My kingdom for a *h₁éḱwos!

Fair warning: Skip this first scene if you don’t like hearing about bad things happening to horses.

Rome. October 15, 275 BC.

The driver steps down from his chariot onto the muddy soil of the Field of Mars. The slight chill on the October breeze feels like mercy as the air dries the sweat on his brow.

He won. Or, the horses did. Better to give the credit to the horses, especially in light of what happens next. His job, however, is done, and he could use a drink.

The attendants have reached his chariot now. He helps them with the harness.

“Well done,” says one of the attendants.

“Thanks,” he says. Then his eye catches a look in the crowd that he doesn’t like. “You might want to hurry.”

“They’ll wait,” says the attendant. “Besides, we’re going as fast as we can.” He finishes loosing the right horse from the yoke. “There.”

The crowd grows louder and more boisterous — on one side are gathered the men of the Sacra Via, near the Forum; on the other are the men of the Subura, a neighbourhood to the northeast. They’re still gathered around the edge of the field, but it’s obvious that the moment they’ve been waiting for is close at hand.

The attendants lead the right-hand horse away to the altar of Mars. He leads the left-hand horse in the other direction, off the field. He’s joined by the other drivers.

“That was pure luck,” says one of his defeated rivals.

“I call it the will of Mars,” he says back, with a chuckle.

Now he’s reached the edge of the field. He turns around just in time to see it happen: the spear is cast and the horse falls. For Mars.

The attendants immediately begin the butchering. First the head comes off, then the tail. One of them takes the tail and sprints towards the city. He’s making for the Regia, the house of the king, back when Rome still had one. No king rules there now, but tradition is tradition. The tail must be brought to the Regia.

The crowd reverently lets the runner through with the tail. But now is the moment. They must have the head. They rush onto the field. By the end of the afternoon, there will be a fair few injuries to treat, and the head, garlanded with loaves of bread, will be nailed up — to the Regia, if the men of the Sacra Via win, or to the Mamilian tower in the Subura.

The driver turns away. It’s time for that drink.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 84,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

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Not since The Godfather have I seen such a fuss over a horse’s head. This was the Roman ritual of the Equus October, or ‘October Horse’.

It is an ancient ritual with roots more ancient still. Scholars of comparative religion connect it to other rites from across the Indo-European world — the cultural world inherited, at least in part, by the speakers of the early Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Even English is a distant descendant of an early variety of Indo-European speech.

There seems to have been a tight connection in the Indo-European imagination between horses and kingship or sovereignty, a link that was reinforced by strange and disturbing rituals such as the Equus October.

Given how central horses were to the Indo-Europeans and their linguistic and cultural descendants, it’s surprising that their word for horse — *h₁éḱwos, which you might pronounce something like heck-woss — has been almost totally erased from the modern Indo-European languages.

So, Indo-European languages: If you like horses so much, why did you lose their name?