![]() 1000 and 900 BC.Ĭavalry, or horse mounted soldiers, enter the pages of written history for the first time during the Lelantine war (ca. Chariots disappeared from the battle field some time following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean world during the murky years between ca. Maybe their accident quotient was simply too low. Flat races were first staged at Olympia in 648 BC but never seemed to gain the same popularity as chariot races. The equine equivalent of today’s overpowered formula one racing cars, these predictably led to lethal crashes, to the doubtlessly raucous approval of the fans and gamblers who routinely jammed the Circus Maximus’s 200,000-plus seats in Rome in the 2nd century AD. Their flimsy racing chariots were drawn by four horses (first introduced at Olympia in 680 BC) and later by two and three horses, but in the Roman period even bigger and more unmanageable hitches were sometimes employed. A 4th century BC white ground rhyton or drinking horn comes from Apulia in the southeast corner of Italy. ![]() ![]() During the historical period Greeks and later the Romans competed with equal panache in the great panhellenic competitions at Olympia and elsewhere, and eventually in Rome’s Circus Maximus and the Hippodrome at Constantinople. The famous funeral games staged by Achilles for his friend Patroclus featured chariot races. After casting their spears, they dismounted to continue the fight on foot. Homer’s aristocratic Trojan and Greek heroes drove, not walked, into battle in two-horse chariots handled independently by their drivers. Horse racing, with which Greek, Etruscan, and Roman society remained obsessed until the end of antiquity, was a direct outgrowth of warfare as it was practiced in the Late Bronze Age. Usain “Lightning” Bolt, the fastest man in the world, was traveling nearly 22 mph when he broke the world’s record for the 100 m dash in 2009, while an American quarter horse carrying a saddle and rider has been clocked at over 45 mph. The partnership between horse and master in antiquity rested on many factors perhaps the most important was that the horse provided man with his quickest means of overland movement. One recalls the cynical utterance of the 5th century BC lyric poet Xenophanes from the Asia Minor city of Colophon: “But if cattle and horses and lions had hands, or were able to do the work that men can, horses would draw the forms of the gods like ” (emphasis added by author). From Homer’s brilliant animal similes and Xenophon’s authoritative how-to manual On Horsemanship (“The tail and mane should be washed, to keep the hairs growing, as the tail is used to swat insects and the mane may be grabbed by the rider more easily if long.”) all the way down to the 9th century AD Corpus of Greek Horse Veterinarians, which itemizes drugs for curing equine ailments as well as listing vets by name, Greek and Roman literature is filled with equine references. How do we know? In part because the ancient authors tell us so. The horse functioned as man’s inseparable and indispensible companion throughout classical antiquity. Punic electrum stater was struck between 310 and 270 BC. Examples drawn from the more than 30,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan vases, sculptures, and other objects in the Museum’s Mediterranean Section serve here as a lens through which to view some of the notable roles the horse played in the classical Mediterranean world. ![]() Curtis’s iconic American Indian photographs housed in the Museum’s Archives, horses stand with man in nearly every culture and time-frame represented in the Museum’s Collection (pre-Columbian America and the northern polar region being perhaps the two most obvious exceptions). From the Chinese Rotunda’s masterpiece reliefs portraying two horses of the Chinese emperor Taizong to Edward S. Several versions of “The Horse in Motion” photographed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 are available in the University Archives.Įquus caballus is handsomely stabled in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
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