The New Warfarein Europe, the Eurasian steppe, and at Troy, it is a valid gen-
eralization that in the Fertile Crescent the horse was of no in-
terest or value except as a courser. Although from the neolithic
period onward horses may from time to time have been
brought to Mesopotamia, only in the Ur in period, at the end
of the third millennium, does the horse appear in literary
sources. The Sumerians called the horse an ANSHE.KUR, liter-
ally an "ass from the mountains." 24 The horse was also, at the
turn from the third to the second millennium, sometimes re-
ferred to by Sumerian scribes as an ANSHE.ZI.ZI, apparently
meaning a "speedy ass." Whatever they were called, horses
were at this time prized in Mesopotamia as mounts for dare-
devil riders. 25 Thus, for example, in one day King Shulgi of Ur
seems to have ridden—to the amazement and delight of all his
courtiers—all the way from Nippur to Ur, a distance of almost
eighty miles. In his hymn of self-praise, Shulgi compares him-
self to an ass, a mule, and a horse (as well as to a lion), and it
is likely that for at least part of the trip between Nippur and
Ur he had ridden a horse. 26
To ride a horse, however, was both arduous and dangerous,
and early in the second millennium a far better way was found
to exploit the horse's speed: a fast-running, two-wheeled cart
was hitched to a team of horses. From that point onward,
horses in Mesopotamia (and in the rest of the Near East) were
almost exclusively "chariot" horses. The horse was never a food
animal in the Fertile Crescent in historical times and was not
used for ordinary drayage. Without exception, when wagons
are encountered in Near Eastern documents of the second mil-
lennium, they are drawn by oxen, asses, or mules. 27 And when
- M. Civil, "Notes on Sumerian Lexicography," JCS 20 (1966):
121—22. - P.R.S. Moorey, "Pictorial Evidence for the History of Horse-
riding in Iraq before the Kassite Period," Iraq 32 (1970): 36—50. - For the hymn, see A. Falkenstein, "Sumerische religiose Texte,
- Ein Shulgi-Lied," ZA 50 (1952): 61-91.
- Hangar, Das Pferd, 488, presented the generalization as "aus-
nahmslos."
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