Alexander Stolbov
writes:
If we believe that the horse and the spoked
wheel are IE peculiarities we have to explain where from Hyksos and Kassites of
19-18th cent. BC took these attributes. It could be Hittite or Luwian
avant-garde which had reached the Levant before the Hittite state in Anatolia
was established.
Advanced warmaking technology seems
to diffuse very fast. From the (secondary) references I've seen, the
spoke-wheeled, horse-drawn war chariot first appears in full glory in explicity
Indo-Iranian contexts in the vicinity of the Caspian very close to 2000
BCE.
From my reading it seems that
horses were still being controlled with nose-rings. Evidence from King Tut's
tomb has the king's chariot thus, while not that much later, Ramses II's
monuments to himself show the horses being controlled with a bridle. The
depiction in Tut's tomb may merely be artistic conservativism on the part of the
artists, but may also reflect something real. The book on the archaeology
of the horse has not been written yet.
The online Britannica says the
Hyksos entered Egypt in the 1700s BCE, and took power ca 1630. They are not
quite so mysterious as they were in the past, but many questions still remain.
Were they a typical IE-style mannerbund? A steppe style confederacy a la
Attila's? Or a distinct people? The idea they used an IE language probably has
to be rejected out of hand, but it is not at all improbable IE speakers were
among them (Anatolians of some sort? proto-Indics?. Or were they Sea People
bringing their chariot technology with them?