History of the Ossetians - as I remember it.. Part I

(which means this may end up like 1066 and All That)

Let's see. Around 7000 years ago, there was a scatter of tribes farming along the big river valleys just north of the Black Sea. We have no idea who these folks were, but some of them at least were Proto-Indo-Europeans, or PIE people. They domesticated the horse and headed on out, all over Eurasia.

Some ended up way north in Russia. Way north. So far north that they were cut off from the PIE homeland and began to develop their own dialect of PIE - becoming proto-Indo-Iranians. (Are you following all of this?) Then they discovered that if you hooked a couple of their cute little horses up to a two wheeled cart you had a super fast little vehicle that impressed everyone, especially attractive young women. A revolution was in the making. Especially when they started using new composite bows from their little carts to shoot down anyone that got in their way: they had invented chariot warfare.

So after about 2000 BC they migrated south with these little carts and passed through a band of civilized settlements stretching between the Caspian and the mountains of Afghanistan- these were the BMAC People (sounds almost like Big Mac People). There the cart driving bowmen learned things like how to make bronze weapons and snort Soma. Some then went south east and ended up becoming the Aryans who settled into India and wrote the Rig Veda and all that other stuff, telling about all the fighting and thinking they had been doing among the BMAC folk. Apparently they had done of lot of both.

Another wave took their little battle carts and composite bows and realized that they had useful services to sell to the civilized powers of the ancient Near East, who like all civilized powers needed to control trade routes for vital resources, tin and copper in this case. Soon these new "military advisors" in the new style warfare did what powerful warrior elites often do - they took over, sometime around 1600 BC.

This led to the creation of the great chariot empires of the bronze age: the Mitanni, the Hyksos, and even the long lost cousins of the PIE People, the Hittites (who were really the Nesli). (It is possible that some of them went East and arrived just in time to teach the Shang Chinese how to use chariots). This lasted until everything fell apart in c. 1200 BC for reasons unknown (the siege of Troy and the fall of the Canaanite cities to the Hebrews were probably all a part of this).

BUT, there was still a group of the Indo-Iranians, minus the 'Indo-' who stayed out somewhere around the Caspian. They figured out better riding techniques, bred bigger horses, and decided they could ditch those clumsy battle carts and just fight as mounted archers. These Aryans then entered the Persian plateau where the word Aryan became Iran, the source of the country's name today. One tribe was the Medes and the others the Persians. They were, of course, a great people and later their king Koresh, or Cyrus, would be hailed as a Messiah by the Hebrews (but that's another story).

We want to go back out to the Aryan tribes north of the BMAC. They stayed out there on the steppes of Central Asia and Southern Russia for a LONG time, perfecting their riding skills and inventing long pants (something the Romans regarded as effeminate - real Roman men wore mini-skirts).

(stay tuned for Part II - the Horsemen)