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

PIE Speakers and Chariot Warfare

It is not only individual PIE speakers whose association with

chariotry is conspicuous. In most of the Near East, two eques-

trian professional classes were designated by Aryan loan-words:

the marya in Egyptian and Akkadian texts was a charioteer or

chariot fighter, and the LU.ashshushshani of the Hittite texts

was a horse trainer. The only convincing explanation for the

loan-words is that the first charioteers and the first horse train-

ers in the Fertile Crescent and central Anatolia had been Ar-

yans.

More ambiguous, but perhaps equally significant, is the evi-

dence supplied by comparatist scholarship on Indo-European

ritual and mythology. Indo-Europeanists have long been aware

of the remarkable similiarities in the Vedic ritual known as the

Ashvamedha and the early Roman ritual of the October Horse.

In both societies, a two-horse chariot race was held annually,

and the horse on the right side of the winning team was sacri-

ficed to the war god. 24 The ritual parallels are here so striking

that most Indo-Europeanists have concluded that a common

ceremony lies behind the Vedic and the Roman traditions. 25

Syrian Documents," JAOS 67 (1947): 251—53; O'Callaghan, Aram Nahar-
aim, 56—63.

24. In Rome the sacrificiant was the Flamen Mattialis. W. W. Fow-
    ler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London: Macmillan,
    1916), 241—50, was led by Frazer to see the October Horse as an agricul-
    tural rather than a military animal, and the ceremony as originating in "the
    simple rites of the farm." The horse slain by the spear of the Flamen Mar-
    tialis was originally a "farm horse," who had shared the farmer's spring and
    summer labors. Roman farm horses, alas, are as imaginary as unicorns. For
    a Macedonian ritual in which "horses in armor" were sacrificed as a lustra-
    tion for the army, see Polybius 23.10.17.


25. Cf. P. E. Dumont, L'Asvamedha (Paris: Geuthner, 1927), 23;
    (j. Dumezil, Archaic Roman Religion (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
    1970), 216. For an archaeological argument to the contrary, see Mallory,
    "Ritual Treatment of the Horse in Early Kurgan Tradition." Mallory denies
    a Proto-Indo-European source for the two ceremonies, on the grounds that
    "a notional date of c. 4000—2500 B.C." for the Proto-Indo-European com-
    munity is too early to accommodate a ritual featuring a chariot race: "no
    matter how striking the ritual parallels, the archaeological evidence does