Re: Goliath and Uriah the Hittite as IE -

From: Mark Odegard
Message: 502
Date: 1999-12-09

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?
 
--
Mark Odegard
markodegard@...