The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

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The Coming of the Greeks

homeland could have been in Anatolia. In abandoning Wies-
ner's generalization that the chariot was invented in an Indo-
European homeland somewhere in the lowlands between the
Black Sea and the North Sea, or on the Baltic, historians have
had to credit the chariot either to Hurrians or to anonymous
"peoples of the hills" whom historians have hitherto imagined
in Bronze Age Armenia.
We must now trace the ambivalent progress of scholarship,
to see how the connection between PIE speakers and the war
chariot was severed by authoritative conclusions, and thus to
assess present opinion on the matter. Hangar's argument, first
of all, was essentially archaeological and was limited to a dem-
onstration that the chariot appeared south of the Caucasus be-
fore it came either to Europe or to the Eurasian steppe. That
the PIE speakers had nothing to do with the introduction of
chariot warfare was simply an inference that Hangar drew,
based on his conclusion about the provenance of chariot warfare
and on his assumption that the Indo-European homeland lay
north of the Caucasus.
Far more damaging to the association between Indo-Euro-
peans and chariotry has been Kammenhuber's argument, for it
claims that documentary evidence—and in particular the Kik-
kuli treatise—rules out the possibility that Aryans were instru-
mental in bringing chariot warfare to the Near East. Many of
Kammenhuber's conclusions about the Kikkuli treatise are
philological and are generally accepted and valuable. She
showed, first of all, that the Aryan terms in the Kikkuli trea-
tise were "fossils," and she reasonably drew the conclusion that
when the Kikkuli treatise was written, the Aryan language was
not a spoken language in Mitanni. 7 Her studies also left no



  1. The Aryan terms are glosses. That is, the Hittite text presents an
    instruction in Hittite terms, and then for good measure adds the Aryan
    "technical term." Kikkuli's instructions for the eighty-third day, for exam-
    ple, direct the trainer to trot the horses for about two and a half miles, and
    then to gallop them for one mile. The text gives us (Kammenhuber, Hippo-
    iogia Hethitica, 80-81): "he lets them trot for ha(&danna and twenty iku,


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