PIE Speakers and Chariot WarfareIndo-European homeland. As the concluding section of Chap-
ter Five has indicated, what evidence we have about the prove-
nance of chariot warfare fits exactly with the thesis that early
in the second millennium the PIE speakers lived in Armenia.
The argument works both ways. Just as Gamkrelidze and
Ivanov's thesis strengthens the likelihood that chariot warfare
originated in Armenia, so does that likelihood strengthen the
linguists' thesis. Perhaps it is theoretically conceivable that the
PIE speakers pioneered rapid and comfortable transportation by
"chariot" in a homeland located in the forest-steppe or the open
steppe above the Black Sea, or possibly in the Carpathian
Basin. Although there is no direct evidence for the spoked
wheel north of the Caucausus before the middle of the second
millennium, 21 one would suppose that light and spoked-wheel
"chariots" were known in the horse-breeding koine at least as
early as ca. 1700 B.C. (the date of the Timber Graves contain-
ing teams of slaughtered draft horses, and of the models of
spoked wheels in the Slovakian and Hungarian graves). But
that chariot warfare was perfected in the lands north of the Cau-
casus is not suggested by any evidence, and is in fact quite
unlikely, since there is no period in which chariot warfare is
attested for the Eurasian steppe. Our earliest evidence for char-
iot warfare comes from Anatolia. If the PIE speakers were in
large part responsible for the development of chariot warfare,
eastern Anatolia is a far more likely Indo-European homeland
than either the Carpathian Basin or the Pontic steppes.
There is another, and more important, reason for reviving
the old notion that the Indo-European "invasions" were in fact
conquests by charioteering peoples. This is the erosion of evi-
dence for Indo-European invasions at the very beginning of the
second millennium. As we have seen, the argument for dating
the arrival of the Greeks to 1900 B.C. has disintegrated, and
there are no grounds whatever for moving that arrival back still
- Piggott, "Bronze Age Chariot Burials in the Urals," 289; Lit-
tauer and Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles, 70.
149