I’ve just published a chapter called “Inventing the Wild Horse: the Manmade History of the Takhi and Tarpan from 1828–2018” in Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (Routledge, 2020). I went overboard writing this and outstripped my word count so …
Category Archives: Bronze Age
The Daddies of Them All: How Arab and Turkoman Stallions Dominate the Gene Pool
A team at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, has discovered that nearly all today’s horses* trace tail-male back to Arabian and Turkoman stallions brought to Europe over the last seven centuries (yes, pre-thoroughbred). There is so little diversity in domestic horses’ Y chromosomes that it took an advance in research methods to be able …
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Horses in Shining Armour – or Plate Mail Catsuits?
This eighteenth-century imagining of ancient Syrian horse armour seems bold, if a little impractical.
Phlegmatic Greys and Woman-Killing Horses – Equine Coat Colour Theory
Some renaissance and early modern horsekeeping manuals get quite carried away about horse colours and what they mean for the temperament and physical qualities of each animal. In 1560, Thomas Blundeville wrote, “A horse for the most part is coloured as he is complexioned” for if he hath more of the Earth than of the …
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Beware Girls on Cream Horses
Ever since I wrote about the “Ice Princess” found on the Ukok plateau in Siberia in If Wishes Were Horses I’ve been fascinated by the early cultures of the Eurasian Steppes. Aside from their deep horsiness, they also seem to have had a very egalitarian society, and their womenfolk fought alongside the men. I’m currently …
Good Job Renaissance Italians Revived the Horsemanship of Xenophon and Not This Guy
I was googling around for details of a Greek cavalry commander called Eumenes, who’s credited with introducing the use of pillars in training horses when I found this. As Xenophon put it, would you whip a dancer? Eumenes would. During this siege, as he [Eumenes] perceived … that the horses would lose condition if they …
Saudis Seek to Bolster Their Claim to Earliest Horse Domestication
A new piece on the BBC website adds more to speculation over Saudi Arabia’s Al Maqar site: could the fragments of horse figures discovered there depict harness? If this could be definitively proved, the Saudis’ claim to earliest horse domestication would be verified. However, as I pointed out in an earlier, more detailed blog post …
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Whole Heap of Little Horse Links
eBay, I don’t believe you. That never happened in my daydreams. Right, on with a long overdue HHLHL! I’ve been busy organising a research trip for book two but the horse world went on turning, and lovely people have been sending me links, so enjoy this extra special post whose diversity reminds me why I’m …
A (Not So) Short History of Women Riding Astride
I enjoyed talking about the history of sidesaddle on Countryfile – it was my first experience of TV and everyone was incredibly friendly and easygoing. We did a few takes of different parts of the interview and it was hard to know whether to embellish what I’d said each time or to say the same …
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The Horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot via the British Museum
How could you fit the history of horses and humans into a space? Not even the British Museum could hold it: it would be crammed like Tutankhamun’s tomb. Selene’s chariot horses on the eastern Parthenon pediment would be eyeball to eyeball with Da Vinci’s triple-life-size Spanish steed. The central atrium would be the tackroom to …
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