The Coming of the Greeks
suggested to Kammenhuber that Aryan speakers had never
ruled Mitanni: the few Aryan words and names attested in Mi-
tanni in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C. can be ex-
plained as the result of contact made when Aryans, on their
way to India, passed along the Hurrians' eastern frontier. It was
during that passage, Kammenhuber proposed, that the Aryans
learned about chariots from the Hurrians, and in return, the
Hurrians borrowed a number of words, names, and gods from
the Aryans. Having expunged the Aryan princes from Mi-
tanni, Kammenhuber did the same for the Levant: the Aryan
names one finds there, she argued, were borne by Hurrians,
among whom Aryan nomenclature was in vogue. As for the
maryannu, Kammenhuber emphasized the Hurrian suffix of
the word and identified the warriors as Hurrian. 9 The Kassites,
finally, borrowed neither words nor gods from the Aryans.I0 In
short, Kammenhuber argued that the supposed incursion of
Aryan charioteers into the Near East at the beginning of the
Late Bronze Age was a myth. Although her conclusions on this
matter have encountered occasional criticism, they remain
quite influential. 11
Let us examine Kammenhuber's thesis that Mesopotamia
(rather than Anatolia) was the place where chariotry origi-
nated, and that the Hurrians were the people who brought the
art of chariotry and horse breeding to its highest level. Her
argument for Mesopotamia's priority over Anatolia has two
points, the first of which is that the Akkadian word "narkabtu"
- DieArier, 220-23.
10. Ibid., 4jff. On pages 58—60, Kammenhuber attacks the con-
clusions that Mayrhofer, in Die Indo-Arier im Alien Vorderasien, had come to
about the Aryan origin of some of the Kassite color terms for horses.
- One of Kammenhuber's first and most respected converts was
I. M. Diakonoff; see his "Die Arier im Vorderen Orient: Ende eines My-
thos," Orientalia 41 (1972): 91—120. Her principal antagonist has been
Manfred Mayrhofer. Mayrhofer's Die Indo-Arier im Alien Vorderasien was
much criticized in Kammenhuber's Die Arier, and Mayrhofer responded in
Die Arier im Vorderen Orient—ein PAytkos? (Oest. Akademie 4er Wiss., Phil.-
hisl. Silzungsberichte, Bd. 294, Abhandlung 3) (Vienna, 1974).
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