Gimbutas’ Kurgan theory
However certain Hermes and Wiesner were that horses were seldom ridden in Neolithic or Bronze Age Europe and the Near East, neither of them excluded the possibility that on the Eurasian steppe—the natural habitat of the wild horse— good riding may have been common already in the third millennium bc. In the second half of the twentieth century belief spread that on the steppe men were routinely riding horses not only all through the second millennium bc but already in the third, the fourth, or even the fifth, and that through all that time they were controlling their mounts well enough to engage in some kind of armed combat. The belief was bolstered early in the 1960s by Dmitriy Telegin’s excavations of a Neolithic village at Dereivka, on the right bank of the middle Dnieper. Telegin found that the several dozen people in the village, which was carbon dated to ca.
4000 bc, regularly ate horsemeat (three-fourths of the bones from hearths and kitchen dumps were horse bones). Concluding from the osteological evidence that the horses were domesticated rather than wild, and assuming that domesticated horses must have been controlled by herders on horseback, Telegin looked for signs of riding. Among the several graves that he excavated Telegin found a “head and hoofs” burial of a stallion, a ritual common on the steppe during the Iron Age and a sure sign of a riding society. In other sectors of his Dereivka excavations Telegin found six perforated antler tines, which he interpreted as cheekpieces for bridles.5 For more than a generation the Dereivka “evidence” muddied the history of horsemanship, but in 1997 David Anthony and Dorcas Brown carbon dated the skull from the head and hoofs burial of the stallion and learned that the burial was an Iron Age intrusion into an otherwise Neolithic site: the stallion died no earlier than 700 bc and possibly as late as 200 bc.6 As for the six “cheekpieces,” the perforated antler tines at Neolithic Dereivka—as at Neolithic villages far removed from horse country—can be more easily identified as piercing or boring tools.7
That the Dereivka and other Neolithic antler tines were cheekpieces was argued most vigorously by Marija Gimbutas, who headed the Indo-European program at UCLA, founded the Journal of Indo-European Studies, and from the 1960s until her death in 1994 was one of the English-speaking world’s most celebrated scholars. Gimbutas argued that horses were commonly bitted, bridled and ridden on the steppe already in the fifth millennium bc. Over three decades of publication Gimbutas’ principal thesis—her “Kurgan theory”—was that from the fifth to the third millennium bc Europe was Indo-Europeanized as waves of riders from the steppe invaded and conquered Europe, bringing with them their Indo-European languages and their warlike way of life, and erecting conspicuous kurgans (in Russian, a burial mound or barrow is a kurgan) in which to bury their chiefs.8
Although not many kurgans dating so early as the fourth millennium bc have been found, Gimbutas was perhaps correct in saying that PIE speakers buried their leaders under kurgans. As Benjamin Fortson has summarized the topic,
Ancient IE texts describing burials, especially of kings or warriors, are known from several branches, and although they do not agree with one another in every detail, they allow us to piece together a reasonably good picture of PIE burial practices. A dead person was buried in his own individual tomb that was like a mortuary house and heaped over with earth (a tumulus or burial mound). The corpse was sometimes cremated; this was the norm in the Indo- Iranian world and a special honor for heroes in ancient Scandinavia. Buried with the deceased were various grave goods, including ornaments, food, clothing, weapons, tools, and often wheeled vehicles, sacrificed animals, and even people. All these things would be needed in the afterlife.9
Although the practice of heaping up a tumulus over the grave of a deceased notable—and stocking the grave with a lavish corredo—may have been common among PIE speakers, it was not restricted to them. Kurgans—thousands of them— were erected especially on the Eurasian steppe, but tumuli were also raised not only in southern Caucasia, Anatolia and Europe, but also in places remote from anything Indo-European: the Levant, Mongolia, China, Japan, Neolithic Britain, and even the lands roamed by the Mound Builders during the Middle Woodland period of North America. Burial under a tumulus was obviously a high priority for the rich and powerful, who wished to spend the Afterlife in a home that was both spacious and pre-eminent. The epitome of burial mounds is Khufu’s pyramid at Giza.
While the PIE speakers may have buried their leaders under kurgans, it is not likely that they were warlike, and it is quite impossible that they were horseback riders. Against the “riders” character of steppe prehistory a few scholars, who were knowledgeable about both horses and steppe archaeology, objected that there was no solid evidence for riding on the steppe during the Neolithic period or even the Bronze Age. Already in 1956 the hippologist Franz HanCar had made the point clearly, although in a huge German book that few American historians read or even knew about.10 By 1990 the same point had been made by Colin Renfrew, Marsha Levine and relentlessly by Alexander Hausler. In a series of articles in specialized German periodicals Hausler dismissed the Gimbutas reconstruction of steppe prehistory and the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe as a Phantasieprodukt.11 Soviet archaeologists also, finding little or no evidence of riding in Neolithic contexts, tended to be critical of Gimbutas’ reconstruction. Especially notable among the Soviet skeptics was Elena Kuz’mina.12
Research on chariotry in the Late Bronze Age steered me toward Hancar, Hausler and the skeptics, and eventually I addressed the riding question in detail.13 My conclusions were that—as the skeptics had been saying for some time—mounted combat began no earlier than the tenth century BC, whether on the steppe or anywhere else (it appears that early in the Iron Age superior bitting, especially the use ofjointed snaffle bits, for the first time made secure riding possible). From the late eighth to the early fifth century bc men on horseback dominated the ancient world, first in the Kimmerian and Skythian raids and then in the Median and Persian empires. At Plataia in 479 bc the Persian cavalry was virtually annihilated by Greek hoplites, and for the rest of classical antiquity cavalry’s role on the battlefield was secondary to that of heavy infantry.
Prior to the tenth century BC men had indeed ridden horses from time to time, but mounted warriors were of no consequence and were nowhere mentioned or portrayed. Although occasional riding had been done all through the second millennium bc it was tentative and insecure. The few textual references to riders in this period are never to mounted warriors, and when a rider is depicted in a relief—usually as a fugitive from a chariot battle—or on a figurine he is sitting not just behind the withers, where he belongs, but toward the rear of the horse. Chariotry was therefore the only military horse troop during the second millennium BC, and large kingdoms employed thousands of chariot drivers and chariot archers. No riding of horses is attested anywhere, either pictorially or textually, until shortly before 2000 bc. A corollary of all this is that Gimbutas’ narrative— that from the fifth to the third millennium BC Europe was Indo-Europeanized by waves of mounted warriors from the steppes—is indeed a Phantasieprodukt, to use Hausler’s term.
