The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The New Warfare

dence in the graves of the South Russian Timber-Grave Cul-

ture, spread over the open steppe between the Dnieper and the

Don and across to the Caspian Sea, that a modest intensifica-

tion of horse breeding occurred at the beginning of the second

millennium.' 7

In Greece and in central and western Anatolia, the role of

the horse in the early second millennium is uncertain, but it is

important to note that the horse was at that time imported to

those lands. The only domesticated equids attested for Greece

and western Anatolia in the neolithic and Early Bronze periods

were onagers or asses,IS but in Middle Bronze levels there is

evidence for horses at a few sites. Horse bones appear at Troy

for the first time in Level vi, in fact early in Level vi (ca. 1900

B.C.).' 9 These bones are found in "a quantity so exceptional as

tion is very different: horse, 19 percent; cattle, 26 percent; ovicaprid, 20

percent; pig, 4 percent; game, 29 percent. Hanc,ar concludes that ca. 2000

B.C. the Tripolye economy shifted "vom Hackbau auf die Viehzucht," and

the conclusion is probably warranted (pastoralists do not favor pigs). Al-

though it is probable that riding horses were useful for herding, clearly the

horse continued to serve mostly as a food animal: there is no need for one

mounted herdsman for every two sheep or cattle.

17. Ibid., 88—122; cf. Piggott, Ancient Europe, 95.


18. Bones of Equus asinus were found at EH II and EH HI Lerna. See
    N.-J. Gejvall, Lerna 1. The Fauna (Princeton: American School of Classical
    Studies in Athens, 1969), 54, andj. H. Crouwel, Chariots and Other Means
    of Land Transport in Bronze Age Greece (Amsterdam: Allard Pierson Museum,
    1981), 35. The ass was probably introduced to Greece during the third
    millennium. In Asia Minor the ass was common all through the Bronze
    Age. Onager bones were found at C>tal Hiiyiik in seventh-millennium lev-
    els; cf. Mellaart, CAH I, i: 309. Bones of wild horse have been reported at
    Demirci Hiiyiik, in northwest Anatolia; see M. Korfmann, in AS 28
    (1978): 17.


19. C. Blegen, J. Caskey and M. Rawson, Troy: Excavations Con-
    ducted by the University of Cincinnati, 1932-1938, vol. 3: The Sixth Settlement
    (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), 10: "One of the most important
    differences between the Sixth Settlement and its predecessors becomes ap-
    parent in an examination of the animal bones that were collected from the
    habitation deposit: for skeletal remains of horses have been identified
    among the material from each of the successive strata. Our systematic col-

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