The Coming of the Greekscharioteers. Now, it is remarkable that nowhere in Hippologia
Hethitica or Die Arier im Vorderen Orient did Kammenhuber deal
with (or even mention) the chariots of Bronze Age Greece.
That is a large omission (although in fairness it must be added
that the Greek chariots were also overlooked by the reviewers
of her books). Early in the sixteenth century B.C., as we shall
see in Chapter Eight, the Aryans' linguistic counterparts in
Greece were using chariots of the same type as those in use in
the Near East, and as those described in the Rigveda. It is not
likely that these Proto-Greek charioteers had learned to use
their vehicles while moving past a Hurrian frontier; but it is
virtually certain that the people who Indo-Europeanized
Greece "knew the chariot when they first entered Greece." 17
The Greek analogy suggests that ca. 1600 B.C., Aryan speak-
ers, too, were already masters of the art of charioteering, and
that it was they who brought the art to the Hurrians of Mi-
tanni. At any rate, no discussion of the relationship of the Ar-
yan speakers to chariotry is worth very much unless it also takes
into account the chariots of Mycenaean Greece. Kammenhu-
ber's thesis, so widely influential, rests upon a faulty foundation.
Since highly specialized monographs—dealing either with
the Aryans in the Near East or with horses and chariots in the
Near East—have denied that the PIE speakers were responsible
for the development of chariot warfare, 18 it is hardly surprising
that the once-popular belief has been renounced by many his-
torians, especially if they have read Kammenhuber's conclu-
sions without testing her arguments. Thus, for example, Dia-
konoff advises his readers that
another formerly widespread opinion now dis-
proved, is that the Indo-Iranians... arrived in the- Wyatt, "The Indo-Europeanization of Greece," 107.
- Littauer and Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles, are the most recent au-
thorities to have denied that the Indo-Europeans perfected chariot warfare.
Like their predecessors, they are forced to this conclusion by their percep-
tion that the chariot originated south of the Caucasus, and their assumption
that the Indo-European homeland lay north of the Caucasus.
146