The Intimate Bond

by Brian Fagan

  Riding horses opened up the steppes and provided a degree of mobility to people living in undeveloped country that had been unimaginable even a thousand years earlier. It also transformed the partnership between animals and humans in fundamental ways. Now the connection was far more than a working relationship; it became a bond between two individuals: a horse and its rider. A successful rider enjoys a close relationship with his or her steed, reinforced by gentle words and familiar commands. With careful training, the two form a close-knit team whose effectiveness comes from cooperation, not cajoling. With so many horses in the villages and with the realities of long distances and cattle herding on the steppe, riding horses had so many obvious advantages to people with close familiarity with their beasts that it would be astonishing if riding didn’t take hold relatively soon after domestication during the fourth millennium. At first, it may have been somewhat of a rarity, but an explosion in the numbers of horse bones in archaeological sites after the fourth millennium may also have coincided with the beginnings of horse burial, where an owner journeyed to the next world with his steed, even with much of his herd, as individual wealth in horses and exotic treasures assumed ever greater importance in steppe society.

  Lumbering Carts

  By 3400 BCE, seminomadic herding societies thrived over a wide area of the western steppes. Descended from earlier societies such as Sredni Stog, they occupied grasslands extending from the Danube River east to the Ural River. This was the moment when another defining innovation arrived on the steppes: the ox-drawn cart. Heavy vehicles with solid timber wheels appeared almost simultaneously between 3400 and 3100 BCE, over an enormous area from Mesopotamia in the south to the Russian/Ukrainian steppes and Central Europe.10 A thousand years later, carts lumbered along the Rhine Valley and came into use as far east as the Indus River in South Asia. They were cumbersome vehicles at best, hauled by laboring oxen using yokes modified from plowing, and moving along at about 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) an hour—under favorable conditions. (Compare this with chariot horses in later times, which could reach 10 to 14 kilometers, or 6.0 to 8.7 miles, an hour at a trot, possibly 30 kilometers, or 18.6 miles, an hour at a gallop.)

  Lumbering oxcarts added another element of mobility to steppe society, carrying people and manure to the fields and increasing farming efficiency dramatically. They also transported vital supplies for herders scattered widely over the grassland and living with their animals for long periods of time. Grave finds tell us that some carts had arched matting roofs, making it possible to sleep in them. Wheeled carts allowed some settlements to thrive as far as eighty kilometers (fifty miles) from the river valleys that anchored their society. Almost simultaneously, too, carts became far more than utilitarian vehicles. They became artifacts of prestige, for the mobility and the evidence of wealth they conferred on their owners in life and after death. Dozens of graves between the Danube and Urals contain sacrificial offerings of cattle, sheep, and horses, and actual wagons or clay votive offerings of them. But why did people use cattle for hauling carts when horses offered significant advantages as pack animals? Equines were faster, able to ford deep streams, and capable of either hauling or carrying significant loads over rugged terrain, especially when pulling two-wheeled carts. The problem was the harness. Equine anatomy was unsuitable for ox yokes, which reduced traction. Centuries were to pass before the Chinese, who had acquired horses from the steppes, developed, between the third and fifth centuries CE, the rigid collar and cart shafts, a technology not adopted in Europe until some three centuries later.

  The horse and wheeled transport opened up the huge expanses of the Eurasian steppe, hitherto virtually inaccessible to any farmer or herder. Much of the expansion west of the Ural Mountains resulted from growing demand for precious metals. Nomadic groups penetrated territories inhabited by but handfuls of hunters and foragers, discovering new metal outcrops in the Altai and elsewhere as they moved into desert Central Asia. After 2000 BCE, the migration patterns were so complicated and multidirectional that a series of local societies came into being from the Urals as far northeast as the Yenisei River in Siberia. Thus it was that advanced wheeled technology reached China.

  By the second millennium BCE, rich horse- and cattle-herding societies thrived in Central Asia. The leaders among them formed an impressive elite, who acquired prestige and wealth through trade and warfare—or, more accurately, raiding. They traveled to the next world in splendor, men and women being buried with carts, but this was the oxcart’s last hurrah, as the horse-drawn chariot with its spoked wheels came into the hands of powerful chieftains. Soon a dichotomy arose, between the pragmatic ox-drawn wagon of the farmer and townspeople and the chariot, the possession of successful warriors and kings. As the archaeologist Stuart Piggott once put it, “the ox cart creaks and groans its way into bucolic oblivion.”11 In its place reigned the horse.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Horse Masters’ Legacies

  Horses were creatures of the steppes, of the great grasslands far to the north of the lands bordering the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The occasional equid traveled southward during the third millennium BCE, but they were never common in a world where communication was, for the most part, by water or donkey caravan. The horse was an exotic beast, known to Mesopotamians as “the ass of foreign mountain countries.”1 They assumed much greater importance as the nomads of the steppes enjoyed thriving economies, settled in every imaginable environment in the north, and developed the war chariot. During the third millennium BCE, gradual, and often sporadic, infiltration of settled lands morphed into much larger incursions that menaced sedentary farmers in new and dramatic ways.

  These infiltrations had a grounding in the environmental realities of the steppe. Living as they did on semiarid plains with irregular rainfall, the nomads and their beasts depended on ever-changing patterns of grazing grass and watering. When the rains were good, the people and their herds ranged widely over the steppe, where standing water could be found. In a sense, the plains sucked people in. Most years, there was enough graze and water to supply everyone’s needs, although there was often high mortality of cattle during very cold winters. Drought cycles offered the greatest challenges, times when pastures dried up, standing water vanished, and the nomads stayed close to precious permanent water supplies. They also moved to the edge of the steppe, to the better-watered, more fertile land where farmers had lived for centuries. These were settled folk, who lived in the same villages for many generations, anchored to their fields. For centuries, nomad and farmer had developed informal economic links, trading goods and commodities back and forth without undue friction. However, drought combined with growing populations of horses and stock in the north required constant searches for new pasture. The nomads, who are by nature warlike, became aggressive and cast covetous eyes on better-watered, settled lands. Sensing easy prey, the warriors of the north with their chariots invaded lands beyond the steppes in much larger numbers. They were people always on the move, aggressive, accustomed to raiding and spoil, unafraid of traversing previously insurmountable barriers like extensive deserts that had once protected cities and settled farmland from outsiders.

  City dwellers and farmers alike lived in dread of nomadic raiders, who brought their herds and flocks with them, annexed farmland, and often showed no signs of leaving. Most nomads had little time for agriculture, or for city life, which depended on a degree of political stability that nurtured the long-distance trade routes that brought wealth and linked them to the wider world. For centuries, raiders from the north preyed on long-established states to the south. Many of them settled permanently in new homelands, while maintaining their dependency on horses. The rulers of cities and states, rightly concerned about political stability, armed themselves with horse-drawn chariots, but they could not stop the constant movements southward. During the second millennium, long after horses were well known, great migrations of horse riders came south, along two major routes. From the western steppes, they penetra
ted far into Anatolia. Nomads from the heart of Central Asia fought their way deep into India and Iran.2 Inevitably, descendants of steppe people formed their own empires, the best known that of the Hittites, a major rival to the Egyptian pharaohs to the south and the Assyrians to the west.

  Kikkuli Trains the Hittites

  The Hittites, originally from the steppes, founded a state at Hattusa, in north-central Anatolia, during the eighteenth century BCE. At its height under King Suppiluliuma (1344–1333 BCE), the Hittite empire (Hatti) encompassed much of Southwest Asia, sharing the political limelight with Assyria to the east and Egypt to the south.3 Hittite armies were efficient war machines, staffed by troops who had a feudal duty to serve, rewarded with booty. Donkeys and heavy bullock carts transported essential supplies, but the vehicle of attack was the light horse-drawn chariot. This was by no means a new weapon. Hatti’s enemies, among them the Egyptians, used them as mobile firing platforms, with a driver and archer. Their chariots were medium- or long-distance weapons that fired clouds of arrows into enemy ranks. The Hittites took a different approach, designing vehicles that were longer and deeper, capable of carrying three men: a driver, a warrior, and a shield man to protect the other two. The crew wore armor; so did the horses, their flanks, backs, and necks protected by armor fashioned in scales. The fighter carried a bow and arrow and a short sword, the height of the platform giving him a major strategic advantage at close quarters. Such equipment worked well against other chariot forces and against inexperienced infantry, who could be cut down as they fled.

  The Hittites and their enemies spent a great deal of time improving their chariots, but the training of the pairs that hauled them received very close attention indeed. So important were chariot horses that an archive of cuneiform tablets chronicles their training, notably the work of Kikkuli, a horse master for King Suppiluliuma. Not much is known about Kikkuli, except that he was a foreigner from Mitanni, a kingdom that flourished in what is now northern Syria. Judging from his training manual, he advocated rigorous conditioning (see sidebar “Thus Speaks Kikkuli”).

  “Thus Speaks Kikkuli”

  “Thus speaks Kikkuli, horse trainer from the land of Mittani,” begins the first of the four cuneiform tablets that comprise Kikkuli’s training manual.4 The manual came to light during excavations by the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler at the Hittite capital, Boghazkoy, in central Turkey, in 1906–7.

  Kikkuli was a ruthless taskmaster, whose program started each autumn and lasted 184 days. He rejected horse after horse in the early, rigorous stages of the training, when the beasts were treated harshly and fed inadequately. He was building strength, leading rather than harnessing or riding them. “Pace two leagues, run twenty furlongs out and thirty furlongs home. Put rugs on. After sweating, give one pail of salted water and one pail of malt-water. Take to river and wash down,” he prescribes for the fifth day of training. Each day had its prearranged rations of feed, numbers of waterings, workouts, and periods of rest. Once the horses were conditioned, the training became even more rigorous, preparing the beasts for tough conditions. Witness the routine for the fifty-fifth day: “When morning comes he takes them out of the stable and hitches them up. He trots them half a mile and when he trots them back he unhitches them . . . they stand hungry and thirsty. When evening comes he hitches them up and trots them half a mile and over twenty fields and he races them over seven fields . . . He takes them into the stable. All night long they eat hay.”5

  Kikkuli built endurance and stamina while testing the limits of the beasts, covering as much as a hundred fifty kilometers (ninety-three miles) daily for several days. They trained at a gallop, at a slow pace; hauled chariots; maneuvered at close quarters. They were sometimes deprived of water to accustom them to thirst, and regularly crossed rivers, as they would on campaigns. The horses invariably trained in pairs so that they became inseparable. The beasts lived in stables, and were rubbed and washed carefully in a program that resembled the interval training that many modern-day athletes use when training for triathlons. Somewhat similar methods appeal to modern-day equine Three Day Event trainers.

  Kikkuli and other Hittite trainers turned out superbly fit, well-trained horses, which is why their king’s armies were so successful. So effective were Kikkuli’s methods that they are still used by some trainers today. Scholar and trainer Ann Nyland translated the tablets, and then tried them with Arabian horses. The seven-month program is said to work really well, to produce “a superb equine athlete without the use of drugs or expensive feed additives.”6

  Interestingly, none of the surviving archives tell us anything about the chariot drivers. Presumably they trained alongside their pairs, so they became as one with the horses and were able to control them under even the most stressful circumstances.

  Hittite military campaigns involved large numbers of horses and chariots. Hittites fought Egyptians in a memorable battle at Kadesh, waged on the banks of the Orontes River in 1274 BCE. The Hittite ruler Muwatalli II deployed at least thirty-five hundred chariots against Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II’s army, which included about the same number of them. The battle was inconclusive, despite heavy casualties on both sides. Ramesses II claimed victory in several grandiloquent murals that adorned temples along the Nile, in which we see him routing the Hittites, but this was mere propaganda. “He betook himself to his horses, and led quickly on, being alone by himself. . . . His majesty was like Sutekh, the great in strength, smiting and slaying among them; his majesty hurled them headlong, one upon another into the water of the Orontes.”7 Chariots also played a significant role in the Trojan wars, perhaps the culmination of centuries of warfare surrounding Troy’s control of strategic trade routes along the Dardanelles and to the north. The beasts carried heroes such as like Achilles into single combat.

  Chariot warfare waned with the collapse of the Hittite empire during the twelfth century BCE. The implosion of established order coincided with a major shift in local attitudes toward horses. For centuries, elite Mesopotamians considered riding them somewhat undignified. In a famous exchange, King Zimri-Lim of Mari (1779–1761 BCE) planned a tour of Akkadian cities under his rule. “Drive a chariot,” he was advised. “Or, if you must ride, ride a mule. For only then will you preserve the dignity of your royal position.”8 History doesn’t relate whether Zimri-Lim listened to his advisers, but good horses were rare and expensive, costing in the order of seven bulls, ten donkeys, or thirty slaves, a commentary on the value of human as opposed to animal life in those days. Mounted couriers used them; so did lightly armed horsemen serving as scouts. Guards on horseback herded thousands of conquered people and their animals to sparsely populated, distant lands to minimize chances of rebellion. Large-scale warfare waged by cavalry was unthinkable until Scythian horsemen from the steppes revolutionized military strategy.

  “The Tombs of Our Forefathers”

  The Scythians inhabited a world of horses and enormous distances, a world where one’s steed accompanied one in life and death. Prominent members of the Scythian elite expected to be buried with their mounts and several other horses under burial mounds called kurgans, which were revered for generations. When the Scythian ruler Idanthyrsus refused battle with Persian king Darius, who invaded his lands in about 508 BCE, he made one exception: “One thing there is for which we will fight—the tombs of our forefathers.”9 Kurgans loomed high above the Eurasian steppe. Stone stelae encircled many burial mounds, symbolic trees of life that linked the layered cosmos—the underworld, the steppe, and the heavens. Scythian chiefs went to eternity in splendor, buried with lavish feasts and animal sacrifices. One kurgan near the Dnieper River was twenty meters (sixty-seven feet) high. Fifteen horses adorned with gold and silver ornaments lay under the tumulus, one with its head and neck stretched forward and legs tucked under its body.10

  The most spectacular kurgans date to the eighth century BCE, notably in the Sayan Mountains, west of Lake Baikal, on the boundaries of Mongolia and Siberia. One huge, drum-s
haped cairn, 110 meters (360 feet) in diameter and 4 meters (13 feet) high covered the burial of a ruler and his consort, richly dressed in sable and adorned with gold ornaments. Six elderly men and their harnessed saddle horses surrounded them. Horsetails and manes lay on the floor of the burial chamber. Seven chambers contained 138 burials of elderly stallions, each saddled and bridled, perhaps gifts from subordinate tribes. Three hundred graves on the periphery held horsehide burials, the remains of a ceremonial feast. The mourners sacrificed four hundred fifty horses.

  Figure 11.1 A horseman depicted on a carpet fragment from one of the Pazyryk burials. Fine Art Images/Shutterstock.

  Two hundred fifty years later, five princely graves at Pazyryk, in the Altai, contained harnessed and caparisoned riding horses, also a team of four horses in one grave that drew a great ceremonial carriage, probably of Chinese origin.11 The region’s severe winters caused the graves to freeze, preserving even fragile silks and other textiles, and carpets. The saddle blankets bore elaborate appliqué designs of stylized deer antlers, symbolizing rebirth. A magnificent felt hanging showed a richly attired rider astride his horse. The chieftains displayed tattoos. They lived violent lives; one of the dead had been scalped.

  The kurgans reveal people who were far more than the unsophisticated horsemen beloved of earlier generations of classical historians. For instance, four long lines of kurgans dating to between about 330 and 270 BCE lie on a natural terrace along the Bukhtarma River, near the village of Berel, in eastern Kazakhstan. Each stands about 4.6 meters (15 feet) high and measures about 30 meters (100 feet) across. At least twenty-four kurgans have been investigated so far, their contents effectively deep-frozen by the permafrost, preserving a jumble of bones, hair, teeth, nails, and flesh. Some of the dead horsemen bore tattoos and had been embalmed, their hair cut short before their heads were covered with wigs.