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

The Coming of the Greeks

on the horse, Hehn argued that in ancient times the horse was

not used for pulling plows or heavy vehicles, and he concluded

that although it occasionally served as a riding animal, it could

not have become important until the invention of the chariot.

That invention, Hehn reasoned, must have occurred after the

Egyptian Old Kingdom, and he attributed it to "the Assyri-

ans." Hehn proposed that the Indo-Europeans, like the Hyksos

and the Egyptians, learned of the chariot from Assyria. Prior

to their borrowing of the chariot, Hehn assumed, the Indo-

Europeans would have valued the horse primarily as a source of

meat, and because fermented mare's milk was a powerful in-

toxicant.

Arguments such as these convinced many scholars that the

early Indo-Europeans knew the horse only as a food animal and,

occasionally, as a riding animal. Thus Isaac Taylor concluded

that "the common Aryan name for the horse must have referred

to it as the object of the chase, and has no more significance

than the existence of common names for the wolf and the fox." 2

In his important study of Indo-European prehistory, Otto

Schrader observed that the chariotry the Aryans celebrated in

the Rigveda had been learned from the Babylonians, and that

in the Indo-European homeland the horse had been valued only

as a source of meat and milk. 3 And Herman Hirt's definitive

nach Griechenland und Italien, sowie in das iibrige Europa: Historisch-linguistische
Skizzen (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1870). The work went through several Ger-
man editions and was translated into Russian and English. The English
translation is entitled Cultivated Plants and Domesticated Animals in their Mi-
gration from Asia to Europe: Historico-Linguistic Studies (London: Sonnenschein
& Co., 1885) and in 1976 was reprinted as vol. 7 in the series, Amsterdam
Classics in Linguistics (E.F.K. Koerner, general editor). For a general assess-
ment of Hehn's career, see J. P. Mallory's "Victor Hehn: A Bio-biblio-
graphical Sketch," pp. ix-xvi in the 1976 reprint.

2. Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, j6.


3. O. Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte. Linguistisch-histo-
   rische Beitrage zur Erforschung des indogermanischen Altertums (Jena: Costeno-
   ble, 1883), 344-45. An English translation of Schrader's book was pub-
   lished in 1890.

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