Over the long term it would have been very difficult to manage horse herds without riding them. Anywhere that we see a sustained, long-term dependence on domesticated horses, riding is implied for herd management alone. Riding began in the Pontic-Caspian steppes before 3700 BCE, or before the Botai-Tersek culture appeared in the Kazakh steppes. It may well have started before 4200 BCE. It spread outside the Pontic-Caspian steppes between 3700 and 3000 BCE, as shown by increases in horse bones in southeastern Europe, central Europe, the Caucasus, and northern Kazakhstan.
THE ECONOMIC AND MILITARY EFFECTS
OF HORSEBACK RIDING
A person on foot can herd about two hundred sheep with a good herding dog. On horseback, with the same dog, that single person can herd about five hundred.35 Riding greatly increased the efficiency and therefore the scale and productivity of herding in the Eurasian grasslands. More cattle and sheep could be owned and controlled by riders than by pedestrian herders, which permitted a greater accumulation of animal wealth. Larger herds, of course, required larger pastures, and the desire for larger pastures would have caused a general renegotiation of tribal frontiers, a series of boundary conflicts. Victory in tribal warfare depended largely on forging alliances and mobilizing larger forces than your enemy, and so intensified warfare stimulated efforts to build alliances through feasts and the redistribution of wealth. Gifts were effective both in building alliances before conflicts and in sealing agreements after them. An increase in boundary conflicts would thus have encouraged more long-distance trade to acquire prestigious goods, as well as elaborate feasts and public ceremonies to forge alliances. This early phase of conflict, caused partly by herding on horseback, might be visible archaeologically in the horizon of polished stone mace-heads and body decorations (copper, gold, boars-tusk, and shell ornaments) that spread across the western steppes with the earliest herding economies about 5000–4200 BCE.36
Horses were valuable and easily stolen, and riding increased the efficiency of stealing cattle. When American Indians in the North American Plains first began to ride, chronic horse-stealing raids soured relationships even between tribes that had been friendly. Riding also was an excellent way to retreat quickly; often the most dangerous part of tribal raiding on foot was the running retreat after a raid. Eneolithic war parties might have left their horses under guard and attacked on foot, as many American Indians did in the early decades of horse warfare in the Plains. But even if horses were used for nothing more than transportation to and from the raid, the rapidity and reach of mounted raiders would have changed raiding tactics, status-seeking behaviors, alliance-building, displays of wealth, and settlement patterns. Thus riding cannot be cleanly separated from warfare.37
Many experts have suggested that horses were not ridden in warfare until after about 1500–1000 BCE, but they failed to differentiate between mounted raiding, which probably is very old, and cavalry, which was invented in the Iron Age after about 1000 BCE.38 Eneolithic tribal herders probably rode horses in inter-clan raids before 4000 BCE, but they were not like the Huns sweeping out of the steppes on armies of shaggy horses. What is intriguing about the Huns and their more ancient cousins, the Scythians, was that they formed armies. During the Iron Age the Scythians, essentially tribal in most other aspects of their political organization, became organized in their military operations like the formal armies of urban states. That required a change in ideology—how a warrior thought about himself, his role, and his responsibilities—as well as in the technology of mounted warfare—how weapons were used from horseback. Probably the change in weapons came first.
Mounted archery probably was not yet very effective before the Iron Age, for three reasons. The bows reconstructed from their traces in steppe Bronze Age graves were more than 1 m long and up to 1.5 m, or almost five feet, in length, which would clearly have made them clumsy to use from horseback; the arrowheads were chipped from flint or made from bone in widely varying sizes and weights, implying a nonstandardized, individualized array of arrow lengths and weights; and, finally, the bases of most arrowheads were made to fit into a hollow or split shaft, which weakened the arrow or required a separate hollow foreshaft for the attachment of the point. The more powerful the bow, and the higher the impact on striking a target, the more likely the arrow was to split, if the shaft had already been split to secure the point. Stemmed and triangular flint points, common before the Iron Age, were made to be inserted into a separate foreshaft with a hollow socket made of reed or wood (for stemmed points), or were set into a split shaft (for triangular points). The long bows, irregular arrow sizes, and less-than-optimal attachments between points and arrows together reduced the military effectiveness of early mounted archery. Before the Iron Age mounted raiders could harass tribal war bands, disrupt harvests in farming villages, or steal cattle, but that is not the same as defeating a disciplined army. Tribal raiding by small groups of riders in eastern Europe did not pose a threat to walled cities in Mesopotamia, and so was ignored by the kings and generals of the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean.39
The invention of the short, recurved, compound bow (the “cupid” bow) around 1000 BCE made it possible for riders to carry a powerful bow short enough to swing over the horse’s rear. For the first time arrows could be fired behind the rider with penetrating power. This maneuver, later known as the “Parthian shot,” was immortalized as the iconic image of the steppe archer. Cast bronze socketed arrowheads of standard weights and sizes also appeared in the Early Iron Age. A socketed arrowhead did not require a split-shaft mount, so arrows with socketed arrowheads did not split despite the power of the bow; they also did not need a separate foreshaft, and so arrows could be simpler and more streamlined. Reusable moulds were invented so that smiths could produce hundreds of socketed arrowheads of standard weight and size. Archers now had a much wider field of fire—to the rear, the front, and the left—and could carry dozens of standardized arrows. An army of mounted archers could now fill the sky with arrows that struck with killing power.40
But organizing an army of mounted archers was not a simple matter. The technical advances in bows, arrows, and casting were meaningless without a matching change in mentality, in the identity of the fighter, from a heroic single warrior to a nameless soldier. An ideological model of fighting appropriate for a state had to be grafted onto the mentality of tribal horseback riders. Pre-Iron-Age warfare in the Eurasian steppes, from what we can glean from sources like the Iliad and the Rig Veda, probably emphasized personal glory and heroism. Tribal warfare generally was conducted by forces that never drilled as a unit, often could choose to ignore their leaders, and valued personal bravery above following orders.41 In contrast, the tactics and ideology of state warfare depended on large disciplined units of anonymous soldiers who obeyed a general. These tactics, and the soldier mentality that went with them, were not applied to riders before 1000 BCE, partly because the short bows and standardized arrows that would make mounted archery truly threatening had not yet been invented. As mounted archers gained in firepower, someone on the edge of the civilized world began to organize them into armies. That seems to have occurred about 1000–900 BCE. Cavalry soon swept chariotry from the battlefield, and a new era in warfare began. But it would be grossly inappropriate to apply that later model of mounted warfare to the Eneolithic.
Riding began in the region identified as the Proto-Indo-European homeland. To understand how riding affected the spread of Indo-European languages we have to pick up the thread of the archaeological narrative that ended in chapter 9.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The End of Old Europe and the Rise of the Steppe
By 4300–4200 BCE Old Europe was at its peak. The Varna cemetery in eastern Bulgaria had the most ostentatious funerals in the world, richer than anything of the same age in the Near East. Among the 281 graves at Varna, 61 (22%) contained more than three thousand golden objects together weighing 6 kg (13.2 lb). Two thousand of these were found in just four graves (1, 4, 36, and
43). Grave 43, an adult male, had golden beads, armrings, and rings totaling 1,516 grams (3.37 lb), including a copper axe-adze with a gold-sheathed handle.1 Golden ornaments have also been found in tell settlements in the lower Danube valley, at Gumelniţa, Vidra, and at Hotnitsa (a 310-gm cache of golden ornaments). A few men in these communities played prominent social roles as chiefs or clan leaders, symbolized by the public display of shining gold ornaments and cast copper weapons.
Thousands of settlements with broadly similar ceramics, houses, and female figurines were occupied between about 4500 and 4100 BCE in eastern Bulgaria (Varna), the upland plains of Balkan Thrace (KaranovoVI), the upper part of the Lower Danube valley in western Bulgaria and Romania (Krivodol-Sălcuta), and the broad riverine plains of the lower Danube valley (Gumelniţa) (figure 11.1). Beautifully painted ceramic vessels, some almost 1 m tall and fired at temperatures of over 800˚C, lined the walls of their two-storied houses. Conventions in ceramic design and ritual were shared over large regions. The crafts of metallurgy, ceramics, and even flint working became so refined that they must have required master craft specialists who were patronized and supported by chiefs. In spite of this, power was not obviously centralized in any one village. Perhaps, as John Chapman observed, it was a time when the restricted resources (gold, copper, Spondylus shell) were not critical, and the critical resources (land, timber, labor, marriage partners) were not seriously restricted. This could have prevented any one region or town from dominating others.2
Figure 11.1 Map of Old Europe at 4500–4000 BCE.
Towns in the high plains atop the Balkans and in the fertile lower Danube valley formed high tells. Settlements fixed in one place for so long imply fixed agricultural fields and a rigid system of land tenure around each tell. The settlement on level VI at Karanovo in the Balkans was the type site for the period. About fifty houses crowded together in orderly rows inside a protective wooden palisade wall atop a massive 12-m (40-ft) tell. Many tells were surrounded by substantial towns. At Bereket, not far from Karanovo, the central part of the tell was 250 m in diameter and had cultural deposits 17.5 m (57 ft) thick, but even 300–600 m away from this central eminence the occupation deposits were 1–3 m thick. Surveys at Podgoritsa in northeastern Bulgaria also found substantial off-tell settlement.3
Around 4200–4100 BCE the climate began to shift, an event called the Piora Oscillation in studies of Swiss alpine glaciers. Solar insolation decreased, glaciers advanced in the Alps (which gave this episode its name), and winters became much colder.4 Variations in temperature in the northern hemisphere are recorded in the annual growth rings in oaks preserved in bogs in Germany and in annual ice layers in the GISP2 glacial ice core from Greenland. According to these sources, extremely cold years happened first in 4120 and 4040 BCE. They were harbingers of a 140-year-long, bitterly cold period lasting from 3960 to 3821 BCE, with temperatures colder than at any time in the previous two thousand years. Investigations led by Douglass Bailey in the lower Danube valley showed that floods occurred more frequently and erosion degraded the riverine floodplains where crops were grown. Agriculture in the lower Danube valley shifted to more cold-tolerant rye in some settlements.5 Quickly these and perhaps other stresses accumulated to create an enormous crisis.
Between about 4200 and 3900 BCE more than six hundred tell settlements of the Gumelniţa, Karanovo VI, and Varna cultures were burned and abandoned in the lower Danube valley and eastern Bulgaria. Some of their residents dispersed temporarily into smaller villages like the Gumelniţa B1 hamlet of Jilava, southwest of Bucharest, with just five to six houses and a single-level cultural deposit. But Jilava was burned, apparently suddenly, leaving behind whole pots and many other artifacts.6 People scattered and became much more mobile, depending for their food on herds of sheep and cattle rather than fixed fields of grain. The forests did not regenerate; in fact, pollen cores show that the countryside became even more open and deforested.7 Relatively mild climatic conditions returned after 3760 BCE according to the German oaks, but by then the cultures of the lower Danube valley and the Balkans had changed dramatically. The cultures that appeared after about 3800 BCE did not regularly use female figurines in domestic rituals, no longer wore copper spiral bracelets or Spondylus-shell ornaments, made relatively plain pottery in a limited number of shapes, did not live on tells, and depended more on stockbreeding. Metallurgy, mining, and ceramic technology declined sharply in both volume and technical skill, and ceramics and metal objects changed markedly in style. The copper mines in the Balkans abruptly ceased production; copper-using cultures in central Europe and the Carpathians switched to Transylvanian and Hungarian ores about 4000 BCE, at the beginning of the Bodrogkeresztur culture in Hungary (see ore sources in figure 11.1). Oddly this was when metallurgy really began in western Hungary and nearby in Austria and central Europe.8 Metal objects now were made using new arsenical bronze alloys, and were of new types, including new weapons, daggers being the most important. “We are faced with the complete replacement of a culture,” the foremost expert on Eneolithic metallurgy E. N. Chernykh said. It was “a catastrophe of colossal scope … a complete cultural caesura,” according to the Bulgarian archaeologist H. Todorova.9
The end of Old Europe truncated a tradition that began with the Starcevo-Criş pioneers in 6200 BCE. Exactly what happened to Old Europe is the subject of a long, vigorous debate. Graves of the Suvorovo type, ascribed to immigrants from the steppes, appeared in the lower Danube valley just before the destruction of the tells. Settlements of the Cernavoda I type appeared just after. They regularly contain horse bones and ceramics exhibiting a mixture of steppe technology and indigenous Danubian shapes, and are ascribed to a mixed population of steppe immigrants and people from the tells. The number of abandoned sites and the rapid termination of many long-standing traditions in crafts, domestic rituals, decorative customs, body ornaments, housing styles, living arrangements, and economy suggest not a gradual evolution but an abrupt and probably violent end. At Hotnitsa on the Danube in north-central Bulgaria the burned houses of the final Eneolithic occupation contained human skeletons, interpreted as massacred inhabitants. The final Eneolithic destruction level at Yunatsite on the Balkan upland plain contained forty-six human skeletons. It looks like the tell towns of Old Europe fell to warfare, and, somehow, immigrants from the steppes were involved. But the primary causes of the crisis could have included climate change and related agricultural failures, or soil erosion and environmental degradation accumulated from centuries of intensive farming, or internecine warfare over declining timber and copper resources, or a combination of all these.10
The crisis did not immediately affect all of southeastern Europe. The most widespread settlement abandonments occurred in the lower Danube valley (Gumelniţa, northeastern Bulgaria, and the Bolgrad group), in eastern Bulgaria (Varna and related cultures), and in the mountain valleys of the Balkans (Karanovo VI), east of the Yantra River in Bulgaria and the Olt in Romania. This was where tell settlements, and the stable field systems they imply, were most common. In the Balkans, a well-cultivated, densely populated landscape occupied since the earliest Neolithic, no permanent settlements can be dated between 3800 and 3300 BCE. People probably still lived there, but herds of sheep grazed on the abandoned tells.
The traditions of Old Europe survived longer in western Bulgaria and western Romania (Krivodol-Sălcuţa IV–Bubanj Hum Ib). Here the settlement system had always been somewhat more flexible and less rooted; the sites of western Bulgaria usually did not form high tells. Old European ceramic types, house types, and figurine types were abandoned gradually during Sălcuţa IV, 4000–3500 BCE. Settlements that were occupied during the crisis, places like Telish-Redutite III and Galatin, moved to high, steep-sided promontories, but they retained mud-brick architecture, two-story houses, and cult and temple buildings.11 Many caves in the region were newly occupied, and since herders often use upland caves for shelter, this might suggest an increase in upland-lowland seasonal migrations by herders.
The Krivodol–Salcutsa–Bubanj Hum Ib people reoriented their external trade and exchange connections to the north and west, where their influence can be seen on the Lasinja-Balaton culture in western Hungary.
The Old European traditions of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture also survived and, in fact, seemed curiously reinvigorated. After 4000 BCE, in its Tripolye B2 phase, the Tripolye culture expanded eastward toward the Dnieper valley, creating ever larger agricultural towns, although none was rebuilt in one place long enough to form a tell. Domestic cults still used female figurines, and potters still made brightly painted fine lidded pots and storage jars 1 m high. Painted fine ceramics were mass-produced in the largest towns (Varvarovka VIII), and flint tools were mass-produced at flint-mining villages like Polivanov Yar on the Dniester.12 Cucuteni AB/Tripolye B2 settlements such as Veseli Kut (150 ha) contained hundreds of houses and apparently were preeminent places in a new settlement hierarchy. The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture forged new relationships with the copper-using cultures of eastern Hungary (Borogkeresztur) in the west and with the tribes of the steppes in the east.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 26
