SIX
The Evolution of Opinion
on PIE Speakers
and the Horse
In the middle of the nineteenth century, most philologists and
historians believed that "the Indo-Europeans" introduced the
horse and horse-drawn vehicles into the Near Eastern and Med-
iterranean world. This belief was based on several observations.
Horses and chariots were prominent, first of all, in the Rigveda
and the Iliad and seemed to have been featured in a number of
early Indo-European myths and rituals. On the other hand, the
horse did not seem to appear in the art and inscriptions of Old
Kingdom Egypt or, so far as it was known, of early Mesopota-
mia. Philologists observed that in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin
the word for horse had evolved from a Proto-Indo-European
ancestor (reconstructed as *ekwos), and that the various Indo-
European languages shared a remarkable number of words re-
lating to wheeled vehicles: the English words "wheel," "yoke,"
"wain," and "axle" all derive from Indo-European roots. The
Sanskrit word for chariot (ratha) was related to the Latin rota
and the Germanic rad.
The belief that the draft horse was brought to the civilized
world by the Indo-Europeans, however, was undermined late
in the nineteenth century. When the polymath Victor Hehn
was banished to central Russia, his interests turned from clas-
sical philology to wider questions of cultural and natural his-
tory; perhaps the most important product of his new interest
was his pioneering study of the "migration" of plants and ani-
mals from Asia to Europe, published in 1870.' In his chapter
i. V. Hehn, Culturpflanzen und Hausthiere in ihrem U bergang aus Asien
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