduction, complements their work and compensates for the dearth of pre-historical surveys. Hence a reasonably priced paperback of he Prehistory would be desirable. A low cost reprint is moot of he Origin of the Indo-Iranians, a Handbuch in the fullest sense in E. J. Brill’s recently estab- lished Indo-European Etymological Dictionary series under the general editorship of Alexander Lubotsky. Many will, given its numbing scope and depth, consult rather than read this in-de-siècle distillation, which is an expanded and updated version of the 1994 Russian original, Otkuda prishli indoarii? Material’naia kul’tura plemen andronovskoĭ obshchnosti i proiskhozhdenie indoirantsev [Whence came the Indo-Arians? he material culture of the tribes of the Andronov cultural community and the origins of the Indo-Iranians]. It is the most exhaustive examination to date of Proto-Indo-Iranians and, as a corollary, foundational for the study of proto-Zoro- astrianism. Salient aspects of the latter were leshed out in the late Mary Boyce’s 1985 Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies, Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1992), 27-51. Boyce correctly included such archaeological and ethnological data into her consciously integrated history of the faith. But both unavail- ability and lack of knowledge of Russian sources, especially the writings of Kuz’mina, has precluded other Iranists from incor- porating such critical research into their own. he Origin of the Indo-Iranians will now be the departure point to all embarking on the study of Zoroastrianism as it afords spatial and tempo- ral ballast for those grappling with its fragmentary literary evidence. Concomitantly, its import is inestimable towards deepening our formulations of late Harappan culture and pre- Vedic religion. 2 he Origin of the Indo-Iranians comprises twenty-six chapters divided into four parts, some 60% of the volume. hey are: the Andronovo cultural entity; the migrations of tribes and their cultures in Central Asia; the genesis of the diferent branches of the Indo-Iranians; and the genesis of the Iranians. he rest is devoted to valuable appendices, line-drawings, and a volu- minous bibliography which meticulously cites the literature on every question including all contributions of Soviet scholar- ship. And while Russian publications have been transcribed, Kuz’mina’s 2002 work, Mifologiia i iskusstvo skifov i baktriĭtsev kul’turologicheskie ocherki, was translated as Mythology and Art of Scythians and Bactrians. No English edition has been ever published. he core thrust of the volume lies within parts two and three, namely the culture and migration of Central Asian tribes from the fourth through second millennia BCE; and the gen- esis of the diferent branches of the Indo-Iranians. Taken together, they would make for a concise monograph on the dispersal and habitation of the Proto-Indo-Iranians. Hitherto dependant on scattered, technical articles, the researcher is provided a sound, pioneering synthesis by Kuz’mina wherein she examines the Andronovan and BMAC cultures alongside the anthropological and genetic data about the Scythian com- plex and farming settlements among Iranians in north-central Asia. he narrative is coherent, the translation commendable; and potential research topics and theses are abundantly dis- cernable. A brisker and briefer pace is evident in he Prehistory of the Silk Road. Despite its title, its six chapters aford a coherent, connected picture of the Eurasian steppe, the upper highlands of the Near East, and western and eastern Central Asia in the Copper and Bronze ages. Arguing with full force of her author- ity, Kuz’mina has now demonstrated that the antecedents of the chariot were not in Mesopotamia but the southern Urals and Pontic steppe (34-38) as well the chronological ordering of Central Asian Bronze cultures with their European coun- terparts (115-28). No translator is explicitly mentioned though several proof-readers are acknowledged by the editor. It is gen- erally readable but not as smoothly as he Indo-Iranians. For example, “northwest Hindustan” (35-36, 188), when surely northwest India is referred to elsewhere in the work, leaves one beguiled. Or (89) that Tocharian B’s “written monuments”— mechanically from Russian—enable one to deduce that it “remained a spoken language in the iteenth centuries AD [sic]”. However, an earlier terminus post quem, at the end of the irst or early second millennium CE following the Uyghur