were erected especially on the Eurasian steppe, but tumuli were also raised not
only in southern Caucasia, Anatolia and Europe, but also in places remote from
anything Indo-European: the Levant, Mongolia, China, Japan, Neolithic Britain,
and even the lands roamed by the Mound Builders during the Middle Woodland
period of North America. Burial under a tumulus was obviously a high priority
for the rich and powerful, who wished to spend the Afterlife in a home that was
both spacious and pre-eminent. The epitome of burial mounds is Khufu’s pyramid
at Giza.
While the PIE speakers may have buried their leaders under kurgans, it is not
likely that they were warlike, and it is quite impossible that they were horseback
riders. Against the “riders” character of steppe prehistory a few scholars, who were
knowledgeable about both horses and steppe archaeology, objected that there was
no solid evidence for riding on the steppe during the Neolithic period or even the
Bronze Age. Already in 1956 the hippologist Franz Hančar had made the point
clearly, although in a huge German book that few American historians read or even
knew about.^10 By 1990 the same point had been made by Colin Renfrew, Marsha
Levine and relentlessly by Alexander Häusler. In a series of articles in specialized
German periodicals Häusler dismissed the Gimbutas reconstruction of steppe
prehistory and the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe as a Phantasieprodukt.^11 Soviet
archaeologists also, finding little or no evidence of riding in Neolithic contexts,
tended to be critical of Gimbutas’ reconstruction. Especially notable among the
Soviet skeptics was Elena Kuz’mina.^12
Research on chariotry in the Late Bronze Age steered me toward Hančar, Häusler
and the skeptics, and eventually I addressed the riding question in detail.^13 My
conclusions were that—as the skeptics had been saying for some time—mounted
combat began no earlier than the tenth century BC, whether on the steppe or
anywhere else (it appears that early in the Iron Age superior bitting, especially
the use of jointed snaffle bits, for the first time made secure riding possible). From
the late eighth to the early fifth century BCmen on horseback dominated the ancient
world, first in the Kimmerian and Skythian raids and then in the Median and Persian
empires. At Plataia in 479 BCthe Persian cavalry was virtually annihilated by Greek
hoplites, and for the rest of classical antiquity cavalry’s role on the battlefield was
secondary to that of heavy infantry.
Prior to the tenth century BCmen had indeed ridden horses from time to time,
but mounted warriors were of no consequence and were nowhere mentioned or
portrayed. Although occasional riding had been done all through the second
millennium BCit was tentative and insecure. The few textual references to riders
in this period are never to mounted warriors, and when a rider is depicted in a
relief—usually as a fugitive from a chariot battle—or on a figurine he is sitting
not just behind the withers, where he belongs, but toward the rear of the horse.
Chariotry was therefore the only military horse troop during the second millen -
nium BC, and large kingdoms employed thousands of chariot drivers and chariot
archers. No riding of horses is attested anywhere, either pictorially or textually,
until shortly before 2000 BC. A corollary of all this is that Gimbutas’ narrative—
that from the fifth to the third millennium BCEurope was Indo-Europeanized by
30 The Kurgan theory and taming of horses