that the Achaeans were not familiar with seafaring until long after their arrival in
Greece, she dated their arrival at the beginning rather than the end of the MH
period, and she believed that the Indo-Europeans who took over much of temperate
Europe were riders rather than charioteers. In other respects, however, her explan -
ation of the Indo-Europeanizing of Greece and central Europe strikes me as very
much on target. What she wrote was soon condemned in Germany and scarcely
read anywhere else.
Another radical appraisal of the advent of chariotry came from Oswald Spengler,
years after he had published his grandiose Untergang des Abendlandes. Although
not much interested in the Indo-Europeans, their language or their homeland,
Spengler was fascinated by the changes in human society that followed inventions
and innovations (the bow, for example, or sea-going ships). In one of his last
presentations Spengler declared, with characteristic drama, that the chariot not only
revolutionized warfare but in fact revolutionized the world.^61 “No weaponry, not
even gunpowder, had such consequences for the world as did the chariot. It is the
key to the world’s history in the second millennium BC, the millennium which—
of all the millennia in recorded history—most changed the world.”^62 Spengler
supposed that the chariot was pioneered by the several peoples (some but not all
of whom spoke Indo-European languages) living on the steppes of central Asia.
The chariot was “die erste Tempowaffe der Geschichte” (armed riding was “nur
die Konzequenz aus dem Streitwagenkampf”), and it fundamentally changed the
concept and conduct of warfare. Although he did not include temperate Europe in
his survey of lands affected by the advent of chariotry, Spengler saw the new warfare
as responsible for historic changes elsewhere: the Aryan conquest of India, the
Achaean conquest of Greece, the Hyksos conquest of Egypt, the Kassite conquest
of Mesopotamia, and—some centuries later—the Zhou conquest of Shang China.
Most importantly for the argument of the present book, Spengler saw in chariot
warfare the birth (biological metaphors appear often in his work) of militarism,
which he celebrated:
Along with the weaponry came a new kind of man. A delight in daring and
adventure, in personal bravery and in a knightly ethos, asserted itself. Ruler-
races made their appearance, made up of men who considered warfare as their
way of life, and who looked down with contempt upon the castes of farmers
and stockmen. Here, in the second millennium BC, we hear men’s voices that
had not been heard before. A new kind of soul was born. From that point on
there has been heroism, conscious of itself.^63In place of the administrators and priests who earlier had made up the ruling
class in Egypt and Mesopotamia there now appeared a military elite, and war
became the profession of the ruling class.^64 Spengler intended to elaborate upon
this theme in his Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte, but died before completing that work.
Spengler’s reputation declined steeply after the Second World War, and subsequent
scholarship on the chariot and chariot warfare has almost completely ignored his
“amazingly correct” thesis about the Streitwagen revolution.^65
Chariot warfare and militarism 123