Like Gimbutas’ original theory, Anthony’s founders on the fact that neither on
the steppe nor in those areas of Europe supposedly overrun by riders from the
steppe do we find evidence that men were riding or even driving horses until ca.
2000 BC, which is also the time at which the earliest demonstrable cheekpieces
appear. It is also relevant that until the end of the third millennium BCNear
Easterners were not sufficiently impressed by their northern neighbors’ riding to
import horses for themselves and to learn how to ride them. Nowhere, so far as
we know, did any artist depict a person riding a horse, nor did any scribe mention
such an act, until shortly before 2000 BC. Through most of the third millennium
BCthe horse was still a food animal. The relationship between people and horses
differed little from the relationship between people and cattle.
The “taming” of horses ca. 2000 BC
Then things changed. From shortly before 2000 BConward all of the kinds of
evidence just listed begin to appear. We begin to have drawings and figurines of—
and textual references to—men riding horses or driving them. Grave goods buried
with men of substance begin to include horses and spoke-wheeled vehicles. And
what are certainly the cheekpieces of organic bits—some found next to the skulls
of the horses that once wore them—have been found in late third- and early second-
millennium contexts. The conclusion is difficult to escape that late in the third
millennium BCthe relationship between humans and their horses began to change
into what it has remained ever since. At least a few horses were now, in their
owners’ eyes, far more important than food animals. The ability to travel at the
speed of a horse was greatly appreciated and was soon communicated across a
wide geographical area.
For the relationship between humans and horses that began at the end of the
third millennium BCwe have no good word in the modern languages. While che -
valerieand its derivatives bring to mind medieval knights, terms such as
“equestrianism,” “equitation,” and even “horsemanship” denote accomplished
riding, and hardly include the mere ability to control a team of draft horses. A
more basic concept comes from the period before secure riding began. In the Iliad
the chariot-driving Trojans are collectively hippodamoi. The Greek word has
traditionally been translated “tamers of horses,” and the best of the Trojans is
“Hektor, tamer of horses.” Although the translation is justified, perhaps a better
one would be “master of horses.”^47 Hippodameia was the name of various heroines
in Greek myth, and the most famous Hippodameia was the bride whom her father
offered as a prize to the man who could defeat him in a chariot race (Pelops finally
won Hippodameia, by sabotaging the linchpins that held the wheels to the axle
of her father’s chariot).^48 In Homeric Greek the compound adjective hippodamos
combines the noun “horse” with the verbal root dam- which denotes controlling,
dominating or mastering. A cognate of the Greek dam- is the Latin dom-, which
likewise meant “to subdue” or “to force” (it is the verbal root of the noun dominus,
and has English derivatives in “domain” and “dominate”).
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 39