While the horse was being domesticated on the borders of Europe and Asia, great agrarian, and urban civilizations familiar with copper were establishing themselves further south in Mesopotamia and Elam: El Obeid (6th and 5th millennia BC), Sumer and Uruk (4th and 3rd millennia). Around 3200 B.C., logograms on clay tablets from Uruk show solid-wheeled carts harnessed to oxen or donkeys. We’ve already dealt with the question of the appearance of the horse in Europe, but how did the horse appear in the Near, Middle and Far East?
The first steps towards horse-riding in the East
The equids unearthed at Çayônü (6th millennium) were not horses, but small hemippes. However, Boessneck and von den Driesch found wild horses from the Chalcoli- thic period at Norsun-tepe (Elazig, Eastern Taurus), based on the robustness of the bones and the absence of horse bones on the same site in the more recent Early Bronze layers. These wild horses were eliminated from “l1 Altinova” on the upper Euphrates when the inhabitants, whether immigrants or natives, introduced the domestic horse: as early as the second half of the 4th millennium, several Turkish Chalcolithic sites in this region, including Arslantepe (Malatya), yielded the remains of “domestic” horses.
The increase in trade in a civilization where the secondary and tertiary sectors were booming, and the availability of the chariot, made it even more necessary to use domestic animals to transport crops and other goods. Cattle and donkeys were used more intensively: the royal tombs of Ur I (2600 to 2400 B.C.) contained chariots pulled by oxen and donkeys, and the Ur Etendard (2450 B.C.) shows chariots pulled by donkeys.
It wasn’t until the second half of the 3rd millennium, a good millennium after their domestication, that horses were also brought in, either from Anatolia or from the Caucasus, where the Maïkop culture was familiar with the domesticated animal: the terms anse. kur.ra and anse.sf.si, which refer to the horse and could be translated as “donkey from the mountain” and “donkey from abroad” respectively, appear in Elamite and Mesopotamian texts from this period (economic documents from Ur III). The “mountain” could signify the animal’s Caucasian origin, while the “foreigner” could be Hourite (eastern Taurus), Kassite (Zagros) or Hittite (Anatolia). Some import regions were already renowned, such as Harsamna in Turkey or the Khabur valley in northern Syria. A terracotta from Kish (Akkadian period: end of 3rd millennium) shows a rider, riding his horse bareback and on its rump, as if it were a donkey. Even in the 18th century B.C., although the horse had gradually been acclimatized and bred locally, it had not really become part of local customs: it was not fashionable for a king to ride a horse, as we can read in a letter from Governor Bahdi-Lim to the King of Mari, Zimri-Lim (1775-1760): the king had to ride a donkey or a chariot pulled by “mules”.
Horses were not harnessed to chariots like oxen and donkeys – these chariots were not immediately adapted to the horse, but to radial-wheeled chariots that the Kassites would have introduced as early as the 18th century BC. Horses were used for “messenger service”, “war” and “hunting”. From then on, they were identified by their origins and description – coat, characteristics – just as they are today, and they were surrounded by the greatest care. The Hourrites passed on their hippo-logical tradition to their Hittite conquerors: the earliest texts on the horse, dating from the 14th and 13th centuries BC, are the Hippological Treatise by the Mitannian Kikkuli, found in the Hittite capital, Hattousa (Bogazkôy), and the Canaanite Hippiatric Texts from Ugarit (Ras Shamra). The use of horses also depended on their geographical origin: among the “yoke” horses (i.e., carriage horses), there was a choice between horses from the land of Kusu, originating in Egypt, horses from the land of Mesu, originating in Iran, and horses from local stud farms. Xenophon distinguished between the small horses of Urartu (Armenia), more ardent than those of Persia, and Herodotus refers to the great Mede breed known as Nisean, from which Xerxes’ army drew its sacred horses, and the smaller horses of India. Hittite horses were thin, standing no more than 140 cm at the withers. According to available documents, the war horse was not mounted until the end of the 2nd millennium: figurations of warriors on horseback do not precede the reign of Sargon II of Assyria (t 704).
The horse in Egypt
In Egypt, the horse is thought to have arrived, fully harnessed, and harnessed for war, with the invasion of the Hyksos in the 18th century BC, at the end of the Second Intermediate Period. By the Middle Kingdom, the (warlike?) reputation of the horse had certainly preceded the physical animal, but its novelty is negatively expressed in the fact that it does not feature in the Egyptian pantheon and no horse has ever been found mummified, unlike deified animals (cat, crocodile, baboon, ibis…).
The oldest horse discovered in Egypt was unearthed at the Nubian site of Bouhen by Emery in 1958 and 1959 and studied by Clutton-Brock (1974). Dated to around 1675 BC, it belongs to the period immediately after that of the Hyksos. It was a large horse with slender limbs. The rare horses of more recent times belong to a more compact type. Unlike donkeys and mules, the horse is never depicted pulling chariots, but always either mounted – sometimes in crouch (tomb of Aremheb, 19th Dynasty) – or harnessed to a battle chariot. Some attribute this exclusive use to the technical inadequacy of carriages, which were unable to harness the horse’s power: this is possible, but the horse’s association with war and victory may well have put aside any idea of using it for other purposes, when oxen, donkeys and soon, mules were already available…
The horse in the Far East
The Serednij Stog culture gave way to the Jamnaja or Pit Grave culture (3500-2400 BC), which extended across the steppes of Central Asia to southern Siberia. This was followed by the Afanasjevo culture (2500-1700 B.C.) in the Altai, on the upper Yenisei, with the discovery of pit tombs and burial mounds (kurgans) featuring horses. To the immediate south and at the same time, in Eastern Turkestan, Indo-Europeans were buried in the same way. Spoked-wheel chariots appeared in Central Asia between 1500 and 2000 BC, testifying to a high technological and zootechnical level and to the harmony between man and wide open spaces: this was the beginning of the “Steppe Empire”. The domestic horse is thought to have been introduced to China towards the end of the 3rd millennium by the Longshan culture, through contact with the nomadic peoples of the steppes mentioned above. The Shang dynasty is said to have imported chariots around 1300 BC or shortly thereafter. They “played the same role as in Central Asia, including that of funerary accessory. They were used, with a few structural modifications, for over a millennium, and their importance increased with their growing use as tools of war”. All this can be seen, magnified, in the powerful earthen army of the first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (221-210 BC), buried at Xian (Shaanxi). As early as the 2nd century B.C., under the impetus of Emperor Han Wudi, the Chinese began sourcing horses from Ferghana, the land of the “celestial winged horses” recognized by ambassador Zhang Qian during his exploratory mission of 138-126 B.C. This is the region of Tashkent, a high valley shared by Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The Altai, which borders it to the north, is also famous for the almost-contemporary Scytho-Sarmatian kurgans of Chibé, Karakol, Kizil and above all Pazryk, where the horses were 128 to 159 cm at the withers.
It was during these exchanges that the Chinese, as they opened the “Silk Road” and exported precious textiles and Mandarin ducks to Rome via Persia, borrowed (from the Kushans?) the concept of stirrups, which would not return to Europe until the end of Antiquity. The necklace was developed in China around this time.
Note the reference to the almost universal myth of the winged horse: its origins in the East can be traced back to steppe civilization, where shamanism used the animal as a means of communication with the supernatural.
Find out more: The Oriental horse
