routing his Asiatic opponents in their chariots.^51 It is well known, of course, that
later kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty were keen to portray themselves in a battle
chariot, acting as both archer and driver and slaughtering the enemies of Egypt.
What we can now say, thanks to Harvey, is that this was the centerpiece of royal
propaganda at the very beginning of the dynasty. This is what warfare was ca.
1550 BC, certainly in Egypt and ipso factoin the Levant, whence chariotry had
come to Egypt. The contrast between chariot warfare and siege warfare is stark.
Wars were now fought on battlefields, and along with that came military glory,
whether real or feigned.
A thesis and some antecedents
The consequences of chariot warfare for the Near East, and the Indo-European
speakers’ role in it, are recognized by many historians. What is not recognized,
but is central to this book, is what the advent of chariot warfare meant for Europe,
where society was still at the pre-state-level and people lived in villages or
unwalled towns. As will be seen in Chapters 5 and 6, plenty of in corporeor other
archaeological evidence shows that in Europe a warrior class with chariots made
its initial appearance soon after the Age of Chariots began in the Near East. It
cannot be proven that the men of that class in Europe were intruders rather than
natives, but circumstantial evidence makes such a conclusion almost unavoidable.
Men of the new military class, that is, apparently conquered several attractive and
defenseless lands in Europe. Many and probably most of these men came either
from the Eurasian steppe or from southern Caucasia, lands where I assume that
various Indo-European languages were spoken. And that, I will argue, is how
Europe was Indo-Europeanized. The thesis has obvious similarities to Gimbutas’,
but places the arrival of military intruders in the second millennium BCrather than
in the fifth, fourth and third, and has at least some of them on chariots. Although
I do not explore it here, the Indo-Europeanizing of northwest India evidently
happened at the same time and in the same way.
Much of this argument is not new. In 1970 William Wyatt’s “The Indo-
Europeanization of Greece,” agreeing with John Chadwick and other linguists that
the Greek language could hardly have begun to form before the beginning of the
second millennium BC, proposed that Greek began when Indo-Europeans—with
chariots—arrived in Greece at the end of the MH period. My Coming of the Greeks
made a similar argument at greater length, although with no greater success. Long
before these publications the spread of the Indo-European languages had
occasionally been tied to chariots. In the Indomania of the early nineteenth century
some British and German Indologists, taking their cue from the Rig Veda,
wondered whether horse-drawn chariots may have been important for the success
of “the Aryans” in their various conquests. Impressed by the fact that the several
branches of Indo-European had inherited from PIE not only a word for horse, but
also words for wheel, axle, thill and wagon, linguists proposed that “the Aryans”
had invented the chariot. These early views also included, of course, the usual
assumptions about folk migrations and the racial superiority of “the Aryans.”
Chariot warfare and militarism 121