5th and middle of the 4th millennium BC. The first evidence of domestic Horse
remains quite possible comes from Aratashen. Because the wild horse is
completely missing in the large bone material from the neighboring Chalcolithic
and Early Bronze Age, we consider these bones as coming from domestic horses.
Whether they really belong to the domestic horse, still needs to be checked by
C14 dating. Of nearly the same age are the oldest horse bones from Shengavit,
Sepasar and Aparan found there in Early Bronze Age sites. Horse bone remains
were found in large quantities in the Early and Middle Bronze Age settlement
and burials (N. Manaseryan, L. Mirzoyan 2000, pp. 87–107).
On the slaughter at kurgan funerals see Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013.
32 Bendukidze 2010, p. 267.
33 As seen by Pogrebova 2003, pp. 399–400, “[i]t is well known that the chariots whose
models were found in south Caucasian cemeteries belong to the type widespread in
the Near East, to be precise, to its Syro-Palestinian or Hittite variety.”
34 Sultanishvili 2008, p. 379, does not mention the priority of organic bits:
The earliest bits have been discovered in Western Asia—at Ras-Shamra, Gaza,
Tel el-Amarna, and Luristan (Fig. 2). All these date to 1700–1500 BC. According
to shape, straight-bar bits, bits with circular cheek-pieces from Palestine and
Luristan seem to be the earliest.
See also Pogrebova 2003, p. 397:
The first traces of the use of chariots, i.e. light horse-drawn vehicles with two
spoked wheels (Littauer and Crouwel 1979, 71; Nefedkin 2001, 61–2), in
Transcaucasia (Fig. 1) can be dated to the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, i.e.
to the late fifteenth- early fourteenth-centuries BC, since rich barrows of this period
yielded bronze chariot models. It is worth noting that at the same sites remains
of genuine wooden vehicles with either four solid or two spoked wheels have been
encountered.35 Sultanishvili 2008, Fig. 3.
36 Simonyan and Manaseryan 2013, p. 187, with Fig. 13.
37 On this topic see now Potts 2014, pp. 48–53, “Advent of Horse Husbandry in Iran.”
Onagers were ubiquitous in Iran all through the Holocene. Horses, in contrast, had been
at home in Iran during the Pleistocene but virtually disappeared at the end of the
Pleistocene. Potts finds only six sites at which horse bones are attested between 10,000
BCand the end of the 2nd millennium BC. Two sites from the Iranian plateau yielded
a few horse bones, evidently of wild horses, from the 5th and 4th millennia BC. Potts
then lists four sites with horse bones ca. 2000 BCand later, and none of the four is on
the Iranian plateau. At pp. 52–53 Potts observes that skulls of evidently domesticated
horses have been found at Godin Tepe, in Luristan, dating ca. 2100–1800 BC, and at
Tell Farukhabad at the same time, in an Elamite context. Finding very little osteological
evidence for Equus caballusuntil late in the 2nd millennium BC, Potts ties the
beginning of intense horse husbandry to “the coming of the Iranians,” and he suggests
that the Iranians may have come from southern Caucasia at that time. On horse bones
see his summary at p. 53: “The quantity of caballine-like equid remains recorded in
pre-Iron Age Iran is minuscule in comparison with that of hemiones, making it difficult
to avoid the conclusion that the earliest horses in Iran were imported isolates.”
38 On the umman-manda see now Adalı 2011. After Adalı’s survey went to press another
possible reference to umman-mandawas published. This stands in an inscription set
up by Sin-iddinam, who ruled over Larsa from 1849 to 1843 BCon the middle
Mesopotamian chronology. See Volk 2011 for the entire inscription. The possible
reference to umman-mandaoccurs at Column III, lines 54–55. Volk did not originally
read it there, but in a Nachtragon pp. 87–88 he inclines toward revising his text, now
232 The question of origins