side, with concentric circles and spirals; it only lacks the outer ring of radial
lines that encircles the gold side and suggests rays of light going out in all
directions. It is therefore tempting to explain the design by reference to the
old Indian theory, and to suppose that the bright face, displayed when the
horse was going to the right, represented the daytime sun, and the dark face,
shown when the horse was going to the left, represented the night-time sun
that travels unseen across the sky from west to east.
How old is all this?The myth of the Sun’s boat could be of any antiquity, as seagoing vessels had
existed for thousands of years before the break-up of the proto-Indo-
European unity. On the other hand, as noted in the Introduction, the myth of
the horse-drawn chariot, as we have it in the Rigveda, the Greek poets, and
elsewhere, cannot be proto-Indo-European, because such a vehicle only
became possible with the invention of the spoked wheel, which first appears
near the close of the third millennium. Of course, the sun might have been
pictured before that as a block wheel, or the god as driving a block-wheeled
cart, drawn by a stronger animal such as a bull; or he might have ridden on
horseback. But whether the horse and chariot version represents the modern-
ization of an older myth or a completely new concept, we have to suppose
that it spread like a wave, together with the techniques of chariot construction
and warfare, across Indo-European territories that were already well on the
way towards developing separate languages and cultures.
It was probably spread primarily by the fast-moving, chariot-borne warrior
bands that roamed widely in the mid-part of the second millennium and
by the poets who followed in their wake. The Scandinavian rock-carvings
and the Trundholm sun-horse are products of the Bronze Age culture that
flourished in southern Sweden and Norway, Denmark, and north Germany
contemporaneously with the Mycenaean civilization in Greece, and archaeo-
logical links with south-eastern Europe can in fact be traced.^54 There can be
no doubt that the people who brought it to the north, warriors with horses,
chariots, and battle-axes who had themselves interred in great round tumuli,
were Indo-Europeans. We have noted elsewhere that the early Mycenaean
civilization may itself have received input from Iranian-speaking invaders
from the steppes.
The notion that the Sun-god commands a yoked team of animals of some
(^54) Gelling–Davidson (1969), 102 f., 122, 128 f.; Glob (1974), 101, 109–11, 129, 158; cf.
H. Genz and others in Meller (2004), 186–93.
210 5. Sun and Daughter