PIE Speakers and Chariot Warfare
divine element. As summarized by Margaret Drower, "the
Kassite kings appear to have come to power as leaders of a pow-
erful, but perhaps quite small, aristocracy who wrote elegant
letters full of compliments to each other and were expert and
enthusiastic horsebreeders."' 2
The maryannu of the Levant were regularly charioteers and
chariot warriors. Although by the end of the fourteenth cen-
tury B.C. most of the maryannu in the Levant had Semitic
names, at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age the majority
must have spoken either Hurrian or Aryan: the word "mar-
yannu" is an Aryan-Hurrian hybrid." Since the status and ob-
ligations of the maryannu tended to be hereditary, 34 it is likely
that after a few generations the Aryan speakers were assimilated
to the Semitic- or Hurrian-speaking population. So close is the
association between the maryannu and chariotry that some
analyses have concluded that the word was a technical term for
"professional chariot forces" (on this analysis the corresponding
term for professional infantrymen, many of whom were Hur-
rian, was SA.GAZ or bapiru).n
Among yet another group involved in a takeover, the Aryans
of India, charioteering was an obsession. The relatively late
Mahabharata as well as the earlier Rigveda are much concerned
with chariotry. In the Mahabharata, two rival chariot forces
battle for supremacy. The mythical charioteers of the Rigveda
were, in the words of Stuart Piggott, nothing else but
the Aryans themselves, magnified to heroic propor-
tions. The greatest god of the Rigveda is Indra, to
- Drower, CAH 11, i: 440.
- Cf. O'Callaghan, "New Light on the maryannu as Chariot-War-
riors."
- A. F. Rainey, "The Military Personnel of Ugarit," JNES 24
(1965): 19-20. At Ugarit, each marya was given a land-holding and pay-
ment in silver.
- W. Helck, Die Beziehungen Aegyptens zu Vorderasien im 3. und2.
Jahrtausendv. Chr. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1962), 530; cf. H. Gazelles,
"The Hebrews," in Peoples of Old Testament Times, ed. D. J. Wiseman, 14.
