Horse-o-nology

glitter-graphics.com Dark Beauties

glitter-graphics.com Horses

glitter-graphics.com Horses 2

glitter-graphics.com Forever Love

glitter-graphics.com Palomino's - one of my favs

glitter-graphics.com Love
Beauty


Unicorns


Black Horse


glitter-graphics.com Winged Horse
Horses, at first, were all wild animals like zebras are today. People hunted them for their meat and especially for their skins, to make into leather hides for clothes and for tents and tools. But around 3000 BC, people began to tame horses, to domesticate them, to eat them and to use them to carry things.
The first horses were too small to carry people, and it wasn't until they had been bred bigger that people could ride them.

It may have been the Indo-Europeans, still living around the Caspian Sea, who first tamed horses for their own use. Certainly the first appearance of the horse in Greece comes with the arrival of the Indo-Europeans around 2100 BC. The first appearance of horses at Troy is around 1900 BC, also probably with the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. And the first arrival of the horse and chariot in Egypt comes with the invasion of the Hyksos, or Amorites, around 1700 BC, when the Amorites had been learning things from the Indo-European Hittites.

Hittite soldiers driving a chariot
Women from Mycenaean Greece driving a chariot, about 1300 BC
By about 1200 BC, in the late Shang Dynasty, people in China were also using horses and chariots. This grave from China (from about 1200 BC) contained two horses, a chariot, and their charioteer, who were all sacrificed for the grave of a rich and powerful man.


Shang Dynasty horsesHaving tame horses made a big difference to people's lives. First off, horses were a tremendous military weapon. You could use chariots to get into battle and use them to squash your enemies, and you could ride them in order to get from one city to another much more quickly than the other army could. You could send quick messengers. And you could carry tents and food on their backs.



Chariot and horses from Ch'in Dynasty China
New Kingdom Egypt horses and chariot
In peacetime, horses could carry trade goods from one city to another, and they could pull wagons full of people or hay or wheat or pots from one place to another too.

Horses were not much used for plowing in the ancient world, where oxen were generally used instead. Horses were too expensive, and they needed better quality food than oxen. Also, no good harness arrangement for horses was invented until about 200 BC, when one was invented in China.


Ucello horses
Also, until the medieval period, men generally did not really fight on horseback. They rode their horses to the battle and then dismounted to fight. In the Middle Ages this changed with the development of mounted knights. Some people have said that this was because the stirrup had not been invented until the Middle Ages, but this is probably not the main reason.

More likely, the reason men did not fight on horseback under Greek and Roman rule is that horsemen are not actually that effective against trained, organized foot soldiers. Both the Greeks (after about 750 BC) and the Romans had trained footsoldiers, but in the medieval period armies did not have the resources to train footsoldiers, and so the cavalry (the horses and their riders) became more useful.