PIE Speakers and the HorseHer articles thus helped to disseminate the idea, now accepted
in most Indo-Europeanist scholarship, that the PIE speakers
were especially dependent upon the domesticated horse (or,
stated the other way round, that the domesticated horse was
somehow peculiar to the PlE-speaking community, and that
this peculiarity antedated the chariot by centuries or even mil-
lennia).
Once the notion took root that the Indo-Europeans were a
horse-taming race, the question arose whether they rode their
horses or drove them. Josef Wiesner, fighting a rear-guard ac-
tion, insisted that the Indo-Europeans were surely not riders:
no evidence linked the Aryans, the Greeks, or the Hittites to
equitation, whereas a great deal of evidence showed that these
peoples used the horse as a draft animal. And because the Indo-
Europeans were drivers rather than riders, Wiesner urged, one
could be quite certain that their homeland was in northern Eu-
rope, and not in the Eurasian steppe (where equitation was tra-
ditional and indisputable). More specifically, Wiesner located
the homeland in the Schnurkeramik and Battle Axe Culture of
central and northern Europe. There, he concluded, the Indo-
Europeans had begun harnessing their horses to plows and
wagons during the third millennium. 14 The wave of Indo-Eu-
ropean invaders who came to Greece and Anatolia soon after
2000 B.C., Wiesner supposed, had the draft horse but not the
chariot. Approximately four centuries later, other Indo-Euro-
peans who had been living in the lowlands of eastern Europe 1 '
began to drive southward. One group headed southwest to-
ward the Lower Danube and the Aegean, and the other headed
for the Caspian, eventually reaching Persia and India. It was
this second wave of Indo-European invaders, Wiesner con-
cluded, that brought the chariot to the civilized world. As for
the place of its invention, Wiesner hesitated between the Baltic
- Wiesner, "Fahren und Reiten," 23—24.
- Ibid., 41.
127