THE HORSES OF DAWN

The third great river in Scythia is Hypanis. This stream rises within the limits of Scythia, and has its source in another vast lake, around which wild white horses graze. The lake is called properly enough, the Mother of the Hypanis.

The Tarpan is the Eurasian Wild Horse or “True Wild Horse” (Equus feras or Equus feras feras) from which the many breeds of the Domestic Horse (Equus caballus) are descended. The name “Tarpan,” meaning “Wild Horse,” is from a Turkic language (Kyrgyz or Kazakh). It was also known as the Dzerlik-adu by the Mongols (and the Yeh-Ma by the Chinese). The Tatars and Cossacks, like these others, distinguished the Tarpan wild horse from the feral horse, which they called the Takja or Muzin. The oldest human records we have of the existence of Tarpans are to be found in cave paintings 20-40,000 years old. The wild horses on the walls of the caves of Lascaux are perfectly-detailed portraits of the Tarpan with its distinctive “Mohawk” mane.

Herodotus in Book Four of The Persian Wars concerns himself with Scythia, which he defines as all the lands between the Danube and the Don Rivers. Herodotus credits the nomadic tribesmen there with being the finest horsemen in the world, and Scythia as the one part of the world where true wild horses still roamed in abundance. The region where wild white horses were to be found grazing (and survived until the early 19th century) was probably the region known as the Pripyat Marshes on today’s Polish-Belarus-Ukraine border.

Max Toppen – 1870
History of Mascovia , Danzig

In the time of the Teutonic Knights, wild horses and other game were hunted for the sake of their skins. In 1543 Duke Albert sent an order to command at Lyck, bidding him take measures for the preservation of wild horses. Proofs of the horse being an object of the chase in Poland and Lithuania are found far into the seventeenth century.

In the forests of Białowieża, Poland, records of the hunting of the Tarpan go back to 1409, when King Władyslaw Jagiello arranged a royal chase in honour of his cousin, Witold of Lithuania. In these immense forests the Tarpan, along with European Bison (Wisent), survived in substantial numbers through most of the 18th century. However, by 1800, the Tarpan had vanished everywhere except on the steppes of Tauria and Cherson. The last herds died out in the Ukraine around 1850, and the last known pure-bred Tarpan was killed near Askamia Nova in Russia on Christmas Day in 1879. Eight years later, the last captive Tarpan died in Poland.

Harold J. E. Peake – 1933
On the Domestication of the Horse, London

The first mention of the horse is documented before 2000 BC in Babylon, where it is called the ‘Ass from the East’, but it does not seem to have been introduced into Mesopotamia before the arrival of the Kassite conquerors in 1746 BC. The horse was also well known to the Hittites, who arrived in Asia Minor about 1900 BC from the Northwest. All this evidence tends to show that the horse was used as a means of transport both in Persia and upon the Russian steppe well before 2000 BC. It seems likely that it was first tamed in that part of the world, or still farther east in Mongolia, as early as 3000 BC.

Samuel Gotlieb Gmelin, a German physician, botanist, and explorer of Russia in the days of Catherine the Great, was the first to collect specimens of the Tarpan and make it known to science. In 1766, Gmelin was appointed professor of botany at St. Petersburg, and the next year he was sent on an expedition to study the natural history of the Russian Empire. In his four-volume Reise Durch Russland, Gmelin recorded seeing the animals in 1769 in the Brobrovsk region near Voronezh. Gmelin’s hunters killed a stallion and two mares and a foal. He described the stallion as “hardly as large as the smallest Russian pony.” Gmelin explored the Don and Volga Rivers and the shores of the Caspian Sea. In the Caucasus he was taken hostage by Usmey Khan of Khaitakes, and died in captivity at the age of 29.

In 1784 Pieter Boddaert named the species Equus ferus, based on Gmelin’s description. This was to distinguish it from its descendants, the 300 or so breeds of the Domestic Horse (Equus caballus, as named by Linnaeus in 1758).

Otto Antonius – 1938
On the Recent Equidae , Vienna

In times not long before the beginning of historical days there were true wild horses or Tarpan spread over the whole Eurasiatic continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Tarpan was a mouse-dun horse, which the medieval philosopher Albertus Magnus means when he calls the colour of the wild horse ‘cinereus’, as in ash-coloured. The first Duke of Prussia, Albert von Hohenzollern, sent wild horses as highly esteemed gifts to the Emperor, and also to the Archduke Ferdinand, so there can be no doubt that these horses were truly royal game – like the Urus and the Bison. The last refuge of the Tarpanis in Poland was the great game park of Count Zamoyski. Here they were strictly protected until the civil conflict and severe winter of 1812 made feeding and survival impossible. Franz von Falz-Fein, the owner of the matchless Ascania Nova Zoo, has told the life-history of that last wild horse of Europe, an old one-eyed mare, lingering for years around the feral horses, covered by domestic he-horses, captured, escaped with its filly, and some years later hunted and killed on the ice by the peasants of Agaiman.

Otto Antonius was an Austrian zoologist and palaeontologist who became director of the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna. An active member of the Zoological Society of London, Antonius was co-founder of modern zoological biology. He was a pioneer in creating modern humane zoo environments and redefining zoos as places to protect and breed endangered species. A key figure in saving the Wisent from extinction, he was also one of the first to attempt “rebreeding” domestic animals back to their wild ancestral stock. At the close of World War II, the Schönbrunn Zoo was nearly destroyed in bombing raids, and with the approach of the Russian Army on 9 April 1945, Antonius and his wife committed suicide.

Antonius’ methods were adapted by others and resulted in the successful captive-breeding of the Przewalski Wild Horse (Equus przewalski or Equus feras przewalski) – the only surviving form of Wild Horse – despite its total extinction in the wild. His concept of “rebreeding” has also resulted in the controversial “reconstruction” of “Tarpan-like” animals that can now be seen in a number of zoos and wildlife refuges.

THE CENTAURS

Tarpan – 1887

Little wild horses of the steppes

Straggling tribal men

What has the Emperor

Behind the Great Wall to fear?

He feeds on peacock tongues

His people cover the lands of the world

His power changes the course of rivers

And shapes the face of the earth

He is disturbed by a terrible vision

He fears the image of a demon

With eight limbs

That is fierce and swift

The Tartar horn blows

And the vision

In a whirlwind comes

At the Dragon Gate

At the Ivory Gate

The bowmen mount the towers

But the demons pass by, not against the wall

But around, their brave hearts pounding distance away

It is the frenzy of the little horses

And the savage tribal men

Two creatures made one

The Tartar horn blows

And the Tarpan carries the tribesmen on

The wall is left to the west wind

The yellow axes of the Imperial Guard are untried

The horsemen pass by, pass around

The cities are pyres

The jade images are shattered

The silk of the Imperial banners

Lies tattered beneath the conqueror’s hooves