PIE Speakers and Chariot Warfarethe first "chariot" was hitched to a team of horses (or even when
the first horse ran from Nippur to Ur). As we have seen, effec-
tive chariot warfare began some two centuries after the appear-
ance of the first "chariots," and four centuries after Shulgi of
Ur delighted in the speed of his horse.
Secondly, even the evidence in the Kikkuli treatise works
against Kammenhuber's thesis. The Aryan horse-training
terms in the treatise, it is argued, were glossed not because the
Aryan language was still in use in Mitanni in Kikkuli's day,
but because they were traditional and venerable terms which
"aus Pietatsgriinden" the Hurrian scribe felt compelled to in-
clude. So far so good. One must go on to ask, however, how it
happened that Aryan horse-training terms came to be held in
such reverence by the Hurrians. One cannot suppose that after
the Aryans had learned the Hurrian art of chariotry, and had
added to it a few elaborations of their own, they wrote Aryan
treatises on the breeding and training of chariot horses. Being
illiterate, Aryan speakers must in person have brought such
terms as aika vartanna to the attention of the Hurrians. In
other words, Aryan-speaking charioteers must at one time have
resided in Mitanni. What is more, these Aryan-speaking char-
ioteers were so highly respected that not only their hippologi-
cal terms but even their gods were taken over by the Hurrians.
Quite clearly, the Aryan glosses in the Kikkuli treatise cannot
be explained as Hurrian borrowings from a nomadic people
passing along Mitanni's frontier.
Other considerations are still more damaging to Kammen-
huber's argument. With its focus on vocabulary, and its em-
phasis on the Hurrian prototypes from which the Hittite
"horse texts" must have been copied, it leaves out of consider-
ation some fairly obvious contradictory evidence from further
afield. Essentially, Kammenhuber argued that scholars' asso-
ciation of Aryans with chariotry is based on nothing more than
a mistaken derivation of Near Eastern words for horse from the
Aryan word "ashwash," and an anachronistic retrojection from
the undeniable fact that the Aryans of the Rigveda were avid
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