SEVENPIE Speakers
and the Beginnings of
Chariot Warfare
During the last fifty years, as I have shown in Chapter Six, the
PIE speakers' association with chariot warfare has been obscured
and then denied. In broad outlines, the general opinion that
prevailed on this topic in the 19305 seems to have had more
validity than does the one that prevails today. It is perhaps not
a paradox that this regress has been accompanied by a daunting
increase in detailed information (archaeological especially) on
chariotry and other wheeled vehicles, as well as on the prehis-
tory of Europe and the Eurasian steppe, and on the Bronze Age
of Greece and the Near East.
In order to understand the deterioration of opinion on our
topic, we must begin by noting that part of the foundation for
the 19305 consensus was defective. A major defect even in
Hermes's perceptive and valuable reconstruction was the chro-
nology upon which it was built. Hermes erroneously placed the
dawn of chariot warfare ca. 2000 B.C., more than three
hundred years too early, because in her day most Assyriologists
were still dating the Age of Hammurabi to the late third mil-
lennium, and Mursilis's sack of Babylon to the beginning of
the second (Hermes accepted Meyer's date—1926 B.C.—for
that event). For many scholars, the early date worked out well
enough for explaining the Hittite nation's invasion of central
Anatolia at the turn of the second millennium as well as the
Greeks' invasion of Greece ca. 1900 B.C., although for the
more meticulous it was somewhat puzzling that there was no
evidence for the chariot in Greece for the first three centuries
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