Re: Horses

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

 

 

Mark wrote: ... One thing does need to remembered about horses. Unless you have lots of 'free' grass (as on the Steppe), they are expensive animals to keep. In the Middle East, horses have always been 'luxury' animals, kept by the rich, or maintained by the king for military reasons. It was NOT a democratic animal. From Ukraine east into Mongolia, however, the horse **WAS** a democratic animal. It was all that free grass.

 

Well, nobody says it was a cheap animal for all IEs, even if it was for the Huns and Mongolians; quite the opposite, for most IE peoples known to me horses were rare aristocratic possessions, and chariotry, whether in battle or in burial, was reserved for aristocratic heroes.

 

In Western Europe, just about everyplace else, yes. Add the (earlier) Indo-Iranians to the list. The Ocean of Grass goes from the Carpathians practically to the Pacific. Lots of free grass.

 

But yes, very quickly it became the preserve of aristocrats. It did not get democratic again until the invention of the horse collar, and even then, only in the last days before the advent of mechanical tractors, and probably, only in the United States (where we had lots of free grass).

 

 

 

As regards the steppe tarpan, my understanding is it was the feral descendant of the earliest domestic horse (they were exterminated as pests by the Soviets).  The Iceland horse gives one an idea of what the first horses must have been like -- small, tough, slow-growing.

 

Hippologists generally regard steppe tarpans as genuine wild horses; an important argument in favour of this position is the great homogeneity of tarpans in comparison with domestic or typical feral horses. They shared the same basic colour and body conformation. You can blame the Soviets for lots of things, but not for exterminating tarpans -- they had long been extinct in the wild by the time Soviet Russia was established, and the very last known survivor died in captivity in 1918. The Central European forest tarpans have always been regarded as wild game clearly distinguished from domestic horses, both by the Germanic and Balto-Slavic natives and by Classical and Mediaeval auctores. Like their steppe cousins, they were also remarkably homogeneous. The Icelandic horse (see the attachment) is indeed a primitive breed, very similar to the ancient wild horses of Western Europe.

 

Another link for Iceland horses. This one leads to a page with pix of a champion stallion. It shows you just how small they are. They are nonetheless true horses. These are NOT ponies.

 

http://www.ice-horse.com/faldur.html

 

Their manes are spectacular, giving them 'bangs', or a Veronica Lake style peekaboo hairdo.

 

Iceland also has a 'primitive' breed of sheep, with a particularly lanolin rich wool, a wool that is apparently 'wamer' than other strains.  Both go well with their archaic language.

 

Mark.