PIE Speakers and the HorseDie Indogermanen concurred that the Indo-Europeans in their
homeland knew the horse only as a food animal, and that only
when they came into the civilized world did they begin to see
that their food animal could also serve as a draft animal. 4 The
early Indo-Europeans' wheeled vehicles, Hirt reasoned, were
ox-drawn. 5 In his "archaeological answer" to the Indo-Euro-
pean question, Gustav Kossinna did not discuss the horse at
all. 6
This modest or minimal association between the Indo-Eu-
ropeans and the horse seems to have appealed especially to
scholars who located the Indo-European homeland in northern
Europe—in Germany, Scandinavia, or the Baltic coast between
East Prussia and Estonia. On the other hand, that the horse
was quite important in early Indo-European society was one of
the tenets of a small but promising school of thought that iden-
tified the Indo-European homeland with southeastern Europe
or southern Russia. This identification, proposed by Otto
Schrader in the later editions of his Sprachvergleichung und Ur-
geschichte, made the "original" Indo-Europeans pastoralists
rather than agriculturalists and assigned them a vast homeland
in the steppes from the Carpathians to the Caspian. Although
the "south Russian hypothesis" was not popular with Indo-
European philologists and archaeologists at the beginning of
this century, it did receive a rather favorable hearing from ori-
entalists and historians. Breasted, for example, regarded as "es-
tablished fact" that ca. 2000 B.C. Aryans were pasturing their
herds east of the Caspian, while their centum relatives occupied
the lands from the Caspian to the Danube. For all of these
Indo-Europeans, Breasted believed, "chief among their domes-
- Hirt, Die Indogermanen, i: 191 and 289.
5. Ibid., 354-55. - G. Kossinna, "Die indogermanische Frage archaologisch bean-
twortet," Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie 34 (1902): 161—222. Kossinna's essay,
which discusses only pottery and other material remains, symbolizes the ex-
tent to which the Indo-European question had become an archaeological
question by the beginning of this century.
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