Authors: Brian Fagan
Horses at Botai
Horses had come to the forefront of local economies by the mid-fourth millennium, especially in the eastern Urals and around Botai, in what is now northern Kazakhstan, in the heart of tarpan country.
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Here, harsh winters and thin soils made agriculture impossible. For many centuries the sparse population relied on hunting and foraging, mostly in small river valleys, while remaining constantly on the move. Before about 3500
BCE
, a tiny settlement of four houses flourished at Botai. Suddenly, what had been a mere hamlet ballooned into a large village of at least 158 houses that thrived for four to five centuries, inhabited by people
who relied heavily on horses (see sidebar “Horses at Botai”). More than three hundred thousand animal bones, nearly all from horses, testify to a dramatic change in lifeway.
The finds from Botai portray a steppe society that practiced a form of mobility unheard of in earlier times. Gone were the days when people lived in one spot, tending herds close to home. Now they could roam freely, graze their animals over much larger ranges, and move them from one widely separated pasture to another. Horses became symbols of wealth, of prestige, with connections to the spiritual world. Botai saw the dawning of a dramatically different, horse-driven world, where constant movement, teamwork between animals and humans, and prowess in war became the dynamics of human life on the steppes.
Horses at Botai
The evidence for, at minimum, close horse management and, most likely, at least partial domestication at Botai is compelling. Of the three hundred thousand animal bones there, 99 percent come from equines. Slaughter curves derived from their teeth tell us that most of them were beasts slaughtered between three and eight years of age, mature adults rather than juveniles. They were generally smaller animals, perhaps around sixty centimeters (twenty-four inches), close to the size of later domesticated beasts, as if the herders were selecting and breeding wild horses for their physical attributes. Apparently, they managed their herds carefully. The males were slaughtered somewhat younger, perhaps young stallions in excess of breeding and other requirements. Some of the actual slaughter seems to have involved poleaxing. Judging from modern practice, two people would hold the horse's head steady with thongs, while a third struck a devastating blow between the eyes that killed the beast.
The Botai may have used their horses as pack animals, but they almost certainly rode them as well. The riders may not have used bits, but relied instead on thongs to control their mounts, presumably for bridles, hobbles, lassos, and whips. The jaws of no fewer than 135 horses from Botai became the smoothers used to process thongs.
Judging from the thick deposits of horse dung, the people kept their beasts in corrals adjacent to their houses, using some of the manure to insulate their homes. The Botai herds were a valuable meat source, but they also provided milk. Highly sophisticated isotope analyses of the minute residues on the walls of Botai clay pots have yielded traces of the fats in horse milk. This is the earliest evidence for the drinking of horse milk, which was fermented and turned into a slightly alcoholic beverage known as koumiss, consumed in Kazakhstan to this day and a staple for steppe nomads for thousands of years.
The Botai preferred horses to cattle and small stock, largely because they were steppe adapted and could feed through snow during cold winters without the need for fodder that had to be collected during the summer. The Botai's survival depended on horses and their mobility, on widely separated grazing grounds, and on their ability to control widely ranging herds from horseback. They seem to have treated their beasts with respect as steeds, but also revered them as connections to the supernatural world. Dozens of horse skulls and articulated neck vertebrae lie in ritual pits around Botai houses. In many Eurasian societies, horses had powerful ritual associations with the chief deity, the Sky or Sun God. Some of the finds may represent beasts sacrificed facing southeast at the time of the winter solstice. Given the featureless landscape, the cardinal directions and changing heavenly bodies were of great significance in Botai society. The only human burial from Botai (that of two men, a woman, and a child) lay surrounded by the remains of fourteen horses placed in an arc. There are signs, too, of a close ritual connection between dogs and horses, the dogs being used both to hunt wild animals and to control herds.
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.
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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 hourâunder 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 warfareâor,
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.”
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In its place reigned the horse.
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.”
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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 penetrated far into Anatolia. Nomads from the heart of Central Asia fought their way deep into India and Iran.
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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 (1344â1333
BCE
), the Hittite empire
(Hatti) encompassed much of Southwest Asia, sharing the political limelight with Assyria to the east and Egypt to the south.
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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.