Near Eastern Historyapparently waged a long war against the Dasyus, dark-skinned
natives, and after defeating them became a dominant warrior
caste. Their language eventually became the language of two-
thirds of the subcontinent.
In each of these takeovers a relatively small force, sometimes
but not always homogeneous in language and provenance,
gains control of an alien city or region. The new rulers are in
most cases a dominant minority, constituting only a tiny frac-
tion of the population. This was especially true of the Aryan
rulers in Mitanni and the Aryan and Hurrian princes in the
Levant; it seems also to be true of the Kassites in Babylon and
the hyksos in Egypt. The Aryan speakers who took over north-
west India may have gone there en masse but were nonetheless
a minority in their newly acquired domain.
The establishment of the Hittite Old Kingdom may in some
way resemble these takeovers, but in more important ways it
does not. Discussion of anything Hittite is bedeviled by our
nomenclature, and so we must begin with that. In second-mil-
lennium Haiti, the existence of "the Hittites" (in the modern
sense of the word) was not recognized. If one looks through the
translations of the Boghazkoy tablets, the Hittites one finds
millan, 1971), 311—12 and 346. M. Wheeler, The Indus Civilization, 3d
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), 129-34, believed that the
Aryans were responsible for destroying the Harappan cities in the Indus
Valley, but other opinion holds that the cities were abandoned (because of
chronic flooding) before the Aryans arrived in India; see Fairservis, Roots of
Ancient India, 310. I. M. Diakonoff, in Cambridge History of Iran, 2: 42—43,
supposes that "the ancestors of the speakers of Indo-Aryan and 'Western'
Iranian idioms (Median, Persian and Parthian) must have reached the
south-western part of Central Asia and Eastern Iran already ... by the end
of the 3rd or the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C." But the "evi-
dence" on which Diakonoff relies are theories about population expansion in
central-southeastern Europe, where Diakonoff supposes the Indo-European
homeland to have been. There is some evidence that the dynasty in control
of southwestern Iran, based at Anshan and Susa, was Elamite speaking until
the second half of the seventh century B.C., at which time Persian speakers
took control: see P. de Miroschedji, "La fin du royaume d'Ansan et de Suse
et la naissance de 1'Empire perse," ZA 75 (1985): 265-306.
63