PIE Speakers and Chariot WarfareNear East and in India ... as conquerors possess-
ing a new technique of movement on light horse-
drawn chariots and the tactics of horse-chariot bat-
tle still unknown to the peoples of the countries
which they invaded. It has now been established
that in the Near East the horse was domesticated
already in the 3rd millennium B.C.... Not only
in mountain regions but also in Mesopotamia
horses were harnessed to war-chariots already in the
2ist to i8th centuries B.C. 19With such a perception of what has been "disproved" and what
has been "established," and supposing that Sumerians were us-
ing horse-drawn chariots in battle as early as the Ur in period,
Diakonoff predictably concludes that the Indo-European
movements "must not be seen as victorious expeditions of con-
querors." Instead, Diakonoff is quite sure, we must imagine
the Indo-European movements as migrations of "pastoral ag-
riculturalists over the spring grass in the course of a number of
generations."
Although Kammenhuber's (and—to a lesser extent—Han-
gar's) specialized monographs are in part responsible for the
current orthodoxy, there have been other reasons for rejecting
the thesis that chariotry played a crucial role in the Indo-Eu-
ropean movements. Initially, racist presuppositions impeded
some historians from assigning much importance to the chariot
in these movements. Believing in the existence of an "Aryan"
race, and in the superiority of that race, they were not inclined
to attribute the Indo-Europeans' success to a gadget (even
Hermes allowed that the Indo-Europeans' rise to power was
rooted in their moral qualities as well as in their chariots). The
reaction to Aryanism was equally uncongenial to the idea that
the PIE speakers began as charioteering conquerors. In such a
picture, after all, especially if one gave it only a superficial
glance, one was embarrassed to see that the PIE speakers still
- Diakonoff, in CHI, i: 46.