Akkadian texts show that ca. 1800 BCthe palace at Chagar Bazar, in north -
eastern Syria, owned twenty chariot horses and employed grooms for them. In
the middle of the eighteenth century BCAnitta of Kanesh had forty teams of chariot
horses in his siege of Šalatiwara. Again, it is not known where these chariots
and chariot horses were coming from, but suspicion attaches to southern
Cauca–sia. Also pertinent is the chariotry of the Great Kings of Hatti. In the 1640s
BCHattushili I did battle against the chariots of Abbaya in his campaign against
Sanahuitta, and both cities seem to have been located to the northeast of
Hattusha. Hattushili had chariots of his own, evidently hundreds of them. Because
it is difficult to see how he could have acquired his horses and chariots—as well
as men who knew how to manage them—from the north, the south or the west,
the odds are fairly good that he got them from the east. The employment of
Mandachariot crews by both Hittite kings and their adversaries in the seventeenth
century BCpoints also, although vaguely, in the general direction of southern
Caucasia (wherever Manda was, it almost certainly lay to the east of Hattushili’s
kingdom).^38
The linguistic evidence
Less vaguely, Akkadian and Hittite texts show that chariots and chariot warriors
appeared early in Hurrian-speaking lands to the north of Mesopotamia, and
indicate that the Hurrian speakers who lived there had learned about chariots from
people who spoke Proto-Aryan, or Indo-Iranian. The Great Kingdom of Mittani,
established in the sixteenth century BC, stretched from the upper Euphrates to points
east of the upper Tigris (probably including Nuzi). Although most people in Mittani
(and at Nuzi) spoke Hurrian, as evidently did some people who lived on the northern
side of the Bitlis-Zagros mountains, the dynasty that established the Great
Kingdom came from a Proto-Aryan community and was in the forefront of chariot
warfare. Hurrian speakers adopted Proto-Aryan words for various exercises in the
training of chariot horses, as shown by the Kikkuli text, and also for the classifi -
cation of horses, as shown by texts from Nuzi.^39 That the Proto-Aryan speakers
as well as the Hurrian speakers used their chariots in warfare is indicated by the
term maryannu. The Proto-Aryan speakers in question presumably lived beyond,
but not very far beyond, the Hurrian speakers.
Indo-Europeanists have for a long time believed that the language most closely
related to Greek is Armenian (this despite the fact that by 400 CE, when Mesrop
Mashtots devised the Armenian alphabet and began a translation of the Bible into
his vernacular, Greek and Armenian were already farther apart than were English
and Italian in Chaucer’s day). The close relationship of Greek and Armenian was
proposed almost 100 years ago, was presented in detail by James Clackson, and
has most recently been supported by Hrach Martirosyan.^40 Recent cladistic
analyses, so far as I understand them, confirm the linguists’ conclusions about a
special relationship between Greek and Armenian.^41
Indo-Europeanists are also quite certain that in a wider subgroup Greek and
Armenian stand close to Indo-Iranian. Clackson in fact concluded that the links
The question of origins 225