The Mighty Dead by Adam Nicolson

Author:Adam Nicolson [Adam Nicolson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Some clues to this world of the horse can be found at a timber town, not that large, about 150 yards across, at a place called Sintashta, on the banks of the wide, gravelly Sintashta river, sweeping down through the grasslands east of the Urals and on the borders of Kazakhstan. A timber-reinforced wall with gates and towers surrounded the buildings, with a V-shaped ditch outside it. Inside there were about fifty houses (some have been eroded away by the river since), and in all of them people had been making bronze and copper swords, knives and axes.

It was clearly a violent, warrior society, with the need for weaponry and a defensive enclosure. In the nearby cemetery, more than half of all the people were buried with weapons, including nearly all the men, but some were also buried alongside something else, quite new: war chariots with light, spoked wheels. They are the oldest chariots to have been discovered, dating from about 2100–1800 BC, precisely the same moment as this book has been arguing for the genesis of the Iliad. The Sintashta people cannot be the ancestors of the Greeks – who must already have been far to the south-west – but to archaeologists it looks as if they might have been the ancestors of those Indo-European-speaking people who were making their way east of the Urals and on to northern India.

Sintashta – and some twenty equivalent settlements have now been found – is a cousin to the Homeric world. Here, as in Patroclus’s tomb in the Iliad, whole horses were sacrificed at the burials. Drivers were buried with bone, disc-shaped cheek-pieces, critical elements in the kind of bridle needed for tight control of chariot horses. There are some flint blades in the graves, which are thought to have been made for javelins – those light spears which can be thrown by a warrior on the ground or from a chariot. The chariots themselves are clearly fast, light war machines, quite different from the heavy transport wagons which had been around on the steppe for a thousand years. These have spoked not solid wheels about three feet in diameter, and are designed to be driven at a gallop. The chariot itself would have been skeletal, consisting of little more than a few struts. In the Iliad it is possible for one man to pick up a chariot to move it out of the way.

This is a combination of things that is deeply Homeric: chariot races fill the last but one book of the Iliad, at the funeral games Achilles stages for Patroclus, where skill in driving, in turning corners, could only have been achieved with the new cheek-piece bridles. At the same time, it is clear from the funerals of both Hector and Patroclus that these were giant communal events, great crowds of people attending the funerary rites of the heroes. Here too at Sintashta, one burial has the bones of six horses, four cows and two rams killed for the death of the great man.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.