Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

premolars from Northern Kazakhstan in the second half of the IV mil. B.C. 133 A
question of a general character needs to be solved in connection with these findings.
Specialists in hippology insist on the necessity of a friendly attitude towards the horse,
seeing in it a necessary prerequisite to successful domestication and safe riding. 134 Is it
possible that the early stages of domestication of the horse were dominated by the
opposite cruel attitude (probably simply due to lack of experience)? If not, then the
damaged teeth point to the cultic use of the horse, which might have been severely
bitted before a sacrifice.
Early data on the spread of horses have been found to the west of the Black Sea on
the Balkans as well. 135 Moreover, it seems possible that not only the whole Pontic-
Caspian area but the neighboring parts of the Southern Urals, Kazakhstan and Western
Siberian 136 regions as well may have been important for the early use of the horse as a
preferred object of hunting and the main cultic animal, later leading to its
domestication.
It is hardly possible that only one linguistic group participated in this achievement.
Some types of domesticated animals were borrowed with their names 137 (thus the
spread of the Eastern Asian name, like Sino-Tibetan *mrâH/mrâM, can be explained). No
matter where and when exactly (in the IV-III millenia B.C.) the horse had been
133 Anthony 1995. On the basis of experimental studies it has been suggested that the stallion was bitted
over a period of no less than 350 hours of riding (Anthony ib., 559) (for the interpretation using methods
of experimental archaeology, see Spruytte 1977; Antony ib.).
134 Starke 1995, passim.
135 Semenov 1974, 294; Bökönyi 1974; 1978; Gheorghiu 1993; 1994; Häusler 1994. On the other parts of
Europe, see Uerpmann 1990; Benecke 1994; Østmo 1997, 288 (with bibliography).
136 Levine 1990. It seems possible that the domestication of an Eastern Asiatic type of wild horse has
been reflected in the name widely spread in Sino-Tibetan languages (*mrâH/mrâM) and borrowed into
the other languages of Eastern and Southern Asia (Polivanov 1928, 52-54; 1968, 123, 337-338;
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984/1995, I, 471, 832; Peiros and Starostin 1996, 35-36 (N 126)); on Nahali
mav “horse” and Dravidian terms (Tamil mâ “horse” a.o.), cf. Burrow and Emenau 1986, 425, N 4780; on
the words of Indo-European languages possibly connected to this term, see below. The problem of the
precursors of the later Petrovka and Arkaim-Sintashta metallurgical city culture of the II mil. B.C.
seems particularly interesting, for which Iranian parallels have been suggested (Zdanovich 1988; 1989;
Kuz’mina 1997, 87-88 (bibliography)). According to the typology established by Childe, metallurgy is
needed for work on chariots.
137 Thus the Indo-European homeland need not be identical to the area of horse domestication, but
should be connected to it. The ways in which names and technical knowledge (particularly of training
devices, Starke 1995) spread should be explored.