have been found, was followed—after 2000 BC—by archaeological cultures
characterized by numerous permanent settlements. In the Srubna, the KMK and the
Sintashta cultures a large part of the population evidently preferred to live in
communities of huts and houses rather than in wagons on the open steppe.
The improvement of riding ca. 1000 BC
Shooting an arrow from horseback, in contrast to shooting an arrow from a
chariot, was evidently not yet safe or successful in the second quarter of the second
millennium BC. Although by the end of that millennium a few riders may have
been hunting on horseback, the earliest such representation, so far as I know, appears
on a limestone altar at Gordion. The altar apparently dates toward the end of the
ninth century BC.^89 Mounted hunting, however, must have been widespread even
at the beginning of the ninth century, because in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II
(889–853 BC) mounted combat had already begun: our earliest portrayals of such
combat come from Assyrian reliefs at Kalhu and at nearby Balawat.^90 It should be
noted, however, that in the ninth century BCa mounted archer in the Assyrian army
seems to have required an escort, who held the reins of the archer’s horse while
the archer drew his bow. Riders in Iran and on the Eurasian steppe were undoubt -
edly more competent than their Assyrian contemporaries, but even in the horse
country it is unlikely that hunting from horseback began much before 1000 BC.
Riding became more secure in the first millennium BCthan it had been in
the second, thanks to improvements in the material and design of the bit.^91 On the
steppe organic bits remained in use until after 1000 BC, and a horse could neu -
tralize an organic bit by clamping its pre-molars down on the rope or leather
mouthpiece. An additional disadvantage of the organic bit was the fragility of
the mouthpiece: sooner or later a horse that persistently chewed on the mouthpiece
would sever it. The liabilities of an organic bit would not often have been disas -
trous for the driver of a team of draft horses, because two horses would not often
have taken the bits between their teeth at the same moment. A ridden horse,
however, may frequently have been intractable.
Throughout the Late Bronze Age chariots in the Near East were primarily used
in battle, and in the clamor and chaos of a battlefield a charioteer needed something
more dependable than an organic bit. Except in Anatolia, where organic bits
continued to be used during the Hittite Old Kingdom and well into the Hittite
Empire,^92 chariot horses in the Near East were bridled with metal bits. In the so-
called “Hyksos” bit, recently shown to have been in use already by the middle of
the seventeenth century BC,^93 a straight bronze bar connected two bronze
cheekpieces (the inner faces of the cheekpieces were studded). Although sturdy
enough this bit too was problematic, especially for a rider, because a horse could
take the bronze bar between its teeth and prevent the rider either from pulling
back the mouthpiece into the sensitive cheek tissue or from tugging one or the
other of the cheekpieces. Much more security came with the jointed bronze
snaffle bit, which first appeared in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and the Aegean in
the fourteenth century BC. The new bit foiled the horse’s inclination to take the
48 The Kurgan theory and taming of horses