The Coming of the Greeksticated animals was the horse.... They employed him not
only for riding but also for drawing their wheeled carts." 7 Like
several other scholars who emphasized the association between
the Indo-Europeans and the draft horse, Breasted largely ig-
nored the hippological argument that until the invention of the
chariot, the horse would have been of little value as a draft
animal.
V. Gordon Childe's The Aryans (1926) promoted the "south
Russian hypothesis," using both archaeological and philologi-
cal arguments. Not entirely a coincidence was Childe's assur-
ance that the horse was "a specifically Aryan animal" and "the
Aryan animal par excellence" 8 (Childe, of course, used the
word "Aryan" as a synonym for "Indo-European"). The horses
in which Childe's Aryans delighted were mostly riding horses,
although occasionally used as draft animals. On the other
hand, Childe's influential book did not make more than a pass-
ing reference to the chariots of the "Aryans," and encouraged
the notion that in early Indo-European society the domesti-
cated horse had a wide and general utility.
At about the same time that Childe was writing The Aryans,
however, other scholars were beginning to assert once again
that chariots and chariot warfare had been brought to the Near
East by Indo-Europeans. This old view, which had faded in the
late nineteenth century, was revived with the discovery of the
Hittites, of the Aryans of Mitanni, and of the Kikkuli text. By
the 19305, eminent orientalists and historians—Hartmut
Schmokel, Albrecht Goetze, Eduard Meyer, and Oswald Speng-
ler among them 9 —were convinced that the chariot had in-
deed been brought to the Near East by Indo-Europeans. The
new consensus, in fact, was that the Indo-European invasions
of the civilized world had been successful primarily because the
- Breasted, Ancient Times, 174; the italics are Breasted's.
- Childe, The Aryans, 57 and 83.
- For Spengler's contribution, see his "Der Streitwagen und seine
Bedeutung fur den Gang der Geschichte," Dei Welt ah Geschichte 3 (1937):
280-83.
124