Hoof Beats. How Horses Shaped Human History, William T Taylor, University of California Press, £25.
We ate horses before we rode them. In Boxgrove, Sussex, a group of early human ancestors ambushed a mare, expertly cut her up, possibly picnicking on slices of warm meat before taking the best of the carcass and hide back to their camp. That was almost half a million years ago. The later Homo sapiens in Europe and North America continued to hunt and eat horses until the end of the Ice Age though rapid warming then drove horses in America to extinction. And, of course, eight European countries still do eat horsemeat.
So it was by giving food, clothing and bone tools that horses first shaped human history, the subtitle of Hoof Beats. Sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated as food animals well before horses, and horse meat remained a food gained by hunting not farming for a much longer time. Indeed, cattle, not horses, were the first transport animals to pull wheeled carts and donkeys the first choice for carrying loads and perhaps people.
In war, donkeys and onagers became the first animals used for conflict, with a 2,600 BC illustration showing a four-wheeled donkey cart trampling the enemy under their hooves. It was the invention of the chariot, drawn by two animals and with only two wheels, that drew horses into domestication. Driving wild horses was safer than riding them. They could run faster than donkeys or cattle and unlike donkeys thrived in the colder areas of the Steppes.
The invention of the bit and bridle, was the next step towards the modern human horse relationship. Cattle, donkeys and onagers had been driven using a ring in the lip just as bulls today are still handled by a ring in the nose. The bit in the mouth, with a noseband, gave much more control, allowing a driver to slow down or steer the horses with greater effectiveness. Like the invention of the motor car, horse drawn chariots spread rapidly across Asia and into Europe. Every rich man had to have one and the elite were often buried with their prestige horses and chariots ready for the afterlife. The tomb of Tutankhamun included six imported chariots, tack and even blinkers to stop the horses being distracted from looking towards the side.
In war, chariots provided mobile platforms for throwing weapons and quick transport for fighters. Chariots helped the Hittites to defeat the kingdom of old Babylon and the Hyksos to invade Egypt. The beginnings of Greek civilisation may have begun with chariot-driving peoples invading from Anatolia, and the palace frescos at Mycenae show horses and chariots. Charioteers built new empires and, as the author comments, ‘in this way horses helped build the first inklings of a truly globalized world’.
Horse-drawn chariots also found their way on to the Mongolian Steppe, where nomads were already herding flocks of sheep and cattle. To find exactly when horses became domesticated there, archaeologists had a bit of luck. The retreating snow on a Mongolian mountain revealed a trimmed horse hoof dated around 1,400 BC. The horse culture of the steppes had arrived. Burial mounds included sacrificed horses, the heads with a pair of hooves, and in some sites there were hundreds, even thousands, of these equine tombs. The remains revealed that these horses were still being eaten, because the most succulent bits were missing, but the shape of the skull nasal bones showed that they had been bridled and driven before being sacrificed.
Evidence of riding was next to turn up in the archaeological record when a pair of trousers, reinforced to prevent soreness in the crotch area, were discovered in the desert cemeteries of Western China. There was also something a bit like a saddle pad, as well as balls and sticks that looked as if they might be an ancient version of polo equipment. Then in Mongolia archaeologists found a slightly earlier §112 bronze age carving of a mounted rider. What is now the modern human relationship with horses, one of riding, was finally emerging in the first millennium BC.
Chariots spread among the aristocracy of the Shang China, but it may have been a relative scarcity of ridden horses among the Shang, that allowed the riders of the Zhou culture in the Steppes to topple the Shang and become the longest lasting dynasty of China. The first cavalry unit consisted of a pair of ridden horses, with one rider controlling the horse and the other wielding the weapons. But single riders, both steering and fighting, soon took over, shaping the world’s cavalry forces for the next two thousand years.
The early possession of horses may have helped established a wealthy elite (not unlike today’s racehorse owners and foxhunters) among the Steppe people and a high frequency of women in warrior graves suggested a non-gendered cavalry! Riding kit was being developed on the grasslands too. Horses buried in wealthier tombs had metal snaffle bits, gilded bridles, and exotic headdresses. The males were gelded and there was evidence of veterinary care with the extraction of teeth that might interfere with the bit. Saddles were prevented from slipping by a crupper round the tail and a girth strap on the chest.
But the biggest jump forward in kit was the invention of stirrups. Alexander the Great had ridden Bucephalus without them as he swept across the known world from Greece to India. And when the Parthian cavalry archers defeated the Roman general Crassus in 53 BC neither side had stirrups. The archers, who perfected the tactic of galloping away only to turn and shoot their arrows as they retreated, had only their thigh muscles to keep them from falling off their horses.
Stirrups first appeared on the buried terracotta models found in Chinese and Korean tombs some four centuries later. But they were not found in pairs. Just a single stirrup appeared on a model horse’s left flank, suggesting that these proto-stirrups may have been a merely an aid to mounting. It was the discovery of iron stirrups in pairs in a Mongolian tomb around the same date that suggested that stirrups, as we now know them, were an invention by the horsemen of the Steppes.
William T Taylor is well qualified to write this book. He has specialised in equine archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum and has, with the help of others, dug many of the ancient tombs that he describes in his book. That horses, both and individually, have shaped human history cannot be disputed. They have also had, and perhaps still have, a symbolic importance to humans. Why else would we still be able to gaze at the skeleton of Napoleon’s horse, Marengo, in the Army Museum or visit the tomb of Wellington’s grey, Copenhagen, at Strathfield Saye?
