in the Near East, they concluded that southern Caucasians learned about chariotry
from Near Easterners.^33 This conclusion is difficult to square with the mounting
evidence that both the bit and the chariot were invented in the forest steppe, and
that metal bits were a Near Eastern improvement both on the Near East’s own
nose-rings and on the organic bits of the steppe.^34 In 2008 Sultanishvili reported
that the earliest bits found in southern Caucasia are jointed bronze snaffles from
the Georgian villages of Berikldeebi and Sasireti, dating to the fourteenth century
BC.^35 Five years later Simonyan reported finding in kurgan N1 at Nerkin Naver
a jointed snaffle bit made of iron dating from late in the third millennium BC.^36
If that dating is correct, southern Caucasia was shockingly precocious in the tam -
ing of horses. For various reasons, as I indicated in Chapter 3, I suspect that the
iron bit may have been an Iron Age intrusion in a Middle Bronze Age kurgan.
On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that bits were not used in southern
Caucasia until the fifteenth century BC. If in fact the Berikldeebi and Sasireti jointed
snaffles were the first bits to be used in southern Caucasia the region was
shockingly slow to tame its horses. By that time horses had long been pulling
chariots almost everywhere else from India to the North Sea. It will not be
surprising if future excavations in southern Caucasia find organic cheekpieces that
preceded the use of bronze bits.
For despite questions about the archaeological evidence we have good reason
to believe that southern Caucasians must have been familiar with tamed hor -
ses already by 2000 BCand with chariot warfare by the eighteenth century BC.
As we have seen in Chapter 2, horses were first imported into Mesopotamia
shortly before 2000 BC. It is not known whence these horses came, but the word
for “horse”—ANŠE.KUR.RA, “ass from the mountains”—gives us as good an
answer as we are likely to find. This Sumerogram, used in various languages
all through the Middle and Late Bronze Age, first appears in texts of the
Ur III period. It has sometimes been thought that the mountains in question were
the central and southern Zagros, but that is not likely. Until well into the second
millennium BCdomesticated horses were exotic animals in the Zagros and the
Iranian plateau, and the few that are attested there between 2000 and 1500BC
must have been brought in from horse country.^37 Easily the closest such country
was southern Caucasia. In the eighteenth century BCthe only certain emporium
for tamed horses in the Near East was the Anatolian city of Harsamna (or
Charsamna), located somewhere to the north of Kanesh and probably in eastern
Hatti.
The first horses brought to Mesopotamia were meant to be ridden, and were
controlled by a nose-ring and a stick. By the nineteenth century BCa few tamed
horses in paired draft were being brought into central Anatolia. A cylinder seal
shows that horses and chariots were known in Kanesh in the nineteenth century
BC, the horses being controlled again by nose-rings. It may be that the taming
of horses for riding, the horse being controlled by a nose-ring, began in southern
Caucasia late in the third millennium BC. If that is what happened, we must also
suppose that early in the second millennium the southern Caucasians learned, from
their contact with the steppe, first about spoke-wheeled carts and then about bits.
224 The question of origins