The Coming of the Greekspersuasive, since in such a sequence of events, one should have
found more than a meter of soil—the soil of the tumulus—
between the slab lid and the skeleton. A better solution, I be-
lieve, is provided by the analogous kurgans of southern Russia
and the "royal tombs" at Alaca Huyuk. At the Anatolian site,
"bones of sacrificed animals were found in situ on the roofs of
the graves." 80 In the Timber Graves north of the Caspian, ar-
chaeologists have frequently found "horses buried above the
roof in the covering barrow." 81 Although perhaps common in
various societies within the horse-breeding koine, the dispatch
of a horse to accompany a warrior in the afterlife was certainly
a primitive Indo-European practice. At the funerals of Ger-
manic warriors, Tacitus tells us, horses were sometimes slaugh-
tered, and a tumulus was heaped over the remains of both war-
rior and horse. 82 So far as the Mycenaean world is concerned,
our evidence is not limited to Homer's description of Patro-
clus's funeral pyre, with the bones of slaughtered men and
horses lying epimix around its periphery. That in their funerary
rites the lords of the Marathon plain at least occasionally sac-
rificed horses is shown by the slaughtered team in the fifteenth-
century tholos (the tholos lies only a kilometer east of the
Vrana tumuli). It may very well be, then, as James Muhly has
suggested, 8 * that after the deceased human was interred in
Grave 3 of Tumulus I at Vrana, a horse was slaughtered over
the lid of the grave, and the tumulus was then heaped over the
grave and the horse. However the horse skeleton is to be ex-
plained, the tumuli at Vrana and at Thorikos indicate that At-
tica was taken over no later than the Argolid and Messenia.
The evidence for Thessaly is less clear. 84 In part this may be
the result of Thessaly's peculiarities. The region is essentially a
- Mellink, "Royal Tombs," 55.
- Piggott, Earliest Wheeled Transport, 91.
- Tacitus, Germania 27.
- Muhly, "On the Shaft Graves," 312.
- For Mycenaean Thessaly, see now B. Feuer, The Northern Myce-
naean Border in Thessaly (B.A.R. International Series, no. 176) (Oxford:
B.A.R., 1983).
IpO