Page 93 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

before the harnessing of the horse, the first emigrants had already
left the steppes, and had gone south, attracted by the wealth of
metal and the skill of the metalworkers in the lands south of the
Caucasus. They had carved out for themselves a kingdom in

northeast Asia Minor, and there, at Alaca Huyuk, the shaft graves
of their kings have been found, wooden chambers below ground
in which the princes lay, surrounded by a wealth of the metal

they had come to seek.
Now with the advent of the oxcart and the horse-drawn
chariot the battle-ax people begin to move north and to fan out

east and west. The land into which they move is not empty.
Outlying communities of herdsmen, and tribes still in the hunt­
ing stage, are overrun, learn the new art of chariotry, and join

the advance.
By the year 2000 b.c. the outward expansion of the herdsmen
of the south Russian steppes has been going on for some three or

four generations. The advance guards of the movement are ap­
proaching the Rhine to the west, and washing against the Ural
mountains to the east. Some semblance of coherence is, neverthe­

less, preserved, and the loose confederacy of tribe with tribe,
which had existed in the homeland between the Black Sea and

the Caspian, still survives. The advance, though swifter than any
movement of peoples before, is still not so rapid as to disintegrate
tribal union. With the horse chariot messengers can, and do,

travel from end to end of the expanding territory in a matter of
a few months.
A child born in 2000 b.c. among the nomads grows up aware

of a loose kinship with herdsmen over the length and breadth of
central and eastern Europe. He will himself be a wanderer,
probably never in all his life sleeping under a more permanent

roof than the hide or felt tents of his people. As far as he re­
gards anywhere as his “home,” other than the place where he

encamped last night, he looks back to the land north of the
Caucasus, probably to the area of present-day Maikop, where the
rich graves of the ancient princes of his people—resembling
closely the wooden grave chambers of Alaca Huyuk—lie be­

neath their green turf barrows.
He will grow up in recognizably the same milieu, wherever