The Coming of the Greeksto suggest that the horse was then an article of food," 20 but it
is likely that the builders of Troy vi also used the horse as a
riding animal and as a draft animal.2I Across the Aegean, horse
bones have been found in Middle Helladic levels at Lerna and
perhaps also at the Messenian sites of Nichoria and Malthi, 22
and one may assume that what few horses there were in these
places were not food animals, but were acquired either as rid-
ing animals or draft animals. 23
However much the horse had been valued as a food animal
lection of animal bones, layer by layer, yielded no trace of the horse from
the earliest occupation of the site in Troy I to the end of Troy v. The initial
stratum of Troy vi, however, produced characteristic bones of horses, and
they continued to appear consistently in all the succeeding deposits."
- H. L. Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments (London: Macmillan,
1950), 307. - Parallels from central Anatolia, as we shall see, suggest that—
whatever else they were used for—the horses of Troy ca. 1900 B.C. at least
occasionally pulled light carts. Blegen et al. assumed, even though no evi-
dence had been found, that the horses of Troy vi were draft horses. Denys
Page, History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1959), 57, 70, and 252, proposed that in the Late Bronze Age, Troy's rep-
utation for the breeding of horses was known all over the Aegean world. - Caskey, CAH n, 2: 125, noted that his excavations at Lerna
unearthed "bones of a few horses (equus caballus)" in MH levels. At Malthi,
bone and skull fragments found at several locations and in several MH strata
were identified as equid, although it is not entirely clear that the equid was
a horse. See M. N. Valmin, The Swedish Messenia Expedition (Lund: Gleerup,
T93^)> 5&1 101, 103, 108, and 138. On page 161, however, Valmin states
without equivocation that in Magazine D 43—46 of MH Malthi was found "a
horse tooth." One bone attributed to Equus caballus was found at Nichoria,
on the Messenian coast; cf. Crouwel, Chariots, 33. Crouwel also lists (p. 33)
a horse molar reported from Argissa-Magoula in Thessaly, from a context
"apparently contemporary with an early stage of the Middle Helladic pe-
riod." - In 1978 four complete horse skeletons were reportedly found at
Dendra, in the Argolid, supposedly in an early Middle Helladic context (al-
though adjacent to tombs of the Mycenaean period). Cf. Nestor (November
1978), i ,281 (referring to a newspaper story in Ta Nea of July 9, 1978).
Such skeletons would not be the remains of butchered animals, but conclu-
sions must await the publication of details.
82