map shows two sites in southern Caucasia where slit-socketed spearheads have
been found. One of these is Gostibé, on the Kura river in Georgia, and the other
is Khodja-Daoud-Keupru in Azerbaijan, where the de Morgans also found one of
the very early Type A rapiers that they brought back to France.^26 Those two are
far from the only sites in southern Caucasia where forged spearheads have been
found. According to Kushnareva,
Bronze spearheads are common in burials of the Trialeti culture. They are
the earliest socketed spearheads in the Transcaucasus. In each of the Trialeti,
Meskheti, and Kirovakan kurgans an example of a socketed spearhead was
found. The spearheads did not differ from each other. At Nuli and Kvasatali
socketed spearheads and dartheads were encountered in large quantities.
Here together with elegant ceremonial weapons the tombs contained crude
spearheads with a slit socket (Figure 39). Archaic socketed spearheads are
known from chance finds at Boshuri near Gori and in the assemblages from
Azna-Byurd and Arich.^27Kushnareva lists three other sites that have yielded “ceremonial” spearheads
very similar to those from Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae.^28
Advent of the tamed horse in southern Caucasia
What is entirely lacking in the material record for southern Caucasia is the
Scheibenknebel, along with any other in corporeevidence for chariotry or the tamed
horse before ca. 1500 BC. That is the date that Hakob Simonyan assigns to the
kurgan burial that he has recently uncovered at Verin Naver, a burial said to have
been accompanied by a chariot to which had been attached a quiver holding sixty
barbed arrows.^29 It must be said, however, that study of the tamed horse in the
southern Caucasian Bronze Age is in its infancy, although beginnings have been
made—separately—by Maria Pogrebova and Irine Sultanishvili.^30 Others have
concluded that from the beginning of the third millennium BC(and possibly already
in the fourth) domesticated horses were raised as food animals in the region, and
that late in the third millennium BCtheir numbers increased and horses were
typically slaughtered at a kurgan funeral there.^31 The rescue excavations at Jinisi,
in Georgia, found that horse bones account for at least 35 percent of the bones
deposited in levels dating to the eighteenth and seventeenth century BC.^32
Although domesticated horses were apparently common in southern Caucasia
during the Middle Bronze Age, the question remains when these domesticated
horses were first tamed, which is to say broken either for riding or to the yoke for
use in draft. Pogrebova and Sultanishvili, who did not discuss the prevalence of
horses as food animals in southern Caucasia’s Early and Middle Bronze Age, dated
the first use of tamed horses to the region’s Late Bronze Age, or after 1500 BC.
Stressing the similarities of the region’s chariots and harnessing to those of the
Near East, and accepting Littauer’s argument that bits and chariots were pioneered
The question of origins 223