Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

of terms throws light on the chronology of the development of horseback riding. It
appeared early in the history of Iranian dialects after their separation from Indo-Aryan
and other Aryan groups. Some general terms (such as *sed- “to sit”) acquired in Iranian
a specialized meaning connected to riding a donkey (Bactrian xarobalano with a
possible meaning “sitting on a donkey” 399 ) or horse, but this meaning cannot be
reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European. This conclusion is corroborated by the data
from other Indo-European dialects. Only some of them (such as Baltic, Germanic and
Celtic) have terms specialized for horseback riding, but they derive from the
terminology of movement particularly connected with vehicles, cf. for instance
Lithuanian jóti “ride horseback” cognate with Hittite iya- “move by vehicle”. 400 A
recent suggestion concerning the Proto-Indo-European form reflected in Latin eques
“cavalryman = knight (a social status); horse” = Homeric Greek flppÒta “horseman,
knight” as an Indo-European word for horseback rider 401 still relies on the relatively
late development of the individual dialects. Judging from the linguistic data, one should
conclude that, if horseback riding really began at the turn of the IV mil. B.C. before the
dispersal of Proto-Indo-European, it did not leave traces in the vocabulary of the later
dialects: the older terms connected with horseback riding were not specific or may have
been ousted by later terminology. Thus it cannot be proven that this type of ancient
(probably quite primitive) horseback riding had originally been connected with Indo-
Europeans. Since archaeological traces of horse riding, at least in its rudimentary form,
become numerous in Northern Kazakhstan in the second half of the IV mil. B.C., the
Proto-Yenisseyan language is a likely candidate. And so the possible link between
399 Livshic 1969, 60, with references on comparable Iranian (Scythian and Ossetic) terms; Steblin-
Kamenskij 1981, 323-324.
400 Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984/1995, I, 627. The main data have already been collected in Buck 1988,
714-715 (meaning a , mostly denoted by verbs derived from the name for horse). Some of the verbs that
Buck gives with meaning a (“to ride horseback”) are found in the most ancient languages under meaning
b (“to move in a vehicle”).
401 Meid 1994; cf. Adams, Mallory and Miller 1997, 277. It seems worth noting that a comparable suffix
can be seen in Cuneiform Luwian a-aÍ-Íu-u-ut-t[i (KUB XXXV 100 Rs. 3, Starke 1985, 408; 1995, 118,
n.236); according to an old suggestion by Sturtevant (recently discussed again by Schmalstieg) the sign -
u- might have a phonetic value [o] as in Hurrian cuneiform writing. Unfortunately, the text is broken,
and the meaning of the derivative in Luwian is unclear. A similar suffix -uti- can be supposed in Lycian
axuti “sacrifice” but there it alternates with -ãti- (see above).