famous, 14th century B.C. treatise which spells out a 7 month, day-by-day regimen for training chariot horses. Dictated to a scribe by one Kikkuli, the Mitanni expert in charge of acclimatizing, conditioning and training the horses of the Hittite King Supiluliumas, the tablets specify a program which includes swimming the horse, an interval-training schedule worthy of an East German athletics coach, feeding and watering routines much like those for the present-day race horse, and a most Indic, aristocratic direction for rubdowns with butter. Subsequent written material about kindred Urartian Armenia as an on-going, prime horse country is also plentiful: from the Neo-Assyrian gazetteer who describes Armenia as “the mountain of horses,”14 to the 1st-century Greek geographer Strabo who characterized it as the superlative “horsepasturing” country. It was the land from whence the Persian kings used to obtain their famous “Nesaean” horses, 20,000 colts a year, animals which Herodotus (7.40) reported as being the biggest, and Aristotle (Hist.Anim. 9.48), as being the fastest horses known. As portrayed on the friezes of Persepolis, these Nesaeans were massive, Roman-nosed cold-type horses (i.e. brewery-dray sorts), though they stood only 14 hands high. High enough. In antiquity these animals, 8 strong and yoked to war-chariots which incorporated mowers with blades attached to the rotating wheels that literally slashed to shreds opposing foot-soldiers, struck terror in all who met them galloping through the fields of human infantry. The Nesaeans also served as chargers carrying heavily armored cavalry men. As with today’s immensely strong but slow-witted German dressage and show-jumping horses who need teams of men to train them, such heavy strong-necked beasts also demanded strong bits to inform them. The development of such bits in the same region as the breeding of their wearers will not cause wonder. A much lighter type of horse must have been current at the time of the Mitanni (a thousand years previous to the Nesaean heavyweights), since the wall art and artifacts of the Mediterranean and Near East of that earlier era show, everywhere, similar animals who more closely resemble the modern race-horse. Such uniformity makes sense if, stemming from one central area, one considers that the Bronze Age war-chariots were neither exported nor imported simply, like DIY packages to be unwrapped and assembled. As R. Drews, a classical specialist points out, with them go “teams of trained chariot horses, but even good horses and good chariots would by themselves have been useless. The most important ingredients would have been the men who knew how to repair the vehicles, to care for the horses, to drive them in battle, and to fight from a fast-moving chariot.”15 Drews maintains that in time, having worked for others in what came to be seen as easy conquests, the “penny dropped” and from
the lands south of the Caucasus ambitious “Proto-Indo-European” speaking “war-lords,” complete with entourages, embarked by sea from the coasts of the Pontus (in one of the several directions of their probable dispersions). Those invasions by charioteers took the form of take-overs, which subjugated societies far more advanced but more vulnerable than those of the adventurers. A seductive thesis in which, if the sea-faring of horses appears peculiar, he reminds readers that horses and chariots were used on the islands of the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age where no horses had been before, and there is a Late Minoan seal which shows a horse standing in a ship. As for the Greek mainland,16 he theorizes that around 1600 B.C. invading charioteers first established themselves in mainly coastal places: at Mycenae in the Argolid, on the Messenian coast, a bit inland at Thebes on the Boeotian plain, at Marathon in Attica, and perhaps earliest and most strongly in Thessaly, the Thessalian plain being the largest and most fertile in Greece and therefore most hospitable to horse-breeding.17 Whether fiction or fact, antique tradition considered Thessalian horses “chief among the breeds for beauty, courage and endurance.”18 Broadly speaking, this light, fine, imported type of animal would persist in Greece up through classical times except that over the dark Doric centuries a likely mixing with stockier, central Asiatic animals19 would give the Parthenon horses their longer stouter bodies, conserving only the fine legs, smooth coats, and small heads. If we refer once again to Xenophon, it appears the Attic animal heirs were also very small relative to the still fabulous Thessalians or to the horses of Ionia of that time. A testimony to their meager size occurs in a passage at the beginning of Xenophon’s 7th chapter, where his approved method of vault-mounting was to “lay hold of the mane about the ears.”20 Moreover, one has only to look at how far the riders’ feet hang below the bellies of the cavalry horses on the Parthenon to have this reading’s determination of size reinforced. Because the legendary endurance of the line had been compromised as well, Xenophon advised councils to require horsemen to make more than one circuit of an arena before choosing cavalry candidates: a lack of stamina in their horses was known to be a problem, too. In fact, due to the often mountainous and rocky terrain, trained human runners were generally preferred to horsemen in Greece for carrying messages over long distances. Not all Greeks agreed with Xenophon’s taste in torturous equine hardware, as a cache of bits excavated from Olympia, in the Peloponnese, reveals. Dated ca. 490 B.C., one has an inoffensive, straightbar mouthpiece with a bronze roller, while others are simple iron, jointed or ringed snaffles. Perhaps, being earlier by 150–200 years, the prevailing style had yet to be set in text, metal, stone, and flesh. Or perhaps these were just mouthpieces meant for Spartan girls’ ponies. In any case, the horse in archaic and classical Greece had other uses besides war, although most of Greece with its moun44