Alexander and Mark write:
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@...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gerry here: In The Alekseev Manuscript, the Neolithic site of Dereivka,
located in the mid Dneiper Valley, was excavated 15-20 years ago and
revealed several skulls of horses. Specialists agree that the finds
from Dereivka are examples of the domesticated horse; the site dates to
the fourth millennium BC. The domesticated horse was not used for meat
milk, or wool but rather for loading and riding. The first horse was
used as a loader animal for transport. The horse is depicted in Upper
Paleolithic cave paintings and in stone and bonre sculpting from a
number of caves in France and Spain. In pictures of the horse, a bridle
is represented.
Gerry Reinhart-Waller
waluk@...