PIE Speakers and Chariot WarfareIndo-Europeans. Unfortunately, the relationship between the
Indo-European conquests and the advent of chariot warfare has
been obscured by the march of scholarship (often in opposite
directions) in the several pertinent disciplines. The original er-
ror was perhaps the failure, in discussions of the advent of the
draft horse, to make a distinction between the chariot and disk-
wheeled vehicles. Orientalists early on confused the matter by
constructing a faulty chronology for early Mesopotamian his-
tory. A bogus "coming of the Greeks" at ca. 1900 B.C. severely
distorted the larger picture of what the PIE speakers did, and
when. And in much of the recent literature on the subject, the
horse, rather than chariot warfare, has come to be regarded as
a distinguishing feature of Proto-Indo-European society.
All the Indo-European movements of the Bronze Age that
we know about are takeovers, date no earlier than ca. 1600
B.C., and are associated with chariot warfare. To "the coming
of the Greeks" we shall return in the next chapter. In antici-
pation, it will here be sufficient to say that the evidence from
Greece, which regularly has been held to contradict the asso-
ciation of chariot warfare with the Indo-European movements,
strongly supports such an association. In short, mastery of
chariot warfare explains sufficiently and cogently what the PIE
speakers (and their charioteering neighbors) were able to do in
the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C., and why
they did it.
Each of the takeovers itemized in Chapter Four seems to have
been accomplished by charioteers. The PIE speakers were most
active in these takeovers, but other language communities
were also involved. As we have seen, the hyksos princes who
established a regime over most of Egypt in the seventeenth
century were apparently Amorites from the Levant and had
Hurrian associates. Hurrian speakers, in fact, seem to have
been second only to PIE speakers as a factor in the seventeenth-
and sixteenth-century upheavals (the extent to which Hurrian
speakers were involved in the armies and palaces of the Levant
at the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom has already been
153