The “domination” or control of a horse probably began not very well: with a
nose-ring. In the Near East the nose-ring had long been the conventional device
for controlling oxen, donkeys, and onager-donkey hybrids used in draft or as pack
animals. By the last quarter of the third millennium BCpastoralists had brought
domesticated horses, as food animals, into southern Caucasia, and it is likely that
some of these horses also served as pack animals. Evidently the pastoralists,
adopting the Near Eastern practice, subjected some of their pack horses to nose-
rings and occasionally sat on horses that were being led by escorts on foot. Perhaps
daring souls then took the lead-ropes into their own hands and found it exciting
to goad a horse into a gallop, the rider being more or less confident that with the
rope attached to the nose-ring he could bring the horse to a stop. This was by no
means good riding, and accidents must have been frequent, but it would surely
have been exhilarating.
In any case, pictorial evidence shows that late in the third millennium BChorses
were for the first time brought into Mesopotamia and that they came as riding
horses, with rings in their noses. In order to turn the horse in the desired direction
the early rider carried a stout stick with which to strike it from the right or the
left. Needless to say, while a nose-ring worked well enough with plodding oxen,
it must often have panicked a galloping horse, with dire consequences. For more
than a century, nevertheless, a few men in the Near East were proud of their ability
to ride a horse controlled by a nose-ring and a stick, and they showed it off in
plaques and cylinder seals. The earliest two-dimensional representation of a horse
and rider comes from Mesopotamia: it is incised on a clay tablet sealed with a
cylinder seal belonging to Abbakalla of Ur and dating ca. 2030 BC. The sealing
shows a naked (?) man seated on a small horse, of course without a saddle, and
with no visible means of control other than a stick that he holds in his left hand.^49
Three-dimensional representations of horse riders began at almost the same time:
the first of the long series of “rider figurines,” clay representations of a man on
horseback, with his arms wrapped around the horse’s neck. The representation
hardly reflected reality. Roger Moorey plausibly suggested that these were votive
figurines, meant to keep the owner safe when on horseback. Hundreds if not
thousands of these clay figurines have been found, some in temple deposits. Most
of the figurines were mass produced in the first millennium BC, but the earliest—
from Tell Selenkahiye in eastern Syria—date between 2200 and 1900 BC.^50
Mesopotamian riders are also portrayed in low relief on clay plaques from the
end of the third and beginning of the second millennium. The riders sit far back,
in the “donkey seat,” and are shown controlling their mount with a line attached
to a nose-ring. For security the rider on one of the plaques grasps the root of the
horse’s tail with one hand, and with the other grasps a surcingle strapped like a
cinch belt around the horse’s belly.^51 Much safer enjoyment of the horse’s speed
came with draft horses pulling a spoke-wheeled cart, and cylinder sealings found
at Kültepe—again displaying horses controlled with lines attached to nose-rings—
show that “chariots” were in use there by 1900 BC.
The importing of tamed horses into the Near East required lexical innovations.
Two Sumerograms were devised for the horse: ANŠE.KUR.RA, “ass from the
40 The Kurgan theory and taming of horses