The Coming of the GreeksPIE speakers learned their chariotry from the Hurrians. It was
the Hurrians, Kammenhuber insisted, who brought the art of
chariot warfare to its highest point of development. For Kam-
menhuber, as for Hangar, the crucial fact was that chariotry
was an indigenous development in the Near East, and of course
both scholars assumed that the Indo-European homeland lay
not in the Near East but north of the Caucasus.
Such, in brief outline, has been the evolution of assumptions
about PIE speakers, the horse, and the chariot. As a result of
all this, there is today—among scholars in several disci-
plines—a general and vague impression that the domesticated
horse was at a very early date uniquely important in Proto-
Indo-European society, that the PIE speakers were somehow
especially dependent upon the wheeled vehicle (whether ox-
drawn or horse-drawn is usually unclear), but that they very
likely were not responsible for the development of chariot war-
fare. The rival orthodoxies on the location of the Indo-Euro-
pean homeland are beneficiaries of this hazy association of do-
mesticated horses and wheeled vehicles with PIE speakers: since
in both the Ukraine and the Carpathian Basin there is ample
evidence for the domesticated horse and the wheeled vehicle,
these two regions have seemed to have the best credentials as
the Indo-European Urheimat. Since the domesticated horse,
rather than the horse-drawn war chariot, is now center stage in
both linguistic and archaeological scholarship on the Proto-
Indo-Europeans, it is no surprise that most Indo-Europeanists
assume that the Proto-Indo-European homeland must have lain
somewhere in the "horse-breeding koine" of southern Russia
and eastern Europe.
The association of the PIE speakers with the domesticated
horse has encouraged some scholars to assume that evidence for
horse sacrifices, or for the ritual importance of the horse, is
reliable evidence for the presence of an Indo-European lan-
guage. 22 In its simplest and most extreme form, the identifi-
- J. Maringer, "The Horse in Art and Ideology of Indo-European
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