The Coming of the Greeks
archaeologists whose concern is prehistoric Europe and Asia,
one still encounters the view that it was in the lands north of
the Caucasus that chariotry began. This view, which was in
some danger of being quashed altogether by Hangar's weighty
study, has lately been bolstered by scientific findings: carbon
dating has shown beyond any doubt that not only the domes-
ticated horse but also the bit and the spoked wheel appeared
quite early in the lands—all of them without written records
for the Bronze Age—of southern Russia and eastern Europe.
The debate has able protagonists on both sides. Thus while
Mary Littauer and Joost Crouwel conclude that the chariot was
developed "in the Near East itself" and was not brought into
the Near East by "Indo-European-speaking steppe tribes," 90
Stuart Piggott and Alexander Hausler continue to believe that
the chariot originated somewhere in what Piggott refers to as
the "technological koine" that stretched from Slovakia to the
Urals. 91
It will be helpful here to repeat a distinction made by both
Littauer and Piggott. The word "chariot" has, for most schol-
ars, a military connotation, 92 especially when the word is used
in Bronze Age contexts. That is understandable, since in our
written sources from the Bronze Age the chariot is almost ex-
clusively a military vehicle, and since much of the artistic evi-
dence from the Near East and Greece also features the war char-
iot. In parts of the Bronze Age world, however, the chariot
- Littauer and Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles, 68. In their rather brief
"Note on Origin of Chariot" (pp. 68—71), the authors are concerned only
with the distinction between "the Near East" and Eurasia north of the Cau-
casus.
- Cf. Hausler, "Neue Belege," 675-76. For Piggott's most recent
discussions, see his "Chinese Chariotry: An Outsider's View," in The Arts of
the Eurasian Steppelands, ed. P. Denwood (Colloquies on Art and Archaeol-
ogy in Asia, no. 7) (London: 1978), 32-51, and also his Earliest Wheeled
Transport, 103—104.
- In this regard, English speakers are better off than their Ger-
man-speaking colleagues, for whom Streitwagen must inevitably denote a
military vehicle.
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