“Five Different Indo-European roots for ‘horse’”

"Five Different Indo-European roots for `horse'"

"But it may perhaps be useful to add that in the context of the Near
Eastern evidence it is still not entirely clear to what extent the
origins of horse domestication are necessarily related to speakers of
an Indo-European language, there being five different Indo-European
roots for `horse' (Coleman 1988), and that there is likely to have
been a Hurrian/Proto-North-Caucasian component to this story, at least
in the context of the introduction of the domesticated horse into
Mesopotamia and northern Syria. Recent evidence from the Khabur
region of northeastern Syria strongly suggests that here at least the
horse arrived in association with Hurrian-speaking peoples (not the
Mittani!), first identified in the cuneiform records at the time of
Naram-Sin (c. 2554-18 BC). Certainly there are important Hurrian
city-states in this region by the last quarter of the third millennium
(Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 1997; Oates et. al. 2001, 393-4)
while, as we have seen, the earliest written documentation of the
horse belongs to the last century of this period. In a recent paper
Ivanov (1998) discusses the name of the horse in Hurrian, and comments
on the possible relationships, inter alia, of Sumerian anse.zi.zi,
Akkadian sisu (sisa'um) (*sisa'um), Hurrian esse, Armenian es
(`donkey'), Luwian assuwa. Unfortunately, our knowledge not only of
the early domestication of the horse but also the spread of the North
Caucasian, Hurrian, and satam dialects is at present inadequate to
resolve these questions.

We can conclude, however, that the domestic horse had certainly been
introduced into northern Syria and Mesopotamia by the last century of
the third millennium BC. Nor is there any doubt that in the second
millennium BC horses were both ridden and used to pull spoked-wheeled
chariots, indeed that the riding of the horse precedes by hundreds of
years the horse-training manual of the Mitannian Kikkuli and other
Hittite `horse-texts' of the Late Bronze Age (Kammenhuber 1961; Starke
1995). The military employment of horses as cavalry dates from at
least as early as the Assyrian armies of the ninth century BC (Oates
2003, pp. 123-124)."

Oates, Joan (2003), "A Note on the Early Evidence for Horse and the
Riding of Equids in Western Asia," in Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation
and the Horse, Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Kati Boyle (Eds.),
Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

M. Kelkar