Roughly 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, the world was irrevocably changed.[*1] There are few instances in history where one isolated event transforms our planet forever and single-handedly leaves a deep and indelible imprint on humankind. With the first comforting hands-on encounter and reassuring whisper between one daring man and one docile mare, an unbreakable bond was forged, and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten.
This initial opportune courtship was likely the result of a swaggering teenager being dared by his snickering friends to approach a submissive or wounded mare and jump on its back. Imagine the brave stupidity and pubescent thought process of this spirited youth as he determined impulsively that attempting to mount a large, wild animal was a good idea! It is amazing that any of us survived to reach adulthood.
Now try to envision the strutting spectacle that unfolded as this peacocking teen led or rode this horse past the dumbfounded and slack-jawed stares of his friends and family. “Horse domestication almost certainly should be understood this way. It is doubtful that any prehistoric genius foresaw the potential capabilities of the wild steppe horse,” explains equine anthropologist David Anthony. “I think the first person to climb on a horse was an adolescent or child. Some kid probably jumped on the back of a mare as a prank, and everyone looked on in astonishment.” Little did they know that at that very moment, this intrepid young horse whisperer had recalibrated the trajectory of human history.
The domestication of horses was nothing short of an Equine Revolution in transportation, traction, trade, and war. It was the complete transformative package of civilization. When the multifaceted power of the horse was finally harnessed, it permanently altered the fabric of humanity and laid the foundations of history. “The horse,” declared famed eighteenth-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, “is the most noble conquest man has ever made.” Surprisingly, it was an improbable candidate to claim this superpower status: the deus ex machina.
Save for small, secluded herds grazing remote pockets of the sprawling Eurasian Steppe, by 4000 BCE the horse had disappeared across global landscapes.[*2] Domestication reined in the horse from the precipice of extinction. Without human intervention, it is likely that the horse would have followed most large mammals and other equine species into oblivion, only to be resurrected as dusty museum displays.
Imagine for a moment our human odyssey and epic sagas without the historical power of horses. I can safely say that our modern world order and sociocultural configurations would be completely unrecognizable. We might as well live on another planet in a galaxy far, far away.
With domestication, the destinies of horses and humans were eternally intertwined. Our triumphs and struggles, our accomplishments and failures, and our unfolding story have been forever fused into a single symbiotic narrative. The human-horse dyad is the most dominant animal coalition ever witnessed.
This “Centaurian Pact” combined the physical and intellectual power of two creatures into a single cohesive unit. Human beings were both literally and figuratively elevated and empowered by horses. “The cooperative union,” states horseman and author Bjarke Rink in The Centaur Legacy, “represents a qualitative leap in human psychology and physiology that permitted man to act beyond his biological means.” Horses allowed humanity to circumvent our physical constraints and evolutionary limitations by redefining and upgrading the capabilities and potential of our species.
Possessing a rare combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse became the pinnacle weapon of war, a political leviathan, a prime economic mover, an agricultural powerhouse, and a universal, multipurpose machine. History marched forward to the cadence of drumming hoofbeats.
For most of us alive today, however, horses were never part of our immediate daily framework or wider worldview. They are now generally relegated to high-stakes racing, equestrian events, rodeos, personal recreation, and television shows and movies depicting bygone eras or fictional fantasies. Like other fabled creatures and fantastic beasts, horses are also mascots for our schools and sports teams: mustangs, colts, mavericks, chargers, stallions, and broncos. Numerous automobile companies have also invoked the horse in branding their vehicles. Although there are still an estimated fifty-eight million horses sharing our planet, they are pragmatically redundant in our modern, mechanized society. Within our historical time line, however, this is a recent phenomenon.
It is easy to forget that cars unseated the horse only about a hundred years ago. “The automobile,” laments historian Walter Liedtke, “has inevitably clouded our view of how important the horse once was in everyday life.” The easiest way to highlight the status of the horse is to take a second to imagine your life today without any form of mechanical transport. Eliminate all cars, buses, subways, trains, planes, and even bicycles. The world would not extend too far beyond your doorstep and then only as far as your feet could take you. This would have been the same uncomfortable reality for our ancestors only a century ago if the horse were removed from their descending generations of humanity.
Innovations in transport are among the most dynamic catalysts of historical change. Think about what the internal combustion engine did to our societies. It drove the shift to urbanization and strip-mall suburbia, instigated a complete overhaul of infrastructure, and struck an unquenchable thirst for oil and steel. It spawned heavy industry, forged assembly-line mass production, retooled the workforce, convened a middle class, and polluted our climate-changing atmosphere. Cars became a visible display of wealth and power recognizable by the Porsche horse coat of arms or Ferrari’s Prancing Horse crest. The internal combustion engine propelled modern mechanized warfare to unimaginable heights of meat-grinding slaughter. It manufactured industrial farming and the convenience of grocery stores, allowing for further technological advancements and vocational specialization. The engine connected and coupled people, places, products, pathogens, economies, armies, and ideas.
It also brazenly rode the tails of the horse, which had already blazed these familiar trails and spurred these transformations forward during its preceding 5,500-year reign. The automobile simply traversed well-trodden landscapes pioneered previously by the horse. The sociocultural and historical impact of the horse, however, lasted fifty-five times longer and was far more profound.
As much as we think of horses as organic animals, we must also view them as sophisticated machines—one of the oldest and most important inventions in human history. When the heavy burden of transport was lifted from humans and placed on the shoulders of horses and wagons, the modern age of the machine was born. The horse was so paramount and pivotal to human society that we base our units of mechanical energy or engine output on horsepower. As an evolving technology, horses, and their historic muscle, were manipulated in a living laboratory.
Under the survival pressures of natural selection, horses evolved over the course of sixty million years from a scampering fox-sized creature to assemble the unique and exploitable attributes that made them the embodiment of power and the premier human sidekick. Meticulous human-induced selective breeding subsequently promoted and enhanced desirable traits in anatomy, temperament, size, speed, and strength. This genetic engineering was enriched by cumulative advancements in training, maintenance, diet, and medicine. The utilitarian potential of this living machine was elevated further with bits, saddles, harnesses, horseshoes, stirrups, whippletrees, armor, specialized vehicles and plows, and sophisticated equine infrastructure. As a result of these natural and artificial amendments, the horse reached the apex of biotechnology.
Sometimes things are so omnipresent, so obvious, that we blithely overlook their importance. In our twittering, computerized age of artificial intelligence, we have lost sight of how essential and impactful horses have been to humanity. The horse was the pinnacle instrument of profit and power. For more than five millennia, with their unrivaled operative force, they steered and dominated every part of our existence. The horse was a source of protein, milk, and a variety of secondary products. It was a war-winning weapon, a groundbreaking agricultural engine, and a high-speed vehicle for transportation, trade, and travel. The horse was the prime mover of civilizations.
With the domestication of horses, human greed and curiosity could now be fully realized. The advent of the farming package (agriculture and the domestication of barnyard animals) sowed vocational specialization, the first urban city-states, and a capitalist surplus economy. High-speed communication allowed distant, previously isolated peoples to become neighbors, allies, or enemies. Remote, exotic lands, only whispered in legend and lore, now entered expanding—and increasingly lucrative and multifarious—trading networks within a flourishing but competitive commercial environment. The chariot and mounted cavalry enhanced significantly the ability of avaricious conquerors to establish, expand, and hold vast empires. The horse was the defining factor that hauled, assembled, and secured these foundational building blocks. It single-handedly created an infinitely smaller and integrated global village.
One of the reasons horses were so historically dynamic and culturally influential is that they eventually became a relatively democratic resource. For the most part, their acquisition and reproduction were outside of government control, commercial manufacturing, business monopolies, social status, and economic condition. Horses were self-reproducing, reasonably self-sufficient, and could be acquired through purchase, trade, theft, and even capture. In this sense, they leveled the playing field through their ability to gain or subvert power. Horses proffered a sense of liberty and endowed the individual with a spirit of freedom. The democracy of the horse allowed women to assume dominant political and military positions in ancient nomadic societies such as the Scythians and Massagetae, and in early dynastic China. The fabled Amazons, as it turns out, were fierce mounted female warriors of the Eurasian Steppe.
Horses transcended demographics, geography, ethnicity, gender, spirituality, class, and station. Horses pulled royal carriages and peasant carts. They conveyed humble merchants to peddling markets and gilded chariots and chivalrous knights to battlefield glory. Horses hauled plows across feudal farms and pranced in regal parades. They shuttled private coaches, hired cabs, and public transportation. Horses belonged, and belong, to all human beings.
They changed the way we hunted, traded, traveled, farmed, fought, worshipped, and interacted with one another. Horses reconfigured the global human genome and the languages we speak. They gave rise to nation-states and pulled into place modern international borders. They were a potent instrument of feudalism, land usage patterns, and European colonization during the Columbian Exchange.[*3] Horses made vital contributions to modern medicine, lifesaving vaccines, and developments in sanitation. They even inspired recreational cannabis use, sports, invention, entertainment, architecture, furniture, and fashion. Horses are an integral part of what it means to be human.
Of the ties that bind, the oldest is that of the hunter and the hunted. Our toolmaking hominid ancestors dined on equines, and horsemeat is still on the menu for over one billion people. Like other barnyard animals, domesticated horses were initially reared for meat, milk, and a variety of secondary products. Riding fundamentally changed the rules to the game of life, and the enduring bond was expanded to traction and transport for migration, trade, farming, and, of course, war.
It is undeniable that war, in which the horse played a paramount role, is one of the most explosive catalysts of change, whether we like it or not. In a peculiar twist of evolutionary fate, as an animal built solely for flight and not fight, horse and rider became humanity’s longest-serving weapon system. “I think that the most important development in history with respect to animals,” asserts archaeologist and prolific author Brian Fagan, “was the adoption of the horse as a weapon of war.”
The lengthy epoch of equine-fueled warfare escorted the basic ingredients of civilization and all elements of our modern world. King Richard III’s immortal Shakespearean cry shortly before his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 during the English civil wars (Wars of the Roses), “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” echoes through the bloodstained corridors of human history and five millennia of unremitting combat.
The thundering spectacle of a cavalry charge is one of the most awe-inspiring and fearsome dramas in our long history of violence. Most of us are familiar with the hoofbeat meter of Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Its galloping stanzas have been quoted in classrooms, speeches, and movies ever since it was published in 1854 during the Crimean War: “Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred…. Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die. / Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.”
For more than five thousand years, horses were drafted as soldiers to fight in our military campaigns. The causes, both noble and nefarious, were nonnegotiable clauses of their conscription. Warhorses, and other animal combatants, had no say in their fate. That unalienable right escaped them.
The horse decided the destinies of immortal conquerors and momentous empires. Without its presence, the decisive battles recited in textbooks and bedtime stories would have been small skirmishes or family feuds, and the legendary exploits of Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, and Chinggis Khan would be expunged from the historical record. Transformative equestrian cultures grazing the global grasslands of antiquity, including Indo-Europeans, Assyrians, Scythians, Xiongnu, Huns, Mongols, Comanche, and Lakota, would have remained anonymous. European colonization and the Columbian Exchange would have been strangled in their cradles.
For millennia, the horse was the invisible hand driving human history. The Indian anti-colonial advocate and ethicist Mahatma Gandhi once espoused that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Historically, horses have been treated as subjugated spectators instead of active participants. Both humans and horses were dynamic beings and wielded overriding agency within our reigning partnership and jointly forged history. Horses deserve to be treated accordingly. “The importance of the horse in human history is matched only by the difficulties inherent to its study,” distinguished archaeologist Grahame Clark states aptly. “There is hardly an incident in the story which is not the subject of controversy, often of a violent nature.” Given the mountain of literature dedicated to the horse and the litany of hot-button topics, this is humbly understated.
This is first and foremost a history book. It is not, however, a general survey of the horse, a singly focused study on any one specific element of equine research or specialist field, nor is it a treatise on cavalry or mounted warfare. While the horse was dying on battlefields from Megiddo (Armageddon) to the Second World War, it did not decide the outcome of every clash or conflict. During the American Civil War, for example, more than three million horses, donkeys, and mules (roughly equal to the number of human combatants) saw service, with half of them giving their last full measure of devotion.
Likewise, although the horse became a universal animal, its influence, like its populations, was not evenly distributed across our planet. While this is a global history, and not “centric” to one region, not all geographical spheres receive equal treatment. This is an expansive human history dictated by the pull of the horse and not by sentimental preference or egalitarian predilections. Given the ubiquitous presence of the horse, it is unrealistic and impossible to include everything in a single narrative volume. This is also not the purpose of this book. This horse-powered journey depicts the game-changing events where the impact of the horse was the definitive factor in forever altering the trails of history. We still live in a world built by horses.
Humans love horses. They hold a distinguished place in our collective heart precisely because they dominated every facet of our formative history. Across an unrivaled 5,500-year span, the horse carried the fate of human civilizations on its back. “There are countless histories waiting to be told in which horses play a major role,” emphasizes Ulrich Raulff in his cultural history, Farewell to the Horse. “The story of technology, of transport, agriculture, energy, war and urbanization.” This is the history you hold in your hand. Human history is also the history of the horse.
*1 An area north of the Black and Caspian Seas (within the larger Eurasian Steppe) stretching 385,000 square miles from Ukraine through southern Russia to Kazakhstan.
*2 Eurasia: the complete unbroken continental landmass of Europe and Asia framed by the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Indian Oceans.
*3 Coining this term with the title of his seminal 1972 work, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, historian Alfred W. Crosby proposed that during the Age of Imperialism global ecosystems were forever rearranged in the largest interchange in natural and human history.