“Wherever they move, we start finding kurgan burial mounds,” Stefan explained. “And also things we wish not to find in a burial. Like this.” He flipped a page to show more photos. A decapitated horse’s skull. A female body buried in a crouched position at the feet of the male skeleton. The trove keeper pointed to the lower half of the skeleton. “Her legs have been broken before she was killed and put in the tomb.”
Cassie laughed bitterly. “I thought Faye was joking. She told me the Kurgans sent their leaders into the afterlife with their wives and favorite horses to keep them company. Then these must be the original overlord bad guys, right?”
Erik paused to consider the question. “I guess you could call them that. When they came galloping out of the steppes, they either killed or exploited everything in their path. Yeah, I suppose that’s fair.”
“What do you mean exploited?” the pythia asked. “I thought they just liked to slaughter things.”
“Not really,” Erik demurred. “They actually liked to set themselves up as the ruling elite in an area. That’s one of the reasons we call them overlords. They would build a hill fort where they could lord it over the locals. They forced the people to work for them, pay tribute, grow crops. Your average protection racket.”
“Of course, it didn’t happen overnight.” Griffin picked up the thread. “It took two thousand years. What began around 4500 BCE was only the first wave of invasions. The third wave wasn’t complete until around 2800 BCE.”
“And when it was over, the kinder, gentler side of homo sapiens went with it,” Fred added gloomily. “The matristic cultures were erased from history.”
Cassie remained still, puzzling over the photo of the broken female skeleton. She briefly flashed on her telemetric experience at Catal Huyuk when she was immersed in the burial of the child. She remembered the attitude of the mourners. The death of a toddler held as much significance to them as the death of a warlord did to the Kurgans. There were no weapons in the child’s grave. No strangled birds to keep it company in heaven. Only a prayer that the mother of all creation would give new life to the little one who had been lost. From what Faye had told her earlier, cultures all over the world would have treated their dead the same way. Why were these Kurgans different? She wondered what sorts of prayers they would have said over the body of their slain leader. Did they ask their sky gods to give the warlord new worlds to conquer? New people to slaughter and enslave?
Breaking out of her reverie, she asked, “How did they get to be so violent? I mean if everybody around the world up till that time was matristic, it’s not like these guys rode out of the steppes with a completely new social agenda of mayhem and destruction. It didn’t come out of thin air. There had to be some kind of trigger that changed them.”
The men remained silent, pondering the question.
Stefan sighed. “That is, how you say, the crux of the matter. At the Kurgan trove, we are not only collecting artifacts of these tribes. We are seeking to trace all the way back to when they were like the rest of the world. Peaceful and not all the time killing.”
“Good luck,” Cassie said ruefully. “That’s got to be one heck of a riddle to solve.”
“It isn’t as hopeless as all that,” Griffin observed. “While we still lack a good deal of concrete evidence, we do have some fairly plausible theories as to why they became overlords.”
“I’m all ears.” Cassie sat back on the couch and folded her arms, ready for a long lecture.
Just at that moment, a young Turkish woman in an apron walked up to the group and asked in English if they would like something from the bar.
“Bar? What bar?” Fred turned to look around the parlor.
The waitress gestured toward the opposite end of the room. None of them had noticed the bar tucked away in a dark corner. At this hour of the afternoon, it was completely empty.
The group ordered various soft drinks, and the woman walked off to fetch their refreshments.
Picking up the thread of their conversation, Griffin said, “It’s highly likely that in the beginning, the Kurgan tribes weren’t very different from the rest of the world. They were most certainly goddess-worshipping and traced their family tree through the female line. The sexes would have been more or less equal. They moved about from place to place pasturing their flocks on lush grasslands. This state of affairs would have continued for a few thousand years until the climate shifted and the steppes began to dry out. It may have taken several centuries to notice a significant change, but eventually, there would have been less land suitable either for farming or for grazing. Water became scarce.”
“A harsh landscape produces harsh people,” Cassie observed. “Didn’t you tell me that once?”
“I may have done,” Griffin replied. “At any rate, it’s true. Life on the steppes became more difficult. Resources dwindled. When such conditions occur rapidly enough, they foster a mental attitude of desperation and competition. To these nomads, taking by force what was needed may have seemed a reasonable option.”
Erik continued the narration. “There’s only one problem with stealing from the neighbors. They don’t like it very much, and they tend to retaliate. This sets up a pattern where tribes are constantly skirmishing with each other either to defend their own stuff or to steal somebody else’s. All of a sudden, battle skills start to get real important. You’ve got a bunch of people who spend most of their time practicing with weapons or actually using them to clean each other out.”
“Dog eat dog. Sounds like a rotten way to live,”
