The Coming of the Greekscoast and "die grossen Tieflandsgebiete von der Nordsee bis
zum Schwarzen Meer."' 6
But Wiesner's reconstruction, along with the entire thesis
of a northern European Urheimat for the Indo-Europeans, was
soon out of favor. The ever more popular view was that the
prehistoric PIE speakers rode their horses, and that they rode
them in the Eurasian steppes. Wilhelm Schmidt described the
PIE speakers as a rider folk of central Asia, whose association
with the domesticated horse preceded by thousands of years
their invention of the chariot and their first migrations. 17
What one pictured was a society rather like that of Herodotus's
Scythians, a nation of horse-riding pastoralists. One could even
go on to describe the character of these Indo-European nomads,
their "passion de la vitesse et leur gout du risque." 18
While the Indo-Europeans' association with the domesti-
cated horse continued to grow, their association with chariotry
was all but dissolved in the 19505. Although Hermes had ar-
gued as early as 1936 that the chariot originated south of the
Caucasus, twenty years passed before anyone ventured to draw
from that thesis a fairly obvious (although ultimately—I be-
lieve—an erroneous) conclusion: if chariot warfare arose south
of the Caucasus, the PIE speakers could not have been respon-
sible for it, since the Indo-European homeland did not lie
south of the Caucasus. This was the conclusion—eminently
- Ibid.,43-44.
- W. Schmidt, Rassen und V'dlker in Vorgeschichte und Geschichte des
Abendlandes, 2 vols. (Lucerne: Stocker, 1946). For a summary of his views,
see Schmidt's "Die Herkunft der Indogermanen." Although Schmidt did
credit the Indo-Europeans with the introduction of chariot warfare, what
interested him most was the Indo-Europeans' immemorial association with
the domesticated horse. Schmidt concluded that the Indo-European home-
land must have been located near the place where horses were first domesti-
cated. This place he identified as the steppes of central Asia, where he sup-
posed ("Herkunft," 314—15) that evidence for the domesticated horse went
back as far as the ninth millennium. - E. Delebecque, Le Cheval dans I'lliade (Paris: Klincksieck,
1951), 226.
128