The Coming of the Greeksand was only a fraction the size of the Semitic. The PlE-speak-
ing community remained intact, playing no significant histor-
ical role, until the second quarter of the second millennium.
In the late seventeenth or early sixteenth century, individuals
and then whole communities of PIE speakers began leaving
their native lands (probably in the lake district of eastern An-
atolia). None of these movements of PIE speakers involved a
population much larger than that of one Mesopotamian city of
the first rank. Nor were the movements Wanderungen at all.
The relocations—some of them apparently by sea—were well
planned and organized, and their leaders knew where they were
going and what they would do when they got there. The PIE
speakers' object in leaving their native lands was to take control
of societies that were vulnerable and that could be profitably
exploited.
Takeovers rather than Volkerwanderungen are what seem to
have plagued the ancient world in the second millennium B.C.
The Indo-European takeovers appear to have been analogous to
the hyksos takeover of Egypt, and to the Kassite and Hurrian
takeovers of various communities in the Fertile Crescent (the
Kassites and the Hurrians may have been neighbors of the PIE
speakers before they set out on their adventures). For all of
these intruders, chariotry was essential: it was their mastery of
chariot warfare that made it possible for the intruders to con-
quer and then to dominate lands from Egypt and Greece to
India. The takeovers were motivated, it need hardly be said,
by the desire for power and wealth.
Our alternative framework has been constructed on the basis
of evidence from the civilized and semicivilized world, but it
also has implications for those lands for which we have no writ-
ten records at all. On the present thesis, the terminus post quern
for the arrival of PIE speakers in Italy and central Europe would
be ca. 1600 B.C. If evidence from either Italy or the Carpathian
Basin should indicate the practice of chariot warfare in the
middle of the second millennium, one could then begin to
make a case that the area in question had by then been taken
198