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

PIE Speakers and Chariot Warfare

doubt that the Kikkuli treatise had been translated into Hittite

from a Hurrian text by Hurrian scribes, several of whom had a

less than perfect knowledge of Hittite. The few Aryan terms in

the treatise, Kammenhuber argued (and here, too, she is con-

vincing), indicate that the Aryan speakers of Mitanni had not

come to Mitanni from India (as scholars had hitherto believed),

but were on their way to India; for these Aryans spoke the still

undifferentiated Aryan out of which both the Indian and the

Persian varieties of Aryan would develop. Kammenhuber also

made the useful point that Aryan ashwash is not likely to have

been the source of the word for horse in Egyptian, Hurrian,

and three Semitic languages (Akkadian, Aramaic, and He-

brew). 8

From these particular conclusions Kammenhuber drew some

wider historical conclusions, not all of them sound. If the Near

Eastern peoples did not borrow the Aryan word for horse, she

reasoned, it is not likely that the Aryans anticipated the Near

Eastern peoples in utilizing the draft horse. That there may

never have been an Aryan text of the Kikkuli treatise, and that

there were no Aryan speakers in Mitanni in Kikkuli's time,

and then gallops them for another twenty iku, which is the aika vartanna."
Whereas in Hittite, danna and iku were as familiar as are miles or kilome-
ters in English, the term "aika vartanna" was exotic. In Aryan it meant,
literally, "one turn" (cf. the Latin vertere). The Hurrian and the Hittite
texts preserved the Aryan terms, Kammenhuber cogently suggests, because
the terms had become venerable (ibid., 293: "aus Pietatsgriinden").

8. Ibid., 236—37. It is likely that all these languages (including
   Proto-Indo-European) borrowed their words from yet another linguistic
   community. On the Semitic loan-words, cf. the entry sisu(m) in the Meiss-
   ner-Von Soden Akkadisches Handworterbuch. On the entire question, see es-
   pecially Goetze's review <JCS 16 [1962]: 34-35) of Kammenhuber's Hippo-
   logia Hethitica. What eventually became the normal Hittite word for horse,
   on the other hand, may have been borrowed from the Aryans toward the
   middle of the second millennium. Goetze points out that although we can-
   not be certain how the Hittites vocalized the word for horse (cuneiform
   Hittite always employs the Sumerogram ANSHE.KUR), it was probably sim-
   ilar to the Aryan "ashwash"; for in "Hieroglyphic Hittite" the word for
   horse was ash(u)a.

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