During the last 75 years a tie between the origins of militarism and the spread
of the Indo-European languages has seldom been explored. Gimbutas’ Kurgan
theory was the great exception, but its version of military history was deeply flawed
and other versions have not been seriously considered. In part this may be because
prehistorians have stayed as far as possible from the histoire événementielleso
despised by Braudel and the Annales School (and not of much interest to the New
Archaeology either). And as war with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons
has become abhorrent, the academy has looked more often and more closely at
the sociology and “culture” of war than at combat itself.^66 Today the dominant
theories about the spread of the Indo-European languages are apparently those
put forward by Colin Renfrew and David Anthony. Anthony, as we have seen in
Chapter 2, has de-militarized Gimbutas’ Kurgan theory, and Renfrew’s theory has
no place for war and conquest. Even Elena Kuz’mina’s recent book on the origin
of the Indo-Iranians, while furnishing them with horses and chariots, does not bring
the Aryans into India as belligerents, and much less as conquerors.
While the decline of military history has contributed to the absence of chariot
warfare in scholarship on the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe, another important
contributor has been the general assumption that temperate Europe was Indo-
Europeanized very early: a millennium or two or possibly even three before chariot
warfare began. In the 1930s the belief was well established and widespread—contra
Hermes, Spengler, Childe (with qualifications) and several other objectors—that
the Indo-European languages were indigenous to northern or central Europe. That
belief, based on racial assumptions, survived for a decade or two after the Second
World War. Giacomo Devoto’s Origini indoeuropee, a book based on work done
mostly in the 1940s and early 1950s, equated the Indo-European homeland with
the Linearbandkeramik culture, an archaeological culture that in the fifth
millennium BCstretched from the lower Rhine to the middle Danube.^67 Pedro
Bosch-Gimpera put the satemhomeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but kept
the centumhomeland in central Europe, north of the upper Danube (whence, at
the beginning of the second millennium BC, proto-Greeks moved southeast into
Greece).^68 Obviously neither Bosch-Gimpera nor Devoto supposed that horses and
chariots were a factor in the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe. Gimbutas, in contrast,
made much of the Indo-Europeans’ dependence on horses and she placed the IE
homeland firmly in the Pontic-Caspian steppe. With her Kurgan theory, never -
theless, she had much of Europe speaking Indo-European languages all through
the third millennium BCand parts of it already by the end of the fifth. Anthony
does the same, and Renfrew synchronized the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe with
the beginnings of agriculture. Since the 1930s it has seldom been considered that
Indo-European languages were not brought to most of Europe until well into the
second millennium BC.
What I am arguing here is that the beginnings of militarism, an immediate
consequence of the use of chariots to kill men, led to the Indo-Europeanizing of
much of Europe. Although Spengler did not include temperate Europe among the
lands conquered by the new military elite (his Waffenadel), I believe that we now
have enough evidence to make that case. It was long argued by Gimbutas that
124 Chariot warfare and militarism