The Coming of the Greekssymbiosis of Indo-Europeans with Hurrians and other civilized
peoples, as the Indo-Europeans recognized that with a suffi-
ciently light vehicle their horses could very profitably be put
to military use. Very soon after 2000 B.C., the Indo-Europeans
perfected chariot warfare in eastern Anatolia and thereupon be-
gan their conquest of much of Europe and Asia. The first Indo-
European conquest occurred when the Hittites headed west-
ward from Armenia to central Anatolia. Several centuries
later—ca. 1600 B.C.—another group of Indo-European chari-
oteers descended upon the Aegean: it was at this time and in
this way that the Greeks came to Greece.I2 On "the coming of
the Greeks," Hermes was, I think, entirely correct; but when
she wrote there was very little sympathy (and not much of an
argument) for dating that event to 1600 B.C.
Hermes's main thesis, unfortunately, incorporated and pro-
moted the misconception that long before the invention of the
chariot the Indo-Europeans were uniquely dependent upon the
horse, both as a riding animal and a draft animal. This miscon-
ception, as we have seen, was encouraged by the writings of
Childe and other proponents of the "south Russian hypothe-
sis." According to Hermes, the chariot was not built until the
Indo-Europeans came into contact with Near Eastern technol-
ogy. What was distinctive about Proto-Indo-European society
in the third (and even in the late fourth) millennium, as she
saw it, was the "tamed" horse per se: the Proto-Indo-Europe-
ans, with their antler and bronze bits, were "tamers of horses"
long before they invented the chariot. Hermes thought that in
the Indo-European homeland the tamed horse was both ridden
and driven: the early Indo-Europeans pioneered the use of the
draft horse, hitching it to disk-wheeled wagons and carts. 13
- Hermes, "Das gezahmte Pferd im alten Orient," 373—75. At n.
26 on page 374, Hermes finds it "unverstandlich" that in searching for evi-
dence for "the coming of the Greeks" most scholars ignored the shaft
graves, the tholos tombs, and the monumental architecture of the Myce-
naeans, and turned instead to a scrutiny of the pottery. - Ibid., 393-94-
126