also pressed into service as pack animals).^47 The “taming” or controlling of horses
and the exploitation of their speed as draft animals was not possible until the
invention of the bit. In an important article that appeared the year after his
catalogue, Hüttel made a very good case that the cheekpieces were evidence
of a “chariot age” in the Danubian lands, as they were in Greece, and he regretted
that this Streitwagenalterwas generally ignored in scholarship on the Carpathian
basin. It is hard to overstate the importance, Hüttel observed, of what the chariots
meant both for the Carpathian basin and for Greece. In both places a military elite
made its sudden appearance, whose members drove the chariots or fought from
them, carried rapiers, and took possession of akropoleis for themselves and their
dependents.^48 In a later study Hüttel stressed the synchrony between the appear -
ance of the tamed horse and of new weapons (spears and swords) in the Danubian
lands.^49 I will add that this would not have been a matter of borrowing, of influ -
ence, or of an indigenous development. Chariotry and militarism arrived
together—in a complex package—in a land in which both were alien, and they
came from a land in which they were not.
The “chariot age” of the Carpathian basin to which Hüttel pointed a generation
ago is still ignored, and that is hardly surprising. In the Aegean we have a multi -
tude of chariot depictions: in stone reliefs, in frescoes, on an array of clay tablets,
and on more than 100 “chariot kraters.” This voluminous Aegean evidence
has now been conveniently gathered together by Marian Feldman and Caroline
Sauvage.^50 The Danubian lands, in contrast, provide no textual evidence at all,
for chariots or anything else, and almost no representational evidence. The only
pictorial evidence for chariots in the Carpathian basin during the Bronze Age comes
from a single cremation urn found in Slovakia. On the neck register of this urn,
dating from the Mittelbronzezeit(Bz B or C period), are crude depictions of horses
pulling driverless chariots.^51 A few clay models of spoked wheels have been found,
and a very few clay models of chariots, the most famous being from Dupljaja in
eastern Serbia: a chariot drawn by ducks or other waterfowl, made well after the
Bz A2 period.^52 The evidence for a “chariot age” in the Carpathian basin thus
depends almost entirely on the cheekpieces catalogued by Hüttel and Boroffka,
but the cheekpieces are enough to tell the story.
All of the cheekpieces from central Europe in the Bz A2 through the Bz C period
are organic (the earliest metal bits in temperate Europe date from the thirteenth
century BC).^53 Made from antler or bone, the cheekpieces have survived while
the mouthpieces—made of leather, cord, or some other perishable material—have
not. Most of the cheekpieces from the Carpathian basin and the rest of temperate
Europe are of two types. The older of the two was the Scheibenknebel: a bone
disk, enhanced with three or four sharpened studs on the inner face.^54 As indicated
in Chapter 2, these disks were used in the southern Urals already ca. 2000 BC.
Hüttel counted twenty-three of these: most from the steppes, but a few from the
Carpathian basin and from Greece. Now that the purpose of these bone disks has
been clarified many more have been identified: a more recent survey of these
studded Scheibenknebel(the word can be both singular and plural) from the steppes
counted more than seventy.^55
142 Militarism in temperate Europe