By the 1880s speculation about Aryan chariots was waning. Yes, PIE had a
word for horse and for wheels and wagons, but the wagons were drawn by oxen,
the chariot was invented in Mesopotamia, and the PIE speakers’ horse was only
a food animal. This change of opinion was in large part due to the 1870 publication
of Victor Hehn’s research on the history of plant and animal domestication.^52 Some
but not all of Hehn’s conclusions were valid, and the result was that the Indo-
European speakers’ connection with chariots was minimized.
The connection was in a few quarters restored in the early twentieth century,
thanks to the excavations that Hugo Winckler began at Boghazköy in 1906.
Akkadian tablets from the site referred to Aryan gods and Aryan kings in Mittani,
several of the kings having names compounded with –āšva(horse) or –ratha
(chariot). This showed that in Mittani the Hurrian populace had Aryan-speaking
rulers, and it suggested once again that the expansion of the Indo-Europeans may
somehow have been connected with their possession of horses and chariots.
Eduard Meyer made that point in the second (1909) edition of his Geschichte des
Altertums.^53 A few years later Hrozny’s decipherment of Hittite as an “Indo-
European” language, and the Hittites’ dependence on chariotry, added support for
a connection between chariotry and the Indo-European expansion. Unfortunately,
by the 1920s the belief was strong and widespread that “the Aryan race” was
indigenous to northern Europe, and it was not easy to fit a chariot-borne expansion
into that belief.
Perhaps the best work on the subject was done by Gertrud Hermes, an outsider
who had no intention to extol the Aryan race.^54 In a series of meticulous articles
in the 1930s Hermes showed very clearly that the attribution of “tamed” horses to
northern Europe (or, for that matter, to any other part of Europe) in the Neolithic
and Early Bronze periods was unfounded. She then went on to argue—here she
conceded that the evidence was circumstantial—that in the second millennium BC
Europe was Indo-Europeanized by conquerors from the Pontic-Caspian steppe who
depended on their tamed horses.^55 Hermes concluded that the Indo-Europeans, after
borrowing chariot technology from the Hurrians, conquered central Anatolia and
established the Hittite kingdom, whose kings promptly sacked Babylon.^56 At about
the same time, attracted by the wealth of the Cretan Aegean, the Achaeans took
over the Greek mainland and set up kingdoms there.^57 Early Mycenaean art, Hermes
observed, spoke clearly about the Achaeans: “Dating from the Early Mycenaean
period, it characterizes these people at their entry into history as a warrior nation,
whose mode of warfare depended on the horse and chariot.”^58 Hermes found it
unverständlichthat although archaeologists had plenty of evidence for a new and
warlike population in the Aegean, they continued to scrutinize pottery for clues
about a change in ethnicity.^59 After Greece was Indo-Europeanized, so was much
of temperate Europe. Following the trail of antler cheekpieces, Hermes concluded
that by the middle of the second millennium BCIndo-Europeans had sought out
and conquered especially the metal-rich regions of central Europe,^60 arriving in
northern Italy and the amber lands of northern Europe not much later.
Parts of Hermes’ reconstruction I must reject. She reckoned with a Hittite
invasion of Anatolia, she believed that Hurrians invented the chariot, she supposed
122 Chariot warfare and militarism