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

The Coming of the Greeks

Also relevant are the "Heavenly Twins," which nineteenth-
century scholars discovered in Indie, Greek, Baltic, and Celtic
mythologies. The twins, as has frequently been noticed, "are
more or less directly connected with the standard horse-unit of
Bronze Age horse domestication, the pair of yoked horses
drawing the swift, two-wheeled chariot." 26 The Heavenly
Twins lie behind the Greek Dioscuri and the Vedic Ashvins
(literally "owners of horses") and are in some respect the quin-
tessential Indo-European heroes. The evidence for the myth, in
five of the language branches of Indo-European, "is of such a
nature that it remains one of the most striking single justifi-
cations for the comparative study of Indo-European mythol-
ogy." 27 The earliest reference to the twins occurs in the treaty
that Matiwaza of Mitanni made with Suppiluliumas of Hatti
in the fourteenth century B.C. There the twins are referred to
as the nasatyas, an epithet that as charioteers they often bear in
the Rigveda. 28 The twins seem to have begun as the ideal char-
iot crew: an unbeatable driver and an invincible fighter. 29
Early nineteenth-century scholars were on the right track in
sensing an association between the war chariot and the early

not support the ascription of paired draught (vehicles) or chariots to the PIE
period." The argument illustrates the danger of relying upon an archaeolog-
ically based chronology (and especially Gimbutas's chronology) for the
Proto-Indo-European community and dispersal.

26. C. Grottanelli, "Yoked Horses, Twins, and the Powerful Lady:
    India, Greece, Ireland and Elsewhere," JIES 14 (1986): 125. That the
    Heavenly Twins were also a part of Germanic mythology was the thesis of
    D. J. Ward's The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition
    (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968); see Ward's summary paper,
    "An Indo-European Mythological Theme in Germanic Tradition," in Indo-
    European and Indo-Europeans, ed. Cardona et al., pp. 405—20.


27. Ward, "An Indo-European Mythological Theme," 405.


28. P. Thieme, "The 'Aryan' Gods of the Mitanni Treaties," JAOS
    80(1960): 315: "Within Vedic religion... the Nasatyas appear again and
    again as heavenly charioteers."


29. On the twins' association with chariotry, see also S. O'Brien,
    "Dioscuric Elements in Celtic and Germanic Mythology,"JIES 10 (1982):
    117-36.

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