The Coming of the Greeksnoted). Still another linguistic community that bettered itself
during the upheavals was the Kassite: soon after 1600 B.C.,
Kassite speakers took over much of southern Mesopotamia.
Perhaps in eastern Anatolia there were several language com-
munities in which chariot warfare became an accomplished art:
the Proto-Indo-European would have been by far the largest of
these communities, but Kassite speakers and some of the more
northerly (and less urbanized) Hurrian speakers were evidently
also much involved.
The Aryans whom we meet in Mitanni were closely associ-
ated with chariotry. This is evident in their personal names
(which frequently were compounds of -ashwa or -rata) and in
the Aryan imperial dynasty's dependence on maryannu. In the
Amarna correspondence of Amenhotep III and IV are thirteen
letters that Tushratta sent to the Egyptian kings, and horses
figure prominently in them. The king of Mitanni not only at-
tached to his letters a greeting to the Pharaoh's horses and char-
iots, but also sends teams of outstanding horses as gifts to his
"brother." 30 It was in fourteenth-century Mitanni that Kikkuli
dictated his Hurrian treatise on the breeding and training of
chariot horses. Amid the infinite detail, as we have seen, the
texts provide us with technical terms in the Aryan language for
the "turns" and courses in which the chariot horse needed to
be exercised. The only credible explanation for the Aryan terms
in the treatise is that the Hurrians had learned about chariotry
from Aryan-speaking experts.
The Kassite-speaking conquerors of Babylon were notorious
charioteers. Of the few dozen Kassite words that are known, a
high proportion are words for parts of a chariot or for the kinds
and colors of horses. 3 ' Kassite horses had personal names, usu-
ally theophoric, in which the goddess Minizir was often the
- For excerpts and references, see Hancar, Das Pferd, 477-78.
- In Balkan, Kassitemtudien, pages 11-40 are given over entirely
to a category that the author designates as "Pferdetexte." On pages 123—
30, Balkan presents the known personal names of Kassite horses and the
Kassite vocabulary for chariotry and the parts of a chariot.
154