Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (13 page)

Only with the establishment of a Hittite state did the Hittite people truly come into being as a nation—one that had Hatti mothers and cousins and uncles. They raided Syria and Mesopotamia, fought with the other great kingdoms of the day (including Egypt), and are mentioned in the Bible.

The Hittites’ culture became radically changed by mixture with the Hatti and with other peoples, particularly the Mitanni—both their Old Indic–speaking
maryannu
rulers and their non-Indo-European Hurrian subjects—with whose kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, to the southeast of Hattusa, the Hittites were often at odds. The Hittites managed to maintain their language for half a millennium, but at the end of the Bronze Age in the early twelfth century
BC
their kingdom was overwhelmed by the convulsions traditionally ascribed to the little-known Sea Peoples, who overran and destroyed many realms in the Levant, particularly in Syria and Palestine, but also in Egypt and Greece.
⁴⁰
A branch of the Hittite dynasty managed to survive for several more generations in Carchemish, but the Hittites as a people disappeared.
⁴¹
The monumental stone Lion Gate of the Hittite capital city still stands today at the entrance to the ruins of Hattusa
⁴²
in Central Anatolia.

The Maryannu

The first Indo-European people of the second wave (Group B) who left clear records of their presence are the Old Indic–speaking chariot warriors known as the
maryannu.
They formed the ruling class of the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, the center of which was located in the area of northern Mesopotamia and northern Syria. The rulers of this kingdom have Old Indic names;
⁴³
the names of the gods they worshiped are Old Indic; the root
marya-
of their name
maryannu
‘chariot warrior’ is Old Indic;
⁴⁴
and words for chariots, horses, horse training, and other elements of their culture are Old Indic. Though the Mitanni texts are written in the local non-Indo-European language, Hurrian, which survived at the expense of the invaders’ Old Indic language, the
maryannu
clearly spoke Indic, not Hurrian, at least in the beginning, and the Mitanni Kingdom must therefore have been Indic in origin.
⁴⁵
How exactly they established their kingdom and maintained their Indic language long enough that it could be preserved as names and loanwords after it ceased to be spoken is unknown, but there is no question about their ethnolinguistic origins. The early Mitanni rulers must have spoken Old Indic, and they were chariot warriors—or, more likely, the Old Indic–speaking rulers had a large comitatus consisting of chariot warriors.
⁴⁶

Moreover, they must have brought chariots, the technology of chariot warfare, and the knowledge of horses with them to the Mitanni area. If they had not, and the Hurrians, the local non-Indo-European people, had possessed chariots and had known how to use them, first the Hurrians would probably have prevailed against the Old Indic invaders. Second, the Mitanni texts would not have Old Indic words for these things, and they would not have Old Indic names for their rulers;
⁴⁷
they would have Hurrian words, or other local ancient Near Eastern ones. If the
maryannu
had learned about chariots, horses, and chariot warfare from the Hurrians, they would not have influenced the Hurrian language and culture in this way.

The reverse is also true. If the
maryannu
had
not
known about chariots, horses, chariot warfare, horse training, and so forth before entering Upper Mesopotamia, but learned them from the Hurrians or other ancient Near Eastern peoples after they arrived, the words for these things in the famous horse-training manual of Kikkuli would be in a non-Indo-European language—either Hurrian or some other ancient Near Eastern language, such as Assyrian. But the Kikkuli text has Old Indic words for them, most of which are inherited from Indo-European, not Hurrian or other ancient Near Eastern words.
⁴⁸
The “localist” Mitanni theory is impossible.
⁴⁹

By the same token, there are no words from Dravidian or Munda or other Indian subcontinent languages in the Mitanni material. If the
maryannu
had come from the Indian subcontinent, their language would have non-Indo-European words for the horse and chariot, as well as for cultural features known to have existed in earlier times in India, such as cattle, grain, and many other things. But Old Indic, both in Mitanni and in India, shares the same cultural vocabulary, which is Indo-European—and therefore Central Eurasian—in origin.

Because it is not possible to derive the Mesopotamian Indic subgroup from the subcontinental Indic subgroup or vice versa, both must have derived from one and the same ancestral Old Indic group. Their territory must have been invaded by the Iranians, who expanded southward into Iran at their expense, leaving the two subgroups separated from each other, as has long been argued on the basis of comparative studies of Indic and Iranian mythology.
⁵⁰

The Mitanni Kingdom was founded in the late sixteenth century
BC
and lasted as an independent realm until it was defeated by the Hittite king Sup-piluliuma between 1340 and 1325
BC
. Though the Mitanni shortly thereafter broke free of the Hittites, they soon came under the control of the Assyrians. King Šattuara II tried to reestablish the Mitanni state in about 1265, but he was defeated and driven from the realm around 1260 by the Assyrian king Salmanasar I (r. 1273–1244).
⁵¹

Northern India

The archaeological evidence for the migration of the Old Indic speakers into northwestern India remains unclear down to the present. Nevertheless, the Old Indic language unquestionably is intrusive in India, having entered the subcontinent from the northwest. Moreover, the appearance of the early Old Indic speakers in India is explicitly represented in the earliest legends of their descendants as an immigrant, conquering nation imposing itself on local peoples who were non-Indo-European in race, language, and culture.
⁵²
This is absolutely clear in the most ancient text,
⁵³
the
Rig Veda,
and continues in much later compositions such as the Indian national epic, the
Mahâbhârata,
especially in its oldest core sections. These early warlike immigrants herded cattle, fought from horse-drawn chariots, and had a highly patriarchal society. They were, simply put, Indo-Europeans.
⁵⁴

The Indo-European conquest of India did not end with the Vedas. It continued over a period of centuries, as the Old Indic-speaking people spread their language and culture across northern India and points beyond. At the same time, the local peoples of India heavily influenced the newcomers, who mixed with them in every way conceivable, eventually producing a distinctive new hybrid culture.
⁵⁵

Mycenaean Greece

The single most remarkable archaeological event in the protohistorical period of Greece is the appearance around 1600
BC
of the monumental, treasure-filled burials known as the Shaft Graves. The weapons, golden grave goods, and other artifacts found in the grave circles at Mycenae are completely unprecedented in Greece and can only be explained as intrusive foreign cultural elements. In other words, these archaeological materials, which are now firmly identified with the Mycenaean Greeks, were introduced by them.
⁵⁶
The Mycenaeans are the first Indo-Europeans known to have arrived in the area of the Greek Aegean, which had long been occupied by non-Indo-European-speaking peoples. This has received additional confirmation from linguistics, which has shown that Mycenaean Greek precedes all of the later known ancient Greek dialects.
⁵⁷
The earliest texts date to the fourteenth century
BC
and include the palace archives of Knossos, Crete, in which numerous chariots and chariot parts are mentioned and catalogued. Moreover, Mycenaean artistic portrayals of war chariots have been found at Mycenae, from the sixteenth to fifteenth centuries
BC
.
⁵⁸
It cannot be doubted that the Mycenaeans had and used chariots in their conquest of Greece.

The Yellow River Valley

The war chariot and some other elements of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex appeared in China
⁵⁹
somewhat before the twelfth century
BC
. Burials in the royal necropolis found in the ruins of the late Shang capital at Anyang on the north bank of the Yellow River include numerous chariots and their horses, often along with the chariot warriors and their weapons.
⁶⁰
The chariots have many spokes rather than only four or six, the typical numbers used in the ancient Near East; they thus have extremely close analogues to contemporaneous chariots found in the Caucasus.
⁶¹
They are also often found together with “northern” type knives typical of the steppe zone.
⁶²
It is now accepted that the chariot is an intrusive cultural artifact that entered Shang China from the north or northwest without any wheeled-vehicle precursors.
⁶³
The practice of burying chariots along with their horses and young men with weapons who seem to be their drivers and archers
⁶⁴
is a distinctive mark of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, which at that time was undoubtedly still exclusively Indo-European. Such burials are frequently found at Shang sites, usually in association with the burial of high-ranking noblemen.
⁶⁵
As noted, historical sources on Central Eurasia from Antiquity through the Early Middle Ages attest that the men who belonged to a lord’s comitatus were buried together with him and their horses, weapons, and valuables. It is also significant that the first written Chinese texts, the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, began to be composed at about the same time. Although there seems to be no direct connection between this writing system and any other known system,
⁶⁶
the as-yet-unidentified Indo-European people who brought the chariots to China may well have brought the
idea
of writing
⁶⁷
as well.