PIE Speakers and Chariot Warfarehelp a foreigner establish himself as lord of Hatti, or of most
of Egypt, would not long have overlooked the opportunities
that beckoned. It is reasonable to suggest that in the land oc-
cupied by the PIE speakers, and in neighboring lands (where,
for example, Kassite and Hurrian may have been spoken),
whole charioteering communities decided to wait no longer for
offers of employment, but to leave home for foreign adven-
tures, and to subjugate societies more advanced but more vul-
nerable than their own. 39
- It is noteworthy, in this connection, that many of the less desir-
able regions of Armenia witnessed a drastic decline in population during
the second millennium. Settlements that had flourished in the period of the
Early Transcaucasian Civilization, and that would be resurrected in the Ur-
artian period, were entirely abandoned in the second half of the second mil-
lennium. According to Burney, Peoples of the Hills, 86, "this decline was
particularly marked in the bleaker highlands, such as the regions of Er-
zurum and Van, where the Early Trans-Caucasian culture lingered on, to be
followed by a long dark age when nomadism may have predominated.
There seems to have been an abandonment of sites in the plains and else-
where, most clearly illustrated by the hiatus at such sites as Armavir and
Garni between the Early Trans-Caucasian occupation and that of the Iron
Age or of the classical period." Armavir and Garni lie a short distance west
of Lake Sevan.
When and under what circumstances Armenian, a satem language,
established itself in Armenia remain difficult questions. It is generally be-
lieved, however, that much of the evolution of Armenian did not occur
within Armenia itself, and specialists have tended to describe the first Ar-
menian speakers in the area as invaders from the west, with linguistic affin-
ities to Thracian and Phrygian (on the fragile foundations for this descrip-
tion see Baldi, An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages, 79—81). As
late as the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., a non-Indo-European language,
Urartian, was spoken in at least a part of what would one day be Armenia.
157