Authors: Brian Fagan
The Intimate Bond (22 page)
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.
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The manual came to light during excavations by the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler at the Hittite capital, Boghazkoy, in central Turkey, in 1906â7.
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 (1779â1761
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.”
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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 fightâthe tombs of our forefathers.”
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Kurgans loomed high above the Eurasian steppe. Stone stelae encircled many burial mounds, symbolic trees of life that linked the layered cosmosâthe 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.
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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-shaped 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.
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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.
Several of the excavated mounds commemorated lesser figures, usually just a man and his horse. But Kurgan 11 was another matter. The mound contained a man in his thirties who had met a violent death, a woman who had died later, and thirteen sacrificial horses, killed after being adorned with their full ceremonial regalia. The excavators removed the horse carcasses from the soil in still-frozen earthen blocks, and then excavated them carefully in the laboratory. Bridle tack displayed plaques depicting real and mythical animals like griffins, which have the heads of eagles and the bodies of lions. Decorated wooden bands on the other animals displayed stylized heads of animals and mythic beasts. These were no ordinary horses, for they wore pendants and garlands and red felt saddle blankets that glittered with gold ornaments.
The Berel kurgans preserve the wealth of elites who spent much of the year with their own small tribal groups, moving with the seasons by horse and sometimes camel. In a classic transhumance pattern, they tended flocks of sheep and goats in higher-altitude summer pastures, moving to the lowlands in winter. From late autumn and winter campsites, parties of mounted warriors embarked on raids to acquire not only animals but also the luxury goods cherished by the elite. They, in their turn, used such booty for ceremonial displays and distributed exotic artifacts to key followers as part of an endless process of alliance building, which was the key to power on the open plains.
Warfare from horseback developed out of necessity in a world of enormous distances and chronic mobility. Cavalry horses were something new. They can have become a potent weapon only among people who lived and breathed riding and who developed extremely
close relationships with their beasts. Just training a horse for combat, let alone fighting with it, was a challenge, a task achieved in steps. It involved transforming a highly temperamental animal, with an instinct to take flight, into a quite different beast. A cavalry horse had to be unfazed by loud noises, to face acute danger, and to maneuver rapidly, jumping without notice and galloping at human command. Such horses also needed to be higher and larger than the squat beasts, whose ancestors were the tarpan and Przewalski's horse, too small for use in cavalry units. Larger horses were faster, more agile, and had more stamina. Their additional stature made it possible to fight from horseback with lances. Quite when such larger steeds were first bred remains uncertain, but their descendants turned the Scythians into the world's best light cavalry.
Xenophon's Mantras
Hard-learned strategic lessons gradually passed southward from the steppes into chariotry circles. Centuries passed before the Assyrians learned the art of cavalry fighting from their neighbors the Urartians of present-day eastern Iran, who had ready access to the steppe and fought almost entirely in hilly terrain, where chariots were useless. Once convinced of the value of mounted warfare, the Assyrians learned quickly. They trained drivers to control a pair of horses unencumbered with chariots, the second rider being purely a bowman. The strategy was so successful that, inevitably, nomadic ways of fighting from horseback became deeply embedded in Assyrian and later armies. Metal bits replaced bone ones; single riders rode into battle instead of maneuvering in pairs. The Assyrians acquired ever-larger numbers of horses from the steppes, and then started breeding them themselves on a large scale, as they turned cavalry from a mob of individual riders into a powerful strike force. Chariots became an anachronism, reserved for ceremonial occasions and parades.
A regiment of disciplined horsemen could deliver well-timed hammer blows against the enemy. By now, Assyrian kings had learned the new rules of warfare. Nearly 2,000 of King Shalmaneser III's cavalrymen
attacked 3,940 chariots in a battle against Levantine forces at Qarqar in 853
BCE
, capturing numerous chariots and their horses. By the reign of King Sargon II in the eighth century, his armies had many more cavalrymen than chariots.