The Coming of the Greeks
to the north or the Caucasus to the east." 99 Mesopotamia and
Syria were even less self-sufficient in the matter of chariotry,
since these areas lacked not only the necessary wood but also
horses. The letters of Shamshi-Adad of Ashur to his son, and
of Aplachanda of Carchemish to Zimri-Lim of Mari, show that
in the Fertile Crescent, at least, rich and powerful men of the
eighteenth century B.C. had to arrange for "chariots" and char-
iot horses to be brought from distant places, lying somewhere
to the north of the Fertile Crescent. Let us review the creden-
tials of Armenia, or eastern Anatolia, as a center from which
chariots and, when necessary, chariot horses might have been
exported.
During the Upper Paleolithic period, horses evidently were
not nearly so common in Armenia as they were in the Eurasian
steppe. For the fourth and third millennia, three sites, all near
Elazig, have yielded skeletal evidence for domesticated
horses, 100 and one gathers that before 2000 B.C. the inhabit-
ants of Armenia did not consider the horse an especially desir-
able domesticated animal. In later times, however, by Near
Eastern standards Armenia was a veritable land of horses. As
far back as they reach, literary sources show that eastern Ana-
tolia was famous for its horses. Strabo, who was a native of
Pontic Amasia, observed (i 1.13.7) that Armenia was a super-
lative "horse-pasturing" country. The Persian kings, he said,
used to obtain many of their "Nesaean" horses from Armenia.
These "Nesaeans" were famous all through classical antiquity:
Herodotus (7.40) reported that they were the biggest, and Ar-
istotle (Hist.Anim. 9.48) that they were the fastest horses
known. Strabo passes on the story that the Persian kings kept
fifty thousand mares in their Nesaean herds in Media and Ar-
menia, and elsewhere (i 1.14.9) he tells us that every year the
satrap of Armenia would send twenty thousand colts to the
- Ibid., 56.
too. J. Mellaart, "Anatolia and the Indo-Europeans/'J/ES 9
(1981): 137.
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