PIE Speakers and Chariot Warfareafter the invasion (Hermes's conclusion that the Greeks came
to Greece ca. 1600 B.C. was generally ignored). 1 Even more
irritating was the fact that the chariot did not seem to have
come to Egypt until the seventeenth century B.C. A "culture
gap" had to be postulated in order to explain Egypt's laggardly
situation, and it seemed that "adoption" of the horse-drawn
chariot must have been a fairly slow and optional affair.
When Sidney Smith, Ernst Weidner, and William Albright
revised Mesopotamian chronology, lowering Hammurabi by
three hundred years, the date for the beginning of chariot war-
fare was (for those who followed these things closely) corre-
spondingly lowered. What happened to Egypt in the seven-
teenth century became more intelligible thereby, but the
Hittite and Greek invaders at the beginning of the second mil-
lennium were left without chariots. If orientalists had it right
that chariot warfare did not appear until the seventeenth cen-
tury B.C., and if prehistorians of Greece were correct in con-
cluding that the Greeks came to Greece ca. 1900 B.C., then
one had to concede that at least some of the Indo-Europeans
had managed their invasions quite successfully without the
chariot. All the more did this seem true when the Hittites were
considered: if the Hittite nation came to Asia Minor before
1900 B.C. (and the Kiiltepe tablets certainly seemed to prove
that the Hittite nation was in central Anatolia by that time),
then both of the earliest Indo-European invasions occurred
without the benefit of the chariot. These chariotless invasions,
of course, could not have been effected by small companies of
conquerors. They obviously were mass migrations, which by
sheer numbers overwhelmed the indigenous populations of
Greece and central Anatolia.
That is more or less the picture that Josef Wiesner preceded
i. For example, Schmidt, "Die Herkunft der Indogermanen," 315-
16, supposed that the invention of the chariot ca. 2000 B.C. made it possi-
ble for the Indo-Europeans to begin their westward thrust from central
Asia: the Hittite invasion of Asia Minor and the Greek invasion of Greece
(ca. 1900 B.C.) were the first fruits of the new invention.