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

The Coming of the Greeks

to draw: ca. 2000 B.C., Indo-Europeans who used the horse as
a draft animal, but did not yet have the chariot, came en masse
from northern Europe to Greece and Asia Minor. 2 In the six-
teenth century B.C., a second wave of Indo-Europeans, with
the chariotry that they themselves had recently invented, came
from the Indo-European homeland to join their Indo-European
cousins at Mycenae and Hattusas, 3 and they came as well to
Mitanni, to various cities in the Levant, and to India. 4 What
motivated the Indo-Europeans to migrate southward, both in
the earlier and the later wave, had never seemed a serious ques-
tion, and Wiesner (like most of his predecessors) disposed of it
with one short sentence: perhaps the climate in the homeland
had changed for the worse. 5
Since Wiesner's time, most scholars have abandoned the be-
lief that PIE speakers introduced the chariot to the civilized

2. In fact, Wiesner was not aware of any reference to chariotry in
   the Hittite texts from the Old Kingdom and accordingly concluded that
   the Hittites did not adopt chariotry until the period of the Empire. Cf.
   "Fahren und Reiten," 23—24.


3. On the relationship of the charioteering Indo-Europeans to the
   original Greek and Hittite invaders of the twentieth century B.C., cf. ibid.,
   38: "In Mykene kann dieses Herrentum [i.e., the sixteenth-century chari-
   oteers], das sich in neuem Formengut und neuem Brauchtum aussert, in
   seinem Kriegsgeist an die Tradition der ihm rassisch verwandten Streitaxt-
   leute ankniipfen, in Kleinasien an das altere Reich der Hethiter. So voll-
   zieht sich iiberall ein jaher Aufstieg zu kultureller und politischer Grosse."


4. Ibid., 37—44. Curiously, Wiesner did not concern himself much
   with chronological matters; he apparently followed the old chronology that
   dated Hammurabi to the end of the third millennium (on page 41, for ex-
   ample, he places the Kassite invasion of Mesopotamia in the eighteenth
   century B.C.). This might have spoiled his thesis, had he known of the tab-
   lets and cylinder seals that show that the chariot was already known in Mes-
   opotamia in Hammurabi's time. However he came to them, Wiesner's ulti-
   mate chronological conclusions—that the migrations of the charioteers
   occurred in or shortly before the sixteenth century B.C.—were approxi-
   mately on target.


5. Ibid., 44: "Den Grund fiir den Aufbruch diirfen wir vielleicht in
   schweren klimatische Veranderungen suchen."

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