More on the Coming of the Horse

Okay, it's a tic, but I'm still curious about the beginnings of civilization, and the coming of the horse. Here's Karen Armstrong again, with some tantalizing stuff. Armstsrong about "the axial age"--broadly speaking, the age of Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and, by a stretch, Zoarastor: conceptualized differently, of religious innovation in China, South Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

Why did the experience of suffering reach such a crescendo in the three core Axial regions? Some historians see the invasions of the nomadic Indo-European horsemen as a common factor in all these areas. These Aryan tribesmen came out of Central Asia and reached the Mediterranean by the end of the third millennium, were established in India and Iran by about 1200 BCE and were in China by the end of the second millennium. They brought with them a sense of vasts horizons and limitless possibilities, and, as a master race, had developed a tragically epic consciousness. They replaced the old stable and more primitive consciousness. They replaced the old stable and more primitive communities, but only after periods of intense conflict and distress, which might account for the Axial Age malaise.

-- Karen Armstrong, Buddha 14 (2001)

Unfortunately, aving laid out so provocative a thesis, she suavely undertakes to shoot it down:

But the Jews and their prophets had no contact with these Aryan hosrsemen, and these invasions occurred over millenia, whereas the chief Axial transformations were remarkably contemporaneous. Moreover, the type of culture developed by the Aryans in India, for example, bore no relation to the creativity of the Axial age

Id., 15 (2001)

So she's just playing around. Her principal references are in German, which I can't read: Alfred eEber, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziology, Leiden 1935; Das Tragische und die Geschichte, Hamburg, 1943. Damn, I knew I should have stayed awake in German class. Wait, I don't think I ever took a German class, but still...