The author holds, in opposition to the currently accepted theory, that the connection between the Indo-Europeans and horses is not so old as is generally supposed, that it was not the Indo-Europeans who were the first to tame the horse, but that they learned to domesticate it from other people dwelling over the eastern steppes of Asia, towards the end of the long period when they had a common language. To maintain this view, at least without inconsistency, the author adopts following premises, which, it goes without saying, are based upon some kind of evidence. 1) Of all the 11 known branch-tribes of the Indo-European family, it must have been the later Anatolian group consisting of the Hittites, the Luwians, and others, who left first their Heimat to start the Volkerwanderung, a view which is very near to Sturtevant. 2) They headed first towards the Kuban basin, then, during the third millennium, entered Anatolia through the Caucasian range. 3) In the vanguards of this migration were the Luwians, who, leaving the royal tombs of Maikop and Alaca Hdyuk behind, moved to Arzawa, the south-western part of the peninsula, and pressed on probably as far as the Aegean Sea. 4) The Luwians were followed by the Hittites, who pushed them onward from behind. The Hittites themselves settled ultimately inside the great bend of Halys, or Kizil Irmak. 5) A sun-god in the shape of a deer seems to have been worshipped among these Indo-European peoples of Anatolia (cf. the Luwian god of deer, Runta, Uruwanda). Next comes a linguistic fact. We have, in reality, no positive evidence to prove that the Indo-Euroaean dialects of Anatolia had any word to mean a horse to correspond to the Indo-European *ekwos, of which the Hittite form would have been something like *e-ku-wa. The only attested hieroglyphic Hittite a-i-wa must be, as Kronasser says, a loan-word from the Indo-Aryan dialect of the marijannis who ruled over the Hurrians of the Mitanni state. Based on this fact and supported by other reasoning, one comes to the following conclusion : the Indo-European peoples of Anatolia had not yet known the horse as a domestic animal, when they arrived there from beyond the Caucasian mountains. They learned its domestication from the Indo-Aryans of the Mitanni state only in the second millennium. This first conclusion leads to a second and more important one : sc. when the later Anatolian tribes started on their Wanderung, there was as yet no domesticated horse among those peoples of the Indo-European common language, or of already slightly differentiated dialects. As a matter of course, there was as yet no cult of the horse. Instead they were fostering a cult of the deer. After the emigration of the later Anatolians, sc. in the last period of the common language, there came from the East the knowledge of horse-taming, and thenceforward, the cult of the deer must have gradually been superseded by that of the horse.
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